Traversing the subconscious
Feels kind of like dreaming
While your awake
Like being half submerged
In about ten memories at once
And at the same time
feeling
as if you are in some post-apocalyptic world
dry heat frying up all comfort
And nothing is familiar
The world is ending
And the truth is that it is
Because you are transforming
Transitioning into someone else
You are inside the chrysalis
Your eyes can only widen at darkened walls
While shadows run across the outside of the shell
You find yourself lost in
Morphing into a new being
All you can do is witness
Stay present
Watch it all unfold
Watch those thoughts like they’re passing cars
Watch for the red ones
Pray for the blue
Encourage the green
And meditate on the yellow
Zoom zoom zoom they go
Can you slow them down?
Can you whisper as they go past…
‘They are just thoughts, I still love you.’
?
I’m realising that the reason I’ve never allowed my writing to be public
To get published
Is because I have been so terrified of criticism
Of being strung out
Brutalised, bullied and beaten
Prodded onto a raised dais like a circus lion
While an audience boos
So afraid I’ve been
That I’d lose myself in the pain
That I’ve only ever let myself
Inch by inch
Be seen, be heard, be witnessed
Perhaps it’s something about stumbling into thirty
I hid all this time believing, that if I hid,
I couldn’t be seen,
I couldn’t be criticized, Crucified and humiliated
Except that I am finally beginning to understand
that I can choose
All this time I’ve just eaten it up
Whatever anyone has wanted to throw at me I’ve just caught it
Without question
I’ve swallowed it whole
Ingested it personally
Accepted my inferiority,
my weaknesses
and other’s observations of me as fact
for what feels like the first time
I’ve stopped eating up
whatever has been given
I can choose to love myself enough to love them beyond the face they wear,
the pain they carry,
the opinions they parade
I can choose to walk that one little step beyond my own pain
To see their wounds, to see my own
To not squirm and run but hold us both in the uncomfortable words
The uncomfortable judgements
That they have let sprout all over them like a personalised fungus and thrust at me to see
‘Here’, they say, ‘take this, I grew it for you.’
And all this time I did
But with this swimming
That I’ve been doing
In my unconscious
I’ve realised I’m allowed to say no
To let people, keep their opinions
To unconditionally love them
The way we all wish we could be
And what if that is my job
And what if that is where my true power lies?
To be vulnerable,
to speak truth even if it’s only truth for that precise moment
and trust
that whatever comes next will heal us both
Myself- the world- each every fucking individual here
Because loving myself through my idiocy, laziness, weakness, anger, pain and jealousy
Is teaching the rest of my fellow humans the exact solution to all of the pain it causes
Compassion