Re-Entry
“She goes each morning to soak in the cauldron of vast eternity.” Reverse Glass painting inspired by an energy healing during my sabbatical.
I’m hesitant to go back. For the last month, I’ve been facebook free which became synonymous with Instagram free, though that had not been my intention. The freedom rippled outward to texts and emails and anything that had to do with connecting via technology. Thus my pandemic isolation turned into a sort of monastic retreat broken only by a few forays into the grocery store, phone calls with a handful of beloved friends, awkward text exchanges explaining my tardiness in replying to messages which went unanswered for days at a time, and a few lovely visits with my Mom and pod-cohort.
I decided to do a facebook free February because I was in a state of dysfunctional overwhelm; I was aware that my nervous system had been on high alert for almost a year since Covid hit our world and my natural proclivity to screens and informational storytelling had devolved into a near constant state of doomscrolling alternated with serotonin seeking good news connections. I also knew that behavior was compounded by the last four years of a presidency that sat very ill with me and the constant feeling of helplessness and disbelief which had finally been gifted some relief. With a peaceful inauguration of Biden and Harris, I felt like I could, no, must, disengage for a while to find my equilibrium.
I have a recurring dream about being on a journey somewhere important which I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I am walking, sometimes I am in a car, but either way at some point the path leads into a kind of warehouse structure that is impossible to leave unless I willingly enter a kind of ferris wheel like contraption that I know will carry me down, under great rushing water, spinning me the whole time like laundry on the rinse cycle, until it spits me out and lets me go on my way. After years and years of having this dream, I know when a seemingly unrelated dreamscape has turned toward this depot…the turbine of water and the terror of risking drowning envelops me every single time. For decades I willed myself awake before the fall into the water. Eventually, I learned to just throw myself forward, but always ended up safely on the other side without a memory of the actual experience…only the visceral terror before the leap which has never lessened even though I know there is ease and salvation on the other side.
Before my sabbatical from facebook, my forays there were often like what I imagine fighting for air is like when being tossed in a giant underwater ferris wheel, especially if the wheel is going very very very fast. One minute I would be convinced I could make the world a better place if I gave to this or that organization or read the article everyone was passing around and the next moment I was assured I could not do a thing to save the planet, it was too late, hadn’t I been paying attention? One coupled friend whose heart and soul I admire was angry because she thinks people are being careless by creating pod groups; while another single friend was near the point of suicide because they were trying to follow the rules and hadn’t touched another living creature in ten months….round and round and round and round.
My month away was like being spit out somewhere safe and then taking the time to really remember, feel, and become conscious of that experience of almost drowning.
There were some instant realizations. In the first 24 hours away from facebook I discovered how automatic it was to be doing anything on my phone, checking the weather, reading a text, taking a photo, and then unconsciously start to open facebook. Fortunately I stopped every single time, but always with a sense of awe at how strong the magnetic pull was.
Without the near constant triggering of alarm bells which accompanied my daily facebook addiction, I also became aware that I’d been on high alert not just since that fateful day in November 2016, but since the middle of January that year when my brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. In the months that followed, I left my support system and home of 20 years in Seattle, moved to Maine, helped nurse my mom through cancer, and inadvertently left my career as a professional actress by relocating hours away from the nearest union theater company. Add to all of this a global pandemic, being walloped on a regular basis by unpredictable perimenopausal symptoms, and isolation from the world in various states of lockdown as a single woman in a rural Maine town and I was forced to admit that I was running on empty. Not only were my adrenals shot, but I’d lost all direction and understanding of how to move forward without completely drowning. When this sunk in, I succumbed to several days of very dark depression and despair.
After that, I was able to recognize that even my “empty” place and existence is quite full of blessings. I have a beautiful roof over my head, the means to feed myself, the sanctuary of forest and sea, beloved critters to snuggle up with, my dearest Mommy close by, and a growing community of friends who value spirit and the multiplicity of ways the Divine shows up in the world. Over the last month, many of these kind souls have been encouraging me to find the way my new vocation of Chaplain can and should begin to manifest itself in the world.
Paradoxically, though, the next realization was that all of these blessings have contributed to my reluctance to examine all those things that threaten to drown me. It has seemed like an indulgence all my life to take the time time and space to feel the full weight of my grief, rage, and helplessness which has been running quietly in the background since I was probably six years old. My white cis-gendered privilege and economic advantages handed to me from birth have contributed to a feeling of ineffectualness, ineptitude, and irrelevance. My struggles seem laughable. My anguish and loss are rendered miniscule when placed next to those of indigenous people, African Americans, families at the border, the beloveds of over 500 thousand (and counting) American souls who needlessly lost their lives to Covid, POC, the LGBTQIA community, first responders who have given up so much to steadily care for us even when we were unwilling or unable to care for them…the list goes on and on. In the scheme of things, I have not one single iota of a right to complain about my life or to ask for more…except, maybe, to ask for forgiveness for not having the wherewithal to do more to help others along the way.
But this is not a mea culpa. Nor a call to be reassured of something I may or may not bring to the table of humanity. It is merely a sort of reckoning of feelings that became clearer to me day by day without the noise of social media and the constant barrage of often contradictory messages being hurled indiscriminately at each of us from friends, friend’s of friends who don’t know us personally at all, bots who just want to roil the waters everywhere, news outlets with agendas I cannot grasp, and even the seemingly innocuous memes which sometimes appear harmless but often reinforce either the protected bubble we want to live in or the otherness of people we are already programed to be afraid of.
Yet. What my month in deep solitary brought in the final days was an understanding that despite my incalculable privilege I still need to own up to the pain I have tried to suppress my whole life. The pain that felt like it would drown me if I examined it closely. I hesitate to illuminate the specific sources of pain because they still feel so trivial in the scheme of injustices and crimes of humanity so many other’s endure and, ultimately, they are irrelevant to this post. Far more important, is the realization that ignoring my pain resulted in being trapped always on the lip of the ferris wheel and never being truly washed out the other side to a place where I could embrace my life and the journey before me. Even though, in the dreamscape, I was taught over and over again that there was a clear road on the other side leading me to some undisclosed destination.
My first stop on this new, open road and the last gift of my month away from facebook is this deeper truth which surprised the heck out of me: that I am worthwhile, worthy of time and space on this planet, deserving of being loved, cherished even. I somehow missed this message for so much of the last 51 years of my existence. And when someone tried to pass me a note telling me the truth of my worth, I would dismiss it, choosing instead to wave it away and deflect attention to the rightful worthiness of others, while simultaneously feeling paralyzed to do anything to make the lives of others truly better. What arrogance. What unending foolishness. What a waste of energy to deny what I bring to this world because my life has been relatively easy and others have to fight so hard just to stay alive and respected for being who they are. If only I could have accepted my worth decades ago and stopped hiding and punishing myself for being in pain while others had earned their right to be angry because they are continually disenfranchised, or worse, by the systems which keep me safe. Even now, writing this feels sacrilegious, as if I might be secretly saying, “poor me.” If anything, I’m secretly saying, “I’m going to get over myself now and simply try to love and be loved and to make this world somehow a little better before I leave it.”
It may seem like this post has gone off the rails. I started off admitting that I’m reluctant to end my facebook sabbatical. I shared a crazy dream. I tumbled and washed ashore on an island of self worth….and all of this is to find a way to authentically reconnect to my dear friends on facebook whose loving and open hearted posts I genuinely miss.
This morning when I awoke and it was now March I thought of immediately diving into facebook to see what I had missed, but I just couldn’t yet. And, here at late afternoon, I still haven’t. It feels a bit like running back to an old lover that you still harbor feelings for while also understanding that they will never be able to love and nurture you the way you need. Especially since between the last time I saw them and now, I’ve discovered so much more about who I am and how I want to be loved and how I want to love in the world.
“Cherish
transitive verb
1a: to hold dear : feel or show affection for
b: to keep or cultivate with care and affection
2: to entertain or harbor in the mind deeply and resolutely”
I want to get it right. I want to bring my full self into relationship with the world and I’ve discovered that that means having a full relationship with myself, my broken places, my ridiculously privileged and self-centered places, my light and gifts which I might offer to others, my desire to be completely cherished by another, and my even greater need to learn how to cherish the diverse population of this planet, those close to me and those who are strangers to me….and I cannot do that while being estranged from myself.
There’s a chance, however, that social media counts on us being estranged from ourselves. There’s a chance that the drowning is not inadvertent, but deliberate. Whether it’s overt manipulation by advertisers and political saboteurs or our own inner gremlins who convince us that doomscrolling is the equivalent of a mask and snorkel, the reality is that it takes much more consciousness than I ever realized to participate in online social platforms without getting trapped in a never ending rinse cycle of my biases, fears, dreams, and self-delusions. The true oxygen tanks, of course, are the stories of your children, the moments of triumph and success shared unapologetically, the photos of things that make you happy and feel safe, even the opportunities to share in your sorrows. It is these things I return to and perhaps there is a way for the heart to filter out the rest even if the algorithms continue to throw buckets of water in my face.