SEPARATE
Well. Here we are. What a place I seem to always return to. This time it is different. This time it is raw. The gravity is heavy, inescapable. The only way through is forward.
I am in this space that is so deeply uncomfortable. The recurring signs and symbols are at times frightening, but if I am honest it is because I am scared by their truth. Scared by my truth. I am on this path. I cannot get off of it.
It feels awkward to say I feel called to do something, but I do not have other words for it than that at this time. I feel called to share this experience. It is through sharing we can heal.
So, I reopened these words I wrote 3 years ago, and find myself in such a similar but vastly different space. I still feel the same What the Fuck am I doing? But now it is a different what the fuck, more what the fuck else am I supposed to be doing? I have tried to fight my path, calling it my ‘mid thirties crisis’ when I felt this discomfort creeping in 4 years ago. I blamed this edginess on my husband and his path through addiction and recovery and the way it effected me. I used his recovery as a means to justify my own numbing down, to continue down the path of not facing who I am, because I wasn’t an ‘addict’ or I didn’t have a ‘problem’. When at the center of it all, was me, this person I have never really meant. And there it was, my problem, my addiction. I have fled the realities of my path over and over again, For the last 25 years I took my feelings of separateness and sorrow, and I drowned them, cut them, snorted them, chased them with whiskey, saw them peaking through, and numbed them again. I pushed that sweet girl who felt she had no-one to talk to, no where to go but down, and put her in a dark room to cry on her own. I hear that girl as the ringing in my ears and she is screaming, screaming at me STOP. Just. Stop. Sit down. Take a deep breath. And another. And another. Feel those emotions? You are at the threshold. That seed has been planted and now it must grow.
I must move forward without the old sturdy crutches which have allowed me to drag my legs behind me on the ground.
I am leaning into the Unseen. Asking for guidance. Revisiting parts of my self that are buried deep beneath the layers of despair, loneliness, depression, self harm, problematic tendencies, substance abuse, and separateness.
So far what this looks like for me is a lot of tears. Early mornings feverishly writing to get the words out. And starting each day, no matter how impossible it seems, sitting with myself in meditation.
All signs point down this road.
Most days I feel squirmy. Like I want to run, so I do, I go for a run. I cry when I feel like I need to, which is more than I will admit. I laugh at myself. I put on music and dance and sing. I listen to the words of those who have walked similar paths to mine, Laura McKowan, Elena Brower, Holly Whitaker, Augusten Burroughs…
I sit in this open wound I have created and breathe in the air that will help to heal it. I call on Spirit, and talk to God, even though I do not really feel that I know how to. I ask for help. Am I doing this right? Is this how I pray? Can you give me a sign? And always, there is a sign. Each day I add a new tool to my tool box, or make something useful out of a broken one.
There is only one way to proceed down the road less traveled by, forward, and it will be dark. and bumpy, and uncomfortable. I will trip over rocks and skin my knees. I will cry out in pain. And run through the sorrow, lungs burning with life. I will feel each rock, each pebble, each scrape.
The underlying current which I which I have swam against and numbed for as long as I can remember, is this. This discomfort, this separateness. Who I am in on the other side of that, and the only way to get there is through it.
This is fucking hard. I don’t necessarily want to do it, but I must.
Thank you for reading my words.