I Want to Tell You

Mediations on Life From a Dizzy Mind (Nov. 2023)

There is so much I want to tell you.

I want to tell you that I’m trying to figure this out so that I can assure you in that not only are you not alone, but things do fall into place. I’m trying to believe so.

I want to tell you that writing this has been inspired by a particularly heavy week, and a particularly odd year. It’s not all this way and it’s not even usually this way. There are weeks recently where I’ve felt lighter than I ever have in my life. There were months this year that I felt unstoppable. The highs and the lows seem to continue expanding further with each phase of life and I continue to learn ways to fall and rise more gracefully, at least some of the time.

I want to tell you that my world view feels so shaky I’m afraid to believe my eyes about anything. I love to blame my past and frankly, that is what I believe right now. I struggle to comprehend it any other way. I have grown to distrust the whole world, how dramatic is that? I wonder if my detachment from the people I love results from my detachment from the whole world, if my splitting mindset about humanity and my splitting mindset about the people I love are one and the same. I have never known how to hold all the good and all the bad all at once.

I want to tell you that sometimes it is safe to have faith in people, but I fear that my mother would’ve told you the exact same thing when she was my age. I’m living with the man I love and I feel like an imposter in my own life as I trigger false alarms at every turn — the incessant fear that we are going to turn this bad. I’m sitting here, desperately looking for reasons I’m wrong, evidence to prove the contrary to my fearful mind, writing lists of gratitude in my journal every morning as if that can possibly counter these paranoias. My convictions seem weightless and I find solace in my old friend nihilism. It doesn’t matter.

There was a time not too long ago when I planted convictions like hundred-year-old trees in my mind and in my words. It was inspiring and beautiful to walk in a forest of my truest beliefs — grounding. In these times, I prided myself on never folding in an argument because I would always be sure about what I was saying. Part of that was naivety, but now I think part of it was a way to stay alive.

I want to tell you that things with dad get easier with time and space. That’s half true. Some days that’s true. Forget I said that, I don’t want you to know that. The hope that either he would heal or become irrelevant to me got me through so much pain, so the hope is worth holding. It’s become quite apparent that neither of those are going to happen here, maybe ever. He is sick and so relevant. He is mean and so deeply rooted in my heart. He is lost and I will never stop looking for him. He is not like a tree I can dig up the roots of, he is an artery to the organ that keeps my blood pumping.

I want to ask you if believing in something is a choice you make or a place within your soul that you find. I’ve become entirely sick of nihilism. For a long time I told myself it was on the same line of critical thinking and empathy — no one thing is right and I will believe in nothing so wholly that I can’t accept someone who believes differently. That doesn’t feel mutually exclusive anymore. I can’t remember if nihilism is something that slowly crept into my mind the more I found cracks in every single thing I ever used to believe in, or if I subconsciously chose it as my thing to believe in — nothingness.

I want to tell you that these days there is only one place I yearn to go, and it is somewhere I can be alone and warm. This life of marriage and careers and adult friendships is a dream I had for a long time and today I’m feeling disenchanted. Today I don’t feel home in this life at all. I feel that I should be sitting somewhere warm, somewhere with butterflies and lush forest and reckless seas that I can sit at the edge of and catch small fish to eat and seaweed to pluck. Alone. I never would’ve imagined the pressure I’d feel in making a home. It’s like everything else in this phase of life: I don’t know how to do it so I’m desperately looking around to see how others have done it, even if I don’t align with them. And the bottom line here is probably a straight shot back to my original qualm: what the hell do I believe in?

I want to tell you how much I believe in the impact of the stories we tell ourselves, and that these questions I’m asking are not conducive to immediate happiness. It feels like, though, now that I know some of the things I don’t know, I can’t unknow this disconnect. I need things to feel like they’re not moving so quickly. I need more time to find these answers. I feel drunk right now though alcohol has been nowhere near my lips; my mind is spinning with every version of myself I’ve ever been and every version I could be. I’m dizzy trying to distinguish fear from intuition. I’m afraid I’ll fall over if I don’t sit down. How can I tell you I know anything for sure?

I want to tell you that part of me wishes I was not dizzy, but still joyfully meandering in the forest of my own making. Feeling the energy reverberating from the deepest roots of my beliefs, through the nourished soil, and into my bare feet. Part of me wants to be a different girl who doesn’t make everything so damn complicated, or who doesn’t acknowledge all of the complicated. Part of me knows that there is no point in wishing away any piece of myself; that when I next meander in a forest of my own making, it will be of stronger, truer foundation and greater peace than I’ve ever known prior. And eventually, as all forests do, it will burn, too. Then I will remember how to start, again.