What the future looks like

The world is a wild place most days. We all have traumas and unresolved backstories.

How do you find solace amidst the madness? How do you reconcile the past with the present and future?

Recently I've been trying out meditation. It's not the first time I've tried.

Meditation can take many forms. Sitting quietly with the wind while your mind rides the waves of hum of flowing air. Closing your eyes and breathing rhythmically before actually falling asleep, the pillow soft beneath your neck.

As a writer, my Meditation has often been a keyboard beneath my fingertips, somewhere without much noise. Many years I spent in public libraries, day dreaming that my name would grace the spines of such books.

Envisioning the life you want is really the only way to design the life you want, as everything we are starts as a thought. 

What life do you want to create?

For years I've imagined a place where I can finally find peace. A place without a tyrannical parental figure trying to sabotage my every move. A place without a terrible partner or spouse that I had to take care of.

I am here, in a quiet place, mostly.

 The attachments that once drug me down have been severed and I can finally breathe.

I've dreamed of living on a piece of land where I can grow my own food and become part of the cycle of life more intimately. To eat what I grow and take care of the soil that feeds my soul.  To be closer to this little blue and green cosmic marble hurting through the void.

I dream of becoming an author. My words on pages that help others find that love isn't something to be earned, it's something within us all along. That even though we might have been hurt, the truth is that we allowed it to happen. Even as children, innocent and pure, our suffering was self-designed. Because as adults we carry forth those same childish patterns and wonder why our lives are still so miserable.

Beneath the totalitarianism of my mother, I learned to hate myself. My very reflection in the mirror a reminder of my inadequacies. I wanted to be a boy so badly because then it didn't matter if I was ugly or lovely, because being an XY made all the difference. Somehow my biology was at fault. Somehow being born female made my mother hate me. Everything I did was wrong, while everything my brother did was adored.

So I hated myself more. 

By the time I was 19 I was a drunk (this is not a unique experience). I was a pill popper. My best friend was a stripper. I ate at strip club buffets to save money. I worked terrible jobs and still managed good grades. I dated disastrous men and did what I thought I was supposed to do:

Go to college. Get a degree and be smothered by debt. Get married. Buy a car. Think about kids. Be happy.

I wasn't [happy].

I was divorced at 26, and found another train wreck of a man to fill the void. He was a real alcoholic and taught me to hate myself further. His dad was worse and I began to wander if I actually hated myself or if I had been conditioned by my mother to be so self-loathsome.

It was the latter.

I began to unfurl my fucked up self.

 I read more books on self help. The Four Agreements made me think about thinking. I spent time outside again after years of terrible desk jobs and grunt work. I jumped on my bicycle and looked to the horizon and peddaled until I couldn't. I listened to School of Greatness and Bulletproof Radio podcasts like it was my religion. 

I became aware of me. I began to see that no one else was to blame but me.

At the edge of this turmoil I found something new.

I found self-worth. I found love.

It was a seedling of the concept, but I tended to it. I began to eat better and learned how to cook. I went to my first yoga classes. I turned off the TV more frequently and picked up books. I immersed myself in the library, and spent hours with my laptop. Words flowing from my mind to word processor. 

I told the alcoholic I had fallen in love with that I didn't want to be a warehouse grunt anymore, I wanted to be a full time writer. I'd keep working at the warehouse until my writing could give me a solid living. For a while he believed in me. We had grown better together (if only for a short while). His love for me wasn't greater than his hate for himself, and he sabotaged our progress and I then cut the cord quickly and left in a whirlwind.

I found another man, and this one seems like the real deal. We've been married 6 years and it's been some of the best years of my life. He believes in me, but more importantly I believe in me more.

There is still progress to be made. My health is a constant reminder that this mortal coil of meat and sinew must be tended to as much as the mind (in my case my mind often seems stronger than my body).

But much like an authors Work in Progress (WIP), life itself is a storyline that is ever evolving. I feel as if my story is only starting. That my thoughts are about to create something worthwhile and integral. 

The suffering I experienced was only such because life is an experiment, and more often than not we fail, fail, fail before we create something that matters. Before we allow ourselves to just be and don't judge where we are, but instead allow room for the moment and the potential of it.