#journaling
What have you realized recently?
At sixteen I decided, I will be happy when I am in college, when I am in my own space, when I find a community that does not judge and a family that I chose myself. At nineteen, in college, loved and accepted, I decided, I will be happy when I find a job that utilizes my skills and passions both, rather than one alone, a job that I choose free of external pressures. At twenty-one, working in an industry that valued my intelligence and creativity and adaptability and efficiency, I decided, I will be happy when I find my own apartment, when I can display my own books and listen to music without headphones, suffering no one else’s messes but my own.
In this decade, wantinghas become habit. Strivinghas become habit. Ambition, hunger, knowing I’m better than this - all, habit.
At twenty-four, sitting at my desk with fandom prints adorning the walls and crafting supplies strewn across the coffee table and a vase of flowers wilting slowly, it is tempting to fall prey to habit. To decide, happiness will come with professional recognition; with marriage; with higher education; with international travel.
But happiness, too, is a habit, practiced each time I stop and light a candle, or play video games with my friends, or read a book, or vacuum so I can enjoy walking on crumb-free hardwood. With time, this, too, will become a well-worn path in the garden of my contentment, provided I take care to walk it on occasion.
How can you tell if you are healing?
In my bullet journal I keep a mood tracker, a grid of empty squares systematically flooded with one of six colors corresponding to one of six states of well-being. This is a new concept to me—tracking my mood. Keeping a record; the luxury of remembrance.
Who cares to remember a childhood dripping red? Red ink tallying the days I managed to move from future to past; red-hot rage shoving my shame and desperation into the pit of my belly; red on my mother’s lips as she cut me to size; red palms hidden in clenched fists as I waged silent wars against the tide.
I used to dream of blue: skies, flowers, painted walls. Of purple and pink: candles, wine, flowers in vases, oversized sweaters. Green: hiking through forests, ink on my skin. Of goldenrod and magenta and lilac and silver; a life without red: prismatic. Happy. Healed.
Today the sky was swollen with rain clouds and and my flower vase sat empty and disappointment burned fiery in my veins. When I sit down to assign today a color, I will pluck a red pen from the pack. Life is not so easy; wounds do not disappear without a trace.
But today was also pink (wine poured into glasses adorned with hand-painted roses) and green (my favorite shirt layered over a cute bra I bought last week) and purple (melted candle wax solidifying in a repurposed jar on the table) and orange (fresh fruit piled haphazardly on my kitchen countertop), a rainbow enhanced, not marred, by the red within it. Today was a kaleidoscope. A reminder that scar tissue is not a testament to an injury you failed to avoid; it is a record, bold and red and marked, screaming I survived, and I built myself up, and I’m all the stronger for it.
Did the pain
soften my edges?
or was it simply the anvil
on which i molded my being
into shape?
I haven’t seen god
since I was 7, kneeling palms-together before the shrine, repeating words in a language I spoke but didn’t know
under my mother’s watchful gaze I pressed first sindoor then haldi then a single grain of uncooked rice to a golden forehead hardly bigger than my fingertip, and when my mother closed her eyes I
kept mine open and searched minuscule bronze pupils for some hint of otherworldly presence, transcendent benediction
asked: are you there; are you watching; can you tell me if I’m good enough; can you tell me how to atone;
and god said: why should I distill my essence into 100 grams of silver rather than the gradual carving of aquifers into bedrock or the ebullience of frolicking through air currents with the eagles; why should I have eyes only when you provide them; why should your sins weigh heavier upon me than those of the raging ocean or the mountains that will not bow their heads
and god said: you will not find me by making me in your image
and god promised: seek the slivers of me dispersed among the infinite entities under my care and lay them one atop the other and in the amalgam you will discover the shape of me
two decades later my search has barely started and I will still be looking when I’m on my deathbed and if I am granted another life to continue paying penance my search will go with me
some days I think that must be the point
I wish I knew how to speak to you in a voice you could hear
What can you never go back to?
dreamless sleep. my hand without the weight of his in it. black coffee and dreary mornings, the relentless insistence that i was okay okay okay
for years i walked with an arm curled around my stomach, protecting the softest parts of me, wearing paperclip chainmail and hoping no one would get close enough to tell the difference. and then he shone a light right through me, exposed all the holes i didn’t know i had and got to work patching them up.
it is easy to explain away the holes if you don’t know you have them. there is less of you than there should be because it’s what you deserve. because you would buckle under the weight of more. because if you are smaller then others more deserving can be bigger. and if your shadow is fragmented, if the wind whistles as it flows through your body, then maybe it’s just your own kind of magic.
but once the holes have been identified, the papier mache excuses peel away and you’re left only with the exposed wounds, and the throbbing of your skin when he brushes his fingers across them. here, i wish this coffee tasted better (and why can’t it?). here, hold me hold me let me shake apart in a way where i can be put together again (go ahead dear, i’ve got you).
where do we go from here? the patching up hurts, even done by hands as gentle as his. but the whistling wind hurt, too, before. perhaps it would be easier to pick up my own needle and thread and join him instead of pulling at the sutures. perhaps it would be easier to let myself emerge.
9/24/21
good morning!
i thought i’d do some journaling this morning because i haven’t in a while ✍