Coming Home: A Reconnection To Connection
Back in the saddle. I could say that I never thought it would feel this good, but I don't fancy myself much of a liar.
The absolute truth is I knew it would feel this good, and then some. And that's where the torture came from - as much as I believed that if I could just get my thoughts to stop spinning long enough to give them the old familiar escape they craved and deserved, hope was pathologically pounded into futility. The whirlwind raged far too fiercely to tame, and so much of my creative ambition was blown by the wayside throughout a profoundly painful storm that consumed three years of my life.
But who's counting? Me, obviously.
That's what happens when you lose yourself so thoroughly despite your very best efforts to keep it all together. That's what happens when ultimate exhaustion paves the way for trauma to become your new copilot, internally steering you off course into a new territory where all is foreign, sideways or upside-down - a crazy place where even your triggers have triggers.
Throughout the vast majority of my existence, I prided myself on the ability to turn horror into beauty through writing. I knew if I worded it just right, you - the reader - would not even realize you were reading horror. Furthermore, I would eventually not realize I was writing it. In the end, it would be nothing but beauty, and I would feel whole again.
This magic potion came in many forms - lyrics, performance, or merely sitting down with nothing but my thoughts, a keyboard and a strong desire to make sense out of the senseless. I've since discovered photography as another rewarding avenue of expression, which has been nothing short of fascinating.
Because, as much as cliches make me want to take steel wool to my face in an act of self-righteous defiance, the one about a picture being worth a thousand words is inherently true. That I cannot deny. However, to me anyway, there is nothing so intimately cathartic and ultimately satisfying as using a thousand words to create a mental image.
Never has been. Whether sitting at a computer, bleeding on a stage, holed up with a journal or what not, I have gratefully found my place here and derived massive, unrivaled pleasure as a result. From my earliest memories as a child, a stark sense of comfort was a constant each time I disappeared into this zone of stories and studies, examination of both myself and my surroundings. I found a much-welcomed ability to communicate that was otherwise elusive to an anxiety-riddled personality.
It's been my life - and given me life - when life did not feel like my life.
Feel that?
I was also fortunate enough to write as an occupation for a long, glorious time before the universe, COVID and greedy business types decided that chapter was written and played out. Fifteen years, countless deadlines met, several nervous breakdowns and a million words ... just like that, it was over.
There is so much I have to say on this subject, but it will be saved for a later piece for fear of losing my focus. Then you will lose your focus, and we'll all just be sitting here ... out of focus. You will resent me for wasting your time and curse yourself for ever joining me on this trip. You'll secretly wish I was never born and wish terrible, unspeakable evils upon me.
I simply can't have that, so on we go ...
Back to the storm. How do you stop a hurricane? You don't. You ride it out, incorrectly thinking the eye is the end. You think it's safe to assess the damage, resume business as usual and step right back into whatever part of your life is most recognizable.
And then a slight breeze begins to blow from somewhere out there on the horizon, disrupting a brief calm you were just starting to trust. A few raindrops begin to fall. A fine haze of clouds dim the setting sun in the not-so-distant distance.
By morning, you will wake to full-on chaos once more, this time less trusting of any future illusion of calm. There's no time for self-indulgence, no place for self-anything ... as much as you may want or need it. You need to keep everyone safe; your own needs can be dealt with later.
When the storm does pass at long last, the search is now on for the remnants of what was lost. As I began to look around with this new, uncomfortable pang of foreboding anticipation, the loss was tough to comprehend. I could detail the tangible losses, but that all seems out of context and far too expansive for this theme. Maybe one at a time down the road as I see fit.
Maybe not.
What I gradually found more disturbing than anything was that I completely lost my sense of self in the ongoing fray. And while I was aware of it happening in the blurry midst of chaos, keeping it intact failed to register highly upon my list of priorities. To be clear and honest, this wasn't even on the list at all. This was survival mode at its most consuming. Anything beyond basic navigation and attention to that particular day's requirements did not exist.
That meant the connection to music was gone. Writing ... gone. Singing ... gone. The work I had previously submerged myself in and leaned on to escape any unsavory realities I didn't wish to deal with? Gone.
Self? Gone.
While I had a camera I partially credit for keeping me as alive as possible, there was a missing internal connection to myself that prevented me from confidently connecting to anything or anyone else. It's not that I didn't want to, because believe me, I did. It was that, regardless of how I tried, I just couldn't.
At my core, I felt the foggy urge to write about this. I wanted to turn the horror into beauty again like I had done so often and freely in a former life and as a former version of myself. But each time, I hit the same wall. I found what I was up against to be so personally crippling that I, for the first time ever, had no words for it.
The well wasn't just dry, it had caved in. Never in my life had I felt so lost and alone with this person I no longer recognized. It felt torturous and isolating.
And then ... an insanely deep breath, some hyper-aggressive introspection, a long look around - and within - followed by an exhale that still pumps the toxic carbon from my soul.
The captain on a time machine spiraling throughout many worlds, here I have landed, transplanted into a whole new world. I'm turning another page, closing out one chapter while writing a new … anew.
Hope is once more my copilot, free from negative shroud. Feeling new wings, turning my back on the blur that encapsulated what I knew as life through its own definition of eternity. I was not myself; I did not feel capable of it.
It’s hard to know yourself in the moment when the moment is more about survival than anything else. And not just my own survival, but the survival of so many others that I used to know. I say this because I felt at the time that nobody was recognizable to me anymore.
I now am afforded the clarity to know that it was myself who was no longer recognizable to me. The world around me merely followed suit.
That’s not to say that world didn’t change, because it did … immensely. Nearly everything I knew as reality either disappeared completely or morphed into a surreal shell of itself. In that perspective, it was I who followed suit.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It doesn’t matter anymore. Or does it? I suppose you could say I am still figuring that part out. The journey is long.
I think we all know that by now.
What I do know is that this most recent chapter in my mounting story was one of horrible beauty, weakening strength-building, dastardly wisening. For as dull, drained and destroyed as I felt, I am starting to believe the intense pain that was omnipotent and omnipresent was not what I suspected it to be in the vacuum I felt incarcerated in.
I, for a stretch, thought I was enduring a grind of destruction. As it turns out, that grind was the sensation of sharpening me and honing the senses required to navigate through to the other side.
Could I have possibly now reached that other side? Can I believe this without feeling presumptuous to the point of vulnerability? Because I never want to feel as vulnerable as I did in what I look back on as the “lost chapter,” the one where I lost myself so entirely and excruciatingly. Recovery finally seems within reach. It is no longer just an unattainable idea to flirt with in my unending daydreams.
It is a reality now. I am getting stronger every day, and I wish to tell about it.
Could that be the sun out there, somewhere resting peacefully on the weathered horizon?
Isn't it beautiful?
Carry on ... chase it, catch it. Just don't get close enough to be burned.
To be continued ...
