How to write about this season I’m not sure. Long-term plans are an illusion. It’s time to trust. Feel your fear and do it anyway. A total remake of life and a reminder of things being transitory and only existing briefly. Ephemerality. The only way is through. Step by step, no more, no less.
The multitude of emotions and epiphanies are shocking at times. Life is like an optical illusion that reveals layer after layer, mirror within mirror.
Once I think I get it, another angle reveals itself and puts me back to questioning what — just a moment ago — I believed to be true.
I’m doing the things I need to do to get where I need to be in spite of my emotional attachment to where and who I have been. I often don’t even know what is driving me yet somehow, I am moving forward. Progress is redefined with the realization that ‘more’ or ‘better than’ are so very misleading and unrealistic terms to define progress. When I understand the futility of reaching for external validation, then what am I supposed to reach for? And how do I feel validated without something or someone else? Yes, it all makes sense but I’m programmed to perform, compare myself to others, bargain for validation. I’m programmed to meet certain (unspoken) requirements and under the illusion that it’s never good enough. That being who I am is not enough and this is what we call normal. We think it’s normal to expect so much of ourselves and each other. I don’t think so.
So my soul marches on with my mind in tow, trying to understand what’s going on and rationalize my soul’s path. My mind has no clue what’s going on.
Sometimes I feel immense loneliness and a sadness I cannot describe nor recall having ever felt so deeply and devastatingly. I wonder, am I now truly feeling instead of thinking? Have I been (re)creating emotions mentally all this time? However intense, the feelings pass and transform. They don’t linger, demanding to be shared with others and thus relived once more. They don’t try to be understood by any means.
Sometimes, when the chaos subsides, emptiness fills up, my hands glow with warmth, my chest opens and I get lifted up without moving. The quest for belonging halts and that seems to me what it means to feel.
