when i returned to my island, it wasn’t by choice.
i had become severely ill three years prior. the epilepsy took friendships, the job, healthcare, and stable home i had just gained, memories, language, movement. it took my body from me and left me with pain, loneliness, scars, uncertainty, and ever decreasing options.
i did my best. i wasn’t always good at it. for every way i knew i was limited, i knew there were others i couldn’t understand, perceive, control for. but i tried.
i was scared. not of the epilepsy. i couldn’t control that or predict it. the seizures came went changed regardless of whether i was happy sad safe stressed. they just were. but watching my life crumble. watching myself decrease - literally becoming small and weak in body, limited in mind, isolated in community - that terrified me. it hurt. but i tried.
and people continued to give up on me. it felt like my life was giving up on me.
my illness was too scary. the force of my spirit - the one thing that was intact and getting stronger - was too much. my needs were too much, though i was still not very skilled at asking for anything that really mattered.
when i thought love had come back to me, a blessing, an eye in the middle of all this storm…no one wants to live in risk. to surrender to something bigger than themselves if they don’t have to. it’s easier to watch in awe from afar than to weather it with you.
the past six years has been very lonely. i have also spent a lot of time alone.
—
this month is the six year anniversary of my mind deciding to say ‘fuck this noise’ and do a defrag purge reset of the memory, trauma, stress, stories it had been running on for the past 21 years.
i was four years deep into weekly DBT sessions and was finally getting a grip on the c-ptsd/depression/anxiety that had been dogging me like a damn Cerberus in the hell of my mindscape. i had committed to my writing and gotten my first publishing, went to my first writing retreat in the woods, made friends who weren’t playin in my face, and got a job that was still below my skill level but would allow me to only have to work one of them, regular hours, doing something that felt like it mattered for a city i love. i signed a lease in an apartment that someone had offered to me with people i thought it would be good to make a home with for a while.
it lasted for six weeks.
when i called my mother after our reading after the retreat, i remember telling her that i had been having strange visions, like seeing faces reflected back at me in water, ones i had never seen, and was losing time, having a hard time focusing. 48hrs later, i had my first seizure, and within a week, my mind and body started breaking down. the first three seizures took months of immediate memory, shattered my left shoulder, and left me unconscious for 3 days.
but when i woke up, a new sense had kicked in - self-preservation. the first thing i said was not to let that damn doctor touch me, but everyone assumed i was delirious.
he mismedicated me for months and now he’s dead so i can’t even sue his ass.
after having been frustratingly indestructible for most of my life, i finally had proof that i wasn’t, and it was almost a relief, having a reason to defend myself.
the truth is, i never needed one. i was just too scared to hurt anyone else as badly as i had been hurt, had been hurting, was afraid i would always hurt.
—
when a time bomb is living in your head, it puts a lot of things in perspective.
not excuses. reasons. purpose.
one of my earliest memories, one im infinitely glad i retained, is my father taking me out during the eye of a hurricane when i was maybe five years old. it was silent and still in the daytime, such a strange, curious thing. as we moved slowly away from the front door, he pointed up, to show me the sky through the spiraling cylinder of clouds and wind.
throughout my life, i have often felt like i am in that tunnel, ricocheting off the sides and rarely riding the middle path toward the sky, despite my best efforts. i wonder when i entered this tunnel, or was i always in it, my father simply teaching me a skill i would need to navigate: perspective.
but when each person’s perspective is their own, and is made up of so many different parts, how do you find the one(s) that will look you in the eye and not flinch? falter? fade away?
returning home has been many things, but one thing i can definitely name it is opportunity. there have been things i have learned and experienced here in the past three years of my recovery that could not have happened anywhere else.
last night, i was talking to a new friend who has quickly become a dear friend, someone who can see hear feel appreciate understand me, and it felt so wonderful to be reached out to because xe heard me thinking of xym. we talked all kinds of shit, and about the anger that has been dogging us for the past six weeks, about people who really don’t get it and are not ready to get their weight up, to do what needs to be done for what’s coming, what some of us have been known, been living.
we spoke of ancestor Harriet Tubman, who i uplift in even higher regard in our shared illness - something in me understands even more her resolve, the resolute cast of her face, the way the iron that struck her must have somehow embedded itself, or simply resonated with what she already consisted of. a woman of her time who said, fuck this, im done, i want what i want, do you want it too? yes or no.
i wonder about the protection of Ogun i am offered, the affinity for iron, lightning, dogs, navigation, loyalty, and war. refuge in the forest and how we would not have innovation and freedom without these determined, difficult to approach, flawed, fearless spirits. i have a deep sense of never-aloneness, and i sometimes wonder if it’s arrogance or ego, but then i remember who benefits from my smallness, and who, my evolution. i also see power, god, in the pantheon of friends who surround me.
at some point, i have to start knowing that i belong.
my star chart has saturn with its earthy ass boots on my neck for 18 years - i’m not in the clear til my early 40s - and for a time, i felt resentful of my ‘best years’, 18-36, being preoccupied with illness, poverty, instability, and houselessness, but it occurred to me that had this shit dropped on me before my Return, i would not have had the skills or awareness to handle it, and if it had dropped on me later on in life, i may not have had the physical stamina to handle the onslaught.
everything happens in its time.
this post has been sitting, waiting for me to finish it, for almost three weeks, but yesterday, i was ruthless in my dreams, and i woke and wrote out all that anger - another post, possibly. today, here i am, completing this one, and other things that are necessary. (there are so many necessary things). maybe the connections i have are not what i wanted or expected, but i am more and more sure that they are what i need.
each time i refuse to reject a version of myself that may push others away, i become closer to myself. and this isn’t even my final form.
stay brave.