“Stand a Little Less Between me and the Sun”

SOLANUM: As a child, I considered such unknowns sinister. Now, though, I understand they bear no ill will. The universe is, and we are.

SOLANUM: I am ready.

I’ve been experiencing a lot of trauma recently. Or at least, being confronted with my own past trauma, that is. Coming to terms with it.

I’m a week back from Japan, most of that post-travel daze having been spent sick—whether from jet lag, hormones, general exhaustion, the flu going around, the absurdly relentless storms and air pressure changes in California, or all of it, or what, who knows. Suffice it to say, my equilibrium has been off, my sleep schedule egregious, and my mind, wild.

But I’ve also not been anxious, not in the panicked and physical way that I’m prone to, that I know best. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a slow work season to ease back into, and more than anything, I made a deal with myself to simply listen to my body for once, and not worry about the “consequences” of letting it dictate my doing one thing or another. Feeling like napping? Take a nap, sleep through most of the day if I need. Wake up at 2:30 a.m.? Don’t worry about it, stay up and finish reading a book and trust I’ll find the time to sleep later. Want to eat cookies but not move? Pay the delivery fee, eat most of a batch until I feel a little sick.

What has unfolded in that time has been a bit unpleasant to be fair—I’m still sick (though decidedly on the mend), and it’s been a different kind of unmoored than it felt to be in Japan, but I’ve felt unmoored all the same. And yet through the frustration of being ill, and the nagging sense that I am “losing time” to it, my brain has done me the curious favor of working through a lot at a serious pace.

I suppose this isn’t surprising though, right? Give yourself enough space to mend and you probably will. I just didn’t realize I was setting out to do this, so my conscious brain is catching up to the gift I chose to give myself. Because I knew on some level I needed all of this. Japan has been my dream trip since I can remember, but I saved it intentionally until I had enough time and money and felt like I was “ready” to do it in the way that would feel ideal to me, when I would be able to go no-holds-barred and just exist there in fully glory. In unfettered happiness, really.

And that’s what the trip was. It was two of the best weeks of my life, a culmination of more things than I will get into here right now but which together made those sixteen days life-changing in no hyperbolic sense.

In Japan I was free. I was the best version of myself, and I was able to know and do what I wanted at any given time, to cultivate a space and time that belonged to me and that no one could take away from me. (My husband came along and I was happy to make time for the things he wanted to do throughout our time there, but he in kind knew how much this sojourn meant to me and largely deferred to me in our itinerary. Grayson, thank you as always).

I’ve had consistent issues, for quite some time now, with people-pleasing and setting boundaries, to the point that I have trouble even identifying what I want at any given moment; I struggle to separate what I actually, personally feel versus what I am tacitly compelled to do by my read of others or by the context of optimizing a given situation. I wasn’t always like that, I can distinctly remember a “before” time, but for what seems like ages now I’ve felt the need to succeed and in doing so, right so many wrongs of my past by overpowering challenges and proving my worth to everyone in a misplaced I-told-you-so to a few. A few, it’s worth noting, who will never care, will never love or regard me like I want them to, will never feel sorry, and will likely never even know about this personal years-long crusade of mine to “undo” the pain of inadequacy or hurt I’ve carried for too long.

That’s everyone though, right? I’m not special, nor do I care to be (not in this regard anyway). Everyone goes through this. Everyone carries the unseen weight of thousands of singular moments whose memories insist on themselves over the more joyful and mundane ones we wish would take precedence. I wrote of a certain character (and think about it often) that "she was small and pained, she hid secrets in the lines of her skin and grief in her lungs and told no one.” That character of course is grounded in part in me—people generally don’t write novels from a place of detachment. (Or if they do, I can’t imagine those books end up being particularly compelling).

So while this tendency to cultivate pain is a shared human highlight, the way we deal with it or don’t is a complicated and personal—and I’m sorry to use this word, but here we are—journey. Another human thing, a right of passage in our maturation if we’re lucky enough to care that much about ourselves and strong enough to face it: healing.

We think we’re healing all the time, and we are trying, surely. We make conscious decisions so many times a day, every single day, in order to feel good, to carve out a life that makes existence bearable and even fun. But have you ever experienced a fundamental shift all at once? I don’t know that everyone has, and to be clear I don’t think it’s better or worse than experiencing a gradual unmarked shift, or a series of shifts (or god forbid you’re just happy, truly and simply happy, and require no such shifts—I am thrilled for you). I only ask because that’s what happened to me in Japan and in its immediate aftermath, and I find it rather astounding.

Astounding enough to wake up at barely five in the morning and dump this out all at once however imperfectly because I finally found the way to articulate what I’ve been turning over in my head for what amounts to the better part of a month now, and it feels revelatory.

Japan—Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hakone to be precise, because how annoying are we when we refer assuredly to an entire country of which we’ve experienced only the tiniest bit—cured me. Not of everything, because rest assured I’m a flawed, introspective person happy to be on a perpetual self-growth trip for as long as I get to breathe, but I’ve been given the extraordinary gift of being able to finally let go of my attachment to a few fundamental wounds that I’ve nursed and compensated for for some fifteen plus years now.

That’s wild to even write, to sit here (lie here? I’m in bed, it’s dark, I woke up compelled) and say “I’m free of this and that,” but I am. The time and space and volition and freedom I gave myself on my dream vacation and in the subsequent jet-lagged flu-ridden week filled me and changed me. I set up that trip to do something to that effect so I’ll not shortchange myself in pretending this is all purely serendipitous, but the extent to which getting to be myself—and my happiest self—completely and for long enough permeated everything in me and so deeply, is remarkable and moving and I will think about this I’m sure in far more nuanced and intelligible ways for years to come.

But for now, because this part starts to get difficult to explain, I’m in danger of rambling, and I don’t care to actually air the specificities of my past pain here, I’ll simply bring this back to the fact that I have carried a lot, in so many ways, that has slowly and insidiously broken me down and twisted the ways I approach certain parts of my life. And I find now that I simply don’t feel like carrying it anymore. I am tired of the sins of my past, whether their dealing hand was mine or someone else’s, insisting on their right to not only live within me—because they will, always, and I welcome that as a complex and storied person—but to also dictate the way I view and navigate life at the expense of my ability to trust in and love and value myself.

I’ve been actively working towards and creeping up on this “decision” to heal and let go and move forward for some time now; I’ve gone to therapy and meditated and journaled and run a ton of miles and practiced consciously interrogating why I do things and drunk too much and drunk nothing and briefly tried anti-anxiety meds, and and and and and. So my overseas trip and its immediate aftermath aren’t simply some eat-pray-love party that magically changed me over the course of three weeks, but they certainly served as a beautiful finale to a symphony of self-actualization.

I woke up this morning as usual from a vivid dream—they are a hallmark of my life as long as I can remember—but today with the kind of clarity and roundness of feeling that comes in the aftermath of subconscious puzzle-solving, in the way that only the most fantastically productive processing dreams can offer. (The brain is really something, no? It will never cease to amaze me). This morning I could see the threads of my life relative to a few profound experiences that were deeply upsetting to me, that I have wrestled with since high school and thereafter and which snowballed and attracted subsequent similar traumas big and small. Little deaths (not in the fun way) that I’ve spent years identifying correctly and analyzing rationally to a fault, but never emotionally enough to free myself from gravitating towards them and courting them in misguided attempts to rewrite their echoes and thus myself.

This morning I felt the pain bloom in my chest, and I said goodbye. I said I forgive you. I said I love you, the versions of you I have created, and the versions of me I have created. I choose me, and faith in people and in the tapestry of a life that tends towards goodness and happiness.

There are so many things I want to say about all of this, and myself, and the way brains and people and I work, but I think I’ll have to save those for other times and spaces, and excuse myself from the need to make this particular meditation on self perfect in its execution.

I am homesick (wc? But I don’t know how else to describe it) for Japan and who I was there; I’ve spent a week going through photos and feeling visceral pangs in revisiting a space that was everything to me, of feeling desperation already to get back and abject fear of not being able to (how will I afford to make it a yearly thing, how will having kids impact my planning, and so on), and trying to figure out how to transition into sharing more about that trip with people when it impacted me in a way that is so much more than what I could communicate with posts about the joy of convenience store food and new year wreaths and tiny individually packaged towelettes—though make no mistake, those are in fact glorious and impactful.

I know that who I was in Japan is really who I am everywhere, and I know that the gifts that trip gave me are ones I have taken home with me in my core and ones that I sought out however unconsciously in the first place, but I’ve had to spend days mulling over the extent to which I am a different person now—for the better—from who I was before the trip, and to internalize it, let alone articulate it. I folded in on myself, wrapped myself in a blanket on the couch for days and tried to just...be.

Perhaps it sounds silly but I can’t help but feel like getting sick upon my return has been something of a molting phase, a congested chrysalis, the final and necessary part of a vital transformation. A come-down and a come-up, it’s all the same.

Because what I mean to say with all this, what I woke up today finally with words for and why it feels important to share even if this is mostly for me, is simply that I have found peace in a way that has been a longtime coming, and which is really lovely to behold and to get to just sit with, and feel—for however long it lasts.

I hope some small bits of it radiate out and reach you too, and I am looking forward to seeing what happens next. Happy new year, I love you.

Credit where credit's due: The title of this post is from Disco Elysium, and the opening quote is from Outer Wilds; both are games you should play. Featured photo is one I took at teamLab Planets in Tokyo this past December.