In the middle of metamorphosis, rest

(This post is almost a series of mini posts somehow strung together into one. I have used the marvellous dinkus a few times to denote a slight shift in focus and to break up the text. I hope it’s not too disjointed a read.)

I don’t have much to say tonight. This space is not a journal, and I do not want to tell much about my day (other than to say I did a lot of writing for work! So grateful that I get paid to write. I feel incredibly lucky). What I do want to do is acknowledge myself for being committed to this practice. Deciding to write 500 words a day for each day in January from the 5th onwards is a big ask.

Today is my sixteenth day. After this there will be ten more days until I press pause, reflect and decide what is next. I started writing so I could unblock myself and be a writer who writes, not one who doesn’t. I started this so that I could honour a dream that has waited for me for a long, long time.

I am noticing the ebb and flow. Yesterday’s post was very significant to me. It needs an edit, but I’m proud of putting it out there. I noticed today that I kept checking to see if people had been reading it, and feeling happy and grateful when I saw or heard from people that they had, and wishing that even more would, too. I need to be honest about that. There is a hunger in me to be seen and heard here. I’m trying not to judge that as good or bad, but to simply acknowledge and allow it. It matters to me that other people’s eyes get on my work. It matters that you, right now, are reading these words. It matters a great deal to me. Thank you.

Tonight, I can feel something different happening. I am writing because I said I would write, and not because I really have anything to say. Yesterday was a risk. Today, I rest.

* * *

In trying to find something to say each day, I have found myself reading words I’d written at different points in the last two years. This has been a time of intense transformation. My life has changed, and I have changed my life. Avenues that felt shuttered off to me have opened up, and probably about 50 percent of what I understood my life to be about has gone.

The following words arrived (where from? Does anybody really know?) about an hour ago:

If the pupa could speak halfway between his first way of life and the next, what would he have to say? Would he speak of grief of the life left behind? Would he know where he is and why? Would he feel the dissolution of his former self? Would he know what is coming? Would he even be aware that the legs and body that carried him this far would, now liquid, metamorphose into an entirely different body, an entirely different being? Would he want this new self, or would he yearn for the comfort of the life he once knew?

Fourteen months ago, I could not comprehend what my life would look like today. Nick, and everything about our relationship and the way our lives have become entwined, and work, and home, and the friends I have made, and the way I live, have all contributed to that. Quite honestly, it’s so much better and happier and lovelier and luckier than I ever thought it would be. I just couldn’t grasp or imagine what was to come. I didn’t dare to hope, I don’t think. I barely dared to hope.

Now, I look ahead and I have questions about what my life is going to become, just as I have questions about what is going to become of the world. I am reminded of Baz Luhrman’s amazing song, Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen, the lyrics to which were actually written by a woman, Mary Schmich (and not Kurt Vonnegut, to whom it’s often mis-attributed - there’s a fabulous interview with her here). This verse in particular stands out right now:

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t
Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t
Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the ‘Funky Chicken’
On your 75th wedding anniversary
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much
Or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s

On December 16th I wrote on my private blog, “Here, at 36, I have been married and divorced, and I have no children. I’ve answered two of Baz Luhrman’s “maybes” so far… well, three: there’s just no way I’ll ever be having a 75th wedding anniversary! Tonight I am sitting in that one simple, powerful word: maybe.”

* * *

Every time I sit down to write, I don’t really know what is going to come out. I have a sense, of course, of the various things I want to say and express. I know that there is much I want to tell you, and that I’m waiting because I don’t want it to be rushed. But tonight, like the pupa in its in-betweeny state in the chrysalis, I’m just resting here, breathing in and out, appreciating the warmth of my home and the soft light surrounding me in the living room, and feeling very, very glad that I showed up once again to this commitment.

* * *

I feel like I am in the middle of a number of becomings. Becoming something is a process and takes time. It feels somewhat hard to admit that I feel so full of hope, because the world and so many of us in it are struggling. But I do, tonight. I have a heart with hope in it – not full to the brim, because there is fear in there too, telling me not to be reckless with my hope, not to risk too much or love too hard… but I’m sitting here somehow sensing that there is a life that has been asking me to dream it, and that it’s safe to let that dream feel alive, just a teeny, tiny bit more. I look around at my life, remember the weekend just gone, think about so many of the experiences of the last twelve months, and feel a little something inside me whisper that maybe, just maybe, this is real.

(Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash. Thank you, Suzanne)