Never the Same Again— | 

I’m entering my fifth month.
No necessity, no work, no accountability, no goal, no future, hardly any contact. I eat, sleep, and fill the day with all kinds of more or less useless things. Which actually makes the question of what is useful loom in front of me like an unconquerable mountain.

For a few months now, I’ve consciously been nothing—though two weeks ago I put communication specialist/author back on my LinkedIn profile.
 Titles. Roles. Words. They never quite capture the weight of a human being. But they give us stability, titles, don’t they?

It feels shaky, a life in which you let everything fall away. Allowing the burnout, the separation, the physical ailments.
The all too usual attempt to patch things up replaced by a deep knowing. Knowing that only one choice would move me forward—or deeper—into my life: integrating what I’d discovered about myself through these uninvited life events.

A phase of realigning my integrity. Accepting, and waiting. Feeling, and wailing. Not being wanted. Not being needed. Not being seen. Scary shit. And a timeline that looks something like this: despair, loneliness, grief, inertia, meaninglessness, digging up the garden, curiosity, understanding, crying, forgiveness, love for life.

Love for life. Yet another platitude.

Just as Instagram drops you from five thousand to thirty views in two weeks when you don’t post every other day, direction and people slipped out of my life as I chose to withdraw into oblivion. That’s not defeat; that’s initiation. The Jung kind of way.

A threshold I know I cannot cross through willpower, only through surrender and faith that somewhere, beyond profile and habits, my wildtype lies dormant.

Beyond love.

Beyond war and femicide and ICE.

Beyond who I was, who I thought I was.

In this fifth month, at times looking despair straight in the eye, I balance myself with my good old mantra: the idea that I am a mere reference point for consciousness. And then I do consciousness a favor—the persistent pleaser that I am—by focusing on something beautiful. A blackbird singing the morning awake. An exquisitely written sentence. A message from my son.