It’s interesting to me how life manages to repeat in so many ways yet still be so different.
Twenty years ago I was going through a period of significant discovery, starting to truly learn who I was on some fundamental level as an adult for the first time, and getting plenty of things wrong in the process. I was experimenting with my identity and almost grasped some of my identity as a non-binary person before I was led astray for many years. I was still doing circus arts, and chasing my dream, but I was struggling to stay afloat.
Ten years ago I was reinventing myself, escaping an extremely toxic and harmful relationship, relearning my boundaries, trying to find a way to live that was true to who I am, learning about the family I had become a part of. By this point I was so deeply moved by the stories of Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu series that I would regularly refer to myself as Har. I had also finally decided (for that time) that hell or high water that I would find a way to escape IT work.
Another ten years brings us to the present, and I find myself in another period of deep upheaval, different but similar. I found myself back in IT work as my way of trying to support those I love. I am again relearning about myself. It’s poetically ironic in a way, I moved away at points from my connection to Wraeththu over the years, and now I find myself being drawn back in unexpected ways. I committed myself to many, and been betrayed by some. I’ve hurt and been hurt. Yet I am no longer a stray, I have a forever family, I have something greater than myself that I serve. I find myself at an inflection point where I am asking myself “What do I want to be doing with my life?” In many ways the answer to that question is already in me.
I want to make the world a better place, I want to help people get to where they need to be, and I need to be true to myself in how I do it. They are straightforward and simple sounding answers, but they are far from easy answers, because now that I have those, the question that is most pressing is the “How do I make that happen?”
In a very dramatic(but unfortunately accurate) view, I am covered in scars from my journeys over the decades. The majority of them from trauma of the situations that I survived, some of them physical that those experiences left permanent impacts in how my body operates. There have been more than a few times that I’ve questioned whether those scars were too many for me to find a way forward. But the truth is despite my body being much weaker than it once was, it is still far more durable than I give it credit for. I may not be unharmed, but I have survived things the would crush many people, and I think that is worth acknowledging.
All the same though I do not have the same spark of youth that I once did. I live my life with it often feeling like my bones are empty and I’m filled with vacuum. Not insurmountable but it’s a delicate dance to work with the limited amount I have. If I listen to the song inside me it tells me that I need to take a rest, that I need to recover so I can regain my strength, but there are many that I now support that need me to keep doing what I’m doing.
I desperately want to have a satisfying resolution. A solution that wraps up these questions & problems and solves them gracefully. A map that I can confidently point to that says “I’ve got it figured out and things will be ok.” Truthfully that is not the time I live in. Akin to some novel about travel I do have waypoints that can act as guides. I don’t know what order they will arrive, or how I’ll discover them, but important all the same.
- Rediscover how to live. Especially in discovering my joy.
- Find my voice. In many ways it feels like I can only whisper when it is time for me to speak for now, and I know it’s waiting to be found again.
- Get back in touch with the compass inside me, and holding true to it even when it is hard
- Find the way of making a living that is actually in harmony with who I am, and where I need to go.
These aren’t all the answers. There will be stars to discover on the new horizons I find myself at that will guide me as well, but that’s part of the journey. I believe there is room for hope, even if I can’t yet imagine what my life will be like in the future.