I’ve had writer’s block recently. I started writing countless other things for this week and realized I was stuck because I kept trying to write what wasn’t true for me in this moment.
The truest thing for me right now is that I can’t control other people. It’s like, duh, I know, but it’s also one of the hardest things to accept.
Someone I love very much is very sick. They have been sick for a long time, and I don’t know if or when they are going to get better.
This person is someone who, on paper, is very dissimilar to me, but who, in soul, couldn’t be more alike. I couldn’t believe my luck when this person entered my life, when I got to call them my family, and I still feel that way. And.
Their sickness is difficult to accept on its own, but it’s even more difficult to accept because I was once sick with this very same malady. We’re so alike, the two of us. Only I got better.
I didn’t realize how controlling or codependent I was, am, until I bumped up against the truth that I cannot make this person well. I can send books and podcast episodes, playlists and links to alternative healing treatments, but what I want for them doesn’t matter. They have to want it for themselves.
It seems impossible to believe you are worthy of care, of love, when all you’ve ever heard or felt or internalized is that you are not worthy. That you are sick and broken, that you are unlovable. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t true.
It seems impossible to get better when the thing that is keeping you sick is the thing that you’ve relied on to get you through every day. When you’ve had a relationship with this thing for over a decade and it’s been a constant, even when everyone else goes away.
This is the illusion of alcohol, of escape. It feels like a friend, a comfort, a lifeline, and yet it is the very thing that is killing you. It’s impossible to see it this way when you’ve entered into a dance with it, when the music stopped a long time ago but the monkey on your back wants to keep dancing, whispers in your ear that it feels good to dance, even though your feet are bleeding and you’re tired, so very tired.
Who are you without the monkey? What is life without the dancing?
This is what everyone can tell you but you won’t know, won’t feel, unless and until you know it, feel it, for yourself.
We can’t make someone else better, only they can do that. They have to want to, they have to enter a new contract, break the contract they made a long time ago with the monkey, the pact they signed in blood without ever knowing the agreement was illegitimate from the start.
The pact we make to feel better is a pact made out of desperation, without knowing all of the facts we need to make an informed decision. The contract we enter without reviewing the fine print is that we will only feel better for a little while, that the music will fade but that we will have to keep dancing, that we can’t take a break or catch our breath, that there’s only going going going until one day we wake up and we don’t recognize ourselves in the mirror anymore.
Who are you without the monkey? What is life without the dancing?
Without the monkey, life will still be hard, it’s true. Life will feel insurmountable and so scary, more frightening than we ever knew, but that is all. That is everything and nothing. Life has been scary the whole time, except now we will see it as if seeing it for the first time, only now we will feel it as if we don’t have any skin to temper the heat and the pain. But then, it will get different.
Without the dancing, life may seem tedious at first, it’s true. There won’t be the abandon and the thrill, but if we sit still long enough, if we let our feet heal, we will find that there are still thrills to be had, still dancing to be found. Except now, we can take a break. Now, we can breathe.
It’s hard to breathe when everything is coming at us full force, when our nerve endings feel exposed and raw, when the mundane chores and have-to-dos are piled up alongside the unexpected diagnoses, the sudden death of someone we love, the loss of a partner or a pet. But now, without the monkey clinging to our backs, whispering in our ears, we can truly experience it.
This experiencing is what allows us to sit in the discomfort and know that this, too, shall pass. That the world feels like it’s ending and things will never be the same, but the world will not end and things are never the same, anyway. Things are always changing, which is scary but is also a kind of freedom.
Things are always changing, and that means we are, too. We don’t have to be the same people we once were, we can break the contract. We can forgive ourselves because we live in a universe that doesn’t want us to be small and afraid, that doesn’t want us to feel shame and guilt. We can forgive ourselves because, for the first time in a long time, we can see things clearly.
When we see things clearly we gain an incredible opportunity, a gift. We are given a choice. We can choose how we react to what is happening around us, to us, and ultimately, for us. Nothing that is happening around us is happening for no reason at all. We don’t deserve the bad things that happen to us. But the bad things that happen to us happen to show us something.
What are they showing us? Sometimes the answer becomes clear: I can handle this. I am stronger than I used to be. I can see this and know that I will come out the other side.
Sometimes the answer isn’t clear, we don’t know, and the not-knowing is so overwhelming and scary, but we don’t have to know the answer. It will be revealed. But only if we listen, if we’re patient, if we sit with the belief that at some point, we will be able to look back and say, Aha. That’s what that was.
But we don’t get the opportunity to look back if we fight the present, if we are mired in the trials and tribulations of the past, if we keep looking forward to the unknowable future, fretting over what might happen. We don’t know what will happen. What we do know is that no matter what happens, it won’t be permanent. Nothing is forever.
Or perhaps what is truer is that some things are forever. Like energy. Like the mystery of this universe. Like the soul within that is trying to find its way through this lifetime so it may enter the next with more clarity, more purpose, more freedom.
We don’t know. And living this lifetime for the freedom of the next is disavowing the freedom that is right here, right now.
There is freedom here for us, even when it doesn’t feel like it, especially when it doesn’t feel like it. There is freedom when we break the contract of what once felt like freedom and is now a prison, an invisible cage that keeps us small and demands we keep shrinking when all we want to do, like everything that is living, is grow, expand, change, explore.
We are meant to explore. We are meant to live. It feels like living when we’re dancing with the monkey, when the music is loud and we’re twirling through space, when we’ve shed our inhibitions and our worry, when the afternoon light is coming through the window just so, we feel it. Something like transcendence.
But then we wake up. We wake up in the morning and we’re still tired, we have a headache, our eyes swim and our head throbs, our mouths are dry and sour, we don’t know how we got here, is this our bed, is this our life, is this is this is this. This isn’t freedom.
It is understandable to try to control what we cannot. It is human nature to seek comfort and beauty, especially in those places where we know, deep down, we won’t find what we are looking for. We are scared and feel small, we just want to feel better. It isn’t our fault.
It isn’t our fault that this world has been designed by those who are unlike us to keep us small and afraid, to keep us seeking and searching for relief outside of ourselves, to pick up the drink, to click the “buy” button, to pull the lever on the slot machine, to grasp and cling for something, anything, that feels like an anchor in safe harbor. But these are not anchors. These are anvils that will keep pulling us down.
These anvils are strong, so strong, they’re designed to be. It’s not our fault. But we are strong, too. We are strong because we are vulnerable, but our vulnerability, our suffering, does not ennoble us or make us pure. Our suffering is a part of us, but it is a part to be acknowledged and held lightly, not clutched and hugged close like it is the most important part of us. It isn’t. It only feels that way because it’s so loud, so large.
The most important part of us is the small voice inside that reminds us of who we are, who we all are, who we were when we were born and who we can reclaim at any moment, who won’t abandon us and is always with us, who says, I am here. I have always been here.
We have always been here. We did not get lost or irrevocably altered by what has happened to us, what we have done. We have done things we’re not proud of, but we did those things because we didn’t know, couldn’t have known, the sound of fear was so loud and we were just trying to feel better. That’s okay. You’re okay.
We are not broken or bad, faulty by design. The systems we exist in are faulty by design, faulty in how they mold us and keep us temporarily satiated, they work as designed, to hurt, to harm. The systems we exist in make us sick, they’re supposed to. But once we can see these systems, these forces outside of us, we can also see ourselves.
It isn’t fair, is it? It isn’t fair that we’ve suffered and will continue to suffer, that we are surrounded by so much pain and hurt. It isn’t fair that bad things happen to us, that we’ve been harmed and that we’ve harmed others without meaning to.
It isn’t fair, and. And, we get to decide what we do with this pain. We get to decide that we mean more than what has happened to us. We get to decide if we will keep suffering, or if we will transcend these systems and suffering to live.
I think of my ancestors, my lineage, the people I did not get to know and the generations before them who were brought here, enslaved, and forced to work until they died. They were meant to live and instead were made to suffer until they died. And when I think of this, I feel so much anger and pain. I feel the generational trauma, the ghosts of suffering nipping at my heels. It would be so easy to succumb to this sadness.
But then I think of my ancestors, my lineage, the people and generations who were meant to work until they died, and many did, but they also lived. They brought stories and music, seeds and herbs, they brought their inextinguishable souls that continue on. They continue on through me.
I can only survive when I think of all of us who have survived, of all of us who survived the unsurvivable, who transcended the pain and the suffering with joy, with music, with community. Many of us succumbed to the monkey on our backs, to the dancing to the indefatigable beat of torment, but so many of us came out the other side. So many of us lived.
What we can’t see when we’re trapped in our sadness, when we’re lost in our suffering, is that we are more than this moment of pain, more than the sum of what we’ve endured. We are part of something beyond our comprehension. We aren’t meant to suffer. We’re meant to live.
I wish I had the magic words, the magic remedy, but I don’t. I can only say that the living is both the source of our pain and the remedy for it. The first step we take toward our healing is one we take alone, but we’re not alone. We can stand on our own two feet and be held at the same time, held in the loving embrace of those who came before us, the embrace of something bigger than us that wants us to get better. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.
The Friday Finds
Action. Add your name to Amnesty International’s letter demanding President Biden address the humanitarian crisis in Sudan.
Listen. “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” by Beyoncé. “Nothin’ really ends/For things to stay the same, they have to change again.”
Watch. Love Lies Bleeding! A badass, sexy, weird, and terrifying love story featuring Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian, Love Lies Bleeding will take you places you’ve never been before. Set in the 1980s in New Mexico, the film centers on two women determined to change their fate, no matter who gets in their way.
Read. Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service by Tajja Isen. An incisive work of cultural criticism and personal essay, Isen grapples with the harm of good intentions, life on the margins, and the sense of self we forge in liminal spaces.
Thank you for being here. Be kind to yourself.
‘Til next time,
Emma
It sounds like you have a twin. Love you bear! I’m going to take the offering of SM.