Every time I feel confused or lost or aimless I think I will feel that way forever, most always I’ve been wrong. Found-ness never feels like a state I can enter into just something beautiful I witness on a train ride, magnificent and life changing, but fleeting, not something I can ever grasp. Maybe this will change when I get older, (it definitely will), but for now it is a breeze in my hair. So sweet when I feel it caressing the back of my neck but gone too soon. It always comes back again though. Clarity always enters like a gift, like a secret I forgot I knew, like a facetime with an old friend, it’s gone until it’s not.
In times like this when I feel oh so lost it feels like nothing could ever be right in my world. I feel so intimately wrong, so dirtied by wrong-ness. It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong.
Last night, I fell into that feeling so deeply, all the shame and sadness of being so wrong and so confused hit me like a truck. My inner reality hadn’t been that dense in so long, and feeling that way even for a day or so really scared me. Like genuinely, there was a moment there (before panic calling my mom) that I was looking up at the sky praying to God. Tears streaming down my face, I kept saying “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.” (I know–the drama…) The last time I prayed like that I was probably a kid, I probably still believed God to be a benevolent white man in the sky, or maybe by then that image had faded into something else, I’m not sure. I felt a bit silly, but the familiar practice of prayer felt somewhat comforting. In that moment it felt like the only path to surrender something. Being in catholic central, there have been many encounters with the holy. Ducking into churches and cathedrals have been soothing if not simply just a sweet reprieve from the sun. I have searched almost all of them for holy water because I’ve always loved the concept of blessed water, but have only come up with empty engraved stone bowls. A drought of holy water. Or maybe they only put it out for services, maybe it’s only for real practitioners not random people that wander into churches to marvel at the elaborate golden alters and high ceilings.
I can’t even really explain what I was so upset about, it was something about the deep aloneness that now felt horribly lonely, about not knowing what to do next and feeling totally aimless, about feeling like I was somehow doing this all wrong.
Later at night, I felt a bit better, and ended up going to a Cuban restaurant where I found a lively band and people singing and swaying to the beat. Oh, what a relief to remember there was a whole world out there outside of my own head.
Well let’s get to it… this is why I’m here and this is why you’re here for the post-breakdown clarity. The remembering that comes after the forgetting. The [LIFE IS AMAZING]! That comes after [life is so horrible I hate everything]!!! In all honestly, I don’t feel totally out of it, but I feel better and more importantly lighter, and that feels like enough.
More and more I’m realizing that all of my life is really just encountering the same truths (and lessons?) just in different flavours. Sometimes I’m amazed how everything really is all the same. In rereading a journal I had at 17 I was amazed to find that all of the truths I was affirming to myself then are all things I return back to now. Nothing new had happened, all it has been is deepening into things I’ve already known. I forget them often, perhaps these are the conditions of living and being immersed in the experience, but then just like that, they enter back in: truer, deeper, more beautiful than I ever remembered.
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Lessons on radical acceptance (again and again and again)
Maybe this isn’t a problem? LMAO the amount of times that this question has saved me. For so long I held on to the belief that I needed to heal things in order to come to acceptance with them. But, recently it struck me, that I always find true healing when I’m able to reach acceptance. Flash back to my health issues earlier on in the trip, instead of gripping to the idea that I needed to figure out a way to heal, I allowed myself in whatever way I could to not make it a problem. Not make it something that needed to be fixed. And just like that it faded.
Maybe this isn’t a problem, that I feel confused about what to do, maybe it isn’t even a problem that I feel really alone and overwhelmed right now. Maybe this is all fine. Okay, okay, maybe I couldn’t believe it was all the way fine, but how about just a little fine? Just a little less of a problem.
The most magnificent, and all so frustrating paradoxes of how reality operates is as soon as you become totally okay with not getting what you desire, you get exactly what you desire. Again, I don’t think this is about negating what we want (I love getting what I want/ and I always expect to get it eventually) more when you’re in the energy of something not being a problem, reality reflects that—it becomes less of a problem. You simply exist in a version of reality that is lighter and not as compacted with the intensity of all the narratives that come with problems and what they mean about you. When you relax into the ease of nothing needing to change, just like that, things change. It’s almost magic.
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Encounters with divinity (&it’s symbols)
I have cried in many cathedrals recently, sometimes because its so beautiful, sometimes because human suffering is just so unbearable, once because I felt heartbroken. I don’t know if I’m crying to some sort of divinity or just releasing something up and out of me, or enjoying the drama of crying in a place of worship, maybe it is a bit of all of it.
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This is a poem/ prose? I wrote
I’ve been debating what parts of my writing I want to keep more private and which parts I want to share. I’m still a bit unsure, but I wanted to include this poem because I love theorizing about God, and how I find the question (do you believe in God?) a difficult question to answer.
Do you believe in God?
It’s thunder storming in Andalusia. The sky cracks open revealing the bright electric white of what lies beyond it. When I was younger I thought that was heaven, and for a moment God was letting us glimpse at what could be ours, the blinding perfection of Whiteness. Of course, I don’t believe that anymore. You can almost hear the land exhale, opening up its pores to let in the sweet nectar. I want to sigh along with it, let out something in me that has been curling itself around my ribs for perhaps a century. When I get in one of these moods, I have to catch the words out of the sky, piece them together in a way that will make me archive this feeling. This moment right now. Watching lighting over Andalusia, in a room all white like in my dream, where nobody needs anything from me. Not yet at least. And, perhaps, most importantly, I don’t need anything from myself. I’ve been dreaming my whole life that I could feel this alive in the world, this alive in my body. I can only access it in these small moments that call to me from somewhere else. There is something cruel about the fleeting nature of it as I watch it trickle through my open hands. Resisting the urge to curl my fingers around something that is and isn’t mine. It is in these moments that I don’t think about who I should be, or how I might be recognized for the way I arrange words on a page, I don’t think about how I might be doing it all wrong. In these moments I feel more than alive, and I could swear my soul feels big enough to wrap around the world two times. It all makes sense, for now at least. I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before, I remind myself. But, every time it feels new, like a revelation. It makes me want to call my mom. This is why I write. Not because I want to, but because I need to. I need to. I need to. It’s an obsession with how close I can get to the realness of being alive. To archive the eternity of a moment, and get so close to it, that if I pursed my lips I might feel the feathery softness as a shadow of a kiss. Each time, I think this is the moment that I can capture the essence in its entirety. Each time, I get so close, but always something escapes my grasp. Some things cannot be put into words. That’s the closest I can get to explaining God. The thing that refuses to be put into words. I’ve met God this way many times before. Feeling it as yearning, maybe even, feeling it as loss. The shadow of it presses up against the page, seducing me, turning away from me, even as it allows me to mold the words against its presence. All I want to do is write about God. Perhaps, that is strange. But, I can’t look at the curve of my lover's back, witness the steady decay of Ending, feel the way the wind caresses my face or otherwise knocks me over without considering It. Considering the way that the forever of those perfect moments often feels like deja vu, like a dream I once had. Like if I wanted to I could reach into my skull and find it under the folds of my brain, and it would say to me, “it’s about time, I’ve been waiting since the beginning.” Where something about the intimate aloneness of the long curve of my shadow, blue on orange snow from the streetlights, walking home can remind me of a story I read as a child. Though I can’t remember what that story is, I think it was about coming home.
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Choose your fighter
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Journal Prompts
In the lost/found binary where are you finding yourself in this present moment?
What does density feel like in your body? Where can you locate it simply as a pure sensation?
Is there something in your reality that could feel less like a problem? (maybe just a small problem??) What narrative would you need to let go of in order to do that?
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Wow, thank you for being such a good listener.
As always, sending my love,
-Thai xx