resisting growth until it corners me on the first sunny day of the year
resisting growth until it corners me on the first sunny day of the year
rebirth isn't always pretty, is it?
spring is for rebirth and retribution / for swallowing the sins of what we did to / sustain ourselves through the bitter months / and for hoping we come out alive, / scratching, and gasping and bloody, but alive
sierra madison
April is upon us, how are you surviving?
It seems like I’ve finally come crawling out of my wintertime grave. A headstone rests upon the corpse of who I was and April forces me us to arrive at who I am — at least, who I am for right now.
Winter is always brutal, isn’t it? Even when I think it won’t be it finds a way to surprise me, forcing enough sacrifices out of me to satisfy the wishes of long-forgotten Gods.
I’ll be honest, I struggled with this month’s newsletter. I found myself stuck in an interesting writer’s block, one I’m still wondering how I’m meant to get out of. I’ve been struggling to find my voice, or at least struggling to make room for this new voice inside myself that I’m growing into.
Spring begs for change, for growth. We begin to bare our skin and chop our hair with the promise of new beginnings. Or at least the promise of a little bit of sun.
It’s no surprise that I’m a sappy fucker, I’m a sucker for a good redemption arc, and after spending most of this winter in a rut of my own, struggling to figure out which way to go next and how to make it there, I’m hoping now it’s my time to shine. Pun intended.
Shit got weird, I got spiritual (my fyp was full of tarot readings and Hopecore videos, I think someone at HQ knew I was at my wit’s end), and my brain struggled to comprehend the very meanings of human existence.
Superrrrr casual wintertime ponderings.
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Though if I’m being honest, I’m beginning to feel stagnant in this self-imposed cycle of self-reflection, I fear I may have gotten a bit lost in it, unable to get out of my head, scrambling for a way out.
I fear even I get too poetic and existential for my own good sometimes; I try to piece together my suffering in a way that makes it sound beautiful so that the mere existence of it doesn’t make me want to curl under my blankets and never come out. However, I’m very gifted at making a bad situation even worse by somersaulting in my brain so viciously that I force myself to arrive at illogical and deeply hurtful conclusions, convincing myself of a new reality that is based entirely upon my delusions.
It’s quite easy to literally think my way to rock bottom. Anyone else do this? ;P
This Winter did indeed feel like a million tiny deaths, a million little lives folded up neatly into a couple of months. I don’t know how but in the Winter, time finds a unique way to extend itself, deluding us into believing it’s much longer than it really is. Every Spring I look back at those snow-covered months, feeling 10 years older than when it began, sobering up when I realise it’s only been three months, not a decade.
However, I don’t know what it is about Spring that makes me see myself differently — by the time April rolls around each year something in my reflection always throws me off a little bit.
I hope I’m not alone in this feeling, but there’s something about the season of rebirth that requires a metamorphic experience. It forces us toward change, whether we like it or not. A subtle change, probably only recognizable by ourselves. The change isn’t always revolutionary, sometimes it’s something only you can identify within yourself. It’s not bad necessarily, but you can’t help but notice something is different.
That being said, I experience Spring as a rebirth, a chance from Mother Nature herself to find myself again. Yet, as I step into an unknown version of myself I can’t help but feel a little uneasy at first. It always happens like this — I’m always shocked by the horror of having to make space for yet another me inside.
I feel so young yet I’m so heavy by the weight of every girl I’ve ever been.
And as I step into this new person I’ve been finding it difficult to write in a way that feels truthful, in a way that feels honest. It seems that this change is beaconing forth a new baseline inside, a new heartbeat to merge with.
I’m struggling to find my voice. I’ve tried to sit down and write this quite a few times, but each time I finish a draft I re-read it and I hate every word. It feels aged — stale, as if I’m writing from inside someone else’s body, someone else’s mind.
This is the part I dread. I have spent many years agonizing over it, I even titled a book after it. GROWING PAINS!
The growing pains, truly, are the worst part. Making space for all these new ideas, these new mannerisms, these new ways of understanding the world. Shedding old skin takes time, and I’m not someone who has a lot of patience, it’s probably one of my biggest faults.
I expect myself to be better at accepting changes, always forgetting how stubborn I am, how tightly I like to hold onto the ways things were; to the way I was, the way I’m no longer.
So, these last few months I let myself be a crybaby, I let myself whine and pout, I let myself read all the poetry that’s been collecting dust on my bookshelf and I let myself drink red wine from the bottle and listen to the blues while eating figs on the kitchen floor in some outdated attempt to feel closer to a God I don’t believe in.
You see, I tend to try to outrun grief until it finds me sprawled out in an open field at dawn, the freshly cut grass soaked with last night’s rain, my body damp with it as I watch the sunrise and realise, for once, I may not have any tears left to cry. I always try to run away from pain but we’re like magnets, we always find our way back to one another, and maybe some part of me enjoys letting it in, maybe I’ve got a knack for coddling it, curling up with it, letting it overstay it’s welcome. So, this time I carved out the time to grieve. I invited it in but didn’t let it stay longer than it had to. I let it swallow me whole and spit me out again, I drowned in it and somehow made it back to shore.
Spring is the season to leave the cruelties of our past behind, is it not? It begs for us to show up ready to bare ourselves, fangs and all. It shows us we can blossom despite all we’ve had to endure. For a sappy poet like me, I can’t help but appreciate its kindness. Spring might be the only party I don’t want to show up fashionably late to.
Don’t get me wrong. Growth is ugly, foul work. I still hate it. But it must get done, and the more I resist the worse it usually gets, so I’m trying my best to enjoy the process as much as I can. It’s a detox I guess (personally I consider it more of a self-induced torture chamber of the mind rather than a luxurious juice cleanse, but alas).
I won’t lie, sometimes I get pretty selfish when it comes to this stuff. I know I’ve offered up my heart and soul for public consumption, but I hope you don’t mind that I keep some things to myself — at least for now. Even my soul needs protection.
It’s a Journey, finding your voice. I keep chasing after it, I keep trying to talk in a way that sounds right, and I feel like I’ve almost got it, it’s on the tip of my tongue. It’s right there, I know it.
It’s strange, to be so confident that something is well within your grasp, so close you can almost taste it (click the link, do it I dare you). It’s a bittersweet feeling, it always is, there’s always one part about it you wish you could change.
I want my writing to sound like me, I want to invite you into my world as best I can, if only to feel understood.
Spoiler: I’ve included some of my own poetry in this month’s poetry corner … reading my old writing always helps to remind me of who I am, and how far I’ve come.
Getting lost is a prerequisite to being found, and sometimes it’s the most exciting part. You always arrive, most of the time somewhere very different from where you thought you would be. But you go on, half because you don’t have a choice and half because being brave enough to keep walking is most of the battle.
There’s always something dead that is begging to be reborn, there’s always somewhere to grow from, there’s always a new version of you to find. There’s always a you that you’re growing into, and I still haven’t figured out if that feeling goes away, if we ever get to feel completely “normal” in our bodies, or if being an adult is mostly about accepting how unnatural so much of the human experience feels.
I did come out of this Winter with at least one victory though, I took some time to really figure myself out, and I’ve come to realise what the person I want to grow into looks like — feels like. I want to be a person whose words inspire others. I want to write the words that help someone feel a little bit less alone because I know how powerful feeling understood, even for a fraction of a second, can be.
I can’t help people in practical ways, like cleaning their teeth, or helping them file their taxes, or by building a bridge. Writing, that’s what I have, that’s how I can help, it’s the only way I think I’m even mildly effective. And the person I want to grow into, the person I feel that I am growing into, is someone who helps, in her own, very tiny way.
So I guess my confession to you this month is that I’m making space for the person I’m growing into, and I have to ask you to bear with me a little. I’m still arriving.
I’ve written quite a bit about spring over the years, so enjoy some of my poems this month <3 with love, always.
One of my friends recently asked me to teach her a crash course on how to let go, and the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realised that to embrace any change, any growth, you need to master the art of letting go.
Let me be upfront: I have definitely not mastered this art, I tend to keep an ironclad grip on every fleeting moment, and feeling, and experience. Though, over the years I have learned how to make the process of letting go easier to digest. So, I’ll pass some wisdom to you:
The harder you try to hold on to something that is hurting you the more you’ll feel like you’re abandoning yourself. Give yourself the gift, and the power, to walk away from the situations, places, and people that no longer feel like home. The greatest gift you’ll ever give yourself is knowing when to walk away and doing it even when it hurts. You can leave the door open a crack but you can’t sit there and watch it like a guard dog.
As we grow and change a lot of the time we try to forget the past, we think it’s easier to stuff it away and pretend it never existed. We try to save ourselves from the misery of memory. But, you don’t need to throw all the good memories away, store them in an old shoebox for a rainy day, when remembering doesn’t hit you like a semi-truck to the chest.
Don’t taint the memories of your past with your knowledge of your future. Good things are still good things even if you can’t touch them anymore.
Letting go, it’s not easy, I wish I could hold your hand through it. But, learning to accept that not everything is always going to look and feel the way it always has is one of the most important lessons we’ll ever learn. And it’s worth it, I promise.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month’s edition of Confessions of a 20-Something. I encourage you to share this with your close friends if you feel like it’s the kind of thing they’d be into.
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Until next month …