i stopped waiting for rides that never took me home. π
a personal diary on: identity, self trust, and boundaries (a year later)
0. the artifact ::
* ββΉ γ. βΌ . βΉβ *
01 the bus stop ::
one year ago, i was still sitting at the emotional bus stop. literally and otherwise. i remember driving around pretty aimlessly looking for a spot to take self portraits, sweating in 90Β°f Texas summer heat while a friend held my camera for me, a human tripod, if you will. the air was humid, thick around all of us, sitting on my shoulders, in my lungs. the plexiglass of the bus stop walls blocked whatever wind might have graced us on that moody, cloudy, post-rain day. i remember sitting on the bench right away, the metal not cold, not scalding, somewhere in between, tapping my fingertips while she fussed with settings. my body waiting for something to arrive that would make everything make sense again. i knew i was waiting for an apology, but i also knew it would never come. i think i was waiting for repair. or clarity. or someone else to explain why my nervous system felt like it had been dropped off somewhere and forgotten. back then, waiting lived in my jaw. clenched to the max. stress will always find a way to externalize itself if you donβt release the pressure valve yourself every now and then. lesson learned. at the time, i thought i was waiting for the right response. now i think i was waiting for permission to leave.
* ββΉ γ. βΌ . βΉβ *
02 the almost ::
there is a version of me who almost made herself smaller just to stay invited. i have compassion for her, now. she was not weak. she was trying to preserve connections with the info she had. she knew how to be useful, patient, understanding, emotionally generous, readable, agreeable, impressive enough to keep around. but there is a cost to staying invited somewhere your body no longer feels safe.
the bus stopβs awning structure was see-through, but solid. unmoving. unbreathable. between those two glass walls, the air stalled. i sat on that bench forever and ever, in rumination: did i make the wrong choice? i remember feeling like my whole body was twisted up in knots that day, and you can see it in the photographs. the tension. the anxiety. the grief, the withdraw. anxiousness, like i had missed my bus or forgotten something important, an appointment, a birthday, or myself.
feeling disconnected is a liminal kind of loss. the feeling of a misstep on a stair, or knowing something is gone, but not knowing exactly what it was. i remember feeling overly attached to spaces where i was having to sand off the edges of my own truth and emotions, simply because i was too honest for the room. a glass cage, squeezing out the breeze, squeezing out the air, nothing left inside except me and stretched truth. eventually, the invitation starts feeling less like connection and more like a leash.
* ββΉ γ. βΌ . βΉβ *
03 the boundary ::
the boundary did not feel powerful at first. it felt awful. it felt like shaking hands, looping thoughts, checking for signs, wondering if i had misunderstood my own pain. self-trust did not arrive as a confident woman in perfect lighting. it arrived as panic. it arrived as me asking myself the same question twenty different ways and still knowing, somewhere under the noise, that i could not keep abandoning myself just to keep the room calm.
when youβre walking around in a daze, disconnected from yourself, agency feels weird. it is easier to stay familiar. easier to keep waiting. easier to wither away quietly than admit the thing you were attached to might also be the thing making it harder to breathe. which is why you have to chop away at those attachment roots, sometimes. anything to fight your way back to yourself.
maybe i shouldnβt have made a public display of my own lesson based around shared pain. or maybe i was just trying to escape the mental suffocation. i was surviving. i did what i could think to do at the time. and maybe that is the uncomfortable honesty of it all: i was waiting for the day where verbalizing a boundary didnβt have my body sweating, shaking, and bracing itself. maybe that day had to start here.
* ββΉ γ. βΌ . βΉβ *
04 the walk back ::
the walk back was not romantic... it was journaling when i wanted to spiral. taking a bath before psychoanalyzing every one of my feelings. writing social media captions as a way to transmute grief, because words were the only place the emotion could move without swallowing me. making art out of what i could not explain properly yet.
journaling brought me back home to myself. The Artistβs Way saved my sense of autonomy. running nature trail runs regulated my nervous system. photography and art made my troubles feel small in the moment. not gone. not solved. just small enough to carry.
once i stopped waiting for permission to create? inspiration opened up to me freely. it felt like creative abundance. not all of my ideas landed, but i sure as hell made and shipped a bunch of things. slowly, the center of my life stopped being the room i lost access to and started becoming the rooms i was building for myself.
it was a slow burn, and then a firestorm. pent up self-abandonment released as hurt, rage, disillusionment, and finally, movement. so many of those βpastβ mistakes are beginning to resurface, transformed into something new and more aligned with who i am now.
* ββΉ γ. βΌ . βΉβ *
05 self trust is the strategy ::
a year later, self-trust is quieter than i expected. sometimes it is tiny actions of agency and autonomy: like not checking, not shrinking. not over explaining. not mistaking grief as evidence i made the wrong choice.
when i look at the images now, i see the writer in me even a year ago was wanting, begging, to externalize itself. the yellow text is crazy to see now, as someone who keeps seeing yellow everywhere as a sign of alignment and synchronicity*.
and sometimes self-trust is letting the old poem stay exactly as it was because my past self deserved somewhere to put the pain. preserving old art instead of archiving it feels nostalgic, cathartic, and exactly my brand of healing. i look at the image now and only now realize: oh, she was already on the path home.
β©Β°γβ synchronicity defined as inspired by The Artist Way book by Julia Cameron ::
* synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence where an internal shift seems to echo in the physical world as tiny evidence. a color repeating. a phrase finding you. an old image suddenly meaning something new. an artifact returning later as proof that some part of you already knew.
* ββΉ γ. βΌ . βΉβ *
06 journal prompts
maybe that is what the year after has been teaching me: not every feeling needs to stay raw inside the body just to prove it was real. some feelings can become images. essays. voice notes. long walks. quiet boundaries. new rooms. a life that feels more honest than the one i was trying so hard to keep access to. a focus on becoming someone who knows what she protected by walking away. the creativity is in abundance now that belonging no longer requires self-abandonment.