Pierce Right Through Me
the ride up is slow but soon you’ll be flying and then it’ll all be over
It’s an Enjoy the Silence vibe for me lately, innit? I keep trying and failing to analyze why I haven’t written a newsletter in so long. So much has happened since I last shared here. Maybe it was too much to get into on this platform with its demand for words. Maybe I was exhausted. Maybe I was depressed. I think all of that is true. And quieting the mind seems helpful to do, seeing my thoughts as separate from myself, letting them pass until there’s nothing, just the leaves rustling in the breeze, peace. Yet I continue to yap into my notes app, voice memos, laptop. I believe in the power of words, in their magic and influence, and sometimes those that pass through me fill me with hope and keep me alive and compel me.
I sort things out through writing, whether I’m inspired, channeling, or diligent, in practice. But I falter sometimes when I imagine perception from an audience and have to contend with some representation of myself, whoever that is! We all know I have issues with self, but I’ve done a lot of healing in the last year with my inner 10 year-old at least, and I’ve discovered undeniable through-lines: music, language, dreams, feelings lol. A little freak sprung out of the mycelial network of my parents’ DNA in southwest Virginia, and she’s still here.
I’ve been getting a lot of messages about directing your life, inventing yourself, being who you choose to be. It’s a beautiful idea and one I’ve needed reminding of after my sentient dandelion seed season, but I also struggle with it. I loved alcohol and some drugs so much in part because they facilitated a slip n slide of self, no hesitation, no decisions really, just things *~happening~* – this meant a lot of mistakes and booboos of course, but for someone with anxiety, ready to overthink any old situation, a spell to quell the mind was oh so welcome. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple anymore, and the tools that helped started to hurt, and I resisted that reality for a long time before accepting sobriety. My first year of sobriety felt exciting and hopeful, partly because I could hardly imagine getting to a year, so it was a thrilling “what if” kind of situation – is she gonna make it?? And I did! Since that celebratory mark, it’s been a bit of a sludgefest with reality. I’m still grateful to be sober and believe it’s the right thing for me in this era, but boy is it hard having to navigate life with full clarity, and my clever little brain has found other ways to avoid sitting in the driver’s seat.
Knowing this, it makes sense why I see myself as someone fully capable of determining who I am and shaping my life at the same time that I feel so fully chaotic and destined. I understand we contain multitudes and all but it’s one thing to say it and another to live it. This is part of my journey though: being in this ambiguous, contradictory space. I was lucky to be certain for so long, certain AND swept up – what a delight. Now I have been deposited on the ground, and it feels like I’m suspended in gaffa, only I do know why I’m crying. People keep dying and turns out I’m not as okay with that as I thought!
My precious cat Lita died at the end of June after about a month of illness, and I have only just begun to regain the shape of a human, having been stretched and shredded, a tattered ribbon of flesh flapping about with nothing to hold together. Watching her languish and being with her in her final moments was horrifying in a way I’d never experienced before despite my long relationship with death. Death has haunted me nearly my whole life, but I only had glimpses of the dying part, and now the entirety of it has intimately and viscerally dug its claws into my guts and wrenched them into a million pieces, and I am not the same. Seeing someone I cared for and loved so dearly have to face the terror and pain of the end really did something to me. She did not go totally gentle. In my end of life courses, we talked about what constitutes a good death. Ideally perhaps, we die peacefully without pain, surrounded by love, with autonomy around how it happens. But death and dying are mostly of our control, and sweet Lita couldn’t tell me what she wanted – or rather, I couldn’t fully understand how she told me. I tried my best to listen but so much was lost in translation, and I was in a whirlpool of my own confusion, having to make decisions for someone else, my responsibility for her glaring in its intensity. Maybe this is why it’s easier for me to believe we’re at the whims of the universe, seeds in the wind. Trying to materially manage the ephemeral feels like folly, and I’m a fool, and I yearn for it! I yearn for the embodied. I long to sink into the soft fur of my sweetheart, to feel her purr, and I did for as long as I could. Impermanence is so painful. Holding on forever is impossible. All of us eventually have to let go, and we do it over and over again, and I’m grateful as always, and it’s horrible. Maybe it’s getting harder as I get older because I’m hoarding experience and it’s making me anxious. More and more life, more and more love, more and more I know I will lose, or I will be lost first. I used to surf it with grace and a twinkle in my eye, and now I get demolished by the waves, and I weep.
My aunt Jan, my mother’s older sister, died a month after Lita. She did not go gentle either. I’d visited her in early May with my younger brother, and we found her in an absolute vortex of interpersonal drama, physical trauma, end of life, and staunch resistance to it all. My formerly chill themes of chaos and control became banshees, screaming in my face to be heard over the other, their time to shine. I held on to whatever I could find that made sense – small acts of care, gentle but firm encouragement, laughter – and I was also scared and frustrated and confused, flailing. It’s painful to accept that sometimes putting a stop to intergenerational cycles of trauma requires boundaries in a relationship I wish could be boundless. I hardened my heart a little bit, and I haven’t really processed Jan’s death and what it means, because it means too much and not enough. Always with the contradictions, so hard to hold. I’ve barely talked to anyone about it. Whenever I think about starting to explore the caverns of it, I find myself overwhelmed and I go quiet. This is the most I’ve written about it anywhere and suddenly I feel a whole novel come crashing in, into my little world. Maybe the words actually are necessary.
AND there’s so much good that’s happened! I traveled to Norway! I saw my oldest brother for the first time in like 7 years! I danced with my beautiful friends! I’m three years sober tomorrow despite the new grief! It’s Tuesday after all, and the tremors have kept me moving with so much zest and gratitude for life. The good is overwhelming too and deserves just as much processing, if not more, for the sake of my bad-news-addled brain, as the capitalist war machine churns in the foreground, destroying everyone in its path, and the beauty of Earth radiates on. I’d heard getting older and wiser comes with more questions than answers, and what once were abstract aphorisms are now my lived experience, and everything makes even less sense than was foretold. I do have some answers, though, to be fair. Many things are known to me – many beautiful, terrible, wondrous things. My self may even be one of them, this neurotic form, the tattered ribbon, the wave rider, eternal and mortal, destroyed and radiant.