Today’s post was written with this stunning song playing on repeat. All art featured today is by Naudline Cluvie Pierre.
Hello y’all,
Thank you for the generous care you have shown me as I share the complex continuation of recovery and healing. It is a salve to feel your companionship, and I take none of it for granted, including the sheer act of reading my posts.
I’m pausing for a moment and leaving those threads hanging, which is something I am learning how to do with more grace these days. How to live unresolved, how to make room for uncertainty, how to trust in a more imaginative unfolding of time than my insecurities often allow.
I began writing my novel again yesterday after setting it down in June 2022, which is a long time to leave 60,000+ words of a novel unfinished. It means I have one-third of a novel written (or two-thirds, according to a kind, new friend, though I’m not convinced) and now the momentum has screeched to a halt and I’m both overwhelmingly far and not nearly far enough simultaneously.
Worry has plagued me for months.
Would I be able to pick it back up again? And how? Should I read what I’ve written to get back into the flow? (Update: I tried that and remembered that editing is much more appealing than the raw, carnal, horrific, beautiful act of writing and I realized I couldn’t get trapped there. I’d never finish! I had to return to that holy and immense act of creation.)
Ok, so do I simply dive in mid-flow and continue as if nothing ever happened? Like meeting an old friend and pressing play instead of rewinding? (Trying that now. Will report back!)
I did make the commitment on summer solstice to *finish* a full draft of it by winter solstice, and now I’m telling all of you. Thank you for holding this prayer with me. All great things are done in community.
Writing a novel is a bit like plunging oneself into a mild version of schizophrenia. I’m remembering what it felt like in 2022. I’m feeling my psyche bend and stretch again to a breadth that can hold the lives of my “characters”, that can make room for their consciousnesses within my own so their lives can unfold with integrity to who they are, which may surprise me, may irritate me, may disappoint me. I get the opportunity to steward their humanity forward, to unlock the stories they are yearning to tell. My novel is specifically about women who built entire worlds without any recognition, whose existences were only known through their very omission in the plot line. (As in: how did he do what he did? Because she was there. Who? Her. Oh, we don’t know anything about her. Right.) They are not victims, they were actively not visibilized in their own lives, and there is a difference.
I’m remembering that things can be left incomplete for as long as they need to. I’m learning in real time that we can always return, amend, arrange, address.
That is what happened with my book. I can feel it. I needed the space in my head to radically rearrange everything about my life starting in August 2022. Now that I am settled, I have cleared some rooms in my mind to invite my characters to move back in. But even though I will complete the book (and hopefully share it widely!), I have released myself from any notion that closure will be found and I feel free.
What is closure anyway but a myth we put faith in?
Isn’t it always a choice to wrangle such a nebulous notion into completion?
Meanwhile, it has its own animacy, its own self-determination.
Perhaps in 8 years you will smell the faintest hint of his subtly intoxicating cologne on the breeze and your knees will quiver and your heart will squeeze, and then in an instant life goes on and you wonder if you made the whole thing up.
Maybe after 5 years since a rupture you will get a text from a new acquaintance that says “I cannot be your friend because of what I heard about you from so and so” and panic broils in your gut, and shock spikes up your spine, and you can’t believe you’re still in high school, where you definitely left those kinds of petty antics behind and said OK. DONE. and then you remember you’re 34 now and your moral character can speak for itself. And then this person decides they actually can be your friend because maybe they shot themselves in the foot on that text, took a bite of that melodrama bait, and upon reading your response (“…two people can struggle to get along but that doesn’t make either one of them unredeemable and maybe there’s more to the story than a simple, one-sided ‘she-said…’”) realized maybe he was presumptuous. Maybe she was unwilling to find closure despite your open-hearted attempts, but no matter how things ended you would never stalk the halls of her life and hauntingly interfere with her burgeoning friendships 5 years later. You thought you said OK! DONE! back then, but it obviously isn’t done.
I read in the comments section of an Instagram post a brief exchange between an author and a fan.
Fan: Will there be a second part of this book? Asking on behalf of my book club. We are all so curious where this will go next!
Author: Thank you so much for reading!! No. The book is complete.
I love this. The audience does not feel closure. The author does. This is a book I need to read. What a fascinating way to press on the edgy, uncomfortable realities of this human experience.
I love writing my book for so many reasons including this one. It is such a portal into play and imagination, into psychological excavation. It is so hard and lonely, but so many worthy investments are inseparable from those qualities.
Today’s post was inspired by the way I woke up this morning. One of those residuous (which is an “archaic” word meaning what it sounds like, and I’m bringing it back, y’all!) relationships I referenced above has been insidiously seeping into the fabric of my life. Just when I think my own sense of closure can blanket the whole experience, I’m CC’d on an email with this person in which I found out that I’m about to share an entire week in the middle of nowhere to move through a very arduous yet hopefully alchemizing and fulfilling experience after a not speaking for 5 years. Life is funny this way. It has its own animacy and self-determination.
But this morning, somehow, unexpectedly, after processing this in a dozen different ways over many weeks - in dreams and in journal pages - I felt liberated. A week ago, I saw a vision of us sitting beside each other by a fire. I felt supremely relaxed in my body, fortified in my spirit, not superior nor righteous but aligned in myself, receptive, grounded. I had nothing to prove. I needed nothing from her. I was un-impacted by her perception of me. In that vision she was a child version of herself. Scared and sad and angry. I couldn’t hear her words, but my heart softened to her.
Today, I felt peace at the thought of seeing her again. I wouldn’t say I feel excited. For the entirety of our “friendship”, old patterning plagued me. She was the cool girl I wanted so desperately to like me - the kind of girl/woman I chased all my life - feeling too Aquarian for my own good, always on the outside. Now I see her own inner wounding bonded to me reciprocally to my own and is still playing out by needing to undermine my new relationships.
I have no desire for relationship with this person, but I can sit around the fire beside her and make room for her humanity without compromising my own.
What matters to me now is how authentically I represent my true self, my big, wisely-boundaried yet un-defended heart, in any and all relationships, no matter what comes at me.
What matters to me is to build relationships with securely-attached compassion, responsible discernment about who and what I invest my energy into, and healthy intimacy that evolves and grows as both of us do.
What matters to me is to be in a place of forgiveness with myself as much as possible, and to forgive others in an ever-unfolding way. Forgiveness is quite possibly one of the most challenging human tasks I’ve encountered. That, and patience. It takes years, lifetimes, to forgive some people, to forgive ourselves.
Forgiveness is an initiation. In a dominant culture fixated on either vengeance and retribution, or avoidance through scapegoating and rejection, the landscape of forgiveness is acutely under-explored. This theme came up consistently in the spring Cultivating Culture course. A resonant theme was the ease with which family members were castigated – whether for a deemed “infraction” of family code or for problematic or intolerable behavior – instead of brought in to the difficult and critical work of counseling one another. We grieved. How quickly we give up on each other.
I think we are culturally conditioned to withhold forgiveness as another manifestation of normalizing extremes within survival paradigms (i.e. capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, militancy, etc). Environments of toxicity are bred by unfelt/unexpressed fear, pain, anger, even basic emotionality. We live with wounds, scabs, and scars caused by those who will never acknowledge their inflicted harm, let alone apologize for it, and we see this at scale – nearly every national leader is a war criminal who will go to their graves without retribution. It’s almost impossible to rise to the top of anything without losing your soul.
In many cases, when the perpetrator of harm is unwilling to witness themselves, maybe due to a complete lack of insight into their own character or an impenetrable self-admiration, the work weighs on the victim/survivor to somehow release themselves from the relentless haunting of an undead violence - the aftermath like a shockwave that can permeate through years or decades of life until it fades into the shadows like a hungry ghost.
I didn't realize how heavy the burden of forgiveness would or could be until some of my most intimate relationships began to demand it from me. I didn't realize how ferociously it would ache to come into full awareness of how much hurt I held from those I loved, and how impossibly distant resolution seemed. How could this be redeemed unless you climbed into my skin, embodied my heart, and felt it yourself? The pain was so vast.
Forgiveness has felt easier to me as I’ve invested in the enabling conditions for my life to thrive.
As I come back more potently into my own wholeness, I actually need not hold anyone in reproach. I can forgive as I would like to be forgiven. I can integrate the reflection of wrong-thinking and wrong-action that are inevitable in this messy human experience. I can say no and yes with clarity. I can actually qualitatively and quantitatively reduce experiences of harm in my life and walk with greater uprightness that minimizes violence in my lived reality — something I didn’t know was possible for many years.
This is what it feels like to close the door on toxic relationships. This is what it looks like to unfollow, disconnect, divest from environments mired in hurt, and to redirect, water, and nurture ecosystems of wellness.
Forgiveness and closure are not mutually dependent.
They are each an act of choice.
They are each a process of emergence.
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