The oceans between my ribs

I used to go swimming often, around the same time mulberries would start to ripen and colour the ground beneath it. Dreaming up dragons and fanciful stories that I can’t remember. All I recall is that deep feeling of serenity that came with floating on the surface, warmed by the afternoon sun. It feels like a lifetime ago and the things that are clearer to me, feel a lot less calm.

I am waiting for hindsight to be less unforgiving, for a gracious light to be cast over things I can’t change until the details blur and the edges soften. But the way memory works is strange and cruel. It stains the way those mulberries stained your soft cotton handkerchief when you were young. You have to wring your life out, between your fists and soak it in cold water. You have to agitate it until the suds turn colour and then you try to breathe again.  A day or so in the sunshine, that’s all it takes sometimes.

I’m expecting a letter soon.

 An email, to be more precise. I wrote it on some dreary June night at some point in the last two years (I can’t remember when) but I’m expecting it to pop up in my inbox soon. It’s a thing I do, you see, I send future versions of myself emails** and pour my honest soul out when I feel conflicted and lost. When I just need to tell myself something or tell someone and not feel like I am burdening them with heavy pieces of my soul, unnecessarily.  

And in the next week, I will get the first one. From a younger version of me who was probably just reaching out and wanting to hold something that only becomes tangible much later. I can’t remember what I said. Usually, these get tangled in the memories of late night exam revision or buried beneath deeply stressful things that I bury and move on from.  I can’t even expect the softened edges or the rosy haze because it would be a voice, clear and raw. And she would have had a lot on her plate at the time. Messy circumstances and a heart that did not know itself. I have these emailed lined up for years to come. At my deepest valleys and on the peaks of my tallest mountains, they have been quickly typed and sent to a random date and forgotten about.

They are markers along a path I forgot I had taken. There are letters from the broken girl, the euphoric girl, the girl in love and the girl dipped in hate, the girl who prayed and the girl who could not remember to because she was terrified of the looming exam.

 Letters about the oceans that exist between my ribs and people who have drowned there. The oceans where I had sunk down into, trying to reason with myself and the tides that wore the jagged rocks down, eventually. The oceans where flotsam and jetsam of shipwrecked regret float. Those things tossed overboard in times of distress. 

 Letters about dying and then blooming again. Pleas to a future self to make things right again. And: I did. I made some of it right. And that was the point, wasn’t it? In writing those “I hope you love yourself deeply by the time you read this”, it was the possibility that the version of myself who read it would have those things I deeply wanted for myself at that dark moment. All the questions and hypotheticals and fears I couldn’t quite address – they are all monsters I have named now.

Whatever the letter says, I know I made some of it right, eons before I fathomed it would be possible. Conquered dragons I did not know the names of, but I know them now. I have wrung my life out until the colour ran clear.

** The service I use to send emails to myself can be found at www.futureme.org

Out of the valley, finally.

I did something out of the ordinary this weekend, stepped out of my little life and my little worries. I went to a place I had been to before (in the technical sense but also a place my soul had been before) and I discovered a part of myself I thought couldn’t exist. I went to Splashy Fen for the music but I walked away with a profound sense of joy and wholeness. 

This post will not be about the festival itself and will definitely be about a very personal thing that happened to occur during it (but the music and overall experience was phenomenal).

When my mother was pregnant with me, around 21 years ago, she went to this same festival and was terribly ill with morning sickness- I’ve always loved that story. I’ve wanted to go for such a long time, my parents and my uncle used to go and it became a mythical thing I remember in my childhood. My uncle coming back with dreamcatchers and little trinkets for my sister and I, his t-shirts that had various years on the back with the lineup. This year seemed like a good time to go, the bands were some of my favourite ones, I felt like I needed to go to something so far from my comfort zone.

It’s been a strange few months for me: I ended my (almost five year long) relationship, I’m in my final year of my law degree and I’m really on a journey of rediscovering and redefining who I am. I went through a phase of having fragile mental health and I’ve done so much healing and I’ve made so many changes to get to this wonderful place I’m in now. It seems unrelated to the music festival but I assure you, they are closely connected. They’re just the context for this revelation I had.

I used to be this very vibrant, bubbly person, to a large extent I still am but I know that I have this very intense extrovert side of me that had stepped into the shadows for a while. I accidentally found that pool of euphoric joy that I know I have in endless reserves, I found it while I was staring at the mountains and I found it with my arms raised as we danced under a large white tent while it rained. I found peace on Good Friday when I walked to the rocks near our campsite and prayed a small prayer. That prayer was gratitude for the lessons I have learned in the last few months and the little blessings that come when I feel so isolated and dejected.

I stopped a few times, in the middle of the crowds and the sway of the music, to take stock of how wonderful it all was. To be present and to feel like I was in control of my destiny again. The anxieties didn’t follow me up the mountains and even if they creep up again, there is this new strength I have. There is the realisation that in trying to be too much for too many people, that I forgot to pursue my own joy and this process of coming back to myself involves holding my happiness in my hands, selfishly guarding it. The air that filled my lungs and the grass that tickled my feet fortified my soul. I didn’t believe a friend of mine who told me I would be different when I came back.

Connecting with strangers is something I do well. I love meeting new people, I met a group of people that became so close to me in such a short time. I laughed with strangers in lines for a shower and I met a friend from Twitter who felt like someone I had already known for years. I poured my heart and soul into it. And I know that if I hadn't made the choices I made to go and to take that risk, I wouldn't have been in such a rare and wonderful place. I will return to my life but I see things differently now.

For a long time, I believed that I could be content with being a duller version of myself, that I was “too much” to be loved as I am and I let the fiery parts of my soul cool to soft embers. I accepted a lot of things to be true of myself but they weren’t. I never questioned it because it felt like it had always been that way. It wasn’t and I am a better person now that I’m learning about myself again. There was a tinge of bitterness when I briefly thought of the Could Have’s but there was no time to mourn things that didn’t happen.

Life is too short for regretting choices we didn’t know we made. I’ve savoured the choices I’ve been making for myself lately, wallowed in the contentment of walking my path with fierce determination. I waded into an icy river and felt the sun kiss my shoulders and my soul whispered that all was well.

I spent a lot of time staring at the stars, the Milky Way became breath-taking in this dark, isolated part of the world.  It illuminated the sky in a way that we don’t see in the city. And now, when I look up at the sparse stars that stay bright enough to light up the sky here- I will remember that there is so much more out there. I will remember that there is so much more to me than I think.

We sat on the banks of a river and I wove a bracelet from the reeds that drank from the clear water. The reeds were bent and braided into a loop, it is drying now and will be kept in a box. I might smell it and fill my lungs with the sweet scent of the mountain when I forget that I am so strong and that my light is blinding. I will look at it and remember that my heart has a fountain of love and joy to give and that it will not drown me to love myself a little more. I will root my joy in deep rivers and plant reeds of contentment on the banks.

It was rebirth, after laborious months of metamorphosis. I am whole, once again.