the stories we tell
I started writing this blog post, paused. It’s 2023, the early days of a new year, the earliest days of what I’m calling the new thing entirely. On New Years day, I hit 40 days post surgery. I fiercely protected my 40 days as an incubation period, a cocooning of this new self that had been built during surgery, a time of real rest. All the days that come after those first 40 are what I have coined the rebuilding days. These are the days when we take the something that was created from nothing during surgery and strengthen it, allow it to soften into its surroundings, rebuild what was lost. And I find it so fitting that my 40 days, and 2022, ended at the exact same time. Day 41, and the beginning of 2023, marked this beautiful entrance into a new thing entirely, a thing for which I am still feeling for edges and navigating my place in.
Since the summer of last year we have had this old, vintage desk sitting in our basement. The goal was to refinish it, which never happened because life got in the way and I got sick. When we took down our Christmas tree, I noticed the empty space, and decided it would be perfect for a cheery butter yellow vintage desk. It has scuff marks along the side, I’m sure it’s seen better days, but it has a story to tell. Just like me. And currently I’m sitting at it, with a chair I salvaged from outside a restaurant that closed in my hometown last year that is covered in water stains, with a cup of coffee and a giant bowl of pasta, thinking about all the ways in which things change, how we begin again, and the stories we tell along the way.
This past year, I’ve spent a lot of time writing my book, which has involved writing down so many of my stories. I’ve shared some of my most sacred writing and processing moments with some of the people closest to me, kept some moments just for myself, and watched as my life changed shape in proportion to how I showed up on the page. I started writing thinking I had a story to tell. I realized I kept writing because I was writing myself free. During this latest surgery, I encountered so many memories, synchronicities and things that reoccured not by chance, and I went in with and maintained the intention of going back into the story to heal what needed to be healed. And I did, and I am. I held so many pieces of my own story, friends held vigil for me while I did the hard and holy work of emotional excavation, and I came out the other side not only with a tender new scar but with integration and wholeness sutured back into my being. I told my story less in factual updates and more in poems and metaphors, a choice I still stand by and am so glad I made.
I think sometimes you have to go back in to come out the other side. You have to dissolve completely in order to emerge again. And my legs still feel shaky as I step out of those first 40 days, and the storm that was 2022, but I know I’m not the same person I was when I went into all this. And I think that’s really beautiful.
I set out wanting to write a post about intentions and what I want to bring with me into the new year, and maybe I still will. But as my teacher, Morgan Day Cecil, always says “Don’t move on too quickly.” I’ve realized the beauty that comes in sitting at this desk and letting my heart spill onto the page, at this desk with a story and this chair with a story in this body with so many stories.
It’s not perfect, it’s not new or shiny, but I think things and people with stories are the best kind. And I really want to be the living, breathing embodiment of my story, in all its guts and glory.
We all have stories worth telling. As we step into the new thing, don’t discredit yours.
