*Cover photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash*
With the energy of reciprocity in mind, I invite you to become a paid subcriber if you have the means to do so and consistently find value in what I share. With your support, I’m able to pour into my craft and livilihood. For my 19 paid babes, deep gratitude for your offering.
Pro tip: You can listen to me read this full essay by pressing play on the article voiceover.
*
*
This weekend was one for nourishing myself. There's been so much going on that it's hard not to feel trapped in an unpredictable whirlwind of emotion. When the world is moving at rapid speed around you, it's crucial to stabilize yourself before being swept away.
On a whim, I booked an impromptu flight to Mexico City and a cute little Airbnb. I canceled it less than 24 hours later. Here I was again, this overwhelming feeling to escape, to disconnect from everything around me. I get that feeling often; it's a feeling I've worked with for years, doing my best to avoid its pull, but its presence reigns supreme.
My desire to escape is something I've been bringing up in therapy, trying to uncover the roots. Much of it stems from moments when I wanted to remove myself from situations, people, and feelings but couldn't. The moments where I was present in the body, but in my mind, I was shrinking into near nothingness.
Over time, I learned to escape in other ways that didn't require me to go anywhere. I could be in one place physically and so far away in my mind that I existed in two different realities. Maybe this is why drinking felt like such an easy path to a new world. With enough liquor in your system, like a magical elixir, you can transport yourself nearly anywhere. But with a tendency to drink until I was black-out drunk, I often sent myself into a dark in-between, a place where I wasn't dead, but I sure as hell wasn't alive.
On Friday, I had breakfast with someone well-versed in astrology who nearly gasped when they saw my chart. Unbeknownst to me, most of my planets are in the eighth house, also known to some as "the house of death." Though the information was new, it wasn't surprising. From my past to how I show up in the present, death and dying have become consistent themes, whether literal or proverbial. It makes me wonder if this is why I've always chased the things that make me feel the most alive. My spirit must have already had a knowing that the cosmos had cast a shadow over me, and I was hungry for light.
I've been listening to Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi for the past few days, and the best way to describe their writing is hauntingly beautiful. In one chapter, they talk about the pathos plant and the difficulty in killing them. Nature remains such a strong reflection of this human experience.
It won't die. It won't rot. It will spill in two directions, insistently alive despite the amputation. Glorious with its wounds. It's not easy to kill a pathos. That's why some give its name over to the devil. It's not easy to kill me either. I am at once the person most bent on my death and the person most successful at keeping me alive.
-Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran
When life begins to seem too heavy, too much, I consider the path I've traveled up to this point. From the outside, people see my armor, a direct reflection of the battles I've fought, and declare me a warrior, one of the strongest people they know. Few people see me clearly and closely enough to have a stark and sobering awareness of the wounds I still tend to, which many assume have healed.
On Sunday at a friend's house, I found myself floating in the pool, my eyes focused on the cloudy sky above; a storm was on the horizon. With my ears submerged under the water, the world's noise ceased. I felt so light; the heaviness was gone. In all its grace and strength, the water held me, caressed me, asking me to give it all my worries and the weight I could no longer carry. As the birds circled overhead, almost as if to let me know that they saw me and that this freedom to fly wasn't just reserved for them, I thought about how precious life is. How often do we miss the beauty of life because we're so busy bracing for the next storm?
I'm trying to forge a new relationship with death, which feels odd to say as a 33-year-old. One that's based on acceptance rather than fear of the inevitable. A relationship that asks me to show up daily and live to the fullest. Without any context of my past experiences, I know it troubles some people when I begin veering into this murky topic. Who wants to hear about death when there is so much life to be lived? But how can you really live if you don't maintain a healthy awareness of the unavoidable fact that you can't live forever, at least not in this body?
In a society so poised to turn away from death, I admire those who stare it directly in the face. Audre Lorde's Burst of Light goes into deeper detail about her cancer battle, which ultimately claimed her life in 1992 at just 58 years old. A quote from this book reads, "…I live my days against a background noise of mortality and constant uncertainty. Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever." Isn't this the way it should be? Living, truly living, because you know one day you will return to where you came from.