I am in love with Life!
What a turbulent and all encompassing affair 
To be breathing & healing &
wounding & being wounded.

Devastate me darling. Make me laugh & 
make me bleed.

I drink like a child. Eyes wide open
both hands around the sippy cup.
I take wide gulps of air in 
in between sips

Needing to self-nourish before 
I dash back outside.

Growth and personal development seem to be regularly portrayed as transformative processes. The now tired phrase “New Year, New Me!” further impounds this idea into our cultural pychse, as if every 365 days, a friendly delivery robot will drop off a new skin suit and corresponding personality on our doorstep. Last year’s model can be sent out with the wrapping paper and into the dump as we become better, smarter, prettier, funnier versions of ourselves.

Time, as a metaphysical concept has been dogging me ever since I graduated from university. I feel like ever since I marched under that Arch, there has been a literal clock counting upwards, as if I am going into debt with the universe for taking too much of it to figure myself out. It has been over two years since I convocated and I have yet to reach the first proverbial summit that almost of my peers have surpassed, and honestly, I do not know when I will get there. During all of this wonderful wonderful time, I have changed so much, however, I have not abandoned those other versions of myself behind. I just grew around them.

Internationally, Matryoshka dolls, or Russian nesting dolls, are viewed as foundational touchstones of rural Russian life. Upon first inspection, the doll looks unremarkable from any other wooden carving, however once opened, reveals a smaller doll almost identical to the first. A joyful child will repeat this process until they get to the seventh, both the last and the smallest of all the dolls.

I think that there is a secret, very small doll self within me, that is both my youngest and oldest selves.

In January of this year, I spent weeks wallowing in my room, simultaneously employed but non-positioned. When asked to recount what I did with that time, I cannot. That was Deep time; time spent firmly ensconced within myself, not producing anything that the world would deem “valuable”.

Anyways, as that doll, my selves sit together on the porch of my dream house. The elder cradles the younger and whispers blessings in her ear. The baby babbles prayers in a language spoken in heaven, not yet forgotten. And together they rock as my world falls apart over, and over again.

Now

It is the month of September! An entire month simply to transition. We watch a thousand deaths everyday as leaves detach themselves from branches to make their way into gutters, or lawns, and finally are raked up into yard waste bags. But it is also a month that reminds us all of beginnings as the scholastic efforts of many begin anew.

I have started my own harvest, the seasonal tilling of my earthly possessions. While sobbing on Saturday afternoon, I re-organized my already tidy desk, and discovered pockets of nonsense around my room. The places were the Things that I had stopped actively perceiving and interacting with were dwelling, bravely catching the dust meant for the spaces below them. All of those items were left at VV Boutique this morning, but this afternoon, I braved the Art Beneath My Couch.

Sitting in the lukewarm sun of a late summer afternoon, I tried to piece together parchment paper puzzle pieces of what was once referred to as my schizo wall. The activity was simultaneously silly and grounding. There was a lot of what could be called the ravings of a self-obsessed manic-depressive, a girl screaming into the void using markers and kinetic energy.

Then

There was so much sadness. So much of anna being sad and Anna reaching back with comfort. The fall I moved to the place I live now was a very lonely season. I was isolated and I did a lot of drugs1 because I thought it would help. It did, and did not. The time I can account for was spent in polar states, vacillating between overshared hyperconnectivity and self-imposed deprivation from both time and the internet. Islanded2.

Those storms raged and howled and young and old rocked on, beseeching me to calm, beseeching each other.

Now

My boyfriend is In The Field, and I feel an inkling, a smattering of kinship with the sect of the population that self-identifies as an Army Girlfriend or Service Spouse. I am not on the course with him but mentally I am. Not constantly, but every few hours or so I fragment my mind. Send it both one hour forward into his timezone, and throw it an entire year back to when I was on the exact same course, and consider what could possibly be preventing him from texting me back. From lived personal experience I know that he has spent the last few days wearing a large and uncomfortable motorcycle helmet and being aggressively driven down black tracks without a phone. But hey, memory loves company.

This yearning or as I sometimes refer to it missiance, has brought on a few tears sure, but cannot account for the depths of my recent emotional volatility. So then, what gives?

Since those strange weeks in January I have been sent around the base like a bad temp, and recently landed myself another position as an assistant to someone fairly important. My supervisor assigned me a task with no deadline on Friday and so then I obviously imposed a very tight one on myself. So today (Tuesday remember), after leaving my vehicle in the hands of Bob of the Windshield Repair shop, I first learned that the library would not be open for another hour and then that my work laptop would not power on.

I dragged myself into a neighborhood bakery, feeling incredibly guilty for every atom of air I breathed because I was Not planning on buying anything and fretted. Sitting beside three generations of White women, I watched the image of youthful privilege Emote via Tik Tok dances in front of her grandmother, I began to cry. I tore up a napkin blotting my face though somehow it held up balled in my fists out of the bakery, down the street, through a construction zone, past a Catholic school, into a community outreach coffee shop and to the library steps with 20 minutes to opening.

Baby Anna gently gnaws on the loose skin of Jjaja3 Anna’s knuckles. Both sets of brown eyes seeing deeper and further than they ought.

Then

I created wildly that fall. All of my anger, my Vaevin4, usually used for fighting (figuratively) - was stymied by various injuries - had to be released. It found seams in my fingers and ripped into the world stark raving mad.

I know that depersonalization has a Real Medical Definition, but when I use it I mean that I kind of sort of stopped being a regular person. Kept apart from regular, healthy interactions with my agemates, I shed all vestiges of normalcy. I spent entire afternoons climbing and speaking to trees, wandering through snow dusted forests that made me think I had slipped into Narnia; I would get lost and try to scramble up escarpments on my hands and knees, avoiding paved trails at all costs. All of this would happen while I emitted noises that now only come out around people I am very, very close too. Sounds that if you heard from outside of a cave would make you think, Goblin.

Now

Most of what I wrote during that time is illegible, not for my penmanship, but for the sheer delusional nature of its contents. I did also manage to sometimes write ideas or pieces with merit and value, one of which made it to the introduction of this entry. My pain was a reoccurring theme in my work, and I tended to refer to it as ‘useful’. I no longer have the same relationship with it, but I am glad it meant something to me at the time.

I want to complete and publish a collection of my writing. I have collections of poems bound up in various creative fashions strewn around my room, but the thought of typing up all of those ideas and presenting them on white pieces of paper is like dissecting a butterfly in an operating theatre to write poems on pollination. Technically valid, but emotionally perverse. Absent from the messy scrap paper context, the paintings and drawings that also helped me make sense of my world, my poetry seems islanded. Cast away from the richness of my artistic enclosure.

Maybe this is more self-obsessed aggrandization. But today (Tuesday), I reviewed the final pieces of paper that were under my couch. cutting away, or copying down the words I found worth keeping and threw away the rest. I pushed all of my horny bleeding darlings into the dumpster like they were unwanted puppies.

Harvesting and culling. Both the squirrel and the oak.

Sometimes, after days of overcast skies, the heavy gray ones that threaten rain with heavy clouds that seem to pool above, but without the decency of becoming heavy enough to release, it actually does rain. The storm is somewhat of a relief. A proof that vindicates my hours wiled away under a roof while baby and elder rock and rock.

After

When the sky produces phenomena, when the bodies celestial strut across their stage, I feel like one whole true continuous forever self. Like when double rainbows stretch across the entire sky, as clearly as if they had been freshly painted there, and paired with a vantage point that provides sightlines to where both pots of gold would be. Or when its cold and bright enough for a sundog to howl into the winter noon. Or even just catching the blood moon rise.

Times when the Anna I am know joines her selves on the porch. I kiss grandma on the cheek, and scoop baby up into my arms and press her to my chest.

The anger. Energy. Anxiety. Sadness, gladness, hope, worry, fear, delight all somehow meld into one experience. Wonder and awe and I am finally silent, and behold, the beautiful beautiful day the Lord hath created.

I did finish the task and I am doing a lot better now. I’ll probably feel shitty again sometime in the future these emotions, like seasons are all so cyclical. Goodbye summer, and thank you.

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it’s been a long time since i wrote anything for public consumption.

i’ve been busy these last few months. i’ve travelled, i’ve failed, and i’ve done so much driving.

i did 299km of driving this evening. after spending the weekend in kingston, ontario with friends from university, i needed to come home. (this type of writing is not coming very natural to me right now. i am out of practice but this is the practice. this is the process and it is the purpose). i have so many Thoughts in my head. not all the time, sometimes i manage to completely exit the menagerie of my mind and find myself, my entire conciousness, my being in my hips, my fingers, the ridges of my forehead. i can feel my heart beat in my toes, in my hamstrings, i can listen to the creak of the trees outside of my window and just be.

this has been a night of thinking. after lying in my bed for almost an hour unable to sleep, i abandoned that squishy surface for another and sat amongst my squishmellows until the thought of roadkill propelled me to my laptop.

that is the context. this essay did not fall out of a coconut tree.

i grew up listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Chanel. i have a lot of friends who tell me lots about the kinds of music their parents would play growing up, they’re able to delve into the genres, the artists, the albums that sounded their childhoods. i simply cannot relate. my parents put on the CBC and me and my brother listened. on saturday mornings either in the car to swim class or in the kitchen doing chores i would catch either snippets or be lucky enough to be able to sit through an entire radio program. i remember listening to as it happens, the debaters, and quirks and quarks on the weekends. on friday evenings driving home late at night from a family function, the smooth dulcet tones of nahlah ayed, the host of Ideas would seem to reverberate through my fathers car as he cruised down silent, but fully lit city-esque surburban streets.

while the vinyl cafe wasn’t on our regular rotation, i always loved hearing stuart mclean’s easy manner. as listeners, we got an almost voyeuristic (is that irony?) perspective into the lives of seemingly regular people. it was funny, it was intimate and it was so uniquely canadian. the show stopped airing in 2015, and stuart mclean passed away in 2017, but its legacy lives on in the podcast: backstage at the vinyl cafe. honestly, i am not a regular listener, but i do remember bingeing a few episodes during one of my long distance drives to somewhere, ontario. there was one story in that brief, but intense time that haunts me to this day. i don’t remember the name and i am not particularly interested in trying to figure out which one it is but i’ll tell you the parts that continue to cast a shadow into my life.

in this episode we follow a father whose son-in-law has decided to follow his heart and become a photographer. unlike most artists however, he is actually reasonably successful, and invites his in-laws to the city to the show where his work is being displayed. we learn about this through a conversation between the father and a woman (either his wife or is daughter i cannot remember), where we also learn about his disconnect to his SIL. the woman not only encourages him to attend the show, but to try to bond with the young man again. and so he goes.

through his eyes we learn that the artists subject are not just animals, but dead ones. the gallery walls are full of larger than life blow-ups of pictures of dead animals. and listeners from the father’s perspective we begin to feel uneasy and distrubed. he asks himself, how is this art, what is this supposed to say?

after the show, the two men go for a drive. it’s late at night and the elder of the two assumes they’ll just have a quick chat on the way back to the hotel room. the younger man, as the driver however has different intentions. instead we get to watch the process of the art being made. he simply drives around, and looks for roadkill. as we all glide down these country backroads late at night, we finally hear from the artist. he explains that he uses his work not only to be a witness to the countless lives that are lost everyday to roadkill, but then to make us, the viewer, the audience, the listeners aware of it too.

i don’t remember what happens after this, and at the time of listening, i had no idea how much this story would follow me. but art has a way of worming its way into the back of your mind and expanding the way you see the world.

in novemeber of 2023, i got into a car accident. making the drive between kingston and my current home, myself and a deer disagreed with who had right of way. it happened just like the cliche says; one moment the road was clear, the next, there was a deer in my headlights skittering along the road and then. impact.

thankfully, i was physically okay, the deer was not seen again by myself or wildlife authorities. my car was significantly damaged and i was fairly significantly inconvenienced by the repair process as it took place hundreds of kilometers away from where i actually lived. in the days following the accident, my father sent me a link to an article titled “How to Avoid Collisions with Animals”. it had three guidelines: 1. avoid driving at sunrise or sunset, animals are most active dawn and dust. 2. avoid driving on two-lane highways. 3. avoid driving on roads with speed limits between 60-80km/h. i laughed after reading it, after less than a year living out of a major city center i realized the article was describing most of the driving that happens in rural ontario.

i drive a lot. when i bought my car in 2023, the odometer read 11, 700 km. since then in 20 months i have added 39,805 kilometers to that counter, which totals to approximately 23,833 kilometers per year, comparatively, the average distance travelled by ontarians driving light vehicles (defined as cars, station wagons, vans, SUVs, and pickup trucks) was 16,000, whilst the national average was 15,200 (National Resources Canada, 2008). this data has probably signiciantly changed within the last decade, and so i honestly don’t know if i am batting around current average, but nonetheless, today, i drive more than somebody would have less than 20 years ago.

the majority of my time spent on the road is not, in my qualitative opinion, from the everyday trips to the mall or the grocery store. as a member of the armed forces, i am required to drive interprovincially fairly regularly for duty or to see the people i love hundreds of kilometers away. i am very lucky not only to have a vehicle, but one that runs well and relatively fuel efficiently. i’ve also really grown to like driving. i like the freedom it gives me, the beautiful and wonderous places i’ve been able to discover and explore, and i like the feel of smooth concrete underneath my wheels. but i also cannot stop thinking about roadkill.

after a long and cold winter, ontario has finally, really and truly begun to thaw. the signs of spring abound! early sunrises, clouds that bring rain, birds that aren’t ravens, and so many four-legged friends. after years of being confined to suburbian warrens, i had honestly not known that animals still roamed free. but living out in the country, i’m greeted by deer beyond my window as the sun comes up, i am regularly delighted by the parabolic pouncing of the gray squirrels and regularly observed by the groundhogs perched upon green electrical boxes as if they are assessing their fiefdom. all of this life, this vigor is beautiful, and it is threatened.

southern ontario is such a strange place to live. the 401 highway connects toronto, kingston, and ottawa, 500 kilometers allowing for inter-regional trade and movement of people and goods and services. the cities are vibrant and beautiful. full of young people, queer people, zero waste stores, hipster pop-up markets, antique emporiums, brunch/coffee shops which sell 9$ orange juice that are run by white women with sleek ponytails, lots of earrings, baggy jeans and generational wealth. they have beautiful parks and (abysmal) public transporation. they seem so alive and vital and perfect. they seem like the entire world must be has to be needs to be Just Like This. but the second you decide to go perpendicular to the sweet city slipstream, go northwest, off the beaten path and into what i like to call Somewhere, Ontario, it all rapidly falls way. first goes the number of lanes, and with that the idea of congestion. with that, the highrises, the density, the hustle and the bustle are all replaced by bucolic pastures. rolling, winding tumbling roads which careen seemingly dangerously close to an outrageous number of waterways. the rivers, the estuaries, the swamps, ponds, and the lakes. oh, my heart the lakes. the still waters almost crying out to be paddled on, the trees begging to be climbed, the fields needing to be tilled. there are cows, and goats, and alpacas just beyond the cities. farmers still farming still toiling to feed cities. and the undomesticated creatures run wild. and run wildly into the road. and then die.

thankfully, i did not kill another deer on this drive back home from kingston. but along my journey i first had to slow down for what i assume to be an escaped black barn cat pick its way very slowly across the road. i spent the kilometers i had cell reception on the phone with my best friend Al and i gave him quite the fright when i screamed. i thought i had failed to avoid crushing a lumpy animal form in the road, i hadn’t but i also think it was already dead. i had to violently swerve my car hours later when i fox ran into the road carrying a dead smaller animals between its teeth. i did not hit the fox, but in its fright it lost its dinner. i hope it went back to pick it up.

my first major collision happened in the blink of the eye. it was dark, late at night, and i was tired. and those reasons are probably why i didn’t swerve when the deer appeared in my headlights. conventional road wisdom advises drivers not to swerve for an animal, as you become incredibly unpredictable to other drivers which can lead to human fatalities. conventional road wisdom aligns with conventional humanist doctrines which always prioritizes our lives over theirs. last weekend also found me driving back home from visiting a major city. less than 50 kilometers away from my destination, just outside of Eganville, Ontario, i hit a bird with my car. i don’t even remember seeing it fly in front of my vehicle i just heard a thunk like a watermelon was cracked on my dash and saw a small white ball exploding swiftly into feathers. when it was safe to do so, i slowed down and pulled over, my heart was beating so fast and i was shaking. honestly, as i went to inspect the exterior of my car, i was more scared that there would be more damage. but once i saw the feathers in my grille i felt so much guilt.

our roads are becoming runways of death. as i careen down these two lane roads at speeds between 60-90 km/h at times that are likely dusk or dawn i see so many small furry bodies. sometimes i’ve distinguished a racoon or a goose, but most times i’m travelling way too fast in my spaceship of steel to be able to discern or pay proper respects.

i got home at around 8:40 pm and i spent my evening on the phone with my boyfriend who is very far away. we talked about taxes, and politics and cars (jesus christ how old are we). he told me he voted for the green party and i almost cried laughing. he acknowledged that within this two-party standoff he essentially threw his vote away, but that he was tired of the status quo. we tried to imagine what a world would look like if it was ran by environmentalists. what would a country be like if it was ran by people who put the planet first. we concluded that it would probably be a society a lot more akin to the Amish than the enviro-techno futures put forth by the technocrat-billionaires who are running the show right now. a world where we’d get around in horse and buggy and churn butter. i dislike thinking about climate change. it makes me angry, so angry. i believe that if any of us are really truly serious about climate justice we have to think further than carbon neutrality. we have to think about a world the modern conveniences the West has touted as markers of advanced civilizations are mostly metrics of consumeriesm and capitlistic growth, are eschewed for slower and quieter modes of living. i don’t know what those policies would look like, or if they would even be policy changes, because how radical can beauracracy be?

i just hope it’s a world with a lot less roadkill.

References

https://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/publications/statistics/cvs08/chapter2.cfm?attr=0

my mother taught me how to ride a bike, and my mother taught me to love riding. rare i think, considering that she was a young ugandan mother in a strange and different country. but my childhood always had bikes in it. but these bikes did not ever appear new, or unbidden. myself and my brother were always apart of The Hunt.

on a random day of the year, my family would all pile into one car and drive for God knows how long. (children have important things to say about the concept of time i think we should ask them more.) we would then appear at a seemingly random house in the middle of nowhere. an old man would appear at the door and after exchanging words with my parents, walk to his garage and unveil a treasure trove. bikes, on bikes, on bikes. he would size us all up, select our ride, and after a few test meters and a shake of hands, we’d be off.

my mother did not believe that children should sit still. i remember many summer evenings passing with the three of us (her, myself, and my brother) pedalling around Brampton. my brother and i would grow anxious as the distance between us and home widened, and would beg her to call our father to pick us up, convinced we were lost. i don’t think we ever were, we just didn’t trust her navigation skills.

as we grew, we shed our guide and found a band of neighborhood children to rove with. my favourite playmate was a vietnamese girl named jennifer. from april to october, each afternoon after school, one of us would wheel to the other’s house and cajole each other to come outside. laps and laps of the block and hours of secrets shared on our faithful steeds. i imagine us in another world as knights, using the forest as the keeper of privacy, our mounts the only others who knew our truths from our lies.

in high school, we moved away from that house deep within brampton and to a house on the border of brampton and Various Rural Towns. (i keep gazing off to stare at the sunset, it’s a marvel, but aren’t they all? the sun sets everyday, no matter how i feel, she does it anyways. this sunset is accompanied by the enourmous petawawa sky, pale blue stretching as far back as my neck cares to be craned. over east, a hood of deeper blue is being pulled up over the eyes of the world. and oh, the clouds, dear reader let me attempt to do these clouds justice. cotton candy taffeta wisps of a dream. underpainted purple and pink and overseeing the last of the pale peach of the sun’s departure. i could watch it daily, and i try to).

i biked sparadically in high school, usually in the summertime before or after my departures. in my adventures, i began to create an overlay of the world in my mind. i discovered interesting places, so different in purpose or apperance from those i knew. i remember winding roads and old and intresting houses. i remember a greenhouse full of flowers and i remember a little country store, but most of all, i remember joy.

i have never felt like i fit in in the bike world.

there are simply not enough people that look like me who want to do the same things that i do. but maybe that’s not true. maybe they do and they don’t know how or they don’t have enough money or courage or time. barriers to access abound in the outdoor realm and i am currently trying to climb over several hundreds of them.

very recently, i was selected to participate in the komoot Women’s Badlands Rally hosted by komoot and Lael Wilcox.

as a young girl, i remember my brother and other boys love for Lebron or Kobe or idk I don’t watch team sports. I didn’t understand why they cared so much about the performance or the story of a man they had never met. until i discovered Lael. during the initial phase of the lockdown, i was so so lost. still exceptionally emotional, and also nearing the end of the turbulence of teen angst. not yet 19, needing to lose weight, and going stir crazy, i started to ride. my bike, had somehow disappeared in the years in between, but no matter, my mother still had one. her bike had become a single-speed with age and was too small for me but i did not care. i developed a routine. forgoing alarm clocks i slept with my blinds open and cracked my eyes open as the day cracked the yolk of the sun across the horizon. i was up and at em before the rest of my family could say boo and i breached the Brampton/Halton border to greet the day properly.

i began to learn more about the area that i lived, the intimate deepspine knowledge gained through the physical intimacy of sweat and pain. i would put my phone upside down in my sports bra and pedal along to audiobooks; that was the summer i listened to Lolita. i started looking at google maps in my hours and hours of free time, searching for conservation areas within a 20km radius and hit Go. i would lurk on facebook marketplace and buy puzzles from people who lived within a 20km radius. as free as i was becoming, i was still trapped within the physical limitations of my body. i could never stay outside for as long as i wanted - which was honestly forever.

i had always been obsessed with endurance sports. in high school, my prowess in field sports (discuss and shot put), let me convince the track coach to run the long distances races with the team. i was terrible at it. i lost all of my races, usually would be disqualified because my time’s were so abysmal and so my name would be struck from the record. i did not care, i loved it. i did not run because i was good at it, in fact i was terrible, i ran because i loved running. and so, when on those endless COVID afternoons, when i would again be trapped inside, i watched youtube, i was discovering Courtney DeWalter and her exploits, and then somehow, Lael.

Lael Wilcox and her sunny smile and laughter introduced me to bikepacking.

There, finally was what i needed to be doing. Bikepacking.

It did not matter that i was also bad at biking. during eleventh grade, i was able to convince my parents to let me miss the first two weeks of school so i could go play outside. it was a cadet regional expedition and we spent our time drifting between provincial parks. first on foot, we backpacked in algonquin, then on two wheels, riding hundreds of kilometers over a very short period of time. i was miserable for the entire bike phase. i remember very clearly wanting to commit suicide. as i would hunch over my handlebars, i would glance out at the road and see an 18-wheeler in my field of vision and dream of its kiss, if only to stop the greater pain of riding. i was the slowest in my group, not surprising considering i was one of two girls, and the larger of the girls at that. eventually, the misery ended, and we finished the trip on canoes. my struggle during the bike phase actually led to the worst of my cadet course reports of my career and i suspect is the reason why i did not go on to the national or international expeditions.

alas.

childhood dreams crushed.

but now revived.

this Rally will be held in Granada, Spain and i will somehow be riding 684km and climbing over 12,000 meters in six days, somehow.

i have never felt more unprepared for anything in my life. i own almost no cycling gear. i don’t have a bike repair kit, i don’t have any money, and i don’t know if im fit enough for this task. i spent most of the fall wounded physically and emotionally, and have only very recently brought exercise back into my life.

i got the acceptance email and realised how much work was going to be required to make this dream happen. because it is that, a dream.

all of my past perfect selves climb the fire escape ladder rungs of my ribcage into my heart and are reinserted into my bloodstream with every beat. i believe growth is simply adding layers onto ourselves, nesting doll-esque and strange. i believe that time is as non-linear as clouds and hope. and so believe you me when i say that it was not anna of 22 who was accepted onto this trip, but the girl just shy of 19 during covid-19. she wants this so badly, and has wanted it for years.

so for her, and the anna’s that i will someday be, i am trying very hard. but god it is hard.

i need so much help to get this done. financial aid primarily, i suspect that when all is said and done, this rally will have cost me $4000, but i also suspect it will rocket launch me into the life i want so desperately. i have been knocking on doors and making a lot of calls and introducing myself to alot of people, asking for support. it is hard, i usually am told no. but i am still waiting with baited breath for a few yeses.

i am an emotional girl, that means i come with All of the feelings and they come visit me Often. lately, ive felt a lot of overwhelm and anxiety.

am i good enough? am i ready? can i do this? should i do this? maybe this isn’t the right time for me to do this, i’m not READY.

but then i go, inhala, exhala and i remember some truths:

1. pray to catch the bus, the run as fast as you can

2. my dreams come from god, and god has the power to accomplish them

3. it is very expensive to be not lame

4. your new life will cost you your old one

5. growth does not come when you are ready, growth comes, and then you become ready.

but me oh my, this is challenging. and overwhelming and different.

but also beautiful.

already i have been showered in love and support. i started my first ever gofundme (linked) and am over 25% of the way towards my goal. i can buy myself a plane ticket to spain! hooray! friends of friend have given advice and offered gear and just extended themselves in ways i did not realise were possible. it makes me want to cry.

i have yoga class so i don’t have a good way to conclude this

thank you for reading. i missed you all.

i’ll write again soon, it’s in my calendar so it’ll happen

little bit of chatter before i get to The Point (like a recipe blog but not)

(i may not have read any Dostoevsky yet but the book stares at me balefully as i each night choose instead to read fairy tales. at this point i probably understand the book as well as i ever could just from the aura it exudes.)

hi substack i missed you. i am not sorry for disappearing, i was just working on expanding myself in other creative mediums.

(god has begun to speak to me and i’ve realised something monumental: i cannot do all things.)

perfectionism is incredibly corrosive to my creative energies. i last wrote for this page in november and it was such a fun piece to write. then for some reason (i know the reason i thought it wasn’t / good / enough UGH), i took it down, then tried to fix it for several weeks. i did not realise that if i was not returning back to the piece the piece was telling me it was finished. i recently republished it, mostly for hillary (thank you by the way, what you said to me meant the moon). going forward i pledge to myself and to you: i’m just practicing; this page is for fun; it is not a homework assignment and does not have to reach the standards of academic perfection i assumed that it did. creative tides are creative tides, i don’t think anyone has ever called a wave ugly.

i am making no promises to you or myself concerning consistency, when called to type, i will type. if else, if i’m findable, you’ll find me on instagram (annasuhjaywalk).(linked!)

week one of the new year done. week two of the new year is soon to be done. isn’t that incredibly fun!

preamble

lately i’ve found myself mired in social conflict (as one should be. how can you call yourself a traveller of life if you’ve never experienced turbulence. bad things are supposed to happen), either as an instigator, a participant, or a spectator. in this series of posts i will retell each (in a way that i hope is vague enough that i remain fairly mysterious, but also detailed enough that you Get The Point), and then reflect. Okay? let’s go!

one

i met a ~boy~ in november of the year that just passed. i think he is adorable and incredibly interesting and i really like him. however , … the good lord has decided that i am so not ready for a relationship in the way that we all assume a boy and a girl are supposed to be in a relationship. that was a Hard Pill to Swallow, however it helped my digestion and in the weeks after he let me down (gently), i produced some incredible art. on pieces of packing paper an ex-lover had once sent to me in the mail i wrote: UNIVERSE I AM LISTENING PLEASE KEEP ME ON MY PATH. it’s rare to write yourself such guiding principles.

i met him when i was drowning in my solitude, and so whereas literally any other girl would have packed herself up and found the door when rejected, i begged for friendship and i am not ashamed to admit it. i had very few prospects (also he’s pretty please remember that).

in the weeks following the day that siri read: sorry anna, i’m not looking for a relationship right now, to me as i was driving real fast down a rural highway, we have continued to parry.

to say that i have been confused is to call a duck, a duck. if not for the unlimited minutes of the modern telco cellular plan, i would be up a creek without a paddle. i have spent hours debriefing, lamenting, agonising, actively teen angsting to anyone who’d listen to me talk about This Boy - here i am now writing, and here you are reading.

between remembrance day and christmas, i deleted his number twice, and resaved it thrice when he’d text me again. the day i left home nought for home prime, his home was the last stop on my list. there i stood (unannounced as is my way), in his living room and asked, are you even interested in friendship with me?! to which he responded, yeah of course we’re friends. ….

the most recent time i darkened his doorstep i feel as if my arrival should not have come as a surprise. i was in the midst of a manic episode and that morning, he’d cancelled plans he had proposed only the night prior. i, in return, was given a practical lesson on emotional regulation in that i was taught that it is something i struggle with.

hours later, i stood again in his living room - believing myself calm, collected, and most importantly, i thought myself Reasonable - begging him to love me. at this point in the tale, i had (mostly) abandoned hopes for a romantic future. i wanted us to be friends! but then there he was again and again and aGAIN not performing friendship the way that i expected! so i asked again: . we’re friends, right?1!?!?!. yeah, of course we’re friends, he replied. and then at some point in the conversation believed it wise to tell me i was overreacting. [advice to any guy reading this never tell a girl she’s overreacting while you play fortnite in front of her she will see stars and not the good kind]. i left in a huff. in my car still in his driveway, i deleted his number. again.

reflection 1

we all want to be treated well. we all want to meet Someone and have it be Easy. we want to tell someone our love story and make their back feel warm. tabby cat somehow got to spend the entire late spring afternoon basking on the kitchen island. pomegranate seeds scattered atop the sun paled yellow tiles. can you blame us? a generation weaned first on disney fairy tales and disney channel originals, then tumblr, polyvore and pinterest (oh my). (i will not be discussing the chokehold tiktok has on the Collective throat i will NOT).

all while these platforms are dedicated to the aestheticization of life, it is a method i, an artist and a romantic, can respect if not endorse. the thing that honestly sends a finger of fear up my spine is the increasing normalization of therapy.

(as i come into myself more i find more and more ideas within myself that are incredibly countercultural let’s explore this one).

picture this: you realise you are Sad and that sometimes your Life is Very Hard. all of the posters, the handouts, the flyers, the billboards around you tell you that if you are Sad, you should call the helpline! get help! speak to your doctor about your mental health. notice how swiftly the medicalization begins? how any and all emotions or reactions which are perceived as negative or averse are siloed. held at a distance from the standard range of human experiences and pushed into the realm of illness.

if you are lucky (although luck must be redefined methinks), you will likely find yourself sitting in a warm and clean room in front of a kind and non-judgemental healthcare professional. if you’re even luckier still, you will meet with this person on a regular basis and you will discuss your Feelings and your Trauma and then hopefully Heal yourself and be right along your merry way, course corrected and ready to perform (under capitalism, which has metastasized beyond our understanding). but maybe talking isn’t enough. and maybe before the talking really begins in earnest you’re prescribed a course of medication to Realign your mind.

we believe that we are in the era of destigmatization but we are only in the era of give ‘em a pill to alter their brains and send them along!

i am not actually convinced that therapy is a solution. i am not actually convinced that there needs to be any solution. not only is it unsustainable wholescale (if we all need therapy, who therapizes the therapists?), it is also too clinical and neat, especially the one-on-one interactions between patient and practitioner.

how many of us will have a terrible week, and then sit in front of the person whose job it is to listen to you talk about your terrible week and have forgotten everything? and because Capitalism, each problem will be attempted to be solved, new platforms are being developed daily. not only can some people text their therapists, but they can call them, at any and all hours of the day. have you ever heard of FRIENDSHIP.

as an autistic girl, friendship has always been very challenging for me, and so i do not suggest it lightly nor blithely. however, hoWEVER, go do the field work. go get into hard conversations with the people around you who are actually in your life. then go home. take the time to find the holes in your own arguments. drown in them. wallow in the depths of your pain. wait and sea if the crush will overwhelm you. seaweed wrapped around your ankle you are drowning. but the water loves the shore, is constantly prostates herself before her, and will gift you back to the land of the walking. it is in the sputtering and the gasping for air that you will see if you had been dead or alive this entire time. either way, the clarity of passing from this plane to the next should give you the opportunity to see yourself only as a performance actor. and in the myth of your own life, when are you the villain?

but , like …. that’s so hard!! and it takes so much time! ugh!

because all we ever want to do is ask love. love, when can i tell them. when can i explain over a cup of hot chocolate for me, and coffee for them that you found me again (because love is always found again) in a transitional period in both of our lives. me, desperately trying to find the shards of god in the ashes of what was once a hand-sized homesense jesus, and you still stumbling away from the ashes of… of… well i don’t know yet we literally just met.

it would be nice to know how your story ends, and aren’t we all praying it ends with a kiss?

reflection 2

no longer manic i am repossessed with my empathy. empathy for myself, and empathy for him.

i still believe (as do all of my friends), that i was not overreacting as i stood in the living room and watched him play fortnite. on my part, it is because i realised that overreacting is not the truest fit. i have landed on omnireacting (i literally just made it up i am actually a genius). omni is the latin-based prefix that denotes ‘all’. allknowing, allseeing, and in this case, all and always feeling.

nothing is ever just happening to you.

because wouldn’t it be so nice to shed your old skins. to think loving was as easy as throwing out all of your b-tier underwear?

however, it is not.

i propose instead that you see yourself as only the largest and the most external of the matryoshka.

and so with that lens, the lens of allfeeling, of always being yourself i can explain myself, with kindness.

reflection 3

it was not only Anna of 22 standing in that living room. this is not the first time i have been so steeped in love it has stained me mad. when i was a pith green girl of 18, 19, 20, i was enmeshed so thoroughly with another soul, but he was steeped so in depression that it stained his world grey. joy was impossible to find in the world of the breathing and the biologically glowing and he was all but intravenously attached to the game Ark: Survivor Evolved.

unnest a little bit further. realise that time is not anything resembling linearity, you’ll find me in another living room. silly girl child of 7, 13, 16, and all of the years in between spent oft an evening at her mother’s knee. my mother, trying so hard to balance the family’s books and motherhood in a new country, could not spare me many moments of her undivided attention. i remember her disembodied voice, sound waves warped around the laptop she used to manage our lives. i remember wanting to scream, to say mommy look at me look at me look at me. look at me.

the inflection

the most magical thing about being alone so much is how much time i get to spend on the phone with one friend at a time. when you talk to one person at a time, you can recite the same story again, and again, and again. and so once again, as i seem to often do, i found myself sitting in a cows stomach.

trying to teach myself how to make friendship bracelets out of intestines

i haven’t eaten in months so i’m trying so hard to keep the soap bubble from bursting on my tongue.

in a past life,

i’d put summer sun warm stones in my pocket. my heart/hand always finds one when i feel myself becoming u n t e t h e r e d

sometimes, fragementing can be beautiful

its easy to forget you can find salvation in yourself

easier still to forget that jonah was not alone in the whale

and so as i took myself through the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum, and the abomasum, my sisterFriends, and the evergreen ushers all my lovely audience, i realised again and again and again, (to all of their chagrin), that i wanted him in my life.

but WHYYYYYYYYYY i asked myself.

until i the universe gave me the answer.

adam wilson, in a homemaking story for a new year, recounts a time where he was genuinely crying over spilt milk. not only were the tears shed for the milk, but of the anxiety induced by the need to confess his failures to his friend (the owner of the cows). but he is an adult man, and further along in his path than i, and so instead of 2500 words, it took him a minute to come to this realisation: “It took a solid minute for me to remember that her ongoing willingness to be in relationship with me did not hinge upon being perfect or even good. Making a consequential mistake would not result in emotional punishment.”

reflecting on the inflection

both myself and The Boy have been acting crazy in the pursuit of this relationship. it has not been simple, or reasonable, or predictable, all things that human beings crave in order to feel stable in their relationships.

but attraction is a crazy thing! so no wonder i was engulfed in my bafflement again and again. each time i would stand in his living room, i was screaming from a rocky shore being battered by the storms of life. do you want to be friends with me!?!?! and still not understanding his yes! meant that his ongoing willingness to build was not despite the storm, but because of it. he has only known me as the girl i am now. 22 and highly liable to losing her mind, lonely and crazy and strange.

and i only know him, The Boy. prone to oscillations in behaviours and hyperfragemented decision-making, as who he was each time i would stand before him. and who he is is someone i find so incredibly interesting.

interesting that i did not consider that he would feel the same way about me.

flying back towards the sun

as therapy becomes more accessible, it has surprisingly insidiously invaded our interpersonal relationships and our worldviews. the cultural attitude has shifted towards us requiring those around us to also be striving towards emotional perfection. on a perpetual march towards Oneness, or Healing. and in the same vein, we are all now increasingly required to only align with individuals who are post-therapy. who as persinette in less tiktok, more screaming, writes “is aware of an has adapted to the newest standards of how to behave”. and is then, as the uber-idealised emotional individual they are, will be more deserving of love.

but when has love ever been about who deserves it more?

happy new moon rising my loves

i will leave you all with this.

some special mornings, and other magical evenings, i pay money to get trapped in a sweltering room and work my body into primal positions with several other human beings.

in that room i come fully into the rainforest of my body. the vessel that carries and stretches and grows to house and feed a multitude of life beyond my wildest imagination.

not only do i carry spores, mites, and a whole microbiome of flora, i also house all of the younger annas i have been, and am constantly laying the foundation for the older annas i have yet to become.

some days, it seems that all of my perfect past selves are crowding the eaves, trying to be seen through the tempest. all of the mes i have been slink along the firescape, constantly seeing red and wanting to flee.

in their earnestness, their fingerprints have been permanently stamped on the windowpanes of my soul. and yet, the wheel weaves as the wheel wills and as yesterday’s breath carries me into today, i try not to forget to dream for tomorrow.

required/further reading

(any relationship with me will involve me prescribing external texts, please if you want to understand my mind a bit more, continue to peruse!)

on substack

Ismatu Gwendolyn, There is No Revolution without Madness.

Threadings.

There Is No Revolution without Madness.

this is an essay once entitled, “revolutionary love costs you your sanity, at minimum. are we sincerely prepared for it to cost us our life?” Hello and welcome to threadings., the newsletter and podcast where we consider the bits of my politic that stitch me together like a patchwork quilt. Today, I am bound together at the seams by the thought of a new …

Listen now

3 years ago · 704 likes · 60 comments · Ismatu Gwendolyn

podcast

CBC Ideas, Neurodiversity and the Myth of Normal https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2028061763982

reading

C. S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40792344-mere-christianity?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=UCzPn5UJXa&rank=1

Philip Pullman. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grim: A New English Version. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13554713-fairy-tales-from-the-brothers-grimm

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i graduated from university with a bachelor’s in political science (with distinction ;0). if you had told me that when i was 17 i would have looked at you with such a look of abject horror that you would’ve done everything to keep me in my school’s engineering program. but i actually ended up loving the program i slide into halfway through the second semester of my second year of school. despite my eventual passion for IR theories, parsimonious and not, sociology is my true love.

i am endlessly fascinated by the relationships that we have with each other and the social constructs we all contribute to build to sustain this world. i think we can all think of serious crimes that tumblr circa 2013 has to answer for, however the one i would bring before the worldly judge is this: those nifty text posts and mile long rants exposed many many young people to fairly novel and at the time, “alternative lifestyles”, without ever really providing any sort of history.

i have been living alone since the beginning of august and in that time since i have learned many things about myself. and one of those things is that i really like nice and expensive things. i try not to be pretentious, but i am! and there is a lot to be said about reading camus in the original french!! same as exposing millions of (usually white) teenagers to feminism, and systemic racism, and the entire alphabet mafia without providing them with any grounding.

this is not the point i am dallying.

however,. what is the rush?

there are so many ways i can begin the paragraph i’m going to type them all out

poverty trauma is real. its really hard to learn how to not live in lack

i also think that most of life and people’s experiences can be quantified through a very interesting lens of lack. and once you realise how much everyone else lacks, eSPECIALLY the people whose lives seem envious to you, you will feel better

i spent four years in university feeling incredibly time poor. i have written about it multiple times and i will continue to write about it until i find something else to talk about! i felt chased every single day. chased by my responsibilities, by my hobbies, by my friends, but also by joy. we were all chasing each other and i had great fun! but i would never do that shit again! it would likely strip 12 years off my life.

after graduation i did not realise that God had answered my prayers. when every single night i would lie in bed and say, wow i wish i could rest, i never thought i would actually get it. i was handed my diploma and also an incredibly large canvas bag. it was full of minutes, and then i realised how the minutes were converted into hours into days into weeks and oh wow it’s somehow been five months since i was a Student.

everyone is so envious of my time. we had all raced to march threw the arch but the wind blew us all dandelion seed apart. and we’ve all tried in various ways to set down hardy roots in fairly arid soil.

remember my tummy ache! it did not stop…

i was put on a ghastly round of antibiotics. prescribed to take 2 pills, 3 times a day, with food. dude the tummy medication made my tummy WORSEE. and they also tasted terrible! so i stopped taking them. yesyesyesy i kNOW about antibiotic resistance, however, most of us cook on non-stick pans, and warm up food in microwaves in plastic so we should all accept we are performing insane chemistry experiments in our own bodies, so mind your own.

i spent the saturday happy then the sunday sad. sometimes the things we hope really hard for just are not meant to be. but that doesn’t mean we’re silly for hoping.

my tummy brought me back to the doctor on monday morning where i was given the entire week off work to adjust to a (theoretically) less terrible antibiotic and let my stummy hurt in peace. sweet! i thought, an entire week off!

and then i realised that i had an entire week off.

i think it is very rare to have five whole days completely unaccounted for. unlike reading week as a student, i had no deadline being held above my neck. unlike the holidays at home, i had no family to visit or other festive diversions to occupy me. i live in strange location, surrounded by ‘civilization’ on one side, and the brush the other, it felt like i got back home and the rest of the world simply slipped away.

i didn’t wear my watch for the entire week. and let me tell you how out of this world that experience is.

i would wake up whenever i wanted too. somedays i was up early enough to do my morning pages and still catch the sunrise, others i would let my feet hit my bedroom floor in a very bright room, despite the blackout blinds. i refused to check my phone. i would put on one of my two pairs of snow-pants, and then my favourite puffy shell combination, my waterproof hiking shoes and go into the woods.

initially, i was sticking to the trails. remember those ones, the ones naked wood had revealed to me. brandishing her collarbones under the stark winter light. winter light can be so cold, the sun is not really giving her fullest effort here. big quiet quitting energy tbh. but i think one day i decided i wanted to see a tree that was off the path a little better, and then it was very easy for me to realise that i was alone. and that no one could stop me.

i tromped. i frolicked. i meandered. i played in the woods. i felt like calvin and eventually my little digital camera became my hobbes. (i actually am starting a youtube channel very soon. i realised i need to let myself be bandied about by my creative whims. just chill bro. try it. if it sticks it sticks. if not oh well).

some mornings i would be out longer than others (i think). honestly i have no way of proving that besides ~ vibes ~. i would come home when i was too cold or i wanted to pee or i was thirsty. it was all very ID stimulating. one morning i was prancing along the woods through the abandoned RV campground right by the beach. the entire RV campground itself is a marvel.

did you know some people will just leave their RVs parked, in one spot, for the entire off season!!!?!?!? these people also set up entire lives in front of their RVs. i was seeing wood sheds, pull-up bars, WHITE PICKET FENCES in front of ABANDONNED MOBILE HOMES. baffling. truly

i let myself be spit out on the beach. i found a bench, i sat on the bench. stood up. realised that the bench wasn’t really attached to anything and tried to pick it up. i was wrong. there was a metal pole driven into the ground and a loop of wire had been strung through the back. up again running again. running on the snow on the beach is not easy. i decided it was time for a snow angel. there was not that much snow i discovered when i stood up and saw sand. up again running again oh wow that tree has such a cool root system. climbing up the root system and oh wow each of these broken off branches are short and sturdy enough to somehow be perfect tree climbing rungs. i had forgotten that trees are meant to be climbed. reach up pull my body up around and around the trunk of this formidable tree until i realised how high i was and what an amazing view i had obtained of the lake. i gave the tree a hug and then i gave it a kiss. thank you tree. for being strong enough to carry me. in the tree i realised just how much other people temper me. but like chocolate, i eventually did snap. it was just a matter of when if we’re all being realistic. i got down off the tree and realised i could just keep walking along the shoreline. on the front the waves were fairly brisk. it was like someone was continuously throwing flowers at my feet but around the bend there was such stillness i had to pause for a second too.

i’ve tried to explain how this place makes me feel but i keep keeping running this poem through my mind. [honestly i had never realised that people were being honest when they said they found solace in poetry. even after i started writing / poems / or my approximation of poems. it wasn’t until i went into my friend breanna’s room and i read The Orange by wendy cope on a large piece of paper above her head. i am not particularly original i went back to my room and copied down the poems i liked enough to want to breathe, put them on my wall and immediately felt better]. this season of my life has had the poem: although the wind ringing over and over in my mind. it’s funny. it’s the first piece of poetry i liked enough to screenshot and keep tucked away, all the way back in 2018 when i believed that me and physics were meant to be (we weren’t it was like dating an onion i spent hours up every single night crying and watching people trying to teach me what my brain had refused to grasp in school on youtube). but it goes

although the wind

blows terribly here

the moonlight still leaks

through the planks of this ruined house.

there were days last week when i felt absolutely feral. there was once a road down to the beach. i have to assume that many moons ago they decided that it would be best if it was no longer an actively used road for vehicles. but the best thing about feet is that they can take you almost anywhere. the route down to the beach is exactly that. downhill and i think it was tuesday morning (does it matter what morning), that i realised that i could say fuck the road and just scale the hill through the woods. it was like rock climbing except there were no rocks. just me trying to find anchors in tree roots and then being shocked when it was not a root! but just a dead branch! oopsies i almost fell!

there was another morning when i said super fuck the road and i slid, very quickly and terrifyingly from the top of the hill. the snow and my snow-pants made it go wheee! but yes i could have seriously hurt myself. but i wanted to. i just ,, was literally chomping at the bit.

i spent so many hours getting to know this forest. i grew up in a neighbourhood. and i spent a lot of time this week writing about my childhood home and maybe one day that will be in my memoir but what do i know. thankfully, it was an old house and so we had deliciously wide sidewalks and graciously old and graceful trees. on the other side of the block, almost 180 degrees from my home there was a weeping willow, honest to god. in the summer it would grow so wildly that its boughs would kiss the ground and turn those four sidewalk tiles into a green shower. in our front lawn we had three (3!!) different trees: a pine, a birch tree and an oak (? unsure). however it would have taken me at least 30 minutes to get anywhere close to a thicket, let alone a forest!

the forest. the woods. nature was reserved for summer camp, and if i’m being honest, white people. i never thought someone like me would get to know a forest. but i’ve begun!!

i had not realised just how much drama there is in the trees. it’s so easy for us to batten down the hatches and firmly close the screen door when the wind starts a-howling but outside, is still outside!! it felt like i was looking at a battlefield. one as old as time itself. great beasts and bastions felled by forces somehow stronger and greater than they. i like how resilient the trees are. i like how most trees do not grow straight, but they are still so true. there’s a pair of trees on the edge of where the sand meets the beach parking lot, and they are so obviously in love. they’re growing wound within each other, eagle pose arms reaching reaching reaching towards the enormous petawawa sky. in some parts of the woods you’d think i was walking through a fairytale wedding set, the branches weighed down heavy and hang low, just kiss the top of my head, and form such a lovely arch. my favourite are the skinny ballerina like trees. those who, by some act of god, or sheer frustration, have drooped and now grow, dramatically, towards the ground. i even like the dead trees. because trees must die. we all must die. there are trees still standing, murdered by woodpeckers, who left them with Munch style holes in their bark. there are some which stand completely hollow. each time i see another dead tree i wish i could become moss! and stay in the trees and watch them live forever. because i want to know what happened! which storm was it that shock the roots out of the earth. i, a lover of house plants, had for some reason expected tree roots to be vaguely green and soft and supple. i was so wrong. the roots are gnarly and are not dissimilar to a garden hedge denuded. branches tough and intertwined. in some places, there are places where you can still see the roots in the earth, covered in stones looking like a giant’s mouth, which is what they are i guess

i could spend the rest of my life like this. fairly content in my bounty and my lack. mornings spent delighted by the water and the wittle pawprints i followed in the snow covered sand. however. i still need to be tempered. i came very very close to consuming a wild mushroom. my teeth were actually already around it when a very loud voice in my head said ANNA NO. and so then i removed my mouth. and nuzzled it first with my nose and then my forehead, and then closing my teeth around it again, softly, and gave it a quick squeeze.

i believe that rooms need to be left and so every morning i would leave, and then when i wanted too, i would return. my lack was this: any sort of desire to feed myself. i was literally dying for attention. i knew that if i had literally anybody else around to god i don’t know supervise me, i would have eaten more than 5 gluten free tortilla chips for lunch, or bowls of cereal for dinner. but like, i had other things to do!! like write! this is not behaviour i recommend, you should eat food. however i simply could not do it. i thought that it was depression rearing up again within me for a bit but that’s not what it was. just a lack of desire for food. probably due to the fact that anytime i would eat, my stomach would incite a tERRIBLE rebellion but what do i know.

i am trying to saturate my life in experiences rather than the landmarks of dates.

rayne-fisher quann writes:

"i remember the feeling of teenage obsession, and i miss it desperately. few things about our everyday lives are more magial to me than the way that loving something with commitment can rewire your understanding of time instead of dates or semestres, i can place moments of my early life inside the year where i only read vonnegut, the month i first loved the smiths, the autumn i spent with that rilke poem. it manages to make time physical - it turns it into something that can be tasted and touched.”

there were two mornings where i spent a very long time making soft scrambled eggs. i had been listening to a philosophy podcast and the host talks about how gordon ramsey takes the pan off the heat and so i figured fuck actually watching gordon i’ll figure it out. the eggs were delicious. so yellow which surprised me. i usually put enough vegetables in my omelettes to create a new gut microbiome, but i could barely be asked remember. so it was just egg. i put some green onion on top and spread the last of my goat cheese on my non soft diet approved bread. the nurse had handed me a soft diet list the day i went in initially. i took a photo of the list and realised that its directives: low protein and high processed carbohydrates were literally antithetical to how i eat that i also simply refused to buy any of the recommended foods. you’re tellin me to stop eating enough oats and seeds to kill a horse!? fine. i will not eat then!

i never said i wasn’t silly remember

if i am anything i will always be unserious. dude , it’s just literally not that deep.

so . time.

it’s just actually a concept. and before i continue let me loop in that seemingly disconnected rant about tumblr here.

i see many many issues with the nature of contemporary discourse, especially the discourse that takes place in supposed ‘woke’ online circles. i think we all do ourselves an extreme disservice when we declare that xyz isn’t real and decide to do whatever we want instead. and LET ME FINISH THIS THOUGHT OKAY. socialisation, which we have all vilified lately, is incredibly powerful. constructivist theory, which i am particular too, argues that there is nothing intangible that would exist without human beings. what that means is that social concepts, are not just airy fairy concepts, they are actually constructs! they can become very real and influence the way that we not only act but how we as a species view one another.

time. is just a concept. and within that concept we have established many social moores and ideas that have us in a chOKEHOLD. gun to our heads type shit. i learned about the idea of chrononormativity this summer. its the idea that we are all expected to live life in a very particular order and that any deviation from the established path is not just a marker of personal failure, but also should be a source of great shame. if you take too long to graduate from university, find a job, partner, have children, you are societally infantilized. you, taking ‘too much time’ to become productive and produce more producers for the capitalist machine, are essentially a child. one who’s life is once again subject to immense social scrutiny. similar to how a child is asked what they want to be when the grow up, the jobless postgrad student is viewed as someone in need of career guidance or marching orders.

i am currently in a strange point in my life. this is a transitional stage. i am, every day, forming myself into the woman i will someday become. i am so excited to meet her. but also i am trying to teach myself to look at the moonlight. i love the moon i would die for her, just like the sun does every day. i am okay with a day being ‘wasted’ because by the end of it, i get to see the moon. and can a day even be deemed a waste. is time a resource. do we pull from it like a well? are we trying to let blood from a stone? we can try to get more of it, but either you’ll have it, or you won’t. and did you know. time can happen and you can just be there. you can just exist. you can spend an entire day doing only the bare minimum. just keeping your body alive, and it will literally be fine.

there is no debt you have to pay back. life is not a mortgage. there is no interest rate. it is impossible to truly be time rich because wealth implies surplus, a stockpile, a full vault. and if you can point me towards your rainy day sand i will be shocked. because you cannot save time! you cannot bank it away and hope the interest compounds. the day will end. and maybe you’ll wake up to see the sun again. maybe she won’t shine. but let me tell you, once the sun decides to rise she does it fast. and either you see it or you won’t! it doesn’t matter! chill!! it’s like literally not that serious!

when you’re 22 and you tell people you’re 22 their entire demeanour changes. i have been called an old soul by strangers enough times (and not just by older men that want to fuck me) to start believing it. i think people can just sense the steadiness in my heart. if i’m standing on a dock, i accept the tides. somedays, i get my shit ROCKED. worst dock standing weather. grey skies, sleet, high winds, misery. but then also, on the days that the sun is out, i bask. i let myself glow, because i know my shit will get rocked again!! that is maturity to me. accepting that sometimes days will be bad. screaming into the wind on the beach, alone in november, ALTHOUGH THE WIND, because you love the moon. i’ve had enough people tell me that i’m just getting started to believe it. instagram and social media have completely warped our ideas of success and when it is appropriate to achieve success. when i was 17, i thought i would be so much older when i was 22. but there are days when i catch my face in the mirror and i hold my own gaze, genuinely shocked to see how young i look. i am a young person, just bumbling around. hopping around on the dock.

i wrote on my wall:

and those all grant me solace.

time will pass, and maybe i’ll be here.

i want to be alive for a very long time. i have recently discovered that i genuinely love christmas. i have not felt this festive in years. i busted out my dollar store jingle bell antlers a few weeks ago and i keep wearing them in public. i have also discovered both my room and christmas decorating ethic. and that is slowly. i think it’s really hard to have good taste. even harder when the people whose homes you admire just link what they bought instead of encouraging you to BE YOURSELF. i want to live a rich life. i want to be able to look around at my memories and my moments and feel their weight in my mind. i want to hold beautiful dinner parties. i want my guests to feel like they are in the museum of my life as they go from entry room, to parlour, to dining room, to fireplace. i want to tell a story for every item i have. i will never just answer ikea, even if it did ‘just come from ikea’. instead, when you ask me about my kitchen cart, i’ll tell you this instead.

when i first moved into my room, i understood a part of myself more. i will never know peace in a dysfunctional room. at night, for weeks, instead of sleeping, i would pace. my flat, is well designed for pacing. the living room and bedroom are divided by a large wall which is itself flanked by openings. it’s almost impossible to avoid making a circuit. but after my nighttime routine, i would lay awake, disquieted, and eventually forced from bed. i would sit awake and contemplate my interior design desires. eventually i found myself on onenote , making quite the diagram comparing all the viable options. i would tell you that when i was next at an ikea, i was with my mother and grandfather. at the time, i believed my room needed a microwave and the dimensions of the behemoth appliance ruled almost all of my choices off the list. we found ourselves in the baby section, where i almost bought a changing table. i kept wondering if the other patrons, assumed me as eagerly family planning. back in petawawa, i was still without a cart and then early on a bright saturday morning i drove the two hours to ottawa alone on a beautiful highway and i bought myself the very expensive cart.

i don’t want my life to be simple. i want you to know that i got my lint roller at a yard sale, and my bedside table lamp was hard won after a protracted dance on facebook marketplace.

at some other point in time i wrote on my wall

last night i had a dream. and in that particular dream, i died in my dreams then awoke not knowing i was still sleeping. i decided to walk. you see that night i walked in my sleep. i slept in my walk. i walked backwards until i saw you for the first time and i could barely muster the courage to introduce myself all over again. (looking for you, rudy fransisco)

i have cast myself as the antagonist and the protagonist of the television show that i am constantly writing in my head. the working title is ‘growing painfully’ and maybe one day i will actually write it down. but in the meantime here are macroscopic snapshots of my life.

time now is 9:32 pm and it is monday november 13. i have decided to transform my relationship with time. my first love turned 22 years old today and i was strong and mature enough to not pick up the phone. it is a new moon and this morning it snowed.

thursday

i met someone new! it is incredibly fresh and different and exciting. we met on thursday and the moment i had a minute alone i turned first to facebook and then to instagram to make sure he was real. i spent approximately 20 minutes wading through teen angst on the phone with my sisterfriend Emma, debating the merits of both apps and analyzing their social connotations.

of the two meta beasts, i chose instagram, mostly because Emma had dubbed it ‘slutty facebook’. the best thing about strangers is that you have nothing to lose and the world to gain, and so my courage knew no bounds. i asked if he would want to accompany me to a christmas market the following evening, and then promptly threw my phone across the room. when i refused to open the app until after noon friday, was i schrodinger or the cat?

he said yes

saturday

after my standard routine of rise, piss, rise, write, sleep, and rise once more, i ate the breakfast of a girl who (purposely!) neglected to grocery shop for 12 days. somehow satisfied by my meager meal, i began my day. the fridge needed to be cleaned and my laundry needed to be finished. i accumulated my daily steps between the kitchen and the second-floor laundry room. up and down the flight, i carried the glass shelves, crisper drawer, sponge and dish soap. i scrubbed and rinsed, returned my clean whites to my room. i folded and sorted underwear, sports bras and socks. the building had been hollowed out by the long weekend and so i had an extremely industrious and peaceful morning.

it was remembrance day and i needed to look the part. after frantically digging through my recently organized storage locker, i turned to youtube and was grateful that my fingers were smart enough to learn how to tie a tie. i drove to the parade and waddled down the road in my too-tight pants and shoes. i had forsaken my coat and was already regretting it 50m away from my car.

(moment of silence elapsed)

back home, the condiment bottles which had been left to languish on the windowsill and the almost dry shelves were returned to the fridge. all the stomping helped the feeling to return to my feet and i was out of the door with my reusable shopping bags and grim determination. rural living has had me drive the same 20 km stretch of road alone more times than i care to count. i made many stops that afternoon and by the end of the day i had notably come away with several thrifted christmas décor items, $4 hummus, and a mortar and pestle. unfortunately, i was without a vacuum and down a $30 pair of beautiful wool mittens bought less than a fortnight before. the way home i kept asking myself why vacuums cost $200, and as i write this i ask myself why the word vacuum has two u’s, it unsettles my spirit.

i was in my room by dinnertime and i did not want to eat. my relationship with food including both its preparation and its consumption have evolved with time. each era is unlike the last, and i am quickly leaving the Joy of Cooking, to Dreading the Mundanity of Standing in Front of a Stove. also, why do we need to keep feeding ourselves?!?!?? bodies are just so needy. (like bitch!! did i not just feed you three hours ago?!?!?)

so instead, i did Other Things. i took my watch off and consumed an edible. i misplaced my phone in my room (i think i do it subconsciously because it happens daily) and i became a girl alone, islanded,

i went to the kitchen and put away my grudgingly purchased groceries. there is no clock in the kitchen. back behind my door, i silently sat cross-legged on my bathroom tile, and lovingly opened and stored my new makeup. i showered and did my entire skincare routine. i put on a cute and comfortable outfit.

stoned and emotionally fortified, i returned to the kitchen. i chopped vegetables, made the peanut sauce and boiled noodles. i called more of my sisterfriends and one by one kissed their foreheads through the phone. we laughed and shared secrets and i felt less alone.

sunday

during my second year of university, which spanned 2020 and 2021, after being violently roused from sleep by my apple watch, i would immediately roll over and open instagram. i was extremely sleep deprived and i figured that the blue light and chaos would have stimulating effects akin to caffeine. but growth is a beautiful thing; by my fourth year, i refused to touch my phone until at least after breakfast. i loved being able to let my mind slowly come alive as my thoughts would peacefully percolate.

my next phase of detachment begun a few weeks ago when i would sporadically not wear my watch to bed on weekends. it is interesting to see just how much of my behaviour is dependant on the clock rather than what my body or my mind is telling me to do. being at liberty to live timelessly is exactly that, a liberty, and it is not one i take for granted. it feels incredibly reckless and freeing to wake up and choose. in my bed i waited, blinds open for the sun. when the sky began to shift from black to grey, i put on my layers and went outside. living as close to the beach and the forest as i do, i know that thoreau would be envious.

for all of their talk of loving winter, most canadians forget that the beach exists after september. standing alone on the shore as the waves prostrated themselves at my feet, i felt as powerful as a queen and happy as a clam. the sun was rising, and the sky, ladylike, was applying the most delicate of pink to her cheeks. on my walk to meet the water, i had taken a different route. the frost had unrobed the trees, and like seeing your lover in the light for the first time, i was privy to all of her secrets. winding paths and connections usually lost beneath boughs and brambles were starkly apparent in the barren.

on the waterfront, i dropped to my hands and knees, becoming first cat with my crescent spine, then cow as i pressed my mitten-covered hands into the cold sand. i found one of the streams that come spring would swell, and standing on top of the snow-covered bridge, kicked the snow into the water just to hear the silly plink plink plink. i picked up the sticks, which iced over, looked like an arm goosefleshed. i tested my weight on barely frozen puddles, and was somehow shocked every time when the thin ice would give below my feet. giddy, i looked at the water and bounced on the balls of my feet,

i had always dreamed of knowing a forest.

it was easy for me to know when it was time to go home. binging is usually a symptom or an overaction to lack, and i needed not worry, i live too close to not return. i made a Good breakfast and ate it crisscrossed on my living room floor. i wanted the time and so then i got it and just like that, i was amongst the living once more. i browned butter on a conference call with my parents and then imbued cookies with all the love and hope of the teen girl i am finally becoming.

later on i sat on my couch, fully dressed, waiting. there was another christmas market to attend, and thank god i did not have to drive. as a passenger the straightaway was novel once again, and with each unexpected turn, new backroads were produced as if pulled from a hat. the christmas market was very unfestive. i made it out by the skin of my teeth, having come frighteningly close to purchasing an apron with Stich (of Lilo and Stitch) on one side, and navy blue polka-dots on the other, for 30 canadian dollars. we stopped at Coles (Indigo’s long-forgotten cousin) where i purchased the Artist’s Way (thanks davin), finally ready to start that journey. we bumbled around, going in and out of different places, slowly handing each other pieces of our lives. it was nice.

the afternoon over, ensconced in my room, i was yet again alone and unsurveilled. save for my car, melon, every parking lot around me was empty. the world beyond voided of everyone but me, the deer and the wild turkeys.

i, a girl(a Witch) got to Work. using my mortar and pestle i ground the mushrooms. i covered the not quite powder with store-bought lemon juice in my beautiful highball glasses, and let it sit. in the space between, i covered my walls in packing paper, knowing what i would need in order to become. i added juice and water to glass, stirred and imbibed.

it was a night of deep sorrow and a night of joy. from the couch by the window i watched the sun go to sleep and found myself within my body. forgoing pants, i abandoned my jeans on the couch, choosing to wear only my white turtleneck, panties, and thick grey socks. my stomach became my focal point and i sat on the toilet, legs splayed, breathing deeply trying to push. having released nothing, i would stand and pace, tracklike around my room. i had not eaten in hours and so though i was not bloated, i was inexplicably full.

my time on the couch was interspersed with time at the parchment paper wall. using coloured pencils, crayons, and markers, i began to tease out the creature that the paper wanted to be.

back on the toilet again i gazed intently at my navel. bellybutton is such a funny word to describe one of the most important parts of us all. and why are we dissuaded from looking. it is in the looking that i was presented with the truest evidence of my birth. striations, darkly coloured and unevenly dispersed spiral outwards, identifying the location where i was quite literally undocked from my motherland. discovering it to be citrus segmented, i felt all at once 22, and 12, and 2, and not even a child, but a fetus, connected and moored to my mother’s stomach.

oh a woman’s stomach how terrible we treat such hallowed ground.

paying attention to the swell of my belly first in the mirror and then with my hands i moved and sounded like someone in labour. islanded, i was allowed to become animal that night (guttural moans, keening wails and battle cries). i kept finding myself on the toilet trying to push. back at the wall i stood on my green step-stool, i gave my owl the teeth she needed. i let my heart choose the next colour and the music guide my hand. there was knowledge inside of me and i did not want it i did not want it i did not want it i thought i had more time i didn’t think it was going to hurt so much why didn’t anyone tell me it was going to be so hard. back on the couch i held my squishmellow to my chest waiting. waiting. up again trying to show myself what the paper was telling me i was cast down. ragdoll flung to the ground for the grief. i beat the floor on my knees and howled.

lovelovelove.

lost.

later on, my water and the spell broken, i stood, finally deflated. all of the mood lighting in my room was on, my blinds were all the way open, and the world outside had been doused in darkness.

anyone standing outside would have been greeted with quite the tableau. but it was that night i realised i had to stop pretending. “pretending [i am] unseen, pretending [i] have a life of my own, … unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole in [my] own head, if nowhere else.” (the robber bridge, maragret atwood, 501).

on the 17th of august in 2022, in my journal i asked myself if a young woman acts and she does not tell anyone or share it on any feeds, did it really happen? i answer her, me, you, us, that yes. you must acknowledge yourself as your own witness. however, be aware that they too can, may, will witness as well.

i, the naked neighbor, kept the blinds up well after another car pulled into the lot across the street. he too existed in his room, blinds open. was it for me i wondered, brazenly pressing my face to the glass, staring, watching, witnessing him, but barely seeing anything (how disappointing for the both of us).

monday (november 13)

dualist theory has coated our world with an almost imperceptible sticky film. arguing that “the mental and the physical are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other”, it would have us believe that there “is no convincing consensus on how to build a satisfactorily unified picture of creatures possessed of both a mind and a body” (dualism, howard robinson). i say no.

on the eve of a new moon, i, as a member of the mind, do declare myself as a member of the body. and my stomach, declared to me that it too has a mind, a full one at that. one capable of teaching me and guiding me, belly leading, through a hard and very important night.

it was woman’s work.

works cited

Atwood, M. (1993). The Robber Bride. McClelland and Stewart.

Button Poetry. (2018, May 30). Rudy Francisco - Looking for you. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqS4wxcX-Lo&list=PLQAY_fltGTJ_bvmC8pkSLEZKCh_AIRPFU&index=25

Robinson, Howard, "Dualism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/dualism/.

i stand on the shoulders of giants, if you want, take a gander at some the works that influenced this essay:

Anderson, E., Pena-Guzman, D. (Hosts). (2022, April, 12). Gossip (no. 49) [Audio podcast episode]. In Overthink. https://overthinkpodcast.com/episodes/episode-49

Button Poetry. (2018, January 23). Olivia Gatwood - When I Say That We Are All Teen Girls. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHaCKwYCFZs

Moses Sumney. (2020). grae [Album]. Jagjaguwar

(sometimes i write something and i ask myself, does this sound sane? i feel like this is insane and that no one else will understand anything i’m saying, but i am learning that i am not insane, i am creative. anything novel and different will seem absolutely wrong when brought into the world. my Censor is a conservative, “faced with an original sentence, phrase, paint squiggle it says, “What the hell is that? That’s not right”! (The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron, 13). but i am arming myself, beginning to establish blockades and defences against the part of me that is scared. maybe the most embarrassing part of it all is believing that what you have to offer is of any value. putting yourself on the shelf leaves you vulnerable to those who will scoff at your evaluation and deride, deciding that the price is too high. but i am a writer. i am reclaiming my narrative. i will continue to call myself a storyteller until i really believe it. because i know that there will be those who will take notice, and carry what i have to say off the shelf, into their pockets straight into their hearts. to them it is worth it, it would not even be deemed a splurge.)

morning pages conceptually, and even practically are not new to me. though i am only just acknowledging this publicly, i have always been a writer. like others before me, i have tried to harness the softness of the morning mind. the one and only time i tried to write after rising, my thoughts, refusing to be yoked would not be goaded into performing. i think i wrote one paragraph before deeming the entire affair pointless and giving up.

in retrospect, that false start makes sense to me. over the last four years, i streamlined my morning routine; refusing to allow myself to be deterred by any sort of decision fatigue, all choices were made the night prior, my every minute accounted for in my handy dandy planner. so when my watch would buzzbuzzbuzz me awake, i could start the day the way i would continue it: head empty.

but entering month two of my ~ healing era ~ my mornings have lacked any sort of form. i’d gotten quite sick of rolling out of bed with only an hour to spare before work. after spending a few weeks stuffing preparing and consuming a wholesome meal, personal and spatial hygiene into 60 minutes, i was primed for suggestions.

so when davin (i’ve spent a few minutes trying to quantify our friendship but i’ll give you this: my time at home is limited. i recognize that i will never be able to distribute it equitably, especially when the allotted brunch turns into hours wandering the mall turns into more hours sitting in my car in his driveway in december, but there are just people in this world with whom you will always have more to say. that is davin to me). and so when davin told me he was reading the Artist’s Way, i listened. if i have not always been a fan of what davin has produced artistically, i have always admired his dogged creative pursuits. after listening to him wax poetic and having not read the book, nor taken a minute to look into any of the author’s theory, i started the next sunrise. i will save the ideas i wrote that thursday for another, more well thought-out essay. instead today, i will continue to practice sharing my thoughts.

(just a bit more preamble i promise)

over time, i have fully leaned into the idea that i write my journal for other people. once i realized that i have always been a storyteller, i decided to live for the drama of a narrative. even at 0700, i scribbled in my bujo knowing it would eventually be shared

this morning, like most mornings i was woken first by my bladder. an experienced predawn urinator, i was quick to relinquish the warmth of my bed. after a lifetime of trying to ignore the urge, i know now that the faster i take care of it, the likelihood of me being able to reclaim my sleep will increase. while the desire to pee is fairly regular, the time never is.

the ritual itself is unremarkable, frictionless now that my bedroom has an ensuite. (there was a four month period where i, a 21 year old woman, would clamber down my bunk bed, put on my pitvipers to stumble down the very well light dorm hallway) i will confess, i do not think germs exist before first light and i never wash my hands.

after relieving myself, my single-minded focus was redirected. i needed to know whether my day was starting then or in a few glorious hours. refusing to attempt the required pincer grip and wrist rotation to turn on my desk lamp field promoted to bedside luminator, i peeked out my window. the darkness was what could only be described as forbidding.

i let my wrist join my head between the window frame and the blackout blinds and using the ambient moonlight, i saw that it was 6:43 AM. aghast, i climbed back into bed. the stifling, hollow, and lonely silence that accompanies rural nighttime does not align with my definition of morning.

the day would have to be stalled, and i groped my way into my sheets. i tried to find the patch of warmth my body had dug in for me during the night. and because i had brought the comforter up to the pillows upon my exit, it was still there.

another confession: its harder to find solace in an empty bed.

i tossed and turned the prerequisite times, and though doubting my chance at meeting the Sandman again, i closed my eyes. inhale-2-3-4, hold-2-3-4, release-2-3-4.

not even two cycles of breath had passed when SMACK. from somewhere in the darkness (and that somewhere i suspected was the foot of my bed) came a paradoxically deafening and dull sound. it was the kind of noise that if heard in my family home, it would have startled not frightened me. it was both my mother and brother’s way to bring bring down their palm like the hand of God to the foot of one’s bed, if they thought the morning needed them. alas, i was NOT in my family home. i was a young woman sleeping naked in a room that was frequented by no one when the sun graced the sky, and so should not be entered at night. obviously, i thought i was about to get murdered.

despite the cacophonous staccato of my heart, whose rhythm had surpassed sound, i felt the blood vessels thrumming in my mind i opened my eyes. the room was graciously empty save for Bella, my outrageously expensive gravel bike. my eyes thankfully not needing corrective lenses, did not take long to adjust to the dark. i took in my (graciously) continued state of isolation and knew immediately what had happened.

while some may call what i have a bed frame, i disagree that anything with wheels can properly fulfill the romantic connotations of the word. rising, once again from my nest of blankets, it was apparent to me that my wheeled carriage disagreed with my earlier assessment. i had surpassed the upper limit of tosses and turns, and it expressed its dissent the only way it knew how. instead of hovering the necessary 5 inches off the ground, the left corner of my mattress had decided to become all too acquainted with the floor.

trying again to inhale-2-3-4, hold-2-3-4 my way out of (fight/flight) FREEZE, i, on all fours, joined my bed on the ground. reaching my arm out under the metal frame, and pulling out the culprit. the stem of the fourth wheel, which had until that morning had been upright, dropped like an unloved houseplant. except that it was made of STEEL (i think). that two pound object had put the fear of god into me, thankfully, it happened after i used the toilet, i would not have wanted to change my sheets the day after laundry day.

somehow i did manage to force the wheel back into the bed, but i could not even cajole myself to get back into it. the time no longer mattered to me. sometimes the universe will tell you when you will start the day, not the sky.

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i recently moved very far away from home. it’s not as if though i’ve lived near my parents for any real stretch of time since i was in high school, but the 200km of windy rural ontario roads really makes you feel the difference between 300 and 500 kilometers. the move took place in the space that is no longer really july, but is hard to classify as august. i still hadn’t received my moving boxes by my birthday (august 2nd), and i don’t think i’ve ever felt as adrift as i did during those days.

for an entire week, i had only 1 pair of clothes, a stripped blue t-shirt, ripped denim shorts, and 3 pairs of underwear. my cartoon character era one could say.

having nothing did not clarify me as the minimalists claimed it would, it only made me realize just how much i valued the material goods i had accumulated in my 21 years of life.

eventually (around eight calendar days), after turning 22, my things finally arrived. once able to change clothes, i promptly did many things during august that were not ‘being within august’.

i treated several momentous events as if they were ducks at the carnival

laser eye surgery? BAM buying a car? BAM first international solo trip? (to ALASKA!) BAM!!!

ive always been a whirlwind. and university only sped me up. i spent almost four years feeling chased. most days at school, i would change my underwear four times. not because i had a problem with bladder control, but because my life somehow required me to be four different people in a 20 hour period. reverse bedtime procrastination became a way of life. when the clock struck 2100, i shut my door and was able to use my time selfishly.

i loved my school. one of the oldest in canada, it had an incredibly strong culture, and it was full of rites and rituals. from the first day you step on campus, you are told to get ready for when you’re going to leave. and as the day grew nearer, the excitement in turn grows.

my drive made me successful. i graduated. i got good grades, had wonderful opportunities, loved and was loved. and isn’t that what anyone wants from a university experience?

i think i was hoped up on so much adrenaline i didn’t realize i was bleeding. (metaphorically)

because this move happened in the days before August, i, like a small child, was dropped off by my parents in my new town. i felt so many emotions during that ride. panic (at realizing i’d left my ID cards home 150km into the journey), apprehension, dread, all felt as the road went from 4 lane highway, to narrow unpaved backcountry roads. i think we drove past 3 different provincial parks, it was a painfully lovely summer day. i was miserable.

on location, we, the dutiful canadians, stopped at Tim Hortons. i could barely eat, my left molar had begun to radiate pain and i couldn’t even handle a bagel.

i, though an irregular flosser, have never even had a cavity, was quite alarmed. by the next morning i could barely open my mouth to speak, let alone eat, and off to the dentist i went.

apparently stress can cause the jaw to lock. who would’ve thought! later on i learned that moving can be one of the most stressful events of a person’s life.

in the aftermath(aftermonth?), of my Big August, i began september in a daze. i think my brain has begun to do the very important work of decompression and didn’t let itself settle on any event during the month.

so now i find myself in standing at the end of october. and i spent this october fairly alone. it felt like the scriptwriters chose ‘going home for the holidays’ as the natural end point for the first season of the show ive been writing in my head about this chapter of my life. (working title, Growing Painfully) i, and the two friends i’d made in the summerfall all went home for thanksgiving. which, okay cool , . but i came back, and they didn’t.

being without friends in a new place i think would be daunting for anyone. and i am daunted indeed.

one afternoon, upon finishing work id planned to ‘relax’ and gave myself luxury of choosing any activity from a predetermined (and ever growing) list of tasks. following my hour of ‘freedom’, i was to then cook dinner and then go to pilates class. i am nothing if not a generous task master.

i chose to read within the embrace of trees located approximately 5 steps from my building. i carried out the comforter that had once kept me warm in my twin XL bed and let it keep my body heat from seeping into the earth.

as the afternoon passed i found myself lost in a story, something i hadn’t really managed since i was a child. i would only emerge to shift myself or the comforter into the sun. eventually i closed my book and instead of getting up, i flipped over and stared at the trees.

i tried to count their branches but kept getting distracted. i actually dozed off a few times.

it was nice.

i don’t do that much in the evenings.

i don’t know what i thought life without school would be like but i didn’t ever expect it to be this formless.

my time is this glob that’s placed into my hands every morning and i’m somehow supposed to know how to mold it. somedays i do.

other days i get home from work and find myself paralyzed. i have finally found inertia. sometimes i’m consumed by the fact that i haven’t had fulfilling a social interaction all day, on others i realize that i’m actually brimming with exhaustion, to the point where more action, another step, will cause it to slosh over the sides and drown me.

on some of those days i still try to keep going. consulting the list i titled ‘things i could be doing’ still trying to and keep on keeping on.

i don’t know what i’m trying to do.

i’m not trying to do anything but learn how to be a person. learn who i am. i don’t know why we laugh at young adults for needing to find themselves. i am so incredibly lost. growing, moulting, changing, are not easy. they are painful uncomfortable and sometimes heartbreaking moments.

i practiced learning to be within october. be within a month, and year, a body, a lifetime, a mind, somehow without goals, without objectives nor expectations.

all i want is to learn how to stop holding on so tight.