This time last year I was just wrapping up TA-ing a course and planning a trip to Chicago to meet Oprah and Brené Brown. We would talk about worth courage and vulnerability and I would find myself open to the later in a way I could have never predicted. A few months prior one drunken night lead to one muddled friendship and things, it turned out, would never be the same. Days after that I would find myself home, in Jamaica for 21 days of sunshine music food and all the freedom I could muster.
Last August I would purchase my first car. A milestone I thought was beyond me due to poor financial choices and irresponsible college years. Days later it would be stolen from my job and would remain missing for 31 nights before being returned to me. I smudged it immediately. December would hold more questions than answers as once again I tried to regain what was lost in June.
January in the first moments of 2014 I would move from trading sweet kisses to holding back tears as he pulled away from the truth. What I know now that I didn’t know then was that it would be irreparable. February and March it would rain from my eyes. I struggled to mask how hurt I was–no one really knew. Trying desperately to make sense of me, us, and what I’d done wrong. I could be different. I bargained. Up until April I drowned in silence.
Needing to feel anything but unwanted discarded helpless and weak, I started to date. Only I had no intentions of beginning emotionally intimate and spiritually satisfying relationships. This was all ID. I just needed to feel good. Better. In May, a rose was laid on the coffin of us and two weeks ago it was lowered into the ground.
It’s been a year. A year of loss. A year where I craved so badly I cried and I needed so badly I ached. The great chaser of freedom had had her fill and all she wanted was roots. Last year. Now…things have changed. A lot can change in a year. I find myself sitting in the same silence but I’m different. I am not clamoring to be validated. I am not willing to change who I am at my core for the comfort of others. I am sitting in my breath, erect, with eyes closed cyclically giving and receiving life force energy. “Will I be something? Am I something? And the answer comes: Already am. Always was. Still have time to be.”
I’m in a new familiar. A place I must have been a thousand times but never seen quite like this. Who was that girl? She was me. Why did she cry? She forgot who she was. It was never in him or in the space between he and she. It was, as it will be now and forever more, in her. Me. She cried because in losing the things and the people she felt she lost pieces of herself. But Self is un-loseable. It is energy and thus cannot be destroyed. She would do well to remember that this next year. You survived it because you were always going to. You’re here because you were always meant to be. And when you arrive at the place you covet, know that you took the first step towards it a year ago: today.
Sincerely, Jess 