Halting, Imperfect, and Uncomfortable

Reflecting on 2018 

The day before Winter Break started, I temporarily disabled my social media accounts. I wanted to be fully present over the break, and I needed my time away from work to be spent in gratitude and mindfulness. And it worked. I enjoyed days and nights with friends and family, I went to local events, read two books, completed courses on Shakti and Zen practices, and took way too many pictures of Luna with Christmas ribbons stuck to her. Not scrolling through feeds every day opened up the time I needed to give myself the break I wanted. But as I type this, I know there’s something I’m not saying. There are details that didn’t make their way into my enlightened list of reasons. My writing has always come from a place of sincerity, and perhaps that’s why I have revised this paragraph a dozen times and am still feeling disconnected from it.

Although it was planned, my exit from social media came about more abruptly than I had initially intended. It’s not overly complicated. I had posted something about myself, and when confronted about it, I shut down. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to know what others had been saying about me, and perhaps most importantly, I didn’t want to answer questions in the moment. When I post, my words are deliberate, carefully curated, and convey exactly what I want them to. I pride myself on being able to navigate difficult situations with grace and calmness, and I have an innate ability to solve problems. But if I’m being honest, those situations rarely catch me off guard, and even more rarely are they a direct result of something I said. However, this time it was, and I reacted terribly. I lost focus on the company I was with, I felt cornered and exposed, and rather than talking about the situation, which may have actually been somewhat comedic, I instead became emotionally reactive and temporarily closed my accounts a day early.

When I sat down to write this, I had no intention of including that paragraph. Yet the more I wrote, the more important those details seemed, especially today. A few weeks ago a friend was visiting, and she mentioned the series I started over the summer – the one about the bath, the quote above the entrance to Hell, and essentially how everything I treasured seemed to fall apart in a matter of months earlier this year. Knowing that I had written four parts, she asked why I had never posted the last two.

After the bath, which I wrote about in the second entry, I was at a low point, and I didn’t know what I needed to feel better. Without a lot of thought, I got in the car, turned on the GPS, and drove to a Buddhist camp that I knew was somewhere between Orlando and the Atlantic. I spent the afternoon there, and reflecting on my experience was going to be the third entry, focusing on non-attachment and compassion. The next morning, feeling more spiritually balanced, I went for a run. It was one of those sweaty, tears-streaming-down-your-face runs where you physically push yourself so hard that you feel as though you’re trying to outrun whatever emotional demons are following you. I was only about 20 minutes in, soaked by the salt of my sweat and my tears, when I started feeling better than I had in months. Then, within a matter of seconds, summer storm clouds moved in, and the sky opened and let loose torrential rains. The final entry in that series was a reflection of that stormy run.  

When asked about why I didn’t post them, I told my friend that it was mostly because I didn’t feel the same sense of anger and frustration that I had when I had written them. Writing them made me stronger, and through the growth that happened in the weeks that followed, I no longer wanted to see myself in the pain and state of sadness I was in when I had written them. Even though the final entry showed a somewhat symbolic rebirth, those posts still felt destructive to share. So I never did move them from draft to published.

My intentions when drafting this post, however, were straightforward. I wanted to reflect on 2018. This year has, without a doubt, been the most difficult of my life. Yet it has forced me to become, not a more authentic version of myself, but quite simply, myself. I have learned how to stand on my own, how to define my boundaries, how to finally make peace with my past, how to forgive, how to accept and let go, how to more sincerely admit when I’m wrong, and how to love myself and others without limitations. But it’s difficult to reflect on and write about 2018 because even now, I am still not sure how to remedy the dark and the light that have collided in the last twelve months.

Maybe there isn’t always a way to remedy all these different parts. Maybe they aren’t all meant to connect and fit together in this seamless, reflective way. And as a writer, I choose which parts of myself I want to share, and sometimes that’s complicated. It’s what I realized by not publishing those two incredibly sad posts, and what became blindingly obvious as I sat, flushed with anger, deleting accounts when asked about my personal life over dinner with friends. But if I’m being honest with myself, this isn’t unfamiliar to me.  

Years ago, when I got divorced, there were so many layers. Not only was it a painful and drawn-out separation, but it also became increasingly complicated because I very openly and very publicly came out as a lesbian. Even though I had been in intimate relationships with women for 20 years, and had never identified as straight, I couldn’t talk or write about those experiences without exposing parts of and inviting questions about my marriage, and I wasn’t willing to do that. So after the divorce, and because I wanted to talk freely about being gay, I altered the narrative. I hid all of the wedding albums on Facebook, I deleted the Instagram posts that mentioned my husband, and I made minor edits to the blogs that talked about being married.

I don’t want this to turn into commentary on social media because that’s not what it is. Social media is the current platform, but our unremitting desire to rewrite our stories is nothing new, and that seems even more significant as we welcome a new year. I write for a lot of reasons. It’s always for me, but it’s not only for me. If I needed to journal and find cathartic release, I would. But I don’t. I share parts of my life and my experiences with an audience. My expectation is that someone else will read this, maybe even 1000 someone elses, with the hope that we can somehow recognize universal experiences. For me, that’s what, in the past, has made it difficult for me to know what to share and what not to share, what to hide and what to let be.  If I am going to publish my work for others to consume, then I need to accept that is what is going to happen. There are messy, confusing, and painful parts, but my life, and this year, continues to be filled with love, and awakenings, and opportunities to learn and change and be even better than I was before.

I want all this to connect. I want to show the causal relationships that serve as maps from sadness to happiness, from confusion to clarity, and from darkness to light, but what I’ve realized is that sometimes we don’t go from one to the other. Sometimes we have to accept that we have to backtrack, that certain roads are dead ends. They don’t connect - they don’t lead somewhere else - they are just places we visit, turn around, and then choose a different path. I wish there were a lesson in all this, but I find it satisfying that there isn’t. I set out to reflect on a year, 365 days on a calendar, and I think that’s what I’ve done. I’m not actually sure what this year, or this post, was supposed to be about, but maybe that’s the point. Sometimes it’s halting, imperfect, and uncomfortable. And that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be.