Today I’m terrified. I spoke out yesterday and now, as I promised, I have to show up. I’d rather watch tv and chill out. Relax rest. This is too much exposure. Just like being in a relationship once was. Too exposed! I need to hide. Just like making love was once too much. Skin exposed, nerve endings awake. I need thicker skin. Teflon skin. Like cool people who navigate life with smoothness, reliable in their indifference. I feel too much!
There was a time in my life where I became very intuitive. Extra sensitive to what went on inside me, and I felt I could read people and heal them. It felt crazy on one hand, but true on another. I was wide open. I’d been meditating a lot, several hours a day for months, so perhaps my rational mind shut up and a sense of wholeness and connection took over. That time was awesome but also frightening. People came to me with deeper and darker issues. I tried to stay open and listen, because I know that attention heals, but I was not ready to go to dark places with them. I wanted shallow. TV junk food and less intensity. So little by little I closed up.
Now I’m the one who has gone to dark places. I had to, in order to explore my depression. I had to contact my depressed self and see what her experience had been like growing up. Meeting her was dark and painful, and I hated every minute of it. Still, I went back because to survive I had to love the part of me that had lived in darkness. I had to love the shame, the hurt, the sadness and fury.
The result is that I can be with myself longer without wanting to escape. I can also stay with others in their strangeness. I can pay attention to frailty and not want to make it stronger, I can observe lust and not cringe with what it desires. Some parts feel harder to love because they hurt more and seem to make me defective, but I stay with them as long as I can. This is what it means to be human, I guess. It’s messier than I thought.
Complex Ring.
Handmade with tourmaline quartz and recycled sterling silver.
Soon in my online shop.