Ink and Vein

As we come up on the change in the calendar year, it’s only natural, I suppose, to reflect on the past year.

Since time really is a construct, my past year feels like it includes large parts of 2023, even if the calendar doesn’t.

On that version of the calendar, my past year includes ending my academic career, committing myself to pursuing a life in alignment with my values, and rediscovering my identity as a writer.

My past year includes new friendships, new experiences, new possibilities, new places, and a reopening of my heart, a learning to be vulnerable.

My past year includes a belief that I had found a place to belong, found people to grow and build community with, people to experience and make art with.

It wasn’t really a year. It was only a few months before pieces of this new belonging, this new vision, started to disintegrate.

It started with no longer feeling comfortable going to one of my hangout spots, and continued with a falling out with a friend. I realized it was false, the sense of community I had, because as soon as I left the space, I no longer saw or heard from the people that meant so much to me.

The disintegration continued when I was ejected from a space where I felt comfortable, useful, safe, and wanted. My attempts to get back into the space failed, and I learned I had imagined my place there to mean more than it did.

Friends I spent a lot of time with sort of disappeared from my life, people I cared deeply for felt out of my reach and I spiraled a bit, feeling lost, feeling foolish. I felt like I had imagined my feelings of belonging, felt like I could lift right out of the lives of people I envisioned a future community with, felt like I had inserted myself into a space and was merely tolerated—a familiar feeling for me.

During all of this, I was trying to write my book, and I was writing it, but my energy was going to everyone and everything but myself. I took the opportunity of this community disintegration to reevaluate how I was spending my time, and where I was putting my energy.

I adjusted, redrew my boundaries, recalled my energy, and reformed community with some of the same pieces, and some new ones. I started to feel good again, but it still felt unsteady, like my world would crumble at any moment.

Part of this is the result of writing a trauma memoir, and part of it is confronting partially healed wounds from past relationships, past experiences, and a lifetime of feeling on the outside, of feeling unwanted, feeling like I needed to earn my place and prove my worth.

Part of it, too, is the events actually taking place. In reality, I know that I am cared for and wanted, but I struggle to feel secure in that knowledge, struggle to feel like I won’t lose that care and love. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel secure. I feel myself putting up walls in anticipation of the hurt that might be coming.

In the past months, I’ve been working with a friend to launch our first project with our independent press, Hysteria Heart Press. I’m excited about this project, about the possibilities, and so enriched by the collaboration, the alignment of vision, the passion we both share.

I feel a growing confidence and assurance in my creative voice, in my writing, in the shape my book is finally taking.

And yet I feel so unsteady.

It’s an interesting contradiction: the ability to feel steady and stable in myself, even though I feel unsteady in the rest of my life.

On my ribcage, I have blue and purple lotuses tattooed with the words “at ease in muddy waters.” I got it in graduate school, an aspirational concept, to be at ease in myself when everything else was in turmoil.

This clarity of self even while everything around me is murky is so unfamiliar, I don’t fully trust this clarity yet, don’t fully trust myself, but I’m getting there.

Whatever the past year(s) brought, and whatever the next year(s) bring, I have at least accomplished this one thing: I’ve come closer to trusting myself and moving into alignment with who I really am.