re: dedication

On my 29th birthday this most recent August, my sister asked me what my theme was going to be for my new birth year. I told  her that I had to think about it because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to usher in or welcome into my last year of my twenties. I soon came to the understanding that I really wasn’t pouring into myself like I actually thought I was. For the last two or three years I really dedicated myself to my mental health, I was exercising everyday (I still do) and I felt like my friendships and familial relationships were in a really good place. Yet, I felt like I wasn’t grounded or had any real commitments in my life whether that be to my passion for writing, being creative or even pursuing romantic relationships. I would often tell my therapist that I was kind of just skimming the surface and that it almost felt like I would dissociate when I would rather be seeking the nuanced joy in many situations. I realized that my birth-year theme was going to be a rededication to self. That word kept coming to me over and over again. Rededication, rededication, rededication. It really felt like Spirit was just whispering this to me. How to rededicate to myself was another issue but that’s how it began, just a word repeating itself in my head like a mantra. That’s how it always starts. I neither felt excited or anxious about the idea, just curious. From the word rededication came the word, renaissance. So, when you combine the two it sort of looks  like committing to self and what benefits me the best yet trying to revolutionize and introduce new ways of doing so. 

If I wanted to rededicate to myself that meant I had to look at what I let fall to the wayside. The main one being my passion for writing. There are a few others such as horseback riding, photography and vlogging as well but writing is the dominate passion I’ve been trying to rededicate myself to. It’s only been in the last three years that I was able to have the confidence to label myself a “writer.” Not even my masters in Journalism drove me to call myself that. Writing is a passion and I love to do it. It’s a part of who I am because for me it's also my most effective communication vessel and I feel that if I couldn’t write one day, I would turn to dust. It would feel like my vocal chords were stripped from my throat and that catatonia would ensue. I journal every morning and every night and keep every journal I’ve filled to go back and review. It's not just writing though, it’s the fact that I let my blog fall to the wayside. One reason being narcissism, or rather wanting to not be perceived as narcissistic. I would dwell on questions like who would want to read what I have to say? It seems so self involved to assume that someone else wants to read what I wrote/write. And then I would ask myself why do I need to publish what I write when keeping it in my journal is just fine for me. I still don’t have an answer for that one. Even when I have posted poems or other essays on my blog, I would delete them because these questions and themes would hit me out of nowhere and I would take them down. I felt sometimes too, that they may have been too personal to share or the wounds that these pieces sprung from never completely healed so having them in a written manifestation kept them alive. In my journal many of them still reside but they’re hidden and somehow those wounds became hidden as well.

In addition to this rededication I had learned of a fear of mine that has been so present in my life I almost couldn’t believe I never saw it before. It wasn’t until an older, handsome Italian man told me over wine, buried in the Cascades, that I was afraid to be happy. In some form or another me and my therapist have been dancing around this theme for the greater part of a year. It was so true, he was so right, I really fear joy, happiness or all around good feeling. When it’s fleeting, sure, a good day with my best friend, a really great date or spending the day with my sister, but to really settle into the feeling. To really allow myself and show myself the grace of experiencing bliss and the exultation of so many opportunities. I just couldn’t, and I don’t know that I still can. I really tried the last few months to allow myself to feel it and I know myself well enough to know that I self-sabotage myself in some way. This is how it goes for me, I allow myself to believe that the bliss is real, that it can happen to me and then I find the one flaw and that’s the excuse, but for me, the reason to push it away. And I want to make the distinction that it’s not an excuse but it’s the reason, the context and the explanation. I am self-aware enough to know this, so self-aware to the point where during the actual act of sabotage, I’m having a parallel reel showing me how to stop it. I used to be able to say that being self-aware was a large leap of growth for me but now I have to take it a step further. What’s the next step? Well, to bring it back to full circle, that’s a part of the rededication. I want to care about myself enough to be able to relish and relax into joy, into being happy. Something goes off in my mind that signals me saying be careful, this isn’t natural, it can’t be real, something is bound to f*ck this up. Usually, it’s me fucking it up. If I want to be dedicated to myself in general, I need to allow myself the grace and the privilege to experience and appreciate an emotion that can be so fleeting and when it’s real joy, it is often fleeting.

Writing and allowing myself to experience the “good” emotions whether you call it joy, bliss, happiness, glee, euphoria or pleasure are two main components of my rededication to self. In a way they go hand-in-hand. I want to enjoy writing and revel in the pleasure it brings me. I also share my work with close friends and relatives and it thrills me when they see something of themselves or their experiences in what I’ve documented. It’s a similar feeling you experience when you’re happier to give a gift than receiving one yourself. Both are terrifying because both of these themes of my “rededication” call on vulnerability. The last few months I thought I was being vulnerable. I thought I shared my bipolar disorder journey, I talked about OCD and I wrote poems about all the above AND the heartbreaks. I also thought I divulged with my partners about my mental afflictions but I was faking vulnerability because I’m not fearful of those things anymore. I’m fearful of living, really fucking living. That’s the vulnerable thing to say, to do, is to live. My first step is to acknowledge it, then it’s second nature to write it. Now I have to try and do it. How to enjoy living, how to appreciate being happy and how to be confident in doing and documenting? I don’t know but luckily my rededication is an ongoing evolution, or should I say revolution, that I’m experiencing everyday. I realized so far that part of the remedy is to just appreciate it when it’s here and look forward to its return when it’s not. I think I am programmed to be a realistic person but now it seems optimism is my last shot and something I have to lean into and embrace in my year of rededication. As for this entry, which will go through many drafts and repetitions, I can only provide a quote from Patti Smith’s Just Kids to further support my drifted and maybe misguided musings

“At  night, alone, I just sat and waited. Once again I found myself contemplating what I should be doing to do something of worth. Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant [...] I chided myself for inactivity and self-indulgence, and resolved to rededicate myself to my work.”

more joyful moments…