In elementary school, there was a roller-skating rink our school affiliated “skate-nights” with. They used to have a game called “black out.” Even then I was stricken by a boy. Even then the boy I turned out loving, that I married, was there. My first best friend was there. Even though I gained and lost all those people, they were foundations.
The skate hall composed of dozens of disco ball sized bulbs where, like a game of musical chairs, we would skate and when the music would stop we would group ourselves under each light bulb. When the light would go on, if you were under the lighted bulbs, you could proceed to the next round until only a few people won. If you were under the blackouts, you were out. Similarly dim is my memory of it, but I still recall the anticipation. I recall the feeling after you chose the bulb to squat under, so vulnerably small and young. I remember it being exactly the way it sounded: a shot in the dark.
That moment when the music stopped, I can picture my small, awkward, glasses wearing self, crouched alone or with several other kids just before the lights exposed our fate; that moment between your choice and the consequences of it. I remember feeling stuck: hoping good will come, or fearing your decisions were misguided. It was too late to change your mind.
For a while I felt stuck. I felt as though I wasn't progressing at all. Things were really discouraging. I thought I was working hard. My mind was in a million places, so it goes, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t make the effort to show up and keep showing up where it mattered and where I really wanted to be. I knew that when the funk was over I’d be back to myself again: driven, passionate, and certain not to take the paths I knew in my heart weren’t right.
The last thing I intended on publishing, though I made many valid points, I still wasn’t satisfied. Everything felt reiterated from prior posts: don’t give up, chin up, keep going. It felt spent. I wanted to be further along in my progression by now. I wanted to lead with my writing by example. I wanted everything to be better not just to seem better, so I didn’t feel like I could say anything that could inspire. I too was tired of hearing my own words repeated for encouragement.
I went in circles in my mind, debating feeling content where I was, to still hoping for improvement, to, dare I say, considering that I should regret the decisions that got me here. I was playing my very own game of blackout with myself. Of course in my own game, I still have no control of which lights go on. I only have control of which lights I stand under. I read a quote by J.K. Rowling: “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
I procrastinated sharing/analyzing this quote for Instagram, Facebook, blogging etc. irrationally. I was afraid I hadn’t even come close to hitting rock bottom and I was even more terrified what rock bottom would look like; a silly superstition. Another reason I didn’t want to use it is because even if I had hit rock bottom, or even if rock bottom didn’t matter, there was no way I felt any foundation in my life to show for. So, I eagerly waited to use this quote until I was “ready;” as if I were waiting for a light to appear above my head signaling that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
On June 15th, 2019, I began a piece called Self Help Tour:
Justine,
There was a time, there have been many times, where you have had to figure things out. There have been times you couldn’t comprehend your emotions, your existence, or even the events that surrounded your life. For a long time, you believed your soul purpose for existing was to find love (blaming my gender as well as Disney). Now that you have had many very real loves and know in your heart that your purpose is to love again and again, as well as hurt over and over; that love is only a cog in the wheels that give your life purpose.
When love betrayed you, when wellness and nurture betrayed you, you learned to be forgiving and tender hearted. You have learned that your own faults are the ripples of how your own pain has also made you imperfect.
Yes, you so badly want to be just. You want to have a well moral compass, a well mind, you want to be well loved and well nourished, but you know you cannot always rely on others for that. You also know that when you are lacking those things, none of that even matters…
unless you are able to provide them to and for yourself; knowing you are worth all of it.
In your struggles everything seems entirely hopeless and unfair. Times there is more hope than others. Times there seems like there is none. You keep fighting the struggle and “For what?” (constantly rings in your mind).
You’ve lost plenty. You aren’t in an outstanding place. You know things could be worse, but you don’t know if you have what it takes to see how. It doesn’t seem like a matter of if vs a matter of when.
Reflecting all those deep dark emotions though, has always been a flicker of hope. You have this revelation that your hopelessness is the very thing that keeps you going. It keeps you going because at the end of the question, “Could this really be it?”, you know that all things have an equal and opposite reaction. You know that if you are afraid of bottom, you can equally anticipate a top.
Once upon a time you were young and naive to the things that churned your life. You were a teenager cooped up in your room and didn’t know the first thing about love, sex, drugs, adulting, addictions, etc. Still, somehow you became the woman you are now which speaks loudly in doing all of those (and more) healthily and wisely.
You were in a place in your life that you knew was off and wanted so badly to change, while holding onto the things that “needed” to remain the same. That is exactly what you were doing wrong. You are trying dearly to hold onto a constant in an ever-changing reality. Even if one thing changes, then everything is changed. You feel stuck because you are trying to allow change in your life, as you know and knew in your heart is what needed to happen, while you grasped for the only life you knew for seven years to remain the same. How crazy does that sound?
As a teenager, before you experienced all the things you have, you didn’t know the first thing about any of it. Still you created a world of your own to survive, to cope, exercise the things you love, explore your interests, and to maintain balance. You wrote. You wrote until the early hours of the morning. Sometimes you’d dream, imaging the woman you wanted to become.
You won’t disappoint that girl if you have not raced in Nascar; if you have not been to Cairo, or the barrier reefs; if you haven’t ended up with the guy you know in your heart always wanted you. It won’t be a disappointment if you haven’t adopted a child yet, or learned to ride a motorcycle. (In case adoption services reads this, maybe consider rephrasing the last statement.) It won’t even frustrate you because you don’t live in the house you dreamed of designing.
The only way you could disappoint that girl that believed in the woman you are now, is if you don’t allow change to happen in your life. She’ll be disappointed if you keep holding on to her, if you keep holding onto him, if you keep holding on to it or them. She will be disappointed if you don’t stop remembering the girl you were and start believing in the woman you have yet still to become.
So, when you feel stuck or regressed, don’t. because you are not the same as you were before those events happened, nor should you be, and nor will you be. You are here for a reason, to allow change, because that is what it means to be alive: to live based on time and energy.
So rather than wasting time and energy trying to return to something or someone never meant to be returned to, do what you are meant to do and live, change, convert, grow. Believe in the ever-changing possibility of a future, whatever one you may be so fortunate to have for having one at all. Adapt, survive, live, like you have been all this time.
Perfect is a word I have never loved. It is a word extremely challenging to use appropriately in the context of ever so variable realities. So, if the woman you are trying to become is “perfect” you will be seeking for her through greater depths than rock bottom.
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My thoughts I’d like to add to this presently:
I have cried often over my recent love situation. I will continue to. Reaching these conclusions, I had to remind myself that as much as I want to blame myself for the situation I am in and the pain I am in. I shouldn’t. I must realize there really isn’t anyone to blame.
I only wish to love. I only wish to love my old loves, their family, my family, my friends, my old friends. That may cause pain since the ways I must love them now are never going to be in the ways I have loved them before. I knew then that I needed things to change so I allowed them even though sadly it hurt so much. I realized this so deeply this past week that my dreams of ever getting back to what was, conflagrated. From the ashes birthed a new me, a new phoenix.
In my month of feeling “stuck” was the revelation that “I had changed. And that, at least, gave me some hope: that even under ordinary circumstances, I still might find a way to live an extraordinary life.” Ransom Riggs.
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