you'll get there

but right now you're here

DISCLAIMER: This is the first thing that I’ve written on here that didn’t start out as something for public consumption. I started writing it as one of my morning pages exercises that no one else but me typically sees. I’m trying to navigate posting what’s authentic to me while not airing out my life on the internet, and I went back and forth on posting this at all. But during some difficult times in the past few months, it was pieces like this from other creators that struck a chord with me, that made me feel a little less alone. So I don’t know if any of it will anything to anyone but me, but on the off-chance that it might, here’s a little random something that I wrote about navigating it. <3

I needed a walk.

The feeling of necessity is physical, like a dog releasing pent up zoomies by ripping through a backyard as if rabid. I know when my limbs need to walk for senseless miles for the sake of it– for the sake of everything.

I need to take deep belly breaths using a new-agey method, I need to listen to a podcast to either make me laugh, weep, or uh-huh aloud like a Pentecostal. I need to play songs that will make me feel like I’m in a music video, like I’m on the precipice of something great, like I’m the leading lady and we’re in the wrap-up scene, and I’m smiling off into the distance with that it all worked out in the end, didn’t it? attitude. I need to listen to meditations and subliminals while I drink a can of sparkling-something so cold that it feels sharp on the way down my throat. In a perfect world, it’s a Friday evening in the Spring, maybe 6pm. In a perfect world, I’m feeling a whole lot better than I’ve been feeling lately.

I needed a walk. Desperately.

I considered bringing my cat Cleo along. I feel bad when she’s pent up in my apartment all day, probably meowing at the walls and having night terrors without me. But I’m not entirely sure that she even likes the stroller to begin with, because she’s a woman of mixed signals. She’s interested, but doesn’t ever want to appear overeager. Sometimes, I have trouble believing that she’s really my daughter, but I digress.

I knew that bringing Cleo meant that my walk wouldn’t meet its intended purposes (fixing me), so I was very brave and left her at home.

I like to play a game when I take these walks, and this is what makes them whimsical. I decide a few rules beforehand. Because I live in D.C., I have a rule that I have to follow the pedestrian signs wherever they say to go. If I walk up to an intersection, I just go in the direction that will keep me walking. If I’m at an intersection with no sign, I'll sometimes choose which house I like best on either side, and then go in that direction. In which direction is the closest bird? I turn where I see pink sometimes.

Every flower I see and every person I pass and every little library I rifle through, feels a little bit fated when I do this. Like I’m meant to see or understand or experience something on this walk, like what I may have referred to back when I was a Christian ™ as a wink from God.

On my walks, I think about many things, one of them being that I find the concept of God so much more believable, so much more comforting, when I remembered that God doesn’t have a gender. My version of God can very well be a woman I trust with my life. This feels like many less hoops to jump through in believing in God, because I’ve believed in women all of my life.

I just couldn’t imagine any man doing pretty much anything for me, but when I remembered God can actually be the coolest, wisest woman with effortless confidence and self-assuredness and kind eyes or something, I felt like I could believe in that. Now that I’m thinking about it, my version of God looks a little bit like Connie Britton.

I could believe that there was some cosmic something, something calmer and smarter than me, that every once in a while, when I can finally soothe my body long enough to stop the never ending chatter of my mind, I can somehow access.

She loves me deeply. She cares what happens to me. She’s the core of who I am, some soul or spiritual woo woo shit that connects us in some insane way I can’t conceptualize and should stop trying to.

So yeah, I think about that. And normal, pop culture things, too. But also the meaning of the universe.

I think about Internal Family Systems, because I also use this same brain to be a therapist, so my wires often get crossed. In my own therapy, I’ve been working to label what IFS refers to as ‘parts’. The most severe and most rare form of this is Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is brought on by profound childhood trauma that causes the psyche to totally split as a method of self-protection, resulting in identities with no conscious awareness of one another. But to a much lesser degree, we do this all the time in less extreme ways. We dissociate one of our thoughts from the other to choke the oxygen out of it like a grease fire. We grow into a person with desires and values and beliefs that often conflict one another. I mean, we say it all the time. A part of me thinks this, but on the other hand another part of me thinks this.

Well who the hell are these parts that we all keep referring to? And why do they get a say?

I think about my parts, which when I put it like that feels nefarious. To be clear, these walks are not nefarious. This is a family friendly channel.

I think about how nothing has happened how I thought it would.

I think about how Elon Musk is probably within a 5 mile radius of me as I walk, and I fight a retch.

I think about how much is lost, and then I think about how much is gained.

I think about work, and tasks, and to-do lists, and then I remember that this is not that kind of walk, and then I’m doing my belly breathing technique again.

I’m focusing on my footsteps, on the breeze, on the feeling of clothes on my skin. I’m doing a grounding technique. I’m rolling my neck in circles, wiggling my habitually clenched jaw. I’m scouring Little Libraries and reaching between someone’s fence posts to grab a dandelion and blow off the seeds with my wish.

I’m thinking about how much effort it takes to feel good, how I’m so sick of not feeling good.

But I’m also thinking about how lucky I am, how unlucky other people are, how deeply sad that reality makes me.

But I’m also thinking about an old roommate who I still have nightmares about, many of which I am stuck locked in her festering room after I had snuck in to steal from her closet.

I’m thinking about how much better I feel from 3 months ago.

But then I think about how bad I felt 3 months ago.

Oops– I remind myself to do my belly breathing again.

Sometimes on these walks I’ll call a friend, more often I call my mom. She assures me that your late 20s feel like this, and then you add a personal tragedy or two. Chaos-blend it.

Of course it’s hard. Hard was a guarantee about this part of your life, so why were you shocked when it came? Luckily, joy and difficulty coexist with more ease than you give them both credit for.

HBO Girls would say, all adventurous women do.

A tattoo on my left arm (on the back, which is why I often forget the tattoo as well as the sentiment of it): great burden, great joy.

How annoying is it that you can’t have one without the other?

I feel better after my walk, 4 miles later. I feel inspired in a way that makes me want to believe that something must have just shifted in my sacral chakra. Did this walk just make me become the kind of person that talks about her sacral chakra?

I’m almost back to my place when I pass a house that I pass on most of my walks, one with a playhouse in the front yard that feels almost reminiscent of one that would have been in the yards of my childhood. It’s under a tree, so it’s covered in dirt and leaves in a way that feels charming and unscripted, crammed in between two gentrified fixer-uppers with floor to ceiling windows and abstract chandeliers that I hate. I’ve always passed this playhouse when it was empty, but this time, it was bustling with kids. I spotted four kids in my quick glance, ranging from toddlerhood to tween. In front of me on the sidewalk came bounding three more of them. They all squealed with giddy excitement to see one another, already starting a conversation before they even reached their first fence post, as if they were simply finishing a sentence from the last time that they spoke. Two of the three kids padded across the sidewalk in bare feet. Their mother stepped out of the car with a covered dish in her hands, her hair messy and in her face, her smile warm and tired. She waved to her friends who stood in the yard with stemless wine glasses, yelled some sort of quip that must be an inside joke of their friendship, that I as a passerby have no knowledge of. They exist in a private world that is their own, and I’m only getting a quick glimpse.

One of the kids has the door to the house held open so that adults can yell in to each other, probably something about dinner. I can see two men standing in the foyer, one with a loud laugh that echoes. All of them look so comfortable that, if this were a much larger house, I would assume that all of them lived there in some sort of commune. A shirtless boy howls like a wolf, and the littler kids squeal with laughter, imitating him in a higher octave.

My first instinct is sadness, simply out of habit. I felt like I was peering through a looking glass at a longheld dream of mine, one that I’ve played out hundreds of times in guided visualizations that I find on Youtube. My family, my closest friends, an unusually warm evening, good food, a board game, comfortable conversation, giddy laughter– the works. The kids are messy and the work week is over and I’m with the people who know and love me best. We’re doing a Friday ritual, wearing stretchy pants, enjoying each other’s company. My best friend, Summer, and I bought houses six minutes away from one another to live out this dream. I felt like I could imagine it down to the studs, this image that I conjured in my head that would signify so much more.

My phone wallpaper reads, You’ll get there. But right now, you’re here.

And so my next instinct after the sadness is hope, though the feeling is hard-earned. A part of me– some eternal nine-year-old, rails up against that hope with wild despair, while the core part of me– the Connie Britton part– lays calm, steady hands onto my forearms.

You’ll get there. But right now, you’re here. She says.

I think about the fact that I see other people’s lives everyday, most of which pass by my awareness without any consideration on my end. Private worlds bumping up against my own, bouncing off in separate directions to never be thought of again. But this moment didn’t feel like that. I felt like I was getting a glimpse into something that already felt a little bit like… mine? Like for a moment, my future crossed into my orbit and showed itself to me. A wink.

I do my belly breathing again. I feel the sensation of my shoes covering my feet. I lift my chin and feel the thin rays of sun peeking out through the overcast sky, grazing my face. I recognize the feeling that sneaks into me on my inhale is grief, and I continue inhaling so that it can work its way through my system. It always finds its way out on the exhale.

You’ll get there, Connie Britton assures me. But right now, you’re here.