Resilience is Our Nature

Near my house there is an empty lane,
A quick shortcut where the dogs shit
— Or so I thought when we were first acquainted.
Then the rains came and turned its parched weeds into splendour.

Dainty daisies, poppin’ poppies, wafts of jasmine.
Each day I visited so I could marvel:
How the grasses grew, rich and golden!
How the trees bowed, lush and shadowed!
I watched the heads of poppy ripen, waiting to tear off their brown lids and spill their blackened seeds.

Until one day the cutters came.
They made a massacre of it all.
And how I wept to see my garden razed,
The stubble stiff, the dog shit more foul than ever.

I hardly walk there anymore,
Maybe when I’m in a hurry.
I see the yellow flowers creeping in the corner,
⬞ ⬞ the crimson blossoms spotting here and there.
I know that resilience is our nature

But I can’t bear another heartbreak, when the cutters return with the rains.

Photo by Eva Elijas from Pexels

Well, This is New…

This time last year I was falling head-first into a nervous break-down.
I decided to take some time away from writing.

I’m not for-sure for sure, but I think that I would still like to have this platform as a place to center my voices, my experiences, and my perspectives. It feels like there’s been a lot of changes in my life — I hope for the calmer, softer, and more spacious, as reflected in the change of my website design.

I’m going to try something new in the format of the blog: I will only feature 1 post at a time. I dunno how often I will update (aka change) the featured post. Let’s see how it goes. Somewhere between once per month to once per season I think is an achievable expectation to set for myself.

This new format may hopefully address several issues I noticed I was having in my relationship with this blog,

1) I realized at some point that I was really expecting that people close to me would read my posts and engage in discussion with me about the subjects.

That wasn’t actually a useful expectation to have since very few of my friends would give any detailed feedback or reflection except for brief and generic words of encouragement.
Basically, I felt disappointed and unloved.
Like I was yelling into the wind.
(And, yeah, I know it’s unfair for me to say that because those generic words of encouragement did often include “thank you for writing this, I learned so much.” But. Well. Yah. That’s why I’m in therapy, y’all. To learn how to better deal with all of this shit that is life.)

Now I’m trying to pay closer attention to the types of connection that I need in each of my relationships in order to feel seen, understood, and loved. Instead of expecting that my friends engage in discussion with me through the rigidity of engaging with my writing, I’m more expecting to engage in actual, flowing, organic conversations with each of them.

As such, my intention is to re-frame my blog posts away from being something that needs to be consumed by a specific audience (i.e., those close to me) and more towards something that I write, polish, and present for my own sake.

Not because I need an audience, but because I need space to develop my voice.

2) I notice that I disagree with some things that I wrote in my previous blog posts.
Because I am a living, growing, changing human.

And so,
while I acknowledge that it was necessary for me to see things from those perspectives in order for me to have gotten to the outlook I have now,
I question whether it’s still worthwhile for me to be making space for ideas that I don’t agree with anymore.

Especially when it comes to emotions and ideas that led to me suffering quite a bit by holding onto them so dearly.
Even more-so when some of those ideas contributed to the nervous breakdown that I had last year.
That actually makes me very worried that I may not be helping people by leaving my old ideas up.

I don’t feel up to the task of revisiting each of my old blog posts to curate them and re-write or re-tract them. In fact, I think that that kind of revisionism is not helpful because it’s against the very nature of what it means to be a living, growing, changing human being.

But I still feel anxious about having the posts up.

And so, I’ve decided that the thing that makes the most sense is to give myself permission to be constantly growing, changing, and living in this moment.

So now y’all just get one blog post to look at!
DEAL WITH IT.

3) Books have been one of my greatest loves in life. When I was a tween I imagined that I might one day be an author.

… Welllll ….

Actually, that’s not quite right.

When I was a tween I expected that I would die tragically young and so wouldn’t ever have to actually do any of the grown-up things that felt overwhelmingly impossible.
So I never actually imagined that I could one day be an author, because I never actually imagined that I could one day *be*.

These days I’m trying to push myself to dream and to imagine a life for myself that I would choose to live.
I imagine as many possible lives for myself as I might choose to live.
I try to be gentle with my day-dreaming and just allow it to be as it is, without expectations that just because I dream it then I must be it (“Don’t dream it, be it.”).
But also recognizing that if I can dream it, then I can be it.

So I’m day-dreaming that maybe one day I’ll have written enough of these little bullshit blog posts that I could feel it’s worthwhile to bring them together in a self-published zine or maybe even something more.

Who knows.

Stay tuned, I guess?

Oh shit! I was gonna end it there but then I realized reason number…

4) It used to take me like a helluva lot of time to write and edit that shit.
Like.
Holy fuck.
Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Not for a pointless little free blog bullshit side-project.

So now you get my less polished writing.

Again, DEAL WITH IT!