This was written right before I left Seattle. I was clearly in a heavy head space. My head is clearer now but my obsessions with identity, mirror an the intangible quality of home we find in ourselves and others- still holds.
What an interesting time to revisit this as I once again am on the precipice of new life, adrift in a liminal space, seeking mirrors with which to build a home.
*(Fugue in this instance is a reference to Fugue State- "It is a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality , and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state is usually short-lived (ranging from hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity" -from wikipedia
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Liminal
place
of transition
between
identities,
stranger in new land, between selves, without a home, hypnotherapy, anaesthesia, dream states,
sleepwalking, insomnia, drowsiness,
intoxication, dissociation, meditation, medication, hanged man, step off a cliff
usually change is so gradual we don’t notice
it until long after it has taken place but sometimes the carpet is yanked from
underneath you and you you are slapped with the awareness that you will never
be the you that you were before and the
frightening emptiness that there is not yet a new formed you to take it’s
place.
you
are lost luggage. no where to land, no
home, not even inside yourself.
A
tame bird set to the sky to circle not knowing where or how to land.
Could
this circling ever be called freedom?
This rootless aimless circling, not freedom and all the hope it
holds. But a limbo, a period of death.
What
if it never ends. What if the bird never
finds a new home, what if you never find a new home within yourself. What if you live the rest of your life a
stranger amongst yourself. Never being
able to settle into your skin again and say ‘now, this, this is me.’ Always looking into the eyes of a foreign
body. How long can a human live without the house of identity it builds around
itself?
sure it can dress itself up, wearing masks of selves . the professional self, the fun self,
I
put on the clothes that I see the others around me put on, but what if it never leads to a truth? A realization of a newly developed self.
What
if it forever remains the act, the
motions of dressing and smiling and behaving the motions of brushing and
cleaning and working the motions of laughter
always with a detached eye asking who is
this? This can not be you? Where are you? Who are you?
Are you gone forever? Will the
rebirth ever come?
Is
spring dead? New shoots forever just
below the soil’s skin, buds forever on the verge of bursting open?
Will
we ever recognize ourselves as real and vital and solid and breathing
again? Will we ever be a necessity. will we ever feel a place of sanctuary
belonging at home within ourselves?
Does it depend on the world? The mirror?
Can it be put right by the reflection of someone who sees it correctly. Did it fall apart because the environment was
wrong. The “other” double quotation marks capital O other that
reflected back at you reflected a picture so out of synch with what you’d had
in your head that there is no reconciling the two.
The
cognitive dissonance imploded your already slightly fractured ego. Leaving nothing no trace of self. No sense of solidity.
Could
it all be fixed with the right mirror.
The right town? the right community?
A single person to see what really is there and give it back to you in
the mirror of comraderie. A mirror showing that indeed it is you alive and
breathing in a recognizable body, a recognizable costume, in a geographic
location.
A
you with purpose place and future. a you
with a present. no longer a collage of so many broken and failed pasts but
“YOU” Capitol y. o. u.
here
in this place standing now. but still moving towards a future, a future
that can hold all of you every last shard of self and be big enough and strong
enough and tacky enough to keep it all together and beautiful enough to give it
a sense of freedom a place to fly to and fly away from. Because freedom has an anchor a home.
Freedom
is the choice to have a home or to leave that home. Choice requires hope. Hope doesn’t exist with
out desire. desire has no home without identity.
But
the mirror the right mirror maybe can build a home
give
you hope
an exit strategy
from
endless free fall
endless vacumm
black hole of the future
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