Be

I went camping over new years with new friends. Lulled by the twilight and the breeze, we sat in the gathering darkness and started to get philosophical. 

I mentioned this blog. I used to write from my heart as a way of figuring out life. It was a form of self-therapy, sharing struggles and aha moments in the written word. This blog stretches back over fifteen years. It was a part of me for a long time, but I haven’t written for nearly three years. I haven’t written much of anything.

My new friend didn’t ask why I wrote the blog, or why share such private things. She tilted her head to one side, looked at me sincerely, and asked, what changed?

2022 was one of the darkest times in my life. As everyone got back to normal after lockdown, I found it way lonelier than the thousands of hours cooped up in my living room. I had a social deficit that nothing seemed to fill. I was touch-hungry and ashamed. I went through the motions on empty. I struggled to see what was even the point of me. It didn’t get better with time. It got darker and scarier, so I sought proper help. 

I won’t go into it, of course, but therapy showed me that feeling sidelined was a childhood wound that I kept doing to myself long into adulthood. I trained myself into emotional neutrality, pushing aside my needs and emotions for some later date that rarely, or never, arrived. I sidelined myself on autopilot, choosing the performance of a person who had everything under control. I fit myself, however poorly, into other people’s lives and their social circles. I never learned how to carve a me-shaped space in the world. I’d find myself adrift when people moved forward and friendship groups changed. When lockdown ended, I had nothing to rebuild with, and I broke.

This blog was a fifteen year project of figuring out how to become a real person, with a real life. Like some kind of pinocchio girl, I arranged my features and wooden limbs with each post. It was never going to work. I would never come alive while treating myself like a construct to be remade and improved.

The only way was to feel. I had to let my raw self exist with compassion and not judgement. Scarier than that, I had to honour and act on those feelings. Be me-shaped. Do me-shaped things. 

Real life can’t be deconstructed and reverse engineered. It must be felt and forged.

I guess I found that hard to write about. It wasn’t something that fit into sentence bites. 

This year, under a wild and beautiful aurora that danced across the starry sky, I made a reverse resolution. This year I give myself permission to do nothing new, or be better in any way. I will be everything I already am. I am not a made thing. I am a soft, imperfect, weird, wonderful, alive thing, and I can just be.