Tag Archives: knowing yourself

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.

The Vulnerability in Knowing

I know that I’ve been absent for quite some time here. There has been no new writing, no spam posting of edited pictures on social media, and a barely-noticable, quite sparse presence on the book of face.
I haven’t been creating like I used to, for months… and that’s okay.

“We’re all on a different timeline.” has been repeated over and again and it makes me wonder. In the multiverse of five billion minds, where will paths cross, intertwine and split again, all creating what we know of ourselves?

What exactly started the chemical reaction of learning more of myself, I don’t know. The healing does not come like a cleansing rain. No, it comes like a nuclear explosion, laying waste to all you’ve ever known. It leaves you in what looks like ruins, flaws and brokeness exposed.

There is no painless way to know yourself.

Before uncovering the foundations a soul stands on, hours, days, months are spent digging through the rubble. Research on radioactive events, in our existence, is never truly over. So it is, sorting through fragmented memory, to find insight into a reason for every element of ourselves.

Clarity is supernatural and what you once thought of in black and white, washes away. Contrast can only do so much to see within, when even our brain-matter is gray. Such is the struggle, when it is realized that previous you-s no longer exist, and you are pressed to give answer to questions insidious persistence. Steady retort is buried under the debris of all I have been and have yet to be.

Long story short, I’ve been learning about myself, pursuing healing, and wrestling with the unknown. When you think about everything you perceive yourself to be, what do you find when the past is pried open and the patterns of of your personality are tracked? Getting to know someone, with all their flaws and idiosyncrasies, takes intention and vulnerability. You are worth getting to know yourself that way.

Access to the Heart