childhood home

I used to feel miserable. So alone and disconnected and tired. So empty. But I set out on a quest to feel better, to truly turn my life around. I came to a breaking point and I had to decide whether I just wanted to give up or whether I had to start doing things very differently. Start taking care of myself. Start seeing my own worth. And I think I did - I wrote lists, made friends, stopped judging myself as harshly, slept for months, let people go, visualized, meditated, reconnected with my inner child, did inner work, outer work, cleaned my closet, went on trips, all of it. And here I am. In my childhood home with the exact same feelings I had growing up. You see it doesn’t matter how much work we put in if the aim is to escape our past. It always catches up with us. All my life all I ever wanted was to escape. Escape my surroundings, my relationships to an extent yes, but when it really comes down to it - myself. My own feelings. My own body. My own thoughts. And believe you me, I have tried. Harder than anything. And over time, it’s become automatic. Auto pilot abandonment. I forgot what it even feels like to be with myself. To stay, when the feelings come. When the shame comes, the dread, the grief and the emptiness. How can I live if this emptiness is real? That’s why I left. If I can only get through this stage of my life, then I will be happy. If i get my own space. If i start loving myself. If I have the right partner and the right friends, who really see me and love me for who I am. This emptiness isn’t real and it’s just temporary. How else would I keep going if this weren’t true?

I thought I knew how to be with myself. I have practiced so much. I’ve realised in the past too that I abandon myself, and so I have worked on it. In new interactions, in my bed wherever I live. But all of it for the promise of relief, the shackles of the past finally released and falling to the ground. Free to be myself. Myself. But who am I? Am I the self help-nut who meditates in the morning? Am I the one writing down my dreams on paper? Visualizing them and working with the blockages? Because that’s what I’ve been told now. I went rogue to the other side. I am not who I was shaped to be, I was conditioned into this personality. I am my soul and my true desires. Gobbling that up I took it and ran for the hills. Freedom awaits, it exists, maybe there is a reason to live on this godforsaken planet after all! But in my haste I forgot something. Below the hills by a quiet lake there’s a little girl still sitting there. All alone just like she always was. Organizing her hundreds of stickers in perfect squares. Lining up all her stuffed animals in a perfect line to give them each a crum of a cookie. Poking the water with a stick and watching it splash. Silent, in her head. Dreaming about mermaids and dolphins and princesses somewhere, on another planet. I left her there. But everywhere I run, I run into her. Stumbling over her chubby legs. You’re still here? I wonder. She just looks at me, and then goes back to poking the water with her stick. She could say the same, but she doesn’t. She could ask me, are you still here? Are you still trying to run from me? But she stays silent. Looking into her green eyes I realize, she is me. Not only is she me but she is the totality of my experience here, that I have turned my back on. Desperate to get away from pain, denying where I have been and where I come from, I tried to wash her off of me. I don’t want her stickers I don’t want her mermaids or her crying horse drawings. I don’t want her emptiness. Please dear God I don’t want the emptiness.

But it’s not her emptiness, it’s mine. I’m looking at my own reflection in the lake. Never before have I seen my life so clearly. And never before have I been with myself without the promise of getting somewhere else at the end of it. This is my life, and this has been it. It’s here, it’s happening. And I see now that no matter how hard I try to get away from it, or to finally be happy, I will always end up here, back at this lake, where I come from. Because this girl wasn’t concerned with being happy, before being sad was wrong. She was feeling life through what she has been through, and she just wanted me to stay with her. Stay in her world and reality. With her feelings. But I didn’t. I did anything I could to get rid of it. I tried to self-help it away. Meditate it away. Travel away from it. But I end up back at this lake. My childhood home. Swimming in this vast emptiness. I can’t even say I decided to dive in, it’s more like I tripped and fell again. Splash. And I don’t know when I will get out this time, but somehow it seems less important. I always wanted to escape this lake, but I’m not sure the lake is the source of my emptiness. Maybe it’s empty because I left, and swimming in it once again, will fill it.