23, Once Again

Twenty three, you are a trip.

Literally.

But now and for the rest of my life, I want to say that when I was 23 I went off the deep end. And survived.

Also, literally.

Like, 6 weeks ago I actually, literally, voluntarily went over a waterfall and absolutely broke myself on a rock after a 20 foot free-fall. As I type this, I'm in that whole ice-and-elevate situation after driving 4,000 miles over the past two weeks and sinking down into the soggy Everglades and letting myself swell up like an aggravated elephant leg; prolonging and making impossible that healing process that my body wants so very badly.

What a fucking beautiful metaphor.

Because what a process it's been, it is. This has been the year of burnout and medication and therapy; of trauma, stress, dizziness, nausea, chaos, growth disguised as stagnation, forgetting to breathe, and loving everybody in the loudest, most out of control way that I never thought possible.

Loving. Loudest love for everybody else, so that I don't have to remember that I don't feel entitled to love. Not yet.

And I'm freaking out because I can't find my red Sharpie that I use to trace the roads on which I've driven, caffeine and taurine racing through my veins and Chicago, Atlanta by day and Miami by night. I want to see that progress. I want to color in those lines myself, etching them onto my map and then my heart. I want to dream some more, of driving the entirety of US Route 1 and finishing that last bit of I-75 and of my ninth and tenth tattoos. I hate driving through construction as much as anybody, but I owe my life to its completion. Forever indebted to Dwight D. Eisenhower.  Roads, like rushing rivers, taking me somewhere, anywhere, anytime. 

And I'm also freaking out because before I'm done being 23, I'll do this whole Soulfire Calendar thing. Freaking out seems appropriate, as the photo shoot will be held almost exactly over my tenth assaultiversary. It seemed easy enough when I decided to do it, because it'll be so good for me; but I forgot about a lot of things. Things like the fact that although we want the photo to be fiery and fierce like we are, nobody in the universe can fit my awkward weirdo body into a dress that isn't made out of t-shirt material. And this is way too important of a picture to cut corners with that polyester blend bullshit, seriously. Nothing feels right, yet. It'll come to me. It'll come to me. It'll come.

First, I needed to realize a couple of things about myself. Besides the fact that I am frightened, and I am broken, and often aloof, and frequently in an inexplicable kind of pain; I needed to realize that I have to stop comparing my healing process to everybody else's healing processes. "Everyone else rocks at healing except for me," cries broken Becca on a sad, sad night. But I don't know that. I can't know that. 

The only things that I know are the things that my heart longs for, and even if they're things that make no sense, my heart wants what she wants. She wants the relationships that she's found. She wants comfort after every strained pulse; beat, beat, beat, breathe. She wants a mother's arms and a lover's embrace. She's a little behind. She's in pieces.

But she recognizes those long-lost pieces of herself everywhere that I go, and I always want to recognize that fact. It's one of the things that I love so much about this difficult journey. When I find a piece of my heart waiting for me inside of somebody else, somebody beautiful...I can't stop the turbulent vortex of entangled, entwined, intimate connection that follows. It's deep, deeper than I can comprehend. So deep that I often feel like I need to quench it, hold it back, reroute myself, stop myself before I explode all over everything.

But my heart wants that connection. She wants to feel together, like she belongs, like she's allowed to be loved.

So from now on, I'll let her. Let's see where this goes; let's see what radiant things happen.

23

I'm really quite exceptionally tired.

Too tired to do any of the things that don't absolutely have to be done in a reasonable amount of time, lest my world explode or something far more dramatic than necessary. More than that, though, I'm too burned out to really actually remember why I like to explore and learn. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is complete dissociation from myself.

So understandably, it's easy to feel like I've lost faith in damn near everything. But, grace still exists and I know that I really haven't. In that spirit, I want to do a little therapeutic exercise and I'll request perspective and patience from my readers; I'm processing. That's all.

23 Things in which I've lost faith:
1. Arguably too literally: organized religion
2. People who cannot read maps
3. My possible Master's degree
4. My ability to remain in academia for the next 10 months
5. My desire to learn details
6. My ability to remember details
7. People who wear flip flops on rugged terrain
8. People who think that we can see a solar transit of Saturn from Earth 
9. Western Christianity
10. My status as a human versus a corporation's status as a human
11. My financial situation
12. Related: the IRS
13. My mental health at large
14. Congress, obviously
15. My ability to fake it 'til I make it
16. My healing process
17. My ability to recognize personal growth
18. My ability to just be nice
19. People who lean on telescopes
20. My capacity for wonder and awe
21. Mosquito repellent
22. My communication skills
23. Being an adult, ever

23 Things in which I've not lost faith:
1. Mountains
2. People who are seeing Saturn for the first time
3. The Sun's ability to create Earth-sized sunspots
4. Aurora Borealis
5. Flying on airplanes
6. Driving on interstates
7. Singing about things
8. People who want to tell their stories
9. My ability to recognize the ways by which I can change for the better
10. My ability to seek out options
11. My curiosity
12. People who graciously let me process this life
13. People who remind me that I have strength as a survivor
14. People who remind me that I am quick to point to joy
15. My ability to network
16. The resiliency of this planet
17. Beautiful things that require heat, pressure, and time to form properly
18. Community
19. People who appreciate nature
20. Related: the NPS
21. Germany, for some reason
22. My immune system, knock on wood
23. The future, even if I'm unusually unsure and scared

Everything is balance. One pro and con for every year of my life. I am equally anxious and excited for the big things coming up...well. I hope they are big. Big enough for me to recognize and appreciate the magnitude. Big enough for me to notice why they're happening. Big enough for me to stop feeling ashamed of where I am on all of my journeys. Big enough for my big, bruised, wide, pulsing heart.

Surprises, Past and Future

I think I underestimated the effect of leaving my therapist and most of my friends in one fell swoop. I thought, you know, that the land could be my therapist this summer. And my friend. I always think that, and it's a giant mistake. I mean, it works to an extent...but it doesn't work all the way. It would work had I been created an introvert, but alas, I am an Extrovert with a capital E and the land does not talk back to me. 

I've been having lots flashbacks, lately. Fortunately and a little bit surprisingly, they've been good ones! Lots of fond memories that I hadn't thought about for quite some time. Like the time my parents dressed me up as a fire fighter for Halloween in Kindergarten. All things considered, for small-town mid-Michigan in 1995, that was pleasantly progressive. Props to you, mom. Props to you.

And then that time when I was 20, the last stop on one of my many solo road trips; sipping champagne on a rooftop with new friends and old, basking in the yellow glow of a Chicago skyline. I didn't have a whole lot of fucks to give, then. I'll bet you anything, though, that I thought I did. And that got me thinking: when I'm 26 and stressed out about life like I am right now, how will I remember this season? Will I shake my head at the moments that I am, right now, currently wasting away with worry? Will I wish I were back here?

Probably.

For brief volcanic moments this past week, I have become very angry. Angry, and sad, and anxious. I am stressed out and restless, unable to sleep well and in a daytime daze. I am out in the middle of beautiful, and I'm absolutely incapable of escaping into the beautiful because I can't figure out how to forget that I have to go back to Clemson in the end...and for some reason, it's killing me.

I hate that I have to go back, but I will make myself go. I will earn a lousy, meaningless piece of paper at the end of this go around. I will not mess it up. I will not sever all of the ties. I will smile, and be nice, and be submissive, and try to make myself care because deep down under the burnout, I used to love this. And I'll figure it out.

But I'm finished with jumping through hoops. Finished. I do not "hate my life," as so many of my colleagues seem to wish to project; I hate that we're in an environment that is so terribly dehumanizing. I ironically and affectionately call our building "my own personal hell," but let's be real. I'd readily prefer my imagined (albeit diluted) interpretation of hell. In hell, the rules don't change overnight, every night. Things are pretty goddamn absolute. I'm tired of people who only value things that are valid in academia, as if it is the be-all end-all of society. It's certainly a highly important institution, but it's not at all an accurate representation of how the real world functions. One has to, you know, do basic things like communicate in the real world. And seriously? I'm very over being judged by my superiors for taking a few spare weekends to spend time with my family, when they have the opportunity to go home to family every single night. Your high horse is dead. Get off.

Being the anti-miserable person that I truly am, it seems like the ultimate betrayal of self to go back. And to think, a year ago I was excited for this! It's because, of course, I expected difficult; not impossible. Not unreasonable. Not nonsensical. Not wishy-washy. Not disastrous. And I have to drag myself, kicking and screaming, back there in 2 months.

Truth be told, I will be so happy to be back. Things will probably get better, and by the grace of everything, I'll remember why I wanted this. But I am so unsure of myself. I feel so unqualified and unprepared, awkwardly stumbling my way through my "life plans" whenever visitors ask. I have less of my life figured out than ever before. So, whatever happens...will be a surprise.

I hope it's awesome.

The Anxious Girl's Prayer, Or Incoherent Rant

I think that I have about six hours left before these meds finally wear off. Or is it ware off? What is ware even used for? Or, for what is ware even used? Grammar.

I can't even spell. Or use proper grammar. Or stop thinking. I'm so tired, and I'm wide awake. My bed right now feels like Christmas. A few minutes ago, a moth fell onto my keyboard because it wanted the light. It startled me, but I wanted to watch it anyway. 

By grace though, even when I'm stoned out of my mind on Alprazolam, I can still do my job. I can help you plan your trip through the Badlands. I can show you Saturn, and tell you about the ice geysers on its moon Enceladus. When my mind is preoccupied with those things, it forgets that it's dizzy. I have to breathe because I have to speak. If I don't have to sit still, I can forget that my tee shirt collar feels like a noose.

And it had been almost two and a half months, so I'd forgotten how bad anxiety days felt. No trigger, just a bad day to drink coffee. I'm okay with it, though. I told myself that I wouldn't hate myself for taking medicine if I needed it. That's what it's for.

I am in, possibly, one of my favorite places in the universe. Badlands National Park is a saving grace and a graceful savior. And I'll say that it's beautiful right to its face, but as the poem in the Visitor Center says, the land will not flatter me back. It's too harsh and it's too real...but what if those things are exactly the things for which I'm searching? In that sense, I am flattered. I'm flattered that I can sit atop the most uncomfortable formations and feel rightly at home. Tough recognizing tough. Survivor acknowledging survivor. A land and a girl who both know that nothing is guaranteed and few worthy things are easy. Both being shaped by literal and figurative tempests; wind and rain and hailstones to end all windshields. In their seemingly woeful tales of erosion, though, both still wide open to the elements and willing to transform. Both knowing that change requires growing pains.

Both enduring, as long as the process allows.