It's not them I miss. It's me
Calling the inner child and teenager home.
I feel like I’ve had an exorcism this week.
A huge excavation and clearing out underneath.
It started with me touching a very old spot of grief with my little one, my inner child.
I cried for her for days, unwinding it, being with it.
Realizing how much time I have to make up with her.
This is the very beginning of a long process.
Then, a few days in, my teenager came in.
We have been having a lot of fun.
She is here to remind me of the rawness of who I really am.
There is this scratchy unrelenting ferocity to her that I have been missing so much.
At first I thought it was her friends that I miss.
I was thinking about people I used to spend time with, reminiscing, wondering what they are doing, but also having this greater knowing… It is really never about anyone else.
And at the bottom of thinking about other people and missing them, is a part of myself that I miss.
The version of myself I was around these people.
It is so easy to project ourselves onto our external worlds.
To make it about something outside of us.
To long for people, places, better times that felt like home when really the pain being severed from intrinsic pieces of our own hearts.
It is more sober here, in coming back to self. There is some disappointment to it, the mundane truth of realizing it is not about anything or anyone else, as the shiny fantasies and nostalgia fall apart.
But the beauty about coming back to self is that it is the freest and truest place that exists.
There is real breath here.
Because nothing inside of us is ever hostage to the specific conditions of the external.
We have unconditional access to all the places inside of us, if we choose to be with them, unravel them, untangle them, to bring them front and center.
So I am sitting with the parts of me that I miss.
I had the most fun of my life as a teenager.
And it was silly fun. Stupid fun. Climbing things. Stealing traffic cones.
Sneaking into the back tunnels of the mall. Piercing people's ears in the mall family bathroom.
Piercing my own face in my friends’ bathroom. And then throwing up. And then doing it again.
I walked a funny line. But anyway.
I’ve really put this part of me away.
I’ve pathologized it and called it “burning energy” or “immature” or whatever judgement my ego needed.
When really it might just be a young expression of a really true and deep part of me.
A part I haven’t known how to make space for recently.
The part that has fun wherever she goes. Who is completely obsessed with experiencing life. The impulsive feeling of being alive.
The true Aries essence.
At some point I switched from running all of my energy outside of me, externally, to running it inside of me.
It’s switched from an explosion outside to an explosion inside.
My ego liked this better as I got older. It was less messy and I could manage the appearances of it.
As I started creating and landing in the world of consciousness and Orgasm and wanting to build my business it felt like that expression of me didn’t have room anymore.
I didn’t know how to hold both.
But now I can see both, side by side, and they don’t feel mutually exclusive anymore.
I respect the path of remembering, forgetting, remembering again.
I believe it’s just a part of the journey. I feel I had to put certain parts of myself on the back burner to really understand what was hiding, tenderly beneath them.
And now that I know myself underneath, I can bring them back in.
There is a process of remembrance here. Getting to know them again.
So I’m sitting with all of this, reflecting on the past week, I have this feeling of awe of the process.
This week has been me, sitting reclined and receptive, watching old versions of myself come in and out, feeling them dancing around me, crying their tears, laughing their laughs, letting them go, and opening to what is true now.
(I went on a first date recently and a man asked me why I don't do drugs.
"I am high without drugs," I responded. And this is what I meant. 🤣 )
And now, writing about the journey of the past week, there is not a feeling of completion.
But there is a feeling of peace, and trust, right in the center of a big unfolding.
A reverence for how it doesn’t need to make any sense.
A deep faith in the energy to take me where I need to go.
It’s a beautiful pose to hold.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to control my path, needing to understand it with my mind, gripping.
I am sure I will do this again.
Thank god to be in the surrender of just letting it be right now, not needing to understand to be willing to have the process, and trust it while I’m inside of it.
It feels like a big homecoming, a deepening.
And it’s right on time.
My work is asking me to deepen and widen.
My body of work wants to grow and it’s asking me to come with it.
To put all of myself on the table for it.
It is nauseating. And confronting. And deeply, deeply true.
So cheers to the beginning, and the gentle return home.
