Happy Birthday NRT!
It has been six years! I can’t believe it. This all started as a lark. A longing for the ability to say what I actually meant, what I actually felt and needing the barrier of writing to be the vehicle in which I reached out to you. I could not handle the confrontation of the spoken word or the actual presence of you. I need the safety of writing it all down and then putting it out there. In so many ways, us writers are very private people who have this perversity where we feel these things intently but have this inability to say it all when you are right here. I guess I should just stand on this truth alone, I needn’t involve other writers here. Although I do feel like there is something safer about writing it down and then letting it trickle out as truth one reader at a time…
I never thought I would be here six years later. I didn’t think that I would really stick with it. I got a lot of support from The Tribe at the time. And I remain forever grateful to them and for them. Because they are the ones that gave me the courage to do this and put it out there. My mom for her endless support and being able to withstand her own discomfort at some of the shit I say and do and feel and discuss. Thank you to you all because I truly would not be here without you.
Thank you to all the men. You were the surprise in all of this. I would have thought my readership would be middle aged white women. And that was about it. But you men came out of nowhere and have become some of my biggest supporters and fans. I didn’t see that coming. And I know some of you read it because you have this idea that I am dateable. I am not. Ask anyone who has tried (I am working on this). But there are some of you who read it because you relate to the words, they resonate with you and your experience of this crazy fucking life. And that makes me immensely happy that I can reach across the great gender divide and connect.
Thank you for courage. I cannot tell you the amount of anxiety I had the day I hit publish for the first time. I was afraid no one would read it ever and that I would allow public opinion to grind me to a stop. But I have weathered a great many scathing reviews and that has only served as more fodder. I have received letters from you that I have responded to each one with a sincere level of interest and heartfelt love. I hope you felt that too.
The more I write, the more I seem to have to say. I feel such safety here each morning, sitting in the dark, in my bed, drinking coffee, tapping out my heart, my soul and all the contents of my head. I dream each day of a time where I can just read and write all day every day and have that be my life. I long for the quiet life that is contained on a mountain side, surrounded by lush, giant redwoods, while a meandering brook flows by. I walk the grounds of my dominion sometimes with a partner that I am pretty sure will never come so I walk it solo in my head most of the time. I feel things. I think things and then I write them down. Attempting to solve the riddle of loving and living one day at a time. To be sober and available to pass on all I have learned. Giving back to all those who might find what I have to say useful or life saving.
I know this dream life may never come but I will tell you it spurns me on every single day. I have run through the details of this alternative existence in my head so often. I can smell the smoke from the cabin and can feel the air on my skin. It is palatable and real, if only in my mind.
But since I brought this whole entity into existence in my mind, I know I can conjure up this other. I can do anything I want really. It truly is up to me.
Right now I feel like I am delving into all this avoidance I seem to be filled with despite my constant and unrelenting work to rid myself of this tendency and fucked up way of relating. I am going to send a writing I did for a new writing project to my friend today and it is raw and vulnerable and hard. And I am terrified, just about as terrified to send it as I was to publish this six years ago. But like then, there is no choice involved. It is just something I have to do. I have to continue to be willing to push the envelope, to thread myself into the fabric of others lives and in so doing, my own. It is in this intimate communion that I find parts of myself I locked away so long ago that I forgot they were there. Now they stand like mocking caverns of fear, daring me to muster up the courage to walk in, torch in hand and light up the blackness within.
Once upon a time, I would have run. But not today, today I light that torch and I walk in with a brazen stride, head held high and fear checked at the entrance. There is no place for fear in a cavern full of midnight. My torch of honest truths shall never fail to light up what once was black and dark.
Today NRT looms like a beacon in my daily regime. She is the container of all that I am, all that I hope to be and all that I survived. She is the light and I am the moth that hovers ever so close, knowing that the heat maims when not regarded with respect and safe distance…but it also provides a healing heat that warms my soul from the inside out. So I come daily to pray at her altar, to write the things down and allow them to flow to wherever they might need to go.
It has been an incredible journey of self discovery. Of communion with others. Of salvation from all the blackness that resides within. I think NRT was born from a silent menacing I could no longer withstand but has become a loving companion to my everyday. We rise together every day and begin each day with thoughts, and ideas, and feelings, and fears and losses and faiths and hopes and joys. It is a mixed bag for sure. She is the place I bring my pain, my loss, my longing, my intimacy, my fear, my anxiety, my love, my crazy. It all happens here…every single day of my life.
I didn’t know that NRT would become my salvation. I just felt the increasing pressure of a rising tide within. And I obeyed, I didn’t resist. I complied. And here we are six years later coming to know the best version of me there has ever been. That feels like quite an accomplishment. We get the life we have always wanted by being willing to do the things that seem hard, stupid, unproductive, uncertain and soaked in self centered fear. In order to get the life you have always wanted, you have to give up the one you are currently half living.
Dive deeply into yourself and find that place in you that calls to you from the other side. Heed the calling and then begin. Don’t worry about stupid things like failure and shame and guilt and blame. Those are only vehicles of the ego to keep you forever chained to some version of yourself you don’t even like.
Fuck that.
Begin today, and change yourself into the person you have always wanted to be. Unsure? Ask me how. I know because I was once there too.
And just for today, do the one thing that scares you most. I hope you will find the you, you long for, the you that you thought was long gone. Do it now. Time waits for no one. And all that is required is the commitment to begin…
Again…still.
