Another month has passed in a whirlwind of absent moments. To where I feel the only mark of time is how often I refill my pill sorting box. It’s Wednesday again, another week gone, in cycle over and over again and it’s a month, it’s a quarter of the year, it’s four years altogether.
The constant evolution of a person over spans of time is never ending. I’m an entirely different person than I was when I drove back to Texas from Idaho. I’m not as much of a writer as I was, emotion has been stilted and stunted, twisted into a whole lot of numb nothing. It was safer then, but I’m tired of it now. I’m exhausted from never feeling the depth that was me before. My life isn’t meant to be felt so pillowed and insulated from emotion. Though doing so through medication likely saved my life. Or sanity. Or both.
No longer do I feel on the edge of tears at any moment, grieving for the loss of a life I thought I wanted. It was folly thinking I was ready to leave my son behind. To think he didn’t need me. Just when I was finally sober after his lifetime of having an alcoholic mother, I left him. Even if it was only for a few months overall the trauma of the entire experience will last him forever. He’s far more cautious in all things than I ever have been, and I’m learning a certain “slowness” from him. Where I’ve always been voracious and insatiable, he shows me that forethought and planning aren’t entirely unappealing. In fact, they are necessary for the bedrocks of what we build ourselves upon.
It does make sense, that when you’ve been stripped of the foundation your entire existence was built upon. When I abandoned the faith and marriage of my youth I didn’t realize how unmoored I’d become. I clung to anything deemed safer and solid, what I was told I “should” build a life upon. Even now it’s pressed on me from all directions, if I allow it. The pressure to pair. I chuckle about it now, as in every conversation with my mother it’s brought up in some way. When I see her clearly as miserable overall with the path she took in life. When she would have been so much happier building a life of her own, instead of marrying young and having kiddos. We all choose how to handle those things we accept as bedrock. Oh, freedom, how delicious and lip-smacking it can be. And when people speak of how ingrained patriarchy and “shoulds” are they can’t even touch the base of the pyramid. It’s in our genetic memory going back thousands and thousands of years. Shaking it free isn’t simple, I have to be constantly on the watch against slipping back into the comfort of things that are, instead of dreaming of how things could be.
My entire life seems to have been a cycle of stripping down to naked newness and grasping at hope. We are raised to do anything other than trust the wisdom of our Self. Conditioning is a powerful thing. Genetic memory is even stronger. And the pull of safety known is so very strong. Pairing up and hopping on the relationship escalator is irresistible for so many of us who have had the rug of security ripped from beneath us. I scrabbled to grab it back for so long.
But I’ve not felt so safe as I do now in a very long time. Instead of sharing a life and centering another’s needs I’ve only myself to answer to. And in the vacuum of chosen isolation I’ve grabbed what I’d always wanted but never felt I deserved. Never felt it was in reach to have a little home of my own and build it up into exactly what I wanted. Never thought I could do it, to be honest. Even with daydreams of sailing the world solo, of hoping I could use my own feet to carry me anywhere I wanted with infinite time laid before me, wishes to sink into solitude which is security to my nervous system, I never thought I’d have the freedom. So I’d snatch bits of time here and there to revel in solitary moments, then return to the fray.
And now all I have is time, and the freedom to fill it as I will. So the moments when I’m refilling my pill sorting box and reminded that yet another week has passed I try to remind myself of the blissful “empty” time passing in which I pursued what I needed, instead of what I was told to need.
A Burd in Flight 