on coming home.

I’ve been finding lately, that the further away I feel from what I think is myself, the more myself I become. It's painstaking, to wait in this transition, to search for something I know is there but is taking time to rise to the surface. I feel a loss that I can't quite describe, where the chaos used to be, and it terrifies me.

It turns out sitting with yourself is very hard.

I have spent most of my life running from or attempting to work my way out of various states of mental illness. When you are drowning, you will do anything you can to keep your head above the surface. Getting healthy is hard work, particularly when life serves up quite a few difficult circumstances. And this is an important part of the process, learning how to swim. Finding that you can make your way out of the depths towards the sun, breathing fresh air for the first time. The relief that comes from knowing you are no longer sinking into yourself, the liberating knowledge that you are no longer trapped within your own mind.

But freedom alone is not enough, and you can't keep treading water forever. You are yearning for the shore, but you are tired. Tired of trying, of fighting. Tired of struggling with yourself, tired of looking for what always seems just out of sight. You recognize that the old way isn't working for you anymore, and that all you have pushed up against for all those years is simply....gone.

You don't want to sink.

But you can't swim any farther.

So you learn to float.

Floating can be peaceful you know, when the waters are calm. It can feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable at first, when you have spent every minute up until now wildly thrashing about. The stillness can be unnerving, and I think that it is here that we can really start to take a look at our soul.

We can really start to listen to it.

This is a lonely process, being with your soul. Everything is stripped away out in the middle of the ocean, and you are left naked and vulnerable. It can feel a bit like you are unmoored, untethered from what used to be a secure anchor of suffering. Of course, you think, why would I want to be chained to what kept me miserable for so long? But don't underestimate the security we feel in familiar patterns, no matter how unhealthy they may seem. Our defenses were useful in protecting us at one point, after all.

This in-between, the space between what was and what is coming, can feel overwhelming at times. Floating requires you quiet yourself, and this is hard to do when you are used to fixing everything within and around you. It is much easier to keep moving, to keep searching, than it is to be still.

But the stillness is where we find our soul, where we come home to ourselves. It's where we find our balance, where we get to see who we are without all the ways we have tried to shield ourselves from the unrelenting waves of the universe. It's where we begin to recognize "the face before we were born".

And I love this idea. I love that our soul has been there all along, that it can recover from hiding underneath the shroud of self-doubt and insecurity that has seemed to last for an eternity.

That we can look with curiosity, and not shame, at all that kept us from being who we really are.

That our souls are so much richer than we originally thought, like a prism catching the light and sending it in a thousand brilliant directions.

So I am learning to be patient. To wait in the emptiness. To endure the unknown. For as restless as I feel, and as frightening as silence has always been to me, I know that there is more. More than just keeping my head above water, more than just swimming to stay afloat.

I am ready to come home.

Back to myself, to my center.

Back to my soul.

It will take time, yes. And uncertainty is part of the bargain. But I'm done swimming, done defining who I am by who I was when I was just trying to survive.

I'm floating, no longer anchored but finally, and truly...

Free to be me.