There’s an image that has been sedating my mind lately. There is a little child in a simple sailboat that seems as if it could have been constructed by tying a bedsheet to a broomstick. The boat serenely sits in an expansive blue-gold iridescent water. It’s a content child, trusting in the safety of the still water and warm glow from the sky. Wonder perches on her shoulder. Two pairs of glass-round eyes meet and welcome the other friend, then flit their gaze out over the expanse.
I recently made a pivotal move away from deeply rooted thoughts and beliefs about a long-standing family situation. This constant source of torment had released me from its capture for the first time ever in my life. Upon deliverance, I came to find myself in the boat.
Walking felt too light without the familiar tension of my tangled trap while freedom was patiently waiting to shake my unsteady hand in what would be our first greeting.
Floating along in my newfound buoyancy, the little bird flew away, vanishing into a gilded pink horizon. Suddenly alone, with no one’s eyes to look in but my own, worry began to make me mistrust the integrity of my once dreamy craft.
Lucky for me, my dear friend and colleague was coming into town for a well-timed visit.
She is a trauma-informed interior designer with extensive knowledge of shadow work, parts and internal family systems with an undeniable anointing for caring for women.
Again, lucky me.
I had been filling her in on my odd positioning. I’m lighter, I’m freer, my mind feels like it has bandwidth and can rest. But I’m not moving towards anything. It’s like I’ve lost all motivation.
There was one quiet call that had sounded in my ears during this time, and it was one inviting me to write. It wasn’t moving at me via my typical inspiration model: immediate and immense vision, near-obsessive inventorying of the details, turbo-charged energy that fuels the first steps towards execution. Instead, I heard a whispered invitation.
What if you wrote a for a while today?
This quiet question felt threatening. I have an interior design business. I’m working on opening a luxury retail store. My friend is flying across the country to discuss our trauma-informed product we’ve been developing for nearly a year. What- I say sorry everyone, I’m going to ditch all that and go finish the screenplay I started in grad school?
We sat together in a rose garden tackling the backlog of pivotal life stories and bathroom stall chit chat from the years before we met each other.
She then asked me something about the house I grew up in. I tell how I first lived in a split estate house with my mom. My dad had already moved out before my conscious memories clicked on. I stayed at his house every other weekend until I was about eight or so. Gets fuzzy. Around third grade, we moved into my stepdad’s flip house where we could literally see into the basement through the crumbling floors on the second story. Then we finished that house, sold it fast- so fast I never even enjoyed having real floors in my room. I let in a tangent about the well-worn plywood floor with flecked splinters that caught my socks for all the years I lived there. We moved into a two bedroom apartment in the complex we owned. We rescued a foreign exchange student from a scam operation that kept the Asian students in unsafe neighborhoods with host families hoping to secure more foodstamps. Then my parents bought land and started building, about when I was in senior year of high school. It was built relatively fast, but I moved out before we upgraded from the wood board ramp up to the front door and 20 foot ladder instead of stairs.
I felt myself getting exhausted at how long it was taking to recount but I was unwilling to forgo important details. Even so, I found her next insight pretty wild.
“No wonder you never felt settled, that is an insane amount of moving. Were you changing schools each time?”
I went to four different schools. More traumatic was changing gymnastics teams five times, with a longer and longer commute each time.
“Well, you always had to be ready to go. You could not get too attached. You had to be ready to switch immediately in order to survive. And if you weren’t so good at pivoting, it would have killed you emotionally and maybe even physically. No wonder you can’t settle into a direction now. You’ve never had the freedom to choose one thing.”
All of the moving and switching had just been background details to me. I’ve told my stories. I’ve written about my stories. I’ve had discussions with professionals about my past. None of this ever came into the main focus. But it always bothered me. All the switching left me unsettled and severed any potential to develop history in one place. I yearned for legacy memories with others- any group would do. No long-time school friends. No long-time gymnastics friends. The final blow was when my step-family hauled out during my mom’s second divorce. Her divorce dissolved my birthright. No institution provided me the opportunity for legacy.
We stopped at my house. Something about this trip had me in such a deeper place of thinking, and reminiscing. I am a very nostalgic person. It takes very little encouragement for me to become the storyteller. With a warm, attentive friend genuinely interested and gifted at coaxing out truths- I was pouring out stories at this point.
I started showing her all of my books in bins in the area that I am going to be renovating to make my in-home office.
Then all of my writing stories came.
Then my photos of the college where I studied William Wordsworth, T. S. Elliot and William Blake. The place where I first wrote my creative nonfiction pieces about my life growing up. I talked about Bruce Bennett, my professor who sat with me through each major writing piece and helped me settle into my voice. I said how much I loved going to his office and talking for hours about poetry, life and writing.
“What did you hear about yourself when you were in that office? Either spoken aloud our communicated unspoken?”
I told her how I felt like what I had to say was important. My story mattered. My observations and personal feelings about the poetry we read as a class, the other students wanted to hear. We were studying works from the 1800s. They are works with so much history and tradition. I felt like I was a part of that.
Professor Bennett stepped into a role that was so much bigger than simply being my teacher. Yes, he was there to correct my run-on sentences and tense breaks, but he was a comfort, someone I trusted and he was a witness to the emergence of my confident soul. He sat with my deepest stories. He helped me to see their importance and acknowledge the power in speaking truth with beautiful words and imagery. I can still feel the embrace of walking down the hall to turn in a paper and pour out my heart in the class discussions, knowing that my words were sowing a harvest of connection.
His office was famously jam-packed. Stacks of books, papers, posters, prints and trinkets. A lifetime of gathering the objects of a poetic life. Something about it felt like home to me.
Then came another something so obvious to her and so wildly groundbreaking to me, “Why don’t you print out that picture of his office and frame it.”
Tears ruthlessly shoved their way to my eyes.
“And while you’re at it- stuff your bookshelves full and spread out your books. This is reminding you of who you are.”
It’s shockingly easy to forget who we are. But we can be reminded. And if there are objects, images, textures and patterns that can anchor us in the truth of who you are- pack your shelves full.
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