Those were some days

One of my favourite profs wrote to me tonight to say she's found a file from 'those days.' letters from the foundation, about the runs that were so much more than we knew.

I sat for a moment and thought back to 1998, which seems a lifetime ago. I thought back to a Chevy Malibu, to a sweet studio flat with the 14 foot ceilings and clawfoot tub, to the futon where the Dead Poet had shaken sex into my body, where I would moon over a young love and moonlight in Long Island Sound. 

I thought back to late nights in smoke-filled bars and open-mic poetry nights, to spending money I didn't have on clothes for another life, one that wasn't quite mine. I thought about dirty martinis and trivia nights, 

sitting as still as a rabbit frozen in headlights in an art class, the sounds of charcoal against paper, winter air cold and sharp as glass against my skin.

I thought about the man I nannied for: the revolutionary, the domestic terrorrist, the husband, the liar, the hope-filled visionary, the thief, the grand chief of a movement and how it really is like Garcia Marquez writes in News of a Kidnapping 

I thought about choices and privilege and how easy it would be to judge for the act without knowing the causal tension between being right and the idea of greater good. 

I thought about the masks we wear, the layers of words and sound we wear as armour, the lives we choose, the lives we leave behind and I shake my head, my son asleep beside me.

Yeah. Those were some days. And I thought all that came before: the weight of other people's decisions that I carried with me because I thought it was my responsibility. 

I thought about trauma and looking at the weight and ramifications of trauma and how easy it is to BECOME our traumas.  I mean, c'mon. I'm so much more than a survivor of childhood sexual assault, or university rape, or having an infant die, or having a mom catch on fire. I'm more than a survivor of domestic abuse.  I can stand in the mire and weight of all of these things or I can embrace the gifts that these traumas have imparted to me, my perfect imperfections. What I need now that I am building new neural pathways, now that I am reconnecting my spirit with the vessel that carries it to move beyond the damage. 

I don't want to be what trauma left me with. I am becoming  want to be what trauma has gifted me with; I want to thrive and move forward.  I want to sit at the various summits and basecamps, in the marinas when I need a break or when it is time to recall but not let it pull me under, the weight of a sinking stone.

But yeah. Those were some days.