The wind of change

“The journal is the ideal place of refuge for the inner self because it constitutes a counterworld: a world to balance the other” ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Yesterday was a day off, yet my ‘off’ days look remarkably like my ‘on’ days, and that is the problem with working at home. I can’t get away from the office as the office is slap bang in the middle of the living room. But it’s more insidious than that. I’m finding it so difficult to switch off, as if, were I to let go for a second, to take a break from this ever vigilant awareness I have cultivated, I would fall down and dissolve. So I sit at my desk coiled like a spring, perched on the seat, waiting… I can sense that life is beginning to change and while I’m happy with this forward movement I’m not sure I want it either. It has taken a long time to get to this quiet place, one not filled with blood and sadness and rage.

How many times last year did I wish that time would not take me further away from my painful memories yet wish for the clock to speed up so the healing would begin. And here I find myself, tentatively, outwardly healed, thinking about myself again, striving, moving, living again. How dare I! For so long I felt the wind in my face as the world and its inhabitants rushed past me, the woman sat in her own bit of time, motionless, stilled. I envied my friends as they lived and loved outside the glass box I was trapped in. The grief that has anchored me for so long has shifted – the air outside has changed, the light is different. I can smile at friends again; I can talk about what happened without the tears coming. But where does that leave me? I’m not sure I know who I am if I am not defined by grief, by loss.

Standing before the sea yesterday, my head still spinning from a successful, satisfying day in London, I felt more open; last night, for the first time in a very long time, I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to be held in another’s arms again. I have always pushed this thought down, denied my feelings, my yearnings, but last night they came out, dancing around me, tempting me, calling to me, and now they are out I cannot squash them back inside.