Returning to Myself (I am, as I always am)
How many times can a life crash down all around someone? Is it just the nature of 22 to fall apart again and again? Is this the "finding myself" every post-undergrad falls into? I never finished college, haven't finished yet I guess. I'm going back in the spring.
I had a life path, a career, a loving home. And then I lost it. And I rebuilt the pieces of me that I thought were essentials and I went to Atlanta to recover from my anorexia (for real this time, not half-assed like last time,) and a single overheard phone call smashed the foundation of the new life I was building. I'm on the rooftop of the luxury building I've been set up in for temporary housing in my home city. Everything is the same as it's always been— me on my $150 five-year-old Costco laptop, the fleece PJ pants I stole from my best friend during our junior year, worn out Last Bookstore t shirt 4 sizes too big from the day my adolescence ended— the weight of the world falling off my shoulders and onto a text box. It's comforting to have been doing this for this long. The seasons change, and I stay the same.
I've been writing for as long as I could hold a pen, in notebooks I'd hide in between the slats of my twin sized top bunk, in smuggled scraps of paper hidden in my bra, openly on the desktops in the library of whatever city I'd been deposited in. I've never ever written well. I've never been proud of any of it, I've been published and still my greatest pieces exist on this blog (and the other 3 under different pseudonyms. This one is my baby though, the other ones are more specialized. Specific projects that get a lot more attention and a lot more censorship. Sites that feature pieces that have gone through a whole editing process. I love "Lin Living Life" because it's my most authentic. She's my stream of consciousness placed on the altar for public consumption. She's my sopping wet soul for you to take or leave as you wish. She's all that I am hidden under a flimsy anachronism.) There's something about the way my thoughts rarely make sense when not in black and white. Writing untangles the rats nest inside.
It's 2pm here at the end of the universe. I am, as I always am, content in my current sufferings. I am, as I always am, returning to myself. Everything changes, everything stays the same.
The world is never ending. I think the repeated tragedies and subsequent sunrises of the past 2 years have hammered that into me. I used to lay down in the middle of suburban streets at 4am in some sort of teenage attempt to spit in the eyes of God, now I go on walks and step to the cadence of my heart, reminding myself by keeping pace. "Everything changes, everything stays the same." The muscle may be weaker now post-addiction, post-stroke, but even the murmur itself bears evidence of continuity. I am as I have always been; weak.
Weakness, as a state of being. Cowardice, as an ornament on the mantle. I display my faults in the entryway of my selfhood. I am, I think, unashamed of the man I can never be, the woman I allow myself to be. I cannot purge these defects any more than I can offload my strengths. I am a whole human being, and I'm me. I think this last year of running from myself can testify to that. As much as I long for the life of a herding dog on an Australian ranch, I think I might be able to find peace here too: in my favorite pajamas, on the rooftop, weight of the world on the page.