This is what I know to be true for me right now.
1. Sometimes staying still looks very much like running away
When everything in my bones screams run—which happens not entirely infrequently in this body of mine, with its years of memorized scripts downloaded directly from the Official Playbook Of Avoidant Attachment—this city’s freeways have often been the conduit for the sort of motion I needed to stay still.
I know, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, except that it does.
Many a night, following tears or anxiety or time spent staring into the abyss, it’s been my endless hours of freeway driving that have allowed me to give in to that overwhelming pull to move while still keeping me heading back home (to my house, to my heart, to my deepest knowing).
The asphalt absorbs the tears, the wind through the open windows tangles my hair (and somehow untangles some of the mixed-up threads of my heart), the music plays loudly and at random and yet somehow lands so specifically on songs that say exactly what my heart was seeking words to explain.
I can go nowhere at all, end up back in the very same place I begin, and still somehow traverse vast terrain all in the span of an hour or two, Just me and my wheels spinning their way down the road, and a heart trying mightily to stay open to what is and what might be.
A heart that, no matter how badly it wants to run, always wants more to return and return, and always return.
2. We humans sure are good at writing our hearts into song
Thank the fuck we are, so that my ache can meet the ache of some stranger with a guitar or a piano or a voice that at some point just needed to sing into the void.
And so there I am on the freeway, somewhere between lost and found, singing along to lyrics I’ve never heard before or memorized years ago or heard once or twice and never thought of again. Except now they hit the exact way my heart needed to get hit to open just a bit farther, and either way, they somehow help me in the endless task of figuring out how the pieces go back together.
And when the final strains of the memory die away, and my heart is still working on putting itself back together, all I have to do Is this…
Simply hit repeat and let the lyrics work their magic and medicine on me all over again, until I finally make my way home.
3. One of the bravest and saddest things about me
“It’s one of the bravest and saddest things about me”, I said to two of my dearhearts last night on a shaky voice memo left rolling along the I-10 somewhere between where I was then and where I am now, “how I know without a doubt that I will break my own heart in order not to lose myself”.
I will break my own heart in order to not lose myself.
I say it again out loud to myself while a song plays truths about freedom.
I will break my own heart in order to not lose myself.
I will break my own heart in order to not lose myself.
And it’s true. I have and I will.
And in that is grief, yes. So much grief for what has been lost and for what still might be lost.
But there is freedom too. And solidity. A foundation of trust that my heart is safe in my hands. That my knowing can rest in my body.
That I will always, without a doubt, carry myself safely home.
4. I want to dive farther than I ever have, trust harder, love bigger
I want to lay to rest, finally, the myths that healing is an exercise in suffering. That a constant reactivation of wounding is required for resolution. That my nervous system didn’t come here to this life possessing the keys for true and lasting regulation.
On the scales of my life, I want to place the largest of weights onto that which will deliver me to the heady sort of joy that begs me to give my entire being to it, the deep contentment that is as accessible as breath, and the rooted peace that lives right under the exhale.
I want to prioritize safety, not in opposition to wide-open freedom, but as the actual pathway to the kind of freedom accessible only from and through myself.
Rather than exploring the entire width of a space or place or person or experience from any sort of surface, I want to submerge myself deep-deep-deep into discovery, to give myself over in totality. To find a foundation that will hold the all of me, with no holding back.
I want to be met, and met, and met again in a way that only makes more possible.
I am writing a brand new story here. I’m not near ready to reach the end.
5. What is now is not always a marker of what may become
It was easy on the freeway last night. This predictable grid of a city is surrounded by a giant, interlocking series of loops of pavement ferrying bodies in a continuous snaking line of humanity. All day and night long and in every direction, hunks of metal and technology carrying what is most priceless from here to there and back again. Part of the engine of life in the city, a constant hum of machinery and motion, the backdrop of it all.
20 years here and I can’t get lost on those freeways anymore, I know they just loop and loop and loop again. The path laid out before me and my muscle memory guiding me to the right exits and off-ramp turns.
They add new sections though, all the time, of course. There are entire spans of road that didn’t exist when I arrived in this desert over two decades ago. Places you couldn’t get quickly and easily back then, and now unending lines of cars zoom by each day.
What used to take an hour might now take 20 minutes. We forget that it hasn’t always been so.
I’m trying to remember this. That we humans pave new ways between here and there all the damn time. That what is isn’t always a marker of what can be.
I’m looking for a new path in my heart. I’m praying that there is an entire crew of hard-working freeway engineers somewhere in there, laying down the infrastructure of an as-yet nonexistent loop I can point my compass along, one that will move me safely and quickly through what now seems like harsh and dangerous terrain.
I’m working to believe with everything I have that this is so.
6. Choice is a really sticky bitch
Not that final moment of choosing. Not the brave leap into the nothing or the everything that’s waiting for us—that piece is usually brutally clear.
But the messy liminality of the in-betweens—where nothing much is certain and ache seems to exist on either side of the line you’re staring down, that’s a sticky bitch of a space to be in.
It seems, sometimes, that a whole lot of my adult life has been about trying (and often failing) to stare down that line with some modicum of grace.
I remind myself again tonight that choice is not some finite and foreign entity, not an alien body living separately from me. Instead, I know that it is a fluid and organic, lived reality.
I am in-choice and of-choice in every moment. But Jesus, it can be hard to hold steady with that knowing.
Especially when the choice in question seems at first to hold no ease and very little grace. When it seems to be a choice between this ache over here, or that one over there.
Even then, when I dial into my heart, I’m most often super sure which ache I’m ready to land inside, which tender space I hope to nurture into something new.
And so it is and so may it be yet again that even in the ache of two choices that challenge, I guide my wheels toward the one that holds a measure of possibility.
Because even at my most unsure, I will always choose to land my being inside of even the smallest sliver of chance, just to see if my heart might have what it takes to expand it into something more.
7. I don’t have a freeway map to any of this being alive and human thing
There is no GPS. No disembodied Siri voice rising up from the car speakers to tell me to turn right now or stay in the center lane. No hazard warning of accidents ahead. I’m in this on my own - we all are.
Right now it even feels like we’ve had a run of cloudy nights obscuring the stars I’d like to use to guide this segment of my journey. What do we do when we can’t even fall back on the navigation systems we know by heart?
I wish I had a definitive answer.
But one thing is for sure. If I close my eyes and cross my fingers and imagine where I hope my car comes to a rest, or the ship carrying the cargo of my one wild heart coasts into shore when it’s all said and done—the answer is real damn clear.
No, I don’t know how I’m going to get there or how many times I’m going to get lost, or how many dark nights of the soul I might live through where it feels like I’m floating in the endless vastness without a star to point my ship toward.
I’m placing my wheels on a map that no cartographer has yet taken the time to draw, traversing terrain that has not yet been explored.
(Yes, I’m mixing metaphors here, but what is life anyway but one giant mixed metaphor, anyway?).
No matter. At some point along this journey, I’m going to have to get my hands dirty and cut away the tangled brush, and lay the path as I go.
I’m hoping I won’t be doing that part alone.
But either way, I know right now where I want to end up, and who I want to find by my side when I get there. I know it with everything I have.
For now, that has got to be enough.
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