One Quarter
To crisscross an area in many directions:
Or, to quarter.
I’ve been walking back and forth across narratives I’ve lived in for decades, treading down the tall grass into new pathways. Hurdling obstacles I thought I’d obliterated, and turning corners to find both clarity and dead ends in equal measure.
Over the past three months since I last posted, with grand plans for this space, I’ve lost so much of my desire to record, to show what I’ve done for myself, to report my worth externally. I deleted Instagram off my phone and I miss it at moments: the easy validation, the comedians, the creative ideas, the trance of scrolling, and the self-abuse. But most times, I forget it exists out there.
I’ve been working with my therapist on letting go. Letting go of the schedules I set for myself, my blind allegiance to linear time, my frustration with slow-moving processes, internal and external. Letting go of framing my thoughts around a constant refrain of “this time last year, I was…”
I have a compulsion to read my journals from this time last year, the year before, to draw connections, to have the retrospective moments of clarity, but I realize more each day how irrelevant that information can be to the present.
There isn’t really a cipher in the records I kept of the feelings I felt, and the truths I tried to avoid. Everything I need, I have already - right now - including the knowledge I still sometimes think is waiting behind a puzzle-locked door.
I’ve got a couple of messy but joyful things developing, and I’m letting go of the need to try to pin them into place. Living with my parents is annoying but also beautiful; the job search is tedious but also beautiful; getting divorced is devastating but also beautiful; selling my first house is irksome but also beautiful; opening up to new people is scary but also beautiful and I realize this whole damn life is split this way, unless you’re lying to yourself or you’re dead, and I’m lucky to be neither.
