Braided Truths
Buy local. Buy American. This is the same. One cannot be true without the other. However, the political left prefer local, whereas the political right prefer American. Yet both are one and the same. We are one and the same. We are braided truths of both light and dark. Positives and negatives. Often it is simply us choosing to hear or see one over the other, rather than both truths interwoven together in all of us.
In recent years, I’ve been told I’m more courageous than I realize, that I’ve survived not one, but a series of life shaking events with courage. Courage, however, is often a choice, choosing to face challenges head on. I did not choose my life’s abrupt trajectory, I was an unwilling participant. It often felt like retribution for past errors, my wrongful choices now requiring atonement. I suppose you might say I chose how to handle these derailing life events, but I never would have selected what has mostly felt like going off the rails, a train wreckage I’ve been trying to course correct for years.
For nearly a decade, every tiny forward gain seemed to require so much emotional exertion that any progress rested upon a fine web of wisdom and pain threatening to collapse at any unpredictable moment. Eventually, though, I began recognizing my repeated thoughts and actions that caused such debilitating and vulnerable fragility. Patterns have emerged to reveal what I couldn’t see during those second (third, fourth, or more) chances to learn lessons I should’ve learned the first time, but were impossible to absorb while spiraling downward in a vortex of mental anxiety. I was just grasping to cling onto anything at all to keep from being pulled into depths of the complete unknown. I was fighting just to hold onto a desire to stay alive, rather than to simply just let go. It’s impossible to look for patterns when it feels like you are drowning.
Slowly and with persistent practice, I started learning how to calm the turbulent thoughts in my own head, but it also needed to take as long as it needed to take. I couldn’t rush the process. Yet when the storm inside my head finally started to feel calmer and the trauma and depression began to part and drift away, only then was it possible to see how far I’d actually come in my struggle to keep engaging in a life that felt worth living. Even though I still didn’t know where the path ahead might lead, somehow the not knowing was no longer terrifying. That is having faith. Now I can see the self-sabotaging patterns I wasn’t able to see before, though all along I’d only been trying to put all the damaged parts of myself back in place, to go back to a time in my life before the storm rolled in.
So, maybe what I’ve fostered isn’t courage really, but is courageous resilience. An ongoing unapologetic ability to keep picking myself up, over and over, despite the shame or guilt of having been there before, but somehow finding a way to keep moving forward and keep picking up the pieces. What may appear to be an ending is actually a horizon, where the sun rises and falls, both equally breathtaking to behold. But the magnificence of a sunrise and a sunset is in the simultaneous presence of both the light and the dark, as one appears the other fades. One without the other would not draw attention to its glory. Coexistence of both together is necessary.