Friday 11 April 2014

Becoming



The process of individuation is a difficult one. Much like shedding the old skin, we know it to be dead, but we feel it's pain, passing and mourn for it, for it was once, a living, breathing sentience inside of us. Even outworn, illfitting dysfunction... As much as it wears, it still has part and place, as a piece of nascency.
And we are all so young... No matter what age. This lie, of being 'adult/grown up'- we never stop becoming. We all go back to our old recesses from time to time, to slip into that old skin, the familiar, the ancient, the very young, the distant past. If only in our dreams, and unconscious will, we live with patterns on mute, but they continue running, like the silence of the tape as it winds to the end.
So what we undo... Is painful. One part is the fear of change, but the other is very much the opening up of possibilities... And that what is underneath might not be as recognizable, as familiar.
That's why it sneaks up upon us.. In increments.

I have faced much in pain lately.. My own nurturing come to light, and my own eyes backwards, facing the distant past... What I have missed, the memories strong and full formed before me. How I've rewritten some, with the time away to think... Was it all as bad as I remember.. Or was that first taste of everything I'd ever looked outside of, and suddenly become very much part of- something to call my own.. Was it really so beautiful, and will it come back, in some different incarnation?
Freedom. Mistakes. Serenity and the scope of infectious beauty. A little bit of hedonism and youth. Friendships. Forged and burned. Left and mourned. Love, safety, and even in the situational oxymoron.. I felt deeper connections. It changed me, forever.

I can't look back and say that five years each time gone that I am the same. And I'm grateful for that. Do I wish to know what is becoming... Sure. But it eludes me until it is free to speak.
One day I might see that all the things I fear today mean very little in the grand scheme of things. One day I might see that I have conquered greater than the things I have shrunk from.
One day I might see that I have thought to spare that does not sit and enquire my silence, that it might share space with others, that it might repay the dividends by allowing me the experience, with only mindful analysis and not an intricacy of over thought.
And this is hope.. But for today, it is the inspiration that has touched me, to steep the depths and peel away another layer of skin. To understand that what I desire needs to flourish within me so that I understand it not a fleeting need. And that the dissonance, the uncomfortable silence and time to sit with myself, the not knowing where anything is going.. The confusion- its all for a beautiful reason.
This is individuation.