Joy

coming home to myself.

inspiration, Joy, life, Uncategorized

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Everyone thought I was fucking crazy.

They thought I was making a decision on whim in January when I bought a one-way ticket back home, to Atlanta, two weeks out. I’ve thought a lot these past six months about the exact moment when I knew I needed to take a leap. About how my fear of the unknown and the uncertainty about where my latest leap would land paled in comparision for the aching of discontent I’d been nursing.

I needed to come home. I needed to return to Atlanta, a city where my heart had remained for some reason, a city where I thought I’d never need or want to return after leaving three years ago for the Spanish adventure of a lifetime.

But what has become abundantly clear these past six months home, in Atlanta, it wasn’t the city itself I needed to revisit and take lessons from. It wasn’t about becoming reacquainted with old memories and emotional and mental sensations which were familiar. It wasn’t about meeting all that made me feel like I wasn’t just passing through in yet another city, bidding my time until I was gone and on the quest for home once more.

It was about committing to the next leg of this never-ending healing journey called life. It was about looking at my demons I’d been too afraid to face. It was about vanquishing the embers of forgotten self-worth, self-trust and self-determination. It was about knowing and accepting the home and heart within myself.

Being back in Atlanta has been odd and nothing short of what I expected. I feel like an outsider. I’ve spent the larger part of my time here tucked away in the suburbs, living alone in the huge family home I grew up in. My days and evenings are cloaked in silence, save for the murmuring of the TV in the background I turn on to distract myself from the fact that I am alone.

On one hand, being as alone as I have been this past half year hasn’t been awful. Alone time soothes me hugely. But being as alone as I have been has once again hammered in that there was nothing left for me as I originally thought; that returning here was only a resting space for me to launch myself elsewhere in the world. A time for recalibration.

Each day in this house I’ve faced my past with a piercing honesty. I’m finally able to see my childhood and life up until now for what it has been — a sequential period of me not possessing enough self-belief to trust if I stood facing the world on my own two feet, just me and God, that I’d be okay. Instead it was much easier to default to leaning on my parents — financially, emotionally and mentally — to carry that torch of lacking self-belief for me. And it has severely hindered me in fully growing up and being an independent and self-sufficient woman.

I’ve never really lived on my own as an adult. When I graduated from college, I moved back home, to the family home I live in now alone, with my parents and my three sisters.  It took me nearly a year to find a job as a reporter where I would actually be using the expensive ass Journalism degree I earned from a private university. That job paid me very little as opposed to job I’d had prior for a huge nonprofit that I was fired from after six months. But I told myself that being happier and fulfilled at work was worth the severe pay cut I took.

My parents supported this decision and did what they have always done — filled in the money gaps. They paid my phone bill, my car note and insurance. If I ran into a (financial) bind they’d bail me out, no questions asked. In their own way this is how they show love — by helping. But there are costs for everything and their ever constant help came at a great one to me and of course, as with money, it came with strings.

Moving to Madrid would not have been possible without my parents. To qualify for my student visa, I had to show a certain amount of money in my bank account that I didn’t have. My parents transferred the money to my account so I could show that. And when I got ready to leave, they gave me more money to ensure I’d be okay my first few months since I wouldn’t be working right away and had no job lined up. When I was fired from a new job I had taken in January of 2014 it was my parents who helped me make my rent because I didn’t have any savings.

Once things settled a bit more for me and I found a better job, it was the first time in my life I was living as an adult on my own. I paid my own rent from money I made. I took care of myself. I felt free and capable. I felt like I could handle my life. Which is why when I decided to move back Stateside after just nine months, I knew I’d been exchanging this sense of freedom for something else.

When I decided to move back to the states after nine months in Madrid, I landed back at home with my parents. I spent two miserable years in DC. During those two years, I struggled to find work and flitted between jobs I hated. I quit jobs often without thinking. My parents had been giving me money every two weeks, so I’d grown complacent. If shit didn’t work out, I knew my parents would be there to catch me. But within the past few years, this has become a battleground and a space for me to be controlled and not treated well; to be helped and had the help hung over my head or thrown in my face at any given moment.

Each day in this house serves as reminder of the state of affairs, as far as my relationship with my parents. It reminds me of living with a mother who stopped at nothing to criticize and pick at me, explaining that her cyclical verbal vitriol was out of love, and me naively believing it. It reminds me of a living with an emotionally absent father who was far more interested in watching CNN marathons than getting to know me as a person.

In many ways, these shadows of my both of my parents haven’t changed. My father is still somewhere off in the stratosphere. He tries to be more present but his attempts are foreign to me. My mother still treats me as a mass of projections and life regrets, using whatever time we’re around each other to denigrate me. The words no longer hurt me like they used to because I accept that is who she is and all she is capable of being. What hurts is to know I’m not respected as a whole person deserving to be treated well to her and that, once again, being at the whims of money she can provide subjects me to more poor treatment.

Everyone thought I was fucking crazy when I purchased a one-way ticket to Atlanta just six days in the year. But knowing I was looking towards a year filled with more chosen misery, I had to leave. It was a means of self-preservation and reclaiming my joy. And although I landed, not exactly on my own, because I do live rent free in a house my parents own, it was a (temporary) compromise I was okay with making.

I’m not a jealous person. People are often jealous of me and it has many times been the reason for the demise of a friendship. Because it’s not an emotion that registers for me I’m oblivious each and every time it happens and only get it when someone else points it out to me. There’s one thing I can say I’ve long been envious of others for — tapping into self-belief enough to land on their own two feet and to live an independent, self-sufficient life as an adult. I ask myself why it has taken being in a new decade for me to realize this needs to happen, why I’ve been afraid of stepping out and consumed with failing and falling flat on my ass out in the big world.

But I realize my fears about stepping out into the world aren’t unfounded and they aren’t individual, specialized fears. Every person who has ever stepped fully into adulthood has felt and thought these things, but with each step they took, they became more determined, more sure, more trusting in both themselves and God/the Universe, to have their back and provide for them. It’s radical trust. It’s radical faith. It’s free-falling into uncertainty and not knowing, all the millions of questions which remain unanswered yet somehow knowing in the end, it’ll all turn out just fine.

Now it’s my turn.

The end of April I received notice that I’d gotten into a creative writing workshop hosted by Callaloo Literary Journal of Texas A&M. The workshop will be held at The University of Oxford all of next week. When I first got in, I had no idea how I’d finance this amazing opportunity (and they were no scholarships available) but less than 24 hours after launching a crowdfunding effort, I had enough money to pay the registration fee. I hesitated to pay it because I had no idea where the rest of my funding would come from.

Well, it all came. And I have followed my heart and extended my time in Europe through the end of August. Not everything is planned. I’m going to allow things to flow naturally as they should. I’ve never traveled this way all the years I’ve been traveling. And I’ve also never fully financed it all on my own either. I’ve spent the past two months working very hard to do this all on my own dime. Without Mom and Dad sweeping in and saving the day. Without completely abandoning my self-belief.

It’s safe to say I’m terrified. It’s safe to say I’m turning over in my head all the billions of unfortunate scenarios which could go wrong. But then I’m also thinking back to that woman, that woman who three years ago was so fucking determined to be free and chart the course of her life, despite how terrified she was. And how it all worked out in her favor.

This woman uprooted her entire life to move to Madrid, Spain, where she knew no one and didn’t even have a job lined up. She rented a room out a flat from a woman personally recommended that was on Facebook. She navigated culture shock with a nonexistent support system in both Spain and back at home.

She weathered a rough almost year in another country and returned to the States more in power of herself, more sure of how she wanted the rest of her life to go. She somehow was able to stay the course during a hard two years in Washington, DC and didn’t give into conformity. She left DC when she knew her joy was still to be captured and it couldn’t be where she was currently. She found more of herself back in Atlanta, her hometown, and was able to look joy in the face again and slowly begin to gather bits and pieces of self-belief. She got into an amazing writing workshop to be held at the prestigious University of Oxford.

That woman is enough. That woman is braver, more courageous, more sagacious and tenacious than she could ever know to everyone around her. That woman is an inspiration. And that woman, that woman who is almost always afraid of the newness that is thrust in her direction yet leaps anyway, will be okay and taken care of.

And that woman is me.

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writing as joy.

Joy, Writing

Joy has always seemed to be an elusive concept to me. Like a mystical state of being I’d never be able to reach. Joy wasn’t for me. Happiness wasn’t for me either. Perpetually just being on the precipice of something greater, that next big thing, just the right circumstance which would make me, or life, better or fulfilling has been the existence I lived. And wanting to rise beyond waiting for life to affirm my joy and my happiness was where my desire to be in touch with my joy and joyfulness was borne from.

Two years ago after a whirlwind nine months in Madrid filled with ups and downs, I moved to Maryland. My father had moved to Maryland, right outside of DC, for a new opportunity the year before, and because I knew moving back to Atlanta would be akin to starting over, I figured it made the most sense to start over in a new city versus an old city. I was also taking a huge chance on love and hoping a new relationship would blossom as a result of me relocating.

My relationship with my father at that time was distanced as best. We were complete strangers to one another although I’d lived with him my entire life. My father has always seemed ambivalent about parenting and me specifically, other than when he felt I needed a lecture or any other instance when he could put me in my place. He was a disciplinarian and a rule enforcer. He was not someone I could trust to care about my heart, my feelings, my happiness, my joy. Instead he was a wielder of inadequacy, criticism and shame. And living with him, one-on-one, without my mother, his workaholic tendencies, CNN marathons and my sisters to act as a bridge and distractions between us only magnified who he was and what he thought of me.

And also what I thought of myself.

I didn’t intend to live with my father long. Before I left Madrid, I’d made a semblance of plans to get a job within the media and resume being a journalist once again. I’d even started applying to a few jobs and letting friends and other people know I’d be relocating to the area and to keep their eyes out for opportunities I’d be great for. My first few weeks, I had several interviews and my plan to only temporarily share the same space with my father seemed to be on the up and up.

Until it wasn’t anymore. The job interviews stopped rolling in. And the heaviness of depression took its place. The new relationship had fizzled at this point. The little amount of money I’d saved from my last teaching check from Madrid was dwindling. I had no friends and no new connections nor did I have any interest in meeting new people. I started to spend an inordinate amount of time — from my bed — ruminating over my joblessness, lack of money and lack of friends and discontent over how this new beginning was shifting into a period of bleak hopelessness.

The conversations with my father certainly didn’t help. A year later when my mother moved into the apartment with us, things only worsened. Not only was I steamrolled with constant criticism about the state of my life in terms of career with repetitive lectures from my father, but I was also receiving the criticism about my appearance, my mannerisms and everything in between from my mother. The areas where my father didn’t touch, my mother seamlessly picked up the slack.

I was being triggered on a daily basis at this point, sometimes multiple times a day, by people who claimed, almost ritualistically they loved me, and wanted the best for me yet the vitriol spewed at me proved otherwise. I was a full-fledged adult but it felt like I’d stepped back into the throes of my childhood which had been much the same, navigating emotional grenades lest they blow up and obliterate my emotional reserves. To make matters worse, because I couldn’t find a job, I was stuck with having to accept their financial help, including for my bi-weekly therapy sessions which were the only thing keeping me afloat. I needed their help but resented it at the same time. And there seemed like no way out for me. I was tired and struggling and suffering.

Last fall, I took a job at a coffee shop. It was a dream of mine to be a barista, and I was excited about the chance, but not really. A few weeks before I’d been ceremoniously threatened by my father to be kicked out of the apartment I was living in with them and the financial help they’d been providing me with was revoked. This declaration followed a huge blow-out between the three of us, and honestly now I can’t remember because I blocked it out of my memory.

I had less than $100 dollars to my name.

I was scheduled to see my therapist a few days later but could no longer afford it. I canceled my appointment and cried for hours. My lifeline had been taken from under my feet.

But taking that job — despite how much I hated it and drained me — put me touch with a sensation I hadn’t ever felt before: joy. It was just a little sprinkling of it but it felt good. Money is control and I’d been controlled, my strings pulled like a puppet, so to take the control back and to not feel so powerless as I had felt for years felt like breathing again. I was no longer being held against my will underwater by the heaviness of suffering and lack of joy.

The month of December last year was spent resting from all the drain and chaos I dealt with for two months as a pseudo barista. I spent Christmas alone as I chose no to go home to spend the holiday with my family for the second year in a row. I  spent the morning meditating and soaking in a bath by candle light and for dinner, made a pot of spaghetti and drank glass after glass of merlot while watching Christmas movies on the couch. The quiet was overwhelmingly needed and nourishing to my spirit and led me to a greater truth — I had to prioritize my joy. Going back home — to Atlanta — to stay in the family house which would soon be empty was an option.

And the morning after picking up my parents from the airport at the conclusion of a quiet few weeks for Christmas, I booked a one way ticket home  leaving in two weeks and told no one.

Once again, I had less than $100 to my name.

The criticism I faced from my parents had relented since I’d started working at the coffeeshop. But it dawned on me, when I announced to my parents I was leaving and going to stay in the house, and they responded with sordid expressions on their face and asking what they would do without me there, it became clear to me.

I’d unknowingly shouldered the suffering and stress and miseries of my parents when I moved back home and started living with them again. I’d made all their suffering, their health issues, their discontent with the state of their lives, facing their mortality, coping with their roles as parents changing as their children grew older, my own. I’d created a space so huge for sorting their own “stuff” and unconsciously enabling them, I’d forgotten that there was a space for my joy, my happiness, my peace, my self-care, my self-preservation.

I forgot about me. I forgot I mattered. And because of this it made damn near hard for me to write, to create, to be the fullest version of myself. To live in my truth. My parents— and being so physically close to them — were a huge creative block for me. They represented everything I negatively thought about myself.

Being back home in the house I grew up in, alone, without my mother and father, without the noise that comes from living with a huge family has been odd but at the same time freeing. I’ve been on a creative high for the past few months I know I wouldn’t have reached without taking a leap for myself, a leap for my joy. Writing feels good again. Writing feels like a high. Writing feels like ease. Writing feels like…joy.

Joy and joyfulness are slowly shifting from being abstract, unfamiliar concepts to me yet the newness and fragility of infusing them into my life are felt. The shakiness of accepting that suffering and struggle don’t have to coexist with joy and happiness is something I toy with almost every day.

I’m acquainting myself with a deep truth which is daily transforming the fabric of my life. I hope if I keep remembering how deeply I matter and how deeply I am needed in this world, creating an altar for joy along with writing, artistry and creation will become a central pillar to my being.