What a week. I’m a mess. I’m in the bowels of what I can only think to call a spiritual/religious experience. Everything feels biblical, but like, in a cool way. (I should note I never read the bible, just what I imagine the bible vibe is.) There is something within me (Jesus?) asking more of myself than has ever been asked before, and for some reason I keep rising to the occasion, shaking, imperfectly as humanly possible. For anyone who doesn’t get down with god/gob, maybe it’s not actually spiritual, maybe I’m just becoming open to my utmost human capacity. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference anymore. Nonetheless, I am asking myself to merge as truthfully as possible with each situation—each moment before me, which sends my nervous system into a frenzy, while simuletanesouly liberating me from its death grip.
I’ve been sharing the most hidden parts of myself with certain people who it pertains to, and others who I’ve established enough trust with to witness me in my fallible human glory, and even a bit with you, something I was very good at avoiding for many years. I feel something like a fatigue of vulnerability; a newfound anxiety that comes with being seen in a light I built much of my life protecting with self-betrayal and delusion. In defending myself from the truth, I lied many times over not only to myself but to others. I don’t want to be that person anymore. And yet, emerging out of this person is very hard.
Growing older on Earth is utterly uncomfortable. It’s not just the fact that I move closer to death all of the time, but my boobs are deflating and my skin is wrinkling in all new ways and places. Naturally, I keep seeking ease and joy, although it seems even the highest of Earthly delights are often over-shadowed by the inevitable loss of them. This painful realization that nothing belongs to me, that all is fleeting, that I am aging and dying, creates giant waves of turbulent emotions within my body. Surely they were always there, but since I am no longer numbing or blocking them from myself with excessive substance abuse, the smaller waves have morphed into tsunamis. I feel everything—the wet, cold stinging of salt in my oldest, deepest wounds, and while I am learning to float with these feels, I still find myself fearful and grasping at their hydrous essence only to hold a fist of my own skin. I sink, nearly drown, I float back up. I want to say it feels near death, but perhaps it’s actually nearer to life—fully living. Sometimes I really do just have to take a nap, or go for a long walk and waver between stress and resolution, over and over until eventually peace catches back up in the brief moment it does.
All I know is that when I die, which may very well be forever, all I will have with me is my integrity and my secrets. I want my corpse to be buried with more of the former than the latter. All I know is that being honest is terrifying and risky, but doing it anyway is how I build the character I actually want to cultivate in this lifetime, which seemingly can be reborn over and over with each breath I’m granted. All I know is that my ego desperately wants to protect, keeping me hidden and untrusting of myself and others, which begets more distrust in this already illusory, chaotic world.
I don’t want to remain a mystery any longer, although it’s always the more appealing path. I was convinced that staying hidden and guarded from true intimacy (not only with people but with the world) is the easier route, but I’m finding whether I live in delusion or in the light of truth, I am on a roller coaster ride of chaos and loss. We search for various meanings while on this ride as well as how to ride it successfully. But meaning is subjective and true success (in my eyes) has little to do with material achievement as much as it does with becoming self-actualized. It’s not merely what I can do in the world—my talents and ways of earning money, but who I can be in this word—a person who lives as their word and embodies their own intimate being thus their own honesty.
There is still much to surrender to and from. Liberation is not a hill I climb out there, it is a small, dark womb within that gestates my own most actualized being. I must seek its council and trust without certainty, even when I really don’t want to. The ego, the mind, the heart, the body are all supporting it at every moment when I decide this is so. Who am I when everything works together instead of against itself? I want to be free and I can only do this by living more and more in the light. This happens by listening to the birthing womb of who I want to be, by extending myself with trust towards truth, away from delusion, accepting all of the consequences for better and for worse.
My unsolicited advice this week: be honest before you have to be honest about not being honest. It goes down much smoother (even if it doesn’t go down smoothly at all), and, be honest even when you haven’t been. This too is medicine. Offering our honesty, our authenticity, even when it is terrifying and feels every wrong way—is medicine. Our time here is short, or perhaps it is long, and for now all we really have is the truth we are willing to give to one another, and this matters even if nothing else does.
ON MY MIND:
tooooo muchhhhhhh
Right on time, as usual 🥰🙏🥰