journal 09: raw

Sunday, May 5th, 2024

It seems to have been a season of collective discomfort. I’ve spoken with a few friends who have felt uneasy and on edge. Tired with transformation. On April 8th, we gathered to watch the solar eclipse and although it was incredible, one of my favourite parts was simply watching humans come together to look up at the sky. Our smallness on obvious display. I happen to be a spiritual person, but it seems to me that something as awe-inspiring as that really has to make you consider your life, your path, your place in the world. And this one certainly did.

For anyone who dares to grow (and I say “dare” because it really is a choice, and a brave one at that), the inevitable uneasiness follows. Growing pains, truly. It is destabilizing and don’t we all love to feel stable. But that certainty doesn’t keep us safe, it keeps us stuck, and to get moving again is a messy business.

Some seasons in life are for growth and this was one such season for me. I grappled with love and loss, confusion and the clarity of hindsight and the mind versus the body. The role that my intuition plays is an ever-increasing one. Ever since I have been able to hear it again, it just hasn’t wanted to shut up. And frankly, I don’t want it to. It has felt a bit primitive to be making decisions based solely on if something feels right and it’s taken my brain some time to catch up with this new form of decisiveness. It is uncomfortable, but I am sinking into my body and following its lead. And anyway, my mind can often find itself stuck in circles.

I notice myself gravitating towards a sense of realness, humanness. Grain. Away from what is contrived or too manicured. I want to feel. This piece started in my journal and included several random thoughts and various lines before coming together as what you’ll read below. Much of it feels dark to me, but that’s where I have found myself in this early spring. And that is what transformation and growth and change involve. These aren’t always pretty, neat things. These are things that disrupt and disturb. To have a breakthrough, you must first break before you move through. To feel the light, you must first move through the dark. The eclipse taught me that. And when the sun returned, it felt brighter than ever.

* * *

I can sense it. The coming undone.

The word raw hangs in my apartment. The sentences in my journal begin with “I feel”.

For the first time my mind asks my heart to take the lead. Something only I can feel is something only I can know.

I feel a distance growing between the me I have been and the me I am becoming.

The me that is ready to grieve the me that needs to be killed.

Becoming is also an act of destruction. Before anything else, it feels heavy with loss.

It feels like unravelling.

The healing for my type of trauma is individuation.

A page on the internet tells me to begin:

“Embodying your authentic voice. Self-mothering. Self-rescuing.

Becoming a person with personhood.”

It is letting yourself be reborn into your own arms.

I must have a presence, I must exist,

but how and as what?

My self ? I just said goodbye to one of them.

But my body knows and I listen.

The woman I am meant to be holds the child I never was,

and both are crying out for a big, expansive life.

I unsnarl me from her.

And I’m tired because I have clawed my way up and out.

To survive, then to heal and now I fight to become. Self-rescuing.

One time I wrote that in order to love, I will first have to be wrong. My instincts were born from shame. I rewrite, I create. Self-mothering.

Embody, to give a tangible form to. Becoming a person with personhood.

I must have a presence, I must exist.

I cry out. Your authentic voice. We gasp for air whether it’s our first breath or our last.

Life begins in the spring,

after something dies.

And then it’s a season of softness.

self portraits, april 30th