I live my life through the words I write
Observe how parts of you
shift,
ascend and recede like the tide,
introducing a new side of you
to yourself
every day.
Passions peak and wane
to our pleasure or dismay.
Try not to make meaning
of the waves,
for when at last you do,
they will already be gone,
leaving you in the still, shallow water
gently caressing your ankles.
Walk in the direction opposite
to the voice in your head
if that voice
does not belong to you.
Starting with short, clean,
clear-polished slates,
twice or thrice
daily lotioning,
keeping mind and body
meaningfully occupied,
together
can grow
a new path through the forest.
I had a safe space.
I invited people in.
I realized
my decision was premature
too late.
My safe space dissolved
into an empty void
for months,
tainted by the destruction
I had invited in,
in naivete.
A piece of me broke away.
Remembering
if I made it once
I can make it again
and this time,
add an extra padlock on the door.
No one expects an invitation
so I disregard any felt obligation
to extend one.
Reclaiming safety
for my soul.
I started a new page in the notebook
with a title at the top:
‘What are some things that I feel CONFIDENT in about myself?’
I started a page on the left,
assuming I would need the spread of both left and right pages
like an open book,
to display my confident knowings
for surely, once I started listing,
pages would fill before my eyes.
My list consists of four bullet points,
consuming a quarter of one page.
The rest of the page-spread remains blank.
I cannot think of more to add.
Adding this to the docket of items
to discuss
at my next therapy session.
As the saying goes,
the past is the past
but at the same time
past can come into the present
if further examination
will help you to process
what did or did not
happen
and who you are now
for it.
Months away from the creative page.
The desire to make things
or express myself with words
evaporated and melted away
like the unseasonably warm weather of these winter months
kept the snow away
and prevented it from returning to stay.
I cannot find the words to convey the depths of pain and grief and depression and anxiety and ambivalence and change and interspersed joy that have filtered through and between the days of recent months.
I could not imagine what such words would look like, sounds like, spell like, write like or hear like, so it seemed worthless to spend any amount of time before a blank page, hoping for the imagining to come to me.
The thought of spending time before a blank page cascaded waves of fear, discomfort and vulnerability through every tissue of my body, maintaining distance between us.
I have felt vulnerability before, even embraced walking alongside it. But this felt different. It was vulnerability in a new form, a more terrifying form, and I chose to stay away for what I believed to be my own self-protection.
Last weekend, in the midst of an anxiety attack, I tried to color in a coloring book with pencil crayons, reasoning that the act of coloring would distract and calm my mind. Instead, my anxiety amplified. Fears of choosing the right picture (not too complex but not too simple), fears of choosing the right colors, fears of coloring too faintly, too intensely or beyond the lines, fears of choosing colors to live next to each other that do not complement. Questioning why I am limited to the colors chosen to be within this collection of pencils. Questioning why I need to adhere to rules and lines and systems laid out by an entity separate from myself. After ten minutes, I abandoned the effort.
I want to stand before a giant white canvas and throw globs of paint upon it, then wave a brush to spread them all around under the guide of exploration and curiosity. I want to get my hands messy. I don’t want to abide by arbitrary rules that tell me what’s right and what’s wrong with my exploration of self. I want to translate myself into colors and textures and images that words cannot always adequately capture within themselves. I am evolving. I am expanding.
I must believe
I am strong enough
to rise up against any tribulation
threatening to pull me down
and keep me there.
I have to trust
that I have the means within me
to face each new situation
in the moment.
It’s somewhere deep inside of me
waiting to rise when the time is right;
the knowing of what to do.
All I need to do is trust.
Trust that evolution
is a celebration
and a journey with no finish line.
I must trust that I remember how to do this,
and will remember how to do this
when I need to.
My therapist
encouraged me to practice making decisions
faster
and based on my instincts.
Not every decision needs to be
weighed and analyzed
for hours
before reaching a conclusion –
a novel concept
for my brain to comprehend.
I took her advice;
I could hear her voice in my head
gently pushing me
out of my head
and into my body.
Warm air, sunshine-soaked sky
lured me to be outside
and move,
while listening.
I want to walk through the park,
I want to explore a new trail,
I want to recreate a small sliver of wild
I chase and revel in elsewhere.
I laugh at myself
as I walk along the trail
at this series of decisions
being the most impulsive I have been
in months.
When did I become so scared of living?
I have been gone for a while
living in the shadows, the darkness,
and finding comfort there,
familiarity,
safety.
I can see the light
but it scares me.
The shadows are quiet,
impose no pressure to speak or do,
their cold embrace enveloping me
until we warm.
I’m liking it here, in the dark.
It feels familiar
for I am often here
though not for long periods of time.
There are bursts of sunlight
that beam through the clouds
interrupting my accumulation of days.
The sun tries to tell me
that really, I’m OK
because I can see the sun
and be happy for a while;
I don’t qualify for a new label.
So when the clouds roll over again
I start back at day one.
And I ask myself the age-old question:
on some level, have I always been this way?
And then I ask the question:
am I trying to make something out of nothing,
this earnesty to classify
and put myself in a box per criteria,
or is this just a simple part
of the human experience?
This time,
I am staying in the darkness for a long time.
Longer than any time before.
I feel scared of everything
all at the same time,
all the time.
Paralyzed.
I have either lost myself
or changed –
I know not which it is.
And I don’t have the energy
to do
what they tell me I should do.
I don’t want to deny the darkness
in an attempt to feel better;
I want to stay here.
Eventually I will let someone down
and I can only blame the darkness
for so many things
because after all,
shouldn’t I be strong enough to fight it off?
But then
someone on the outside
saw me, and saw the shadows.
She acknowledged,
she validated,
and she nudged me towards a new source of light.
I have been gone for a while
and I’m not back yet
but maybe,
someday,
eventually.
Trees, forests, water
and time away from home
pulled my heart to the north,
to Waskesiu.
For years
I have heard, from people countless,
of Waskesiu being included in their summer plans
and each spoke of the place
with such fondness
that it made me want to stay away.
I did not want to find joy
in the same place as so many others
for fear that doing so
would render me ‘common’, ‘basic’,
or ‘just the same as everyone else’.
I fiercely believed
I needed to be different;
I needed to find a different place
to nourish myself
so I could stand apart from the crowd.
My mind told my heart
I was not allowed to go there;
I would not be happy in being the same.
With shifting priorities and family structures
this year, Waskesiu made sense
and yet,
I remained determined to spend the time
in a way that afterwards
when I shared my story
it would land outside what I assumed to be
the ‘typical’ experience.
We rented a cabin,
we brought our five-and-a-half month-old puppy,
we cooked our own food,
we hiked kilometers of trails.
We encountered hundreds of people
and dozens of dogs
and as I observed my surroundings
I saw people
laughing and talking and playing together,
running, reading, chasing after each other,
enjoying time alone,
in family gatherings spanning generations.
My eyes scanned the beaches
painted with rainbows of towels, umbrellas and bathing suits,
picnic tables holding families and food,
and hiking trails leading the way
deep into the forests
otherwise unseen from the main roads.
As I watched these hundreds of people
each in their own way
connecting with nature,
I felt my need for competition,
my need to be different,
my fear of fitting in,
fade away.
Instead, I began to think about
how many people
every summer
come to places like this
to be amongst the trees, on the sand, in the water,
away from home –
somehow
hundreds, if not thousands,
of people find some degree of reprieve and restoration
in coming here.
The unique becomes the universal.
I began to understand
the scenes before my eyes
illustrated a commonality
connecting us to our humanity –
that being in nature,
feeling the sun on our skin,
squeezing sand between our toes,
breathing in the pine of the forest
and living amongst the wilderness
are perhaps inherent needs
to us as human beings.
Perhaps it’s a need for me to wholly embrace,
rather than hold at an arm’s distance
in fear of this collective commonality,
what I need to nourish my soul.
Sameness is not always the enemy.
Dawning Words 