“You see, my love, see how out of fear I'm already organizing, see how I still can't deal with these primary laboratory elements without immediately wanting to organize hope.
Because for now the metamorphosis of me into myself makes no sense. It's a metamorphosis in which I lose everything I had, and what I had was me - I only have what I am. And what am I now?”
TO CHANGE
Times of immense change always call for an inwards introspection of self, bringing to the surface waves of well-hidden emotions and feelings along with it. Complacency and distraction allow for us to cast our most intense feelings to the side to endure whatever it is we must go through.
I constantly wonder, how do I decide what to commit myself to? I am consumed by desire to try everything, see everything, go everywhere. I want it all and if I can't have it, I sink into despair. Yet I think its okay to process change however I need to affirm my (intense) feelings. There's no reason to force myself to feel less. I am calling for compassion and forgiveness through these vulnerable waves of change.
Change invites loss. I shed old perception as i deepen my ability to pierce through the veil, giving myself space to mourn all the past versions of myself that the temporal river carries further away from me.
We lose the person we once were, the selfhood that was once so familiar becomes a stranger to us. We are forced to shed our old self, who was once everything we had. To be unsettled and confused is an understatement. We rip ourselves from the comfort of our own foundation to take the leap into something new, to a sense of becoming. Fear is inevitable. We must swim through, however uncomfortable and agonizing it may feel, to reach the other side and see what has been waiting for us.
I don’t want to be resilient anymore. It has hardened the softness in me that is the only thing that I truly love about myself that I want to protect. The softness that is my inner child, a sweet, innocent, loving, intelligent little girl swimming like a mermaid in the ocean and lost in her fantasy books. She was excited and curious of the life pulsating throughout the world around her. I faintly remember the joy I felt exploring my little backyard as a child, inventing worlds in my imagination and skipping around in the soft, pillowy grass. Or giggling with my childhood best friend as we excitedly looked towards the constellations and explored the mysteries of forest, inventing different names and stories for ourselves and the paths and trees surrounding us. I hate that I’m slowly forgetting these things.
I don’t want to close myself off anymore, from myself. I need to feel everything, deeply. That is how I know I am alive, that I am grounded in this reality. I imagine this recent awakening of my feeling is akin to timidly lifting the veil of the eggshell, peeking into the new reality of my perspective and worldview. What do I see? There is softness all around me, in the water, the air, the ground below my feet. This plane is my metaphor for everything, but to me it is real. It is the medium I experience my life through, the universe within me.
I constantly lean toward literature, art, film, philosophy, to find answers to these feelings whenever I fall deep into the solitude of consciousness. There must be someone else going what I go through. Where can I find connection? How deep can I plunge into existential depths until I find my answer?
TO FORGIVE
"I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.”
We tend to see ourselves in only one perspective. It can be extremely intimate, being the only one that witnesses ourselves eating, sleeping, loving, dreaming, knowing what lays in the dark corners of our consciousness. To be "other" from this familiarity can feel like a perversion, an abomination to what we believe ourselves to be.
When ego disappears and an erasure of self occurs, and the body becomes an empty vessel. In these moments, I consume pages upon pages of my books and allow the barriers of the writer melt away and find myself immersed within the life of the work itself. The fog inside of my head is thicker than ever, impenetrable. My vulnerability is inaccessible.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” The words of Dostoevsky echo in my mind. Has it all been for nothing? A void? What more can we want when it has all been been reduced to nothing? I empty myself from within and no longer recognize this person. I seek the path towards redemption, but there is nothing. I am but a wandering ghost, emptied. To be nothing, I must let go of myself. The concept of self that I have stubbornly created. I don’t think that always has to be a bad thing. I have realized that more I know, the less I understand. I tell myself to let go. What is there when there are no longer things to have or possess, and nothing to hold on to those nothings?
I want to love the void. I want to see the emptiness and throw every attachment I have into it, and watch it sink into nothing. The black hole of nothingness is the portal to freedom. In losing myself, I am free.
I forgive myself. What more can I do? The past is gone, and tomorrow is yet to be born.
TO LIVE
What now? All has been lost. We begin again, and witness the transformation. There is power in change, even in its most painful forms. Nothing has ever been clearer than the need to acknowledge contradictions and dualities within our own nature, and to continue to live.
It becomes clearer. Fullness restricts us, while the form of emptiness is eternal, deep, unfathomable. Nothingness frees us from the material form and imagines space for transcending. It is in the emptiness we find our meaning and what we desire to fill it with. Stillness allows us to return to ourselves, back to the root.
It pushes me to move forward without a plan or a stubborn attachment with the future or what I should be doing. I want to relinquish control and find a wisdom in the nothingness, in the vision of every version and form of me that I may become. The freedom to let myself be and be released from the formless possibilities that fall through my fingers like water.
I want to find a rare togetherness. I am too far away from others. I want to remake myself in the presence of others, even strangers. I want to leave myself, enter a season of reconstruction, and return better. The voice within me grows louder by the day. I hear its echos reverberating and whispering sweetly in my ear. I never want it to stop.
