Tag Archives: a challenge

Searching

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” – Emily Dickinson

9.27.26

Today was the first day in a long time that I did not have an impending sense of doom. Not doom in the normal sense, but the inability to be fully in the moment because there’s too much hanging over you, a backlog of to-do’s that may or may not ever be done, trying to hold all the pieces of staying in touch with others and with myself.

I’ve been in some level of survival mode for months now. Life doesn’t care or slow down. I’m busy and overwhelmed daily…except for today.

I think I’ve been searching for a me that I remember fondly. One who held to a routine, sang for the sake of singing – and posted it for strangers on the internet, one who got home from work tired but would still make dinner feel far from mundane; the one who wrote, who relaxed – from the past. I miss her. I don’t know when she left or the real reason, but I’ve wanted her back ever since.

The version of that me I have been desperate to have back, is highly romanticized. All of the pain and struggle that existed simultaneously to this version of me, has been muted.

So, I realized today, that I can never be that person again – and that’s okay. Current me, future me, are just as important as the one in my memory I’ve been trying to hold on to. Instead of looking for those pieces of me, and trying to make them fit into my current life, I must accept the me that exists now. How sad to leave her waiting, while I conduct a pointless search for pieces of the past.

I am not the same person I was, and yet I still am me. Celebrating that sounds silly, especially since I don’t harbor as much love for this me as the other, but what might be a turning point, a perspective shift, that is worth a small celebration.

How else do we move forward, if we do not let go of the past…

So hello, Strangers and Friends. It’s so good to speak to you again. I’m hopeful for the future, even though unknown.

Holes

“Everyone’s got stuff.” is a statement that I sometimes repeat, to remind myself, the person yelling at me on the phone could be consumed or overwhelmed with something far less trivial. The person practically pushing my bumper as I drive the speed limit, in the right hand lane could be blinded to their own actions by worry or urgency of an event.

How do we deal with our stuff? Most of the time it’s bad habits, unhealthy coping mechanisms, really anything to fill the holes that only hope holds together. Even when something is found to try filling it, it was dug up elsewhere, simply moving the problem, instead of a solution filling it.

I am hungry and tired, day after day moving dirt around my pockmarked heart. As soon as a hole seems filled, close to overflowing with sweet temptations, it’s empty again, just as fast.
“You said hope holds them together. What hope, if this is a never ending push and pull?”
In a world where our happiness rules supreme, and comfort decides value, where is hope indeed. Unlike many, I don’t believe that the point of living is to be happy. This doesn’t stop the addict in me, always looking for that fix. Yet, accepting that the point of life is not, to “be happy” or achieve top social standing, is resolutely freeing.

I often fall into my holes. Cycles still haunt me, whispering, taunting. I know I could be, can be, so much better, so much more. But still, I am hungry, tired.

Someone told me, not too long ago, that in order to change something that you keep going back to, you first need to find the underlying reason. If you keep falling in a hole, get to the bottom of it. Dig deep, so to speak.
It’s a very personal, raw and vulnerable act, to face that place that we keep trying to cover.

If you couldn’t tell, by the lack of posts, and the tone of what is there, being as it is, I’ve been dealing with some holes. I still am.
Would you do something for me, friends and strangers? Would you try facing your holes instead of filling them, covering them? Would you sacrifice the façade of alrightness, the clinging to what feels like control? I’m not asking you to succeed in a single attempt, just try. Take off the VR goggles, the filters and fronts, face whatever your emptiness is and get to the bottom of what you’re trying to fill it with.
It might not make you happy, but it will make you free.