Frayed, rough, hidden.
The edges of who I am live deep within. All along and inside and outside these edges live other women, their lived experience, their pains and pleasures, their knowing, their secrets.
I have been deep in the wondering and wandering who these other women were, who they are, how they live in me. I have been hearing their words and voices in my own: the sharpness, the sadness, the wanting. I have been feeling the wails and roars and yearning and pleading. All of them rumbling and stomping and dancing within me as I try to make sense of who I am and what I want and how I am to be in this world.
Am I their happy ending? Am I the end to this long line of disconnecting from our daughters? Does the self-hatred and doubt end with me?
Probably not.
Maybe.
Most definitely yes.
All of the above.
The coldness. The frigid. The crispness.
The stoicism. The always in control. The tamed.
How to shake it off? To shake it out? To loosen those super glued edges and allow them to fray and unravel?
Looking in and out and around. Spiraling, always spiraling, never a straight line or direct path.
All these words swirling. They are nonsense and all sense. How do we put concrete words to ethereal sensations?
*She says:
If you own this story, you get to write the ending.
Yes. Own the stories. All of them. The ones that are theirs and the ones that are mine. The ones that are true and ones that aren’t. The ones that are facts and the ones that are fantasies. When I own they become mine and then… then they can be shared. Then the generations of isolation can come to an end. The the centuries of secrets and the unspeakable will be spoken. Then…
At the edges. Where words aren’t enough and are too much. There is no definition and it is so clearly defined, no finite and also no infinite. Where there is struggle to stay held together and to let it all go and the battle rages on.
Expanding out to the edges. Learning the stories that live within, hearing them, allowing them to be witnessed. Sharing them. Moving them out, giving them breath and birth and life and death. Letting the secrets be told and the shame be shifted. Allowing love, light, peace. Allowing wildness, fun, unencumbered dancing and flailing and howling.
Always coming back to the howls. Back to the wails. Back to the grief.
Back to it and not staying there. Allowing it, embracing it and then changing dance partners. Trying out silly and loose ends and untamed being.
Pruning the dead ends, the numb limbs. Creating space for regrowth, rebirth, (un)becoming.
Opening my throat, reminding you to open yours, and letting those howls, those wails, those roars out. At last. Again. For the first time. Always.
And so we begin again. We dip our toes into our wildness and feel what is beyond. (join us). We dive into our untamed being and experience our embodied knowing. (join us). The circles forming, expanding, growing. The roars and howls and wails rising up and demanding to be heard.
*She = Brene Brown
This post inspired by In Her Skin :: the sexuality session.