You know, there’s a funny thing about me. I’m a beautiful, intelligent girl with so many quirks. But even I do silly things to avoid pain. The thing is, as I’ve learned throughout my life, a certain degree of pain is inevitable. I’m sensitive and so full of love for others that the grief and suffering that comes from letting go of different stages in my life has been overwhelming at times.
I owned up to some tough things today. The relationship I didn’t want to be in anymore that makes me feel so powerless that it takes the words right out of my mouth to end it. I have been afraid of my own strength. I am never one to hide from grief, the kind that comes from investing in others but I still lack the confidence to have the first word, to make the first move. Instead, I make myself incredibly distant and difficult. Untouchable. Unlovable. That is how I get rid of people, situations and things I feel I don’t want to own enough to independently walk away from. For all my strength, that is my weakness.
Tonight I apologized to my best friend for lying. She always sees in me what the best and brightest things are. She always encourages me and the soft, round bubble of my life and love, to grow in the direction of the light it most deserves. Recently, I was so consumed by feelings of inadequacy, from months in the wrong relationship and at the wrong point in my life, that I did the only thing I knew how to do. I pushed her until she walked away from me, throwing her hands in the air.
I couldn’t admit to myself that I was not happy. My life felt like one impossibility falling down on another and I couldn’t even find the voice enough to leave the relationship, to trust my heart, to find the fresh air I needed to breathe into my life. I became fixated on the idea of his happiness in my absence. The next girl after me. The opportunity I was squandering by having feelings of needing space to figure myself out. Like we had given each other enough of a chance. Like I had handed out too many chances. That this was what I deserved to feel. As if someone was pulling out my insides every day and telling me, in all certain ways, that I was unworthy of them. And sometimes that’s how things are.
Sometimes you have to lose your footing. You have to scream and howl at the moon. You have to curse and ask god, “Why?!” and maybe receive an answer and maybe not. I have become someone I do not like. Someone who is dependent on another person, the wrong person, for things I know they are not capable of giving anyone because then I feel validated in my own unworthiness. Dependency as a poison. As the thing chaining me to my bed. What a feeling.
I know what you’d say. “You’re such a writer”. I have always felt the need to push myself to feel through to the very depths of an emotion and an experience. To run with the river until it runs dry. Then to cry at the moon. To stare at the blood on my hands and feel that was not enough. My heart isn’t full enough. My body isn’t healthy enough. I’m not detoxed enough, loud enough, smart enough, pretty enough, good enough.
And there my best friend was. Telling me, “Do you even know who you are? What you’re destined for in this life? How much of a force you are? Do you really have any idea?” At the time, I insisted on running still with the wolves, blood in my mouth and in my hair. The dark place getting darker and darker and my voice getting weaker and weaker.
Last week I saw a healer. He said I have been here hundreds of times before. That there is a lesson in all of this. That there will always be someone else even if there doesn’t feel like there will be one. There will always be another time. Another place. I can be anything I want. Go anywhere. Be anyone. Anything can be fixed with time. Anything can be created.
I do not like the person I have become. Blood in my mouth and in my hair and on my thighs. So now I stop. I chose instead to swim downstream. To find the words that have been sitting idle in my mouth for much too long. To fit into my life only what deserves to be there. This time, I look at my grief and my pain and I thank it for coming into me. I thank it for releasing in choked sobs in the bathtub. I thank it for coming when I am still bleeding. My body still sore and shifting and leaking. My heart still clutching and turning over and beating. I thank it for coming and cleaning my slate. For allowing me the rest I need. For being deep and seemingly endless right now. For bringing me back into the darkness but instead now with a light and a trust that I am no longer afraid of what comes next. That even with the worst it ever gets, you still get through. The wounds heal. You stitch them up when the time comes but first you must feel them fully in order to purge yourself. I do not create a small, empty space in my heart to keep parts of this. I want it gone. Out. Cleansed. However that comes to me. However that happens. Even if it means I need to drag myself by my hair for a while through the months to come. I will do what it takes.
I am ready now to meet the person I will become in the next stage of my life. To say goodbye to the way things have been for a while now. To let go in all the curses and uncontrollable sobs and cries and deep, uncomfortable bouts of sadness that I need to free my heart and my life of the things that have been chained to it. I am not afraid of myself anymore. Of my power. Of my strength. Of me, so unlike any other and in such confidence I can say it and feel it and know it deeper than the deepest, most sacred thing in my heart.
I ask for forgiveness. I bring back into my heart the strength and light it needs to bring me into the skin of the next woman I am becoming now. The one who will look back on this year and say, “I did stupid things but I am not that person anymore. I needed that stupidity to bring me to who I am now.” I look forward to what my grief brings me and to what the unknown holds. I am ready to face it. Not run. I can go anywhere. Be anything. I am already so much.
I close the door now on the things that do not serve me and I lock it. I clean the windows and find that I can see the ocean, in it’s endless push and pull, just beyond where I am standing. Always there.
Love,
Zandria
So You're A Writer? 