A rare ‘live’ Sunday writing, without refinement or edits, because it feels like everything went far too fast this last week for me to be able to properly sit down and think. Thinking is a privilege in this world. I am coming to understand that engaging with thinking as a process, a reflective tool, and a way of finding meaning is not accessible to everyone. This week I did not have time to engage in the process of taking inventory of what I am noticing and understanding. What made that so? Filling out paperwork for clients, trying to engage with therapist communities to establish my presence as a solo practitioner, tossing hay into a feeding pen for a almost-ready-to-birth cow, and spending time with a 16-year-old farm dog.
I wanted to bring in a writing prompt from
grief studies course, where the group has been doing reflection on a spectrum of grief topics and how the process can be linked with decolonization.The prompt for today is “What are you releasing in order to find meaning?”.
I am holding so much. I did not for a moment consider that I would need to release something, or that I could release something, to find meaning: in this life, in my experiences, in daily interactions, or even in splitting the layer above a golden yolk at breakfast this morning as I ate alone at the counter of my neighborhood breakfast spot. This week in my personal therapy session, I confessed that I feel am too half of too many things and that I am not whole of any one thing in which case I do not and should not take up space in places where people with whole identities deserve to be and there is no place where I could show up without being a grifter or a cosplayer or just not enough of any one thing. This is tough to swallow, because growing up I was too much of many things: too sensitive, too dramatic, too emotional, too talkative, too loud, too needy, too picky, too particular, too clingy, too rejecting, too avoidant, too angry, too conflicting, too contrasting, too forward, too expressive, too…
Now I am not too much of anything. I am small. Not tempered, but restricted. I do not dare change my clothes. I do not dare insert an unwarranted thought. I work with all of the force in my body to refine the words that come out. You have no filter! Filters are not a thing, but I have used all of mental power to remember every single thing that is socially acceptable and what is not and to make sure that before I speak I scan that long long list and even then, after, I worry that I missed something on the list and may have offended someone.
The fact that I could be half of anything is offensive to many: In decades past, I would not exist. And if I did, it would be under much heavier scrutiny than I have endured. It feels like crumbs of nothing to hold out my grievances about identity. Why should the painful part of being too between be worth consoling? I am too between race, too between gender, too between sexuality, too between God and Earth, too between my current self and a self I may never be.
To find meaning, I want to release the idea that halves are not whole, and that halves can’t be experienced as fully whole. I desire to be able to walk into a space with what I do have and be seen as enough. To be refined in a way that feels interactive instead of restricting and steeled enough to be present for those who express dislike for my handling of life. I want to believe that release is possible. I want to see it in real time. But I also want to hold that there’s a big possibility that I won’t even notice until long after the holding is over.
I will be looking at myself some day in the mirror and I will recognize who I see. No stranger, no collage of the many people I’ve loved, no forced presentation, no parental expectations. I will see a whole person whose parts I have merged together to create something uniquely true: a single life and a single body, worth being here in. I will continue to peel away the belief that there is no in between too much and not enough, so that this person may emerge. I will be patient, knowing that release is not an all at once experience for everyone. That it is a process. That it is worth waiting for.
