Revolution

I just turned 38. I don’t even remember living this long. It feels like a series of different lifetimes; a mashup of realities I can recall but can’t quite say that I experienced. It feels more like a reel: images & fractions of events strung together to some nameless tune; my face, laughter, hiding, yelling, love making, crying, smiling, fucking….dreams. The reel ends, feeding itself now into…..

….it begins again. An emerging. 

I’d say it feels like a seed, sprouting into a new world now, eyes shut from the pain - glaring, radiant sun - allowing it to burn & nourish it into something yet unrecognizable, but this feels different, and yet, I’ve been here before; not as if I’m experiencing the world anew but as if I'm experiencing myself anew. 

I want to thank you. I needed you, you know that? I see why it hurt so much to let go, to live, to love, to lose. Some people really don’t like to think of their experiences, their trauma, their history, as a thing that makes them better. They say things like, “I didn’t need to be stronger, I need my mother/father/partner,” etc., but I don’t see it that way. It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t need to be stronger or to learn to protect ourselves, but that’s not the world. We’re not here to make the world perfect, actually. We can’t. It’s not for lack of wanting, but lack of knowing. We love people through the filter of our own history, our own programming, and they love us in return with their filter. I am convinced that most of us do our very best, and when we fail or someone fails us, it’s a crack in the compartment we’ve created. It hurts, but it’s the only way to expand beyond ourselves.  It’s what forces us to see other peoples filters too, to have tough conversations about why they reacted that way, why they have that fear, what led to them having that opinion, holding that ideal. Then, because we love them, we make room. We say, “This isn’t how I am or how I feel, but because I love you, I want to learn to see things a little bit your way. I may not change all of me because I need to honor myself, but I can hold space for you.” CRACK. It hurts. It’s confusing. It’s frustrating. It’s hard. 

The more this happens, the more we expand, and the more we expand, the more our own filter changes, and we begin to see that we’re all just fucked in some ways. I want to love you so much, you feel safe to be fucked & to be growing simultaneously. 

38 years. 38 revolutions around the sun. Countless revolutions within.