| A break was needed to reflect. I wrote a public narrative to reflect the growth. Part 1: Starting this story of self was extremely difficult for me. Firstly, my vision of self changes day-to-day. Secondly, for the past full moon’s worth of days, I haven’t been getting along with the self who’s been sitting down to write this story. For around a month, I’ve felt disconnected and lost. These are feelings with which I had grown quite acquainted with in the past, disconnect and lack, but the sheer force of their re-emergence in my life has had me in a very introspective place in the past four weeks. At school, work, the dancefloor I love it. I see my people, we hug, smile, dance. When I’m alone though, every Thursday these days, that’s when it flips; willingly, but not without suffering. I begin to question, to criticise. It’s painful to be that which you despise. I hate hypocrisy. Yet hate is born of fear, and what you fear is what you become. I reached out to close allies, chosen tribe members and with their help, I bounced back. I’m here, in front of you ready to share, ready to shine. Blessed. Blessed to mirror the light in your eyes as you take this in. I’ll start the story in a past place, a past time, a place full of clutter, when the world I lived in was much smaller than it is for me today. Imagine the board game 'snakes and ladders', you roll a dice, ladders take you up, snakes take you down. We’re going to slip right down the serpent’s back and take a shortcut through the past. Today, I look at the past as a place which I grew out of, though I used to see it differently. Sometimes, I want to judge that place harshly. I feel it as being cold and dark. Can you feel it? That dark, cold, gloomy place that you barely escaped from alive? Welcome to my closet. I’ll say things like, “I never want to go back there”. I mean, I’ve gotten so far, I’m so much closer to being happy all the time, I’m spending less time with the hurts… You know the hurts? You're enjoying a perfectly beautiful day: sun, warmth, flip-flops (or maybe boots crunching in the snow) then you hear it, feel it, out of nowhere it flashes through you, like lightning through nothing. Nothing you can see, but you sense it, smelling the charred dust of an echo, from the past. A song, a name… and I’m back there again. A place of pain, a place of judgement. My closet, it’s so small in fact. Yet, in my head it’s so big that any direction I run to, agony fires back at me like weaving snowballs glazed with ice. Flying objects that I thought I’d unidentified with. Words. “Loser”; “fuck-up”; “failure”; “idiot”. I see everything and everyone I felt I ever did wrong, all my wants, all the times I’d given up. They’re all coming at me from the countless corners I want to retreat to. My breaths speed up, I’m doubled over clutching at my core, breaking in half at the center, or maybe even about to burst outward when I pass out. I wake up short of breath, shivering, not quite ready to, wipe away the thin film of slime on my eyeballs, remnants of the shadows, of the walls, of the closet, of my imagination. Those are the hurts. I’ve been dusting out the corners of my hurts for the past month. Why? It’s like a house that you’re moving out of, you need to empty out every last room and closet before making moves. Empty. My dilemma has been transforming my goal of becoming empty into 1000 words of motivation. Hah! . . . Part 2/3 coming tomorrow. |