🎶 And I don’t want the world to see me
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am 🎶Iris, Goo Goo Dolls
I listened to this song a million times when I was struggling with how to coexist with my sexual identity. It took me years to emerge from that, and I was hopeful life wouldn’t have anymore earth-shattering revelations left for me. I was freshly exhausted from the knot-holes I kept being invited to squeeze through, and fearful as I inventoried all the ways life had humbled me in each process. Surely, there could be a reprieve now? Ha! [Insert laughter here.] A decade later, humble pie is permanently on my menu. Add a side of (tofu) crow.
When there is nothing else left to do but face all that has been, when it’s not even to salvage anything but just to make my body and mind inhabitable, a strange kind of freedom emerges. When there is no one for whom my performance makes a difference, no one’s mind I can change, and nothing left to be proven, the entire equation flips. A new energy emerges, along with the invitation to make unilateral and distanced peace with all who haven’t had my back, who haven’t even seen me and my heart. There is something grounding about letting go of the need to be understood. A decade ago, I didn’t want the world to see me. When I began this website with my writings in 2023, I wanted the world to understand me. Now I don’t care if the world sees me, because I know it cannot possibly understand me. That’s an inside job. It isn’t dramatic nor loud. In fact, it’s quite subtle and seems to come into the space freed up by my deep, bone-stored tears.
Though I have cried this year more than, hell, ever, I have also been able to genuinely be grateful for past experiences that were good in their real time. The more sadness, shame and anger I have acknowledged, the more at first benign, then downright pleasant some of my other feelings have become. I don’t have to resist feeling the hope, happiness and excitement I felt at certain times simply because it all ultimately came crashing into a bloody fucking disaster. I can cherish and be immensely proud of how much I loved my pregnancies, babies and children, despite those children growing up to wish they had made soul contracts with some other parents. I am genuinely able to run the tapestry of my full life experiences and not feel the reflex to push away the sweet, just because my shadow side was also an active participant in its making and in its ultimate demise.
It’s fascinating what’s required of us to step into our own. It’s not perfecting the narrative and decorating over the sins, nor is it staying locked in a moral chokehold of shame for how we survived the knot-holes. It’s giving each piece a rightful presence. Dust off, pop into its shape, tag, catalogue, include in the inventory on record; not to prosecute myself, but to finally integrate the whole of me. Everything was made to be broken, and for the first time, standing in a body that is finally mine to inhabit, I am beginning to know who I am among the pieces.
Leave a Reply