Tuesday, March 13, 2012

A Letter to Ourselves

You’ve been wandering for quite a while now. You know it, I know it. The path through the forest seems to be taking a suspiciously circular formation; you think this because this seems an awful lot like the same mud hole you got stuck in last time.

I know what you’re thinking. What you’re feeling. You have become intimate friends with the self-deprecating gears grinding away in your skull. And by friends I mean, of course, sworn enemies attached at the hip.

You’ve come to the point where you’ve collapsed on your ass in the middle of a strange, cold wilderness, thrown up your hands and declared, “What the hell am I doing here? Why?” I know you have done and said these things, my love. I know because I was there with you, by your side and in your heart. Thinking you were alone, you were frightened and ashamed, putting on a proud, brave face whenever passersby came near, intent on their own twisting paths.

Amidst the wilderness, you felt your body had become an even more terrifying place, a war zone. Alien and uncomfortable, what should have been your home, your safe and sacred place, was nothing more than a reminder of all the mistakes, and all the left turns you made when the simpler path was to the right. And even in that moment, knowing clear and well, you turned left yet again.

“I am lost!” you sobbed, pounding your fists into dirt, into stone, “I am lost, I am lost!”

Stripped bare of all external defenses, you have guarded your heart well, finding it better to carry the heavy wall than to let it drop and leave the burden behind. Stronger this wall became, and heavier, until you were forced to slowly drag it behind you, pulling and straining, forgetting not only where you were going but why you were headed there. Frustrated, it was this moment your knees buckled under all the pressure, and the self-loathing you created.

But here is the beginning of your story, and the moment you open your eyes to gaze around at the wilderness you found yourself so hopelessly lost in. In the moment you realized how lost you truly were, you also discovered you knew exactly where you were. There was no other place you could have been, as you found yourself: dirty, exhausted, broken, disillusioned, and utterly, and completely REAL.