Day 117: Quenched
July 8, 2020
Day 117
When I was a younger person, say in my 20s and well into my 30s, I was obsessed with the "me" I felt lost to and missed terribly. I could not articulate who she was or where she'd gone; I only knew that I felt a deep longing that followed me everywhere, through my days and nights.
Little by little, I found her. Myself, that is. And now, not often but every now and then, I have a pang of that missing and I wonder if it's a phantom pain, the missing of something that is no longer not there, some kind of double or triple negative that leads to a thinking trap. And that reminds me that the thinking trap was itself how I managed to live all those years away from myself.
It was only once I began to release myself from the mental gymnastics and allow my body to speak that my self came forth. She roared forth, all rage and sex and rebellion and reclamation. For a while, I held tight to the rage and rebellion parts, afraid if I softened my grip she'd slip away with them.
Little by little, over the course of the last decade, I've changed again. But it's the kind of changing that is more like becoming, or even more than becoming, it's like settling, like a self slowly, gradually, surely enough seeping into every crevice and crack of my being until there are fewer and fewer untouched places, fewer neglected places, fewer aching to be seen places. I picture water flowing and how it always finds the dry spots. I am quenched.
I want to reach my arm around my younger self sometimes and tell her she did her best. She really did. She wanted love and a family and a home and to make a beautiful life, she wanted to matter, she wanted to belong, she wanted to stand out, she wanted to blend in though she might never have admitted it.
She was largely blind to the ways her white, heteronormative, upwardly mobile upbringing had shaped her, but the quaking of wanting to get away from the very life she was making never stopped shaking, though she quieted it well enough for quite some time.
Sometimes it takes something seismic to wake us up to who we were all along. But after that, it takes courage and commitment not to go back to what you'd come to know, what you'd come to associate with comfort even though you knew it was constricting.
I no longer want to go back.
“This is not the time for guilt. It is not the time for handwringing. It’s not the time for feeling heartbroken, even though that is a natural response. This is the time for courage. This is the time for really digging deep within ourselves and challenging ourselves to act and be in ways that we have not before, and ways that make us not comfortable. We all have to find courage in ourselves. We’ve been lulled by complacency and we think that comfort is the goal of our lives and it’s not. The goal of our lives is to be awake and alive and you cannot be that if you’re complacent and comfortable. And so people talk about wanting these things to end, whether it’s racism or the diviseness in the United States or whatever it is, and they have to have courage for that to happen. And it’s not going to be that person out there or that book that you’re going to read or that guru or that TED talk. It’s going to be the day-to-day, in-yourself courage to keep going, to keep fighting, to say the thing that nobody else in the room wants to say, but it’s the truth. And people aren’t going to like you when you say the truth. But your goal, again, is not to be liked. You did not come here ot be liked. You came here to be awake and alive. My vision is for more people ot be awake — not woke — but awakened and alive to do this work.”