As someone who has feverishly sought happiness and softness since likely my first breath, it’s been quite odd to finally come face-to-face with it.
Perhaps, because it has sent me searching through my past, and made me question what feelings I must have encountered before. All those moments, when a smile shone across my face, and my heart felt so light, were they simply apparitions or samplings of what life should truly feel like?
More and more, I’m realizing true happiness goes beyond the physical; it’s in the energy above, below, and between us that it exists. Where was I before, that I couldn’t sense these things?
The doorway and change to it all could only have been my body, or more pointedly, my mind’s eye of it. We can yearn for peace all we want, but until we’ve let ourselves finally simply be—truly be—in our bodies, there is no hope of finding it. Oftentimes, it is the pieces of ourselves that we find the most distaste for, the parts we’ve turned away from, that make us the most beautiful. I used to hate my lips, my butt was always too big, and there was a time (believe it or not) that I actually wished to be shorter. I wondered why the only time I got attention from others was when they pointed out the things that I didn’t even understand. Why was my voice like that, was I boy or girl? I sought happiness outside of myself because the lengths of my insides were but a minefield for self-inflicted wounds.
The truth is conflicts are being waged in most people’s bodies.
Then, like some self-fulfilling prophecy, the world around them becomes a mirror of just exactly what they’d love to escape from.
Hurt people, hurt people and misery loves company.
These were simply words at one point until I saw how desolate and hardened my own reality had become. The broken spirits around me, and my own pain could do nothing for one another except light the trash around us on fire.
This, I know now can be fun—to a point. In the moment, with the warmth that was generated and the laughs shared around the beautiful mess we made, I think there was certainly a sense of comfort in sharing space with these people that so loudly spoke of how they didn’t love themselves and acted so clearly in ways that showed that they didn’t love me either.
However, the party, thankfully, ended and I woke up cold and alone.
I looked at myself and felt even more repulsed and confused by what I saw. There are likely so many reasons for this: confusion about why my identity, and possibly even my mistakes, had somehow mattered more than the person I had tried to be, the internalized struggle of wishing to be desired before I even desired myself, and years of self-neglect and overwork.
I know now that I needed to go to these lengths, to the very last stop on the train, in order to fully appreciate the person I have blossomed into. I wear my past proudly, perhaps too loudly sometimes (hehe), but I don’t care—it’s mine. There was no button that suddenly plopped me where I am today. It took hours of self-reflection in journals, traveling (meeting incredible, liberated people), and all the (sometimes scary) bumps in the road.
Even still, I will never arrive.
I don’t want to though, I’m enjoying this [part of the] journey so much more. I think my excitement is palpable; it oozes out of me, and sustains me so much more than the cheap thrills that used to keep my mind busy. I’m squarely aware of the fact that I know next to nothing, but I also feel so affirmed by the little things that have started to click.
Like how I’m softer with myself now, thanks to the examples set by my friends and some kinder lovers. I’m wiser now when it comes to my words and knowing the power they hold because I’ve shifted my own mind and others. I’m happier now because I’m responding to a world around me that can choose to love me or leave me, without that being some kind of judgment on my worth. Now, the “work” that used to scare me, excites me, and I’m seeking out my own boundaries with a sledgehammer in tow.
And I feel I’m thinking more.
I must be, because these new words continue to find me, and the things that used to hurt to look at, seem to intrigue me now more than anything. I’m tending to these wounds and seeing how that care seems to leap outside of myself onto other canvases. I’m no longer willing or wishing time to take me to other realities; the time and place I’m in suits me just fine.
That is true peace; what I want all around me.