Like A Millennial With A Real Job, I’m Moving Out

A friend reminded me last night that I have not posted a blog in a while. He was right. I haven’t. And it is weird when a writer stops writing. Writers have a reputation for not holding back, for both celebrating the good and for laying themselves bare in heart-wrenching detail with words. Sometimes the words launch themselves in rounds from an automatic rifle. Sometimes they come on the back of a desert tortoise. And, sometimes, the words lie in wait. They wait for clarity or resolution or time to heal or situational appropriateness. Sometimes they aren’t written for a period because it is not time for the truth to out. Sometimes they never make the light of day.

This morning, I saw this quote on the page of a fellow blogger.

You are here. However you imagine yourself to be, you are here. Imagine yourself as a body, you are here. Imagine yourself as God, you are here. Imagine yourself as worthless, superior, nothing at all, you are still here. My suggestion is that you stop all imagining, here. ― Gangaji

I have spent most of my life imagining (believing, really) I was crammed inside a box labeled Supposed. Inside this box, unable to wriggle into a different vantage point, I continually faced the false narrative of who I am supposed to be. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, inside that box I was made to view dark, horrific imagery until what I saw of myself made me sick. I began to accept what I saw on the inside of that box as the only Truth of me. I lived inside that box so long that I forgot who I once was on the outside.

A couple days ago, like a young child, I marked my half birthday. I am now six months from the big 5-0. I don’t know how I got this far, but I do know I don’t want to live the last bit of my life, however long or short that may be, cowering in the box I was stuffed into before I understood the air holes poked in the cardboard were not large enough to keep me from suffocation.

Recently, I have been working with a therapist to kick the sides of that box from within and weaken my corrugated cell. On Monday, I did my first session of  EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. I sat in the therapist’s office, following her fingers from left to right like a patient undergoing hypnosis while reimagining an incident that had a negative impact on my sense of self. A few hours after I left the office, I noticed the memory was no longer painful. It was simply something that happened. And the message I learned about myself on the basis of that incident had been replaced by something its polar opposite. Since Monday, I have been able to accept without question a truth about myself that had been waiting for me on the outside of my box all this time. We opened an air hole large enough for a breeze to enter and wide enough to allow me to see outside for the first time since my incarceration began. Outside, I can see hope.

I now believe there will be a time in the foreseeable future when I won’t be imagining myself as something negative and I won’t be fighting to imagine something positive in its place. Like I quote, I won’t have to imagine anything. I will simply be here. And being here will not only be enough, it will be everything. And I will go on to do the great things I imagined I could do if I ever busted out of that crappy prison box and left it like a discarded skin on the side of the road out of town, proof of my growth.