What do you do when a moment, or a song, or a book, or maybe just a random something you encountered that you can’t even place sends you back to a place you never thought you’d be again?
After a series of random, seemingly unconnected events (that will not be discussed further here), that’s where I find myself now. In this place I was sure I’d walked though, and left behind, long ago. It’s exactly the same but also brand new. I’m so much older which I would think would help, but it doesn’t. All time has done is allowed me to see everything from more than one side. All time has done is allow this formerly closed off piece to quietly grow, and in one moment it exploded into every ounce of my life, and I struggle to see how I ever saw my life without it. How I managed to get to where I am without this feeling so present, and heavy, and impossible is beyond me. But I did, right? Not 30 days ago, everything wasn’t… this. My life didn’t feel so polluted. So unsure. How?
I have written before about feeling like I was standing in the dark and life was violently spinning around me while I desperately tried to grab hold of something steady. And that was true. But now? I’m not sure if this is purely hindsight or rose-colored glasses, but within those thoughts I’ve written about before, it feels …temporary? Possible? Like it had to have an end, eventually. All storms end, eventually, right? And even if I could not see that hope in that moment, I knew it would come. I knew I could be honest about how it felt to me in that moment, because in the end, eventually, the hope comes to steady it all and allows me to breathe again.
But this? This is uncharted.
That’s really the only word I can think to explain what it feels like to be in this place. Uncharted. There’s no roadmap. It’s ambiguous and confusing. Really, I just would give almost anything to be able to talk to the one person that helped me though this entire thing the first time, in real time, but I cannot.
So it feels so lonely.
It feels impossible.
It feels uncharted.
So what the hell do I do now?
I don’t know. Who does, really. If I knew that, I would not be typing all this out.
I can, however, take all I have in me and force it to work for me instead of against me. Will it work? Hell if I know. But the way I made it through this initial situation when I was younger, and the way I learned to cope with literally anything was, in short, shove it away and do your absolute best to convince everyone you’re fine.
“This is fine. I’m fine. You can’t touch me. You’ll never see how much this hurts. You can break me.”
Only this time it’s me against me. This seemingly never-ending wave of memory and hurt crashes against me constantly. I never had a chance doing this on my own. So instead, I take all that same energy that I used to survive before, and turn it against myself… sort of. This time, instead of me convincing the world that I’m ok and untouchable, it looks a little more like me telling friends “I know this has to be a lie. But I feel like you abandoned me. This is impossible. This onslaught of pollution into my life will never let up so I can breathe and find out how to move forward. If I did not have this faith that I have, I would have given up on this fight.”
This time, when the only thing I can hear is how impossible and unending this is, I meet that energy with the same force, I call it the lie it is, and I just… try.
It doesn’t feel like a lie when I tell them. It feels like the truth. And thank God I can be a stubborn ass because I know I’ve believed differently for 20+ years. I have known that hope is coming. Even when my mom died, I knew that good would come again. That my faith tells me that good wins in the end, and that, eventually, hope returns.
It feels like a lie, for now. And the only thing that feels true right now, in this minute, is that this will never stop. This won’t get better. But believing just the opposite has gotten me this far, so I’ve either been telling myself a lie for most of my life, or I’m telling myself a lie now. It seems far more likely that I’m telling myself a lie now, despite every part of me screaming to my brain how that’s not true at all.
So… what now? I’ll keep blabbing it out in thought circles where I can, to anyone who will listen. I’ll keep calling and texting friends. I will keep talking about how all these lies feel like the only real truth, but I’m leaning into my stubborn spirit and asking them to hold me up until I can breathe again.
For now, I don’t argue with them when they say they hear me. I don’t argue with them when they say they care. When they say they cared in the minute when it all crashed back into my head. I listen to people that have, in the past, only spoken truth into my life. Despite what my brain would have me believe right now, I also know they’ve not lied before.
I didn’t have this many people to speak such truth into my life before. While I’ve lost the one person who got me through it before, I have since gained so many more. So, while I am walking through all of this again, as a much older me, I also have a whole lot of truth in my life I never had before. If it was true then, it’s true now too. How do I know? Well, right now I don’t. But it’s easier to settle on the thought that it’s still true than it is to settle on the idea that I’ve believed a lie for most of my life.
It feels uncharted. And maybe it just needs to for a little while. Until then, I guess, I’m out here tossing words wherever they’ll land, desperate for the truth to feel true again.