Lucky

I’ve started to wonder if I’m meant to be uncomfortable as a life path. Sure, you could look at any number of systems using my birth info to see blatant signage about discomfort but there’s a part of me that rejects the notion that any of us were meant to suffer endlessly. Hardship becomes the pressure that makes a diamond, as they say, but when is enough, enough? When does it become a force that shatters the diamond? I’ve started to wonder if I came into this world with a curse and then continued to meet people who were put off by my multi-faceted shine and sent me a bucket of evil eyes for good measure.

This morning, under a warming California sun (I wonder how I got to California from rural Kansas), and I gazed between the two tall palms on the other side of the fence where I’m staying temporarily, a godsent room rental on this unhoused journey, and saw a pattern. When I had the stability of a roof over my head and work that brought in an income, I had a string of relationships, since childhood that offered me emotional instability in the forms of abuse. I wanted to die a lot during those times. I’d lay in an empty bathtub to feel the cool surface under me, something foundational to bring me back to reality during these dark spirals down into that space of feeling like I didn’t have a right to exist. And, if existing meant constant abuse, neglect and trauma, why would I want it anyway? I made peace with Death during those moments, but Life feels like an elusive tease of getting the rug pulled out from under me. Death is a beautiful woman by the way, with a golden heart. Sometimes she sends me ravens.

And now, as I move from tent to motel to hotel to tent, and a room rental in a house with people who are easy to be with, I wonder how long it can last. Because while I have emotional stability and peace, I do not have any certainty of the resources it takes to maintain a living situation. My suitcase sits unpacked. I’ve taken more things out of their bags this time but inside is a warning to not get too comfortable. Because comfort is dangerous. I worry that if I make too much noise or forget to scoop the dog poop on my turn, if terms will change because that’s what happens sometimes. When the rug gets pulled out by unstable people, you’re left wondering what the last straw was in their decision to send you packing. So, I stay coiled, ready to pack the car again.

It’s the same within. I remember all the times I awakened. It comes in stages. Old parts die off, new parts emerge from under the rubble. Like tender flowers with their stems not quite that vibrant green, needing sun and water and fresh air. But free, at last. During my blooming years, there was also a pattern. My autistic brain is so good at seeing these patterns, sometimes too late. But this time is different. I have been focused, maybe by circumstance, fully on myself and survival. And I feel the rubble clearing and my heart asking to pop up from the earth. Two weeks of sleeping in a stable place has that damn flower wanting to burst through the earth yet again. The thing is, once you’ve gotten stomped on enough times during your most pivotal bloomings, there is a part of you that you cannot control, that will become a barrier to ever poking your head out in the sun again.

Deep down, you know your light is so vibrant that it draws in that which wants the light for itself. Deep down, you want those who have their own light. But how do you know which is which, when you are the sun and they are the moon? Both shine. And the trick is discerning those whom your light is reflecting on and those whose light is also coming from within. Surface versus depth. I wonder if the discomfort has given me this gift in some mysterious way. And I wonder if this journey into the unknown has given me necessary space to know my light at such a depth that it will be unmistakable when I re-enter the world of connections. There are no easy answers in this life. Being human is discomfort. Maybe my life has played that story out very literally. And they say if you want to make art or write, then you have to experience things. So, my heart flung me out into the wide open because as a child, I wished to be a writer. And if people wanted to be spoken of kindly, they should’ve behaved better. Despite all the odds, I feel lucky. It’s a matter of perspective in the end. Because what I’ve experienced should’ve killed me but it didn’t. So what to do with the time I have left?

I’ll tell my story.