Finding Ourselves Again

Study for “Apotheosis To Thomas Cole” by Frederic Edwin Church

If my words were any consolation to myself then I'd say I'm doing ok considering the struggles and the hardship. Words on the page lay flat like a washboard, but they bubble up, they ripple and they wade in and out of our hearts unless we are not feeling.

But for most of us we can find ourselves in the thick of pain, confusion, sorrow, betrayal, hopelessness or any other kind of shit that life puts on us to feel lost, senseless, without purpose, adrift in a sea of despair.

When I first realized my words were healing me was when I started to truly surrender to the dark stuff. When I let my writer's guard down and decided I'd let the words fly from the depths of me onto the page if nothing else, but a cathartic act of release without anticipating any benefit. Just pure surrender.

The longing for feeling airy and weightless is heavy inside of me. Life and all the crap can sure pull you down and have you feeling pretty disdainful at times.

I'd never lived in this state for more than a day or two at a time in the past, but when you start residing there day in and day out - weeks and months have gone by and you realize you've become that thing. You take up residence there. You get comfortable. You grab all your snuggly things and you decide to stick around, be in it, maybe not with it because that other part of you wants to be set free, but that girthy part of you gets really comfy there.

The sky is blue, but my words have been very grey. And when the sky turns grey my words seemingly turn black. I love black don't get me wrong, but in this context, it's most certainly dark and gloomy, peppered with salt and a tinge of something bitter with a god awful aftertaste that leaves you yearning for something sweet.

I do the heavy lifting, the internal work to mend and heal and time does none of it. It does not heal. It anchors you into it rather. It solidifies it in a very substantive way. Time simply gives you more time to think about it.

But I digress into the blackness and remind myself that I'm working to pull myself back into the light. I'm working to find the parts of me that make up the whole. I'm finding that I can still feel deeply. I haven't gone completely numb although I do on a regular basis feel surges of nothing, a sort of profound numbness that leaves you blank, in a sort of empty cavernous feeling that is perhaps what falling through a black hole might feel like.

And yet, in these moments of profound emptiness, I sometimes catch glimpses of myself again. Like finding forgotten treasures in an attic - a laugh that sounds like my old self, a moment of genuine curiosity that breaks through the grey, a flash of passion for something I once loved. These small discoveries remind me that I haven't disappeared completely.

The paradox isn't lost on me - that I had to get lost to find myself again. That surrendering to the darkness eventually revealed pinpricks of light. That the very words that chronicled my descent are now building a ladder for my climb back. The blank page that once mirrored my emptiness now reflects fragments of my returning self, assembled word by word, emotion by emotion.

I'm not fully back yet, and maybe I never will be exactly who I was before. But I'm finding my way through the labyrinth back to myself - a self that now carries both darkness and light, both weight and weightlessness. And somehow, in this contradiction, I'm becoming whole again.