Retrospective: January 2015

The holidays are a difficult time for me, involving sad attempts to recreate past traditions that are lost and painful reminders that my life, as much as I love it, does not include the deeper loves of family that many people enjoy and I may never know.  Longing for a way to celebrate and honor the year in my own way, I decided to take the week between Christmas and New Years to reread my journals from the previous twelve months. This withdrawal from creativity to reflection has enabled me to focus my energy on my seasonal job’s need to have me full-time while spending the holidays with the most cherished member of my family: myself. I have relished reminiscing and feeling grateful for what myself and I have endured and triumphed over this year, and gathering threads of wisdom for a vision of what our next year together may hold.

While I braced myself for some difficult reading, I was thrilled by how much beauty and hope I was in touch with even in the darkest period of my struggle to release the life I had been living. I was also startled to see how much material I had to cover – four college-rule daily journals and two dream journals, not including what I have written for this blog. I am so grateful to have documented my transition with such rich detail, insight, and metaphor, but I quickly realized that my goal of reading it all in a week and drafting a single blog with highlights was unrealistic.

What has surfaced is a long-term project of reflecting on and integrating my journey, and while I am invested in that process, I would like to share a few of the richest entries, unedited. I believe that the rawness of the stream-of-conscious format communicates both the bewilderment that I experienced during my early transition, and the abundance of light and movement that seems to surface whenever I write long enough to let my deeper voice emerge. I hope you enjoy this retrospective journey as much as I am, and perhaps feel moved to recognize that our greatest comfort and mentor is not to be found out in the world, but deep inside of our own solitude. I believe that our relationship with ourselves is the most vital one in our lives for it is enduring and can be rich with wisdom, generosity, and mutual trust if we nurture it well.

This first entry I am sharing was from the darkness of winter after taking some time off work due to a flu and reconnecting with myself at a crucial time. I was in the middle of a three-month break from the support of the Authentic Portland community in order to grieve the ending of my relationship with one of its leaders, and I was beginning to accept that my vision for and connection to my career was unraveling beyond my ability to either transform it or endure it.

January 13^th, 2015

“This loneliness does not come from being alone. It comes from being separated. Sometimes company makes it feel even more desperate. As I dig around, I feel warmer. It’s here inside, not out in the world. It’s in the suitcase, not in the place I am traveling to. Always traveling. There’s something soothing in the movement, like the flow of water over a patch of insect bites, but the venom is still in there and it just burns hotter once things are calm again. A week wasn’t enough. I don’t know how much time would be. It is not in my nature to drop everything and run away, so I must take the time I have, whatever hours are gifted as my own, to dissolve. The transition is hard, yes. My mind gets running so fast and my body clenches up to keep it from flying out of orbit, but I must always keep a finger on the switch. I must swallow the fear of hearing the engine rev down and knowing the silence is coming. Because I know what I will find in the documents and evals and meetings and calendars. I don’t know what I will find when everything stops. But the only alternative is this gnawing restless sadness that has propelled me through so many obstacles. I am tired of fighting. I am tired of shedding ever tighter skins – of being squeezed, of being stretched. The only way back is out and down, into that fearful quiet emptiness, into that precious solace I know will break my heart again and again each time the world dawns with its endless demands. Like coming out of meditation to petty separateness. After every achievement, there is a stroll through the night when I feel the joyful sadness of the deep insignificance of everything we do. But I am a half-breed. Borne of the stars and our callous institutions. Craving structures for safety, lashing against them for liberation, and yet knowing all along that the only thing that endures is fickle memory and even that will fade into insignificance when I return to where I came from. What is the point? I cannot speak of what is truly real without feeling misunderstood and alone – or feeling deeply in love and broken by their inevitable humanity. My inevitable humanity. But I love it all so dearly – love that chaos that birthed me and moves in my blood. These languages do not translate. There is one spoken at home and one out in the world, and I must simply speak both if I am not to die of loneliness for my source or aloneness from my people, place, and time. My secret is deep in me. Sometimes even I forget where I buried it. But when I hold it, I can endure anything. When it is lost, the simplest pleasant life grows unbearable.”

Nancy