Waves and change-ups
pain is inevitable, change is constant
Thank you for being here.
Yesterday, I returned to my May post, which was so richly centered around movement, and I’d forgotten I’d written so much about that. I long for that because I’m nooooot moving much. This post is being written while navigating restrictions I currently have around moving physically, while I traverse a journey that exists within (the mind and within the body) partially because I have no choice but also because I am rolling with the tides.
Examples: communication, exploration, confrontation. Experience of various glass walls, as I like to call them — boundaries that you don't realize you have until suddenly you’ve run into them.
In other news: I moved. Moved right into my own place that I can prance around in…
eventually.
I enjoy my little “covert” single-living things like leaving the ice cube tray in the freezer empty, and leaving the dishes in the sink. No one can tell me what to do and that is simultaneously silly and incredible.
In alphabet letters on my fridge, a message reads
lets go to first base
a message to no one but me because I live here and the fridge is mine.
In this place, my place, I like to keep the bathroom door open for myself and for Apollo, whose favorite thing about his new home is the width of the windowsills. When I first got here and I created my wifi name for myself, I wondered what I should call my home, but I agreed (with myself, I guess) not to name it yet. So in the meantime, my wifi is called laners, and that feels bittersweet and playful and like something nostalgic that I don’t want to cry about, so I ignore it.
But now that I’m settling more, I am playing with a name for what is beginning to feel like a green castle,
a castle that sounds very much like a rainforest throughout the day but especially in the morning. I wake to the loudness of birds, and Apollo moaning about how he badly wants to catch one.
I am slowly turning this home into a home, and playing with what it all means to me, but my progress is slowed tremendously by my injury. Great time to severely sprain an ankle, four days before your big move. Needless to say I have incredible friends who carried everything on The Big Day while I hid in my fortress, ashamed I had to ask for so much help.
Since then, I have been rocking with crutches and newly, a big heavy boot. Projected heal time is longer than I’d like to even mention here, and though you all know I like a challenge, my limited capacity deeply hurts my pride and breaks my heart that I am unable to be active and walk and explore and climb with friends after months of making huge physical strides.
BUT this is temporary and
I am practicing radical acceptance and sitting with the lessons in patience this injury is teaching me. I am supplementing with other outlets, and setting other intentions like beginning drum lessons in earnest. Writing music is cathartic, and that’s continuing at a pace that feels comfy and gentle to me. While it’s painful and cumbersome to get on my mat and exercise, I’m trying to sprinkle that in, too.
There is a lot to be said about all the energy and change taking place in my body and my mind and my nervous system, and I am proud when I think of it all. My group therapist who is wonderful uses a metaphor: life is like a pitching machine, and it will continue to throw balls. They don’t stop, he says. No matter how sincerely you wish they’d stop flying at you.
Lately, I have identified strongly with this image, but I have to believe that everything is informative and so I try (so! hard!) to give myself credit for moving (slowly) with as much grace as I can muster.
Through grace I am re-exploring the power of communication — with myself and with others. I feel somehow less spikey, and I wonder if that is coming from the company I keep — or maybe the time I’m spending alone. Maybe I’m unraveling in a manner of speaking though I don’t feel that I am.
Not in the general sense at least.
I am seeing how having difficult conversations with transparency and vulnerability cracks us open. Later, we heal closed in a more whole way.
My wish as I think about it now, is to see life as exploration, whether that is external or internal — and often, I think it can be both at the same time. Joy can be found in all things. I may be in emotional/physical pain/temporarily incapacitated but in other respects I feel more myself than I have in a long while, and admitting that is.. somethiiiiiing.
Sometimes I find myself sincerely present in my now, and other days I am stuck so completely in the noise: my hangups, my pain, my phone, or otherwise distracted.. and yet, there are still others when I am tugged backwards, sometimes in my dreams or my reveries or my songwriting.
This is me noticing waves. Ones that rumble low as they swell, forming.
Waves that crash over me leaving me dripping,
and then sure enough, a gust of wind comes to blow me dry, and I am grateful for these experiences that teach me more about my human experience.
This morning I hung up a note that reads,
I am very young. I am learning how to live.
And I am, and so are you. We ought to be kinder and less harsh to ourselves in light of that information.
I feel that right now, I have nothing and everything to share with you. Today is a day that is flowing all the way through me. I’ll be back soon.
A
If, like me, you are dazzled by the human experience and our collective understanding of it, consider this:
I am launching a project at work based around our shared experience of Hope. If you feel excited to, please consider sharing a story centered around Hope, no matter the context. You can read more about the project here, and you can submit your story here.