Now What?

Sitting on a ledge waiting for the whisper...

My writing has been all over the place lately.

I’ve been doing the deed, penning what’s come to mind, committed to getting down and out what’s been swirling about. But, I can feel the frenetic energy of it, the angst. It’s not going anywhere, not building towards anything. Swirling.

In a recent piece by Abby Maslin, she mentioned the memoir author, Jessica Kingley, who gave an interview indicating her regret over using up all of her life’s hardship in her first book. That comment stayed with me as while I have by no means shared all of my trauma and tragedy on the page yet, I do feel I have used up some of the more low hanging fruit. And by used up, I mean that I have wrung all of the meaning off of those trees. I’m out of juice when it comes to joy, particularly after tragedy.

When I interviewed Jessica Buchanan for my Fascinated series, she told me that she feels like she’s completed the growing part of post-traumatic growth. The publication of her book, How to Survive Survival, felt like an end to that PTG era. What’s next remains to be seen, but she called it “post traumatic expansion,” a term I had never heard but which has also embedded itself in my brain.

I might be swimming somewhere between the two, no longer tethered to the tragedy of my mother’s death but not yet having slogged myself all the way from the canyon to the mountaintop. I do notice that the air on my skin feels cooler as I ascend. I can breathe without gasping. I no longer feel the desperation of just needing to get up…up…up. In fact, the blood pumps hot in my veins, my heart is finally beating at full capacity, and my legs anticipate the lactic acid of a steep pitch.

There’s still a climb ahead. And as much as I want to join Jess in the ascension, which sounds way more appealing than the growth part, I’m not there yet.

Which brings me back to the swirling. I’m metaphorically pacing, not quite stalling, exactly, but gathering energy. Over the past several months, I’ve been observing, watching, learning the landscape. I could stop here, that much I know, and it would be considered a success. In fact, nobody but me would likely know if I didn’t make it to the top; it could be my little secret. And that thought is appealing. I’ve worked so hard to get my head above the trees. That could be enough. I keep telling myself that it might be enough.

Except, I know it will not be enough. And I am equal parts grateful for a personhood that keeps pushing and pissed off that I cannot be pacified with part way.

Growth is an expansive process by nature. The intent is to keep growing until we reach our full capacity. Growth is stunted only by external forces; when left to its own devices, an organism will achieve its cellular maximum. All that to say, I know I have it in me to summit. I just have to get all the other shit out of the way first.

One of the things that keeps me swirling is that I’m not entirely sure what that shit is. I could guess, but every time I go poking around its edges, willing to open the internal box I’ve shoved it in, my intuition smacks my hand and whispers, “Not yet.” So, if its not that, little lady, what is it? What is next to tackle? I feel ready. I’ve hydrated, fueled, cleaned up a little. I’m doing a Rocky bounce on the side of a mountain. Let’s fucking go!

“Not yet,” she insists.

And so I pace, uncertain exactly how to get off this ledge and reengage the climb.

Now what? Waiting for a whisper…

Up to this point, I knew what the North Star was, the guiding light to follow, the thing I needed to build a relationship with in order to fight my way out of the canyon.

Joy.

But I had a long way to walk, and after spewing horrible sentences at joy as I sweated my way up, I finally succumbed to her quiet presence. Much like my husband, she just wouldn’t go away, and so at some point, instead of an accusation of abandonment, I issued I an invitation for her to walk with me. She took my hand, squeezed, and matched her stride to mine. As the path wound upwards, she’d come and go as she pleased, but I took heart in trusting that she’d always find me, her footfalls steady, right at the hardest parts of the journey.

Joy and I are buds now, “besties”, as my daughter would say.

So, who’s going to walk with me to summit? I expect they’ll need a thick skin because I cuss like a sailor when I’m in pain and anger will always precede any other emotion and hang on for all its worth. Not an enticing invitation.

But I need someone to raise their hand. I can’t do this alone.

More and more these days, I find myself going quiet. My husband notices, and always worried that he’s missed something he should have seen, he’ll ask gently, ready to disengage or duck if I come out swinging in response.

There’s nothing wrong, per se. I’m not thinking about anything in particular. I honestly don’t even know what I’m doing.

Maybe I’m listening. Shutting down the noise so I can hear intuition’s whispers.

But it’s because I want her to tell me where to go, damnit! I need her to point me in a direction and release me. The ledge that once felt like Heaven now feels like purgatory, a perpetual “almost” where I hover above despair but am being prevented from pursuing peace.

It’s like I’m sitting crisscross apple sauce in forced meditation, gritting my teeth while trying to coax an answer into my brain. I know it won’t work, which pisses me off even more, but I have nothing new to say because we’ve been through all of that before, so until I can go explore the next pitch, I’m stuck swirling around the same shit.

And so I’m quiet. Because I don’t have anything nice to say, and at least I’ve finally learned that when that happens, its better to say nothing at all.

So, please accept my apology.

I know its been hard to follow the Joy Luck Club lately, at least if you’re here in pursuit of joy. We’ve pingponged from hope to the bright side to death to decisions all in the span of a month. I feel the whiplash; my own neck aches. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you. You probably don’t know whether to start your Wednesday with a stiff espresso, a honey lavendar latte, or a Xanax and a bottle of vino.

I feel ya.

The good news is that I’m so tired of swirling that I couldn’t even come up with anything random to write about this week. The bad news is that there’s still no clarity to the whispers, so the standing still continues.

I have lived enough years now to promise you one thing. I will not go walking in a random direction, and especially not to spite the wind. Historically, waiting this long would have necessitated an action on my part, and I would have haughtily set off on the path less taken only to find out the reason is that only idiots take that path because it is meant for bears, and if I don’t get eaten first, I will get lost bushwhacking through brush wasting a crap ton of energy only to emerge back where I started.

Nope, I’m committed to staying put until I hear something more certain. I now know that the Universe tests my weakest muscles first. And patience is by far my most atrophied asset.

So, while I sit, I will do my best to regale you with reading that’s not just randomness. I don’t know what that is yet, but I’m thinking we might go for some humor. This summer seems to be a comedy of errors on so many fronts that a little laughter seems apropos.

At the very least, it will help kill the time.

If you feel like you’re swirling around something but you don’t know how or what to get to it yet, pop a squat and pull up a dirt chair next to me. And maybe tell me about it in the comments below 👇.