Remember
On drawing yourself back into existence
Everything feels uneasy.
Like I’m trapped in this mucus membrane that I can’t seem to escape from. I want to move through the unpleasantry of what I’m feeling into something else. At this point, anything else feels like a respite.
My heart feels full and not in the way it usually does when I recognize all the glimmers that surround me.
My heart feels full like it has nothing to empty into. I keep looking for the pin that’ll prick it so everything can begin to flow out.
It’s like having a balloon full of water. As it continues to fill, you feel the uneasiness within your body as space becomes an issue.
You don’t have words to describe it yet. You don’t know what to do.
So you sit with it.
And hope that it shifts.
And it’s that — that hoping — that impedes the process.
We are so quick to want answers, to want clarity, to want direction.
We forget that there is magic in letting things emerge.
The key is sitting with no expectation.
Simply the desire to be present.
Letting the heart know —
I’m here.
There is nothing else I need to do or be or even have.
I am writing this as I move through this visceral feeling — reminding myself that there is nothing wrong in being naked in front of people, digitally or in real life.
If I’m being honest, I was ready to erase these words.
I wanted this letter to begin with the phrase that came to me in meditation when I first sat with its birth.
Perfection still sits in a corner of my mind especially as I shift my focus toward owning my rawness and vulnerability. So knowing this letter wouldn’t begin with those words definitely hit a nerve.
When I first sat with this letter, the words that poured out were these — when my heart first uttered the word ‘remember’
And off I flew.
Remember? Remember what?
I immediately began sifting through my mind as if my heart had given me an assignment that needed to be completed overnight.
I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I sat with my head in my hands like — what is it?
Then I started laughing and crying all at once.
Because moving into your heart is moving away from the hamster wheel. I know that.
And yet the tendency to want the A+, to knock something off a list — it still circulates in the body.
This is what it feels like to be caught in the cycle of what you once deemed important, when someone else created the standards and you accepted them.
Even as I write this, I can feel my heart get lighter with laughter.
Life is meant to be fun, light and playful.
Somehow I find that so hard sometimes. Do you?
We are so skillfully trained —
To escape.
To numb.
To fix.
To believe there is something wrong.
We lose out on the chance to listen —
beneath the layers,
the words,
the symbols,
the colors,
the elements of life.
Even within my writing process, I have learned how swiftly words can escape me especially when I let them linger as the element of air.
When I try to slow them down, to record them into written form, that swift magic disappears and I’m left longing for what was.
I can’t tell you how many times I end up frustrated, reaching for what I believed came out so beautifully as if that were the only way it deserved to be written.
As if I couldn’t trust myself to find a new way.
As if there is only one way.
Have you ever done that? —
Made yourself feel inadequate for forgetting something?
Spent so much time on what you could have done, or
how you were better before?
You don’t even realize you’ve slipped into a game of comparison — only this time, it’s with yourself. Chasing a ghost of the past. A version of you that no longer exists.
How many times do we do that?
How many times do we get caught up in what doesn't exist?
What if that’s the remembrance?
What if when my heart said remember —
it meant remember this moment.
Remember that this is all that exists.
What if the call to remember is actually to re-member — all the parts of me?
What if my heart is asking me to see which parts of me exist right now and to let those assemble?
What if I’ve been running after ghosts — the parts of me I thought needed to exist, the parts I keep longing for that are no longer part of this identity?
The ghost of how beautiful I once was.
The ghost of how ambitious and focused I was — forgetting how much of my own health I had sacrificed.
The ghost of the approved job title.
The ghosts of friendships.
The ghosts of what I wanted.
The ghosts of identities once held.
I could probably keep writing this list forever.
What if the last step of grieving is not acceptance — not even gratitude — but re-membering?
A process of collecting all the bones that are left. And assembling them into whatever shape suits you now.
As I re-member, I get to create something new.
I get to determine my soul’s song this time.
I don’t know if I ever truly fathomed that was possible — at least not in an embodied way.
It’s hard to define something that is meant to be felt.
A soul song is not something you can fake.
It is a sense of liberation.
A way of becoming.
Of returning to who you are.I know I will continue to evolve.
Who I am will shift.
And still — I get to create a soul song for this moment.
How cool is that?
That mucus membrane doesn’t feel as tight now.
There is more spaciousness appearing within my body and my throat as I write these words.
I can feel the holes appearing — the stickiness not being as scary.
It was never about the answer itself.
It was the emergence of what could be.
The beginning of the next.
These letters ask you to come as you are.
So you can leave more yourself than when you arrived.
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Thank you for the beauty of your vulnerability. You’re not alone.