When the wheel of life turns back around toward new endings, it can be difficult to keep yourself from turning sour. It can be difficult to regulate yourself or move through conflict with grace. It’s only human to struggle in these ways.
I’m only human.
When faced with new endings, it’s important to remember there are also new beginnings up ahead. But it’s also important to take the time to grieve, to hold yourself accountable for your humanness, and to find acceptance within yourself.
Nobody said it was easy.
As I leapt off the precipice, I stumbled and tumbled through anger, resentment, grief, anguish, disillusion, helplessness, denial, delusion, dissociation often several times a day. But as I tumbled, I also found respite in pockets of gratitude, vulnerability, and community.
Still
I
Fall
I fall clutching my heart, holding the love as close as I can. Without the love, the falling never ends.
It’s so
HARD
some days
I hold onto the love when I want to cry
when I want to scream
when I want to
D I S A P P E A R
Without that love, I fear there would be nothing left of me at all. It holds me together, like the gold in a kintsugi pot.
I am shattered. Broken.
But my pieces can still hold the love, and the love is what makes me whole again.
I cannot move forward without it. And into my broken and mended vessel I pour the memories that would be too painful or messy to bear without that glue-like love.
You asked me once, why do I fear death?
The truth is, without the fear I would have already chosen it a hundred times over.
I used to fear love, too.
Why?
I feared losing love. If I knew what love could be, I might fear the loss just as greatly as I feared death. I feared the pain of loss would be worse than death itself.
Admittedly, the pain does hurt like death. But it is nothing compared to the love itself.
Each day I choose a memory from my vessel of love and carry it into my life. Sometimes I carry it through notes to myself. Sometimes it’s in the little things like how I butter my bread, express my exasperation, or laugh quietly to myself at reminders of that old life. The foods I choose to eat and cook for myself are now an amalgamation of all the people who have shone their love into the vast darkness of my fearful and despaired world.
Over the past few years, I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror or in photos. I could hardly recognize myself within myself. I often felt like I had died, and another soul had come down to take over. I realize now how I was being transformed. I struggled to contain the love in my life within my inner world of darkness. Wherever I tried to squeeze the love in, the darkness would bleed out. It was an ongoing war in my mind as my loved ones struggled to understand or support me.
How could anyone maintain the strength to support someone whose darkness keeps bleeding onto them?
Still
I
Fall
Until I crashed through the barrier, shattered into a million pieces, and recognized that the darkness and the love must coexist.
I am piecing myself back together, little by little, until I am no longer a fragile vessel of old memories but a wholly realized self with new dreams, new goals, new adventures, new memories and an inner peace within my mind.
I am still me, but I am made stronger through love. I am transformed through love, loss, and grief. I will carry all of that forward through my regrowth, not as a burden but as a guide.
Your love guides me, always.
The Art of Bree 