Returning to compost

It happened all at once, a sudden desire to leave all the social media online madness, and lie in the ground to compost away (I’m okay, just a metaphor).

I was in a therapy session with my partner. We’re working with this unique couple based in Peru; together, we form a container of two couples, or four of us. She asked me how I was doing, and I gave a completely BS answer that had nothing to do with me, a way to deflect.

She asked again.

And then it hit me, out of nowhere.

I feel trapped.

It’s that same spot of my body, the black bean shape void just above my heart, the space of my anger/rage/anguish, and my sadness/grief. This time, I feel this invisible wall, the illusion of freedom, the cage I’m in.

I feel like a caged wild animal. Tears flowed down. No, I was born in captivity. I look out the window, and I see the sunshine, longing for a freedom that I have never experienced.

My entire existence was programmed before I was even born. The masters, whom I cannot see, trained me to do these tricks, to perform for them.

I cried for forty minutes, in a phone booth at work. Crushed. My spirit extinguished.

For my father, there was a literal cage, an imprisonment after the war ended. My mother was adopted into an abusive family, caged in her way. And I was born in a refugee camp, and my cage was the United States of America.

I can’t see the walls of my cage. I can’t see where the boundaries are. It’s invisible to me.

And cracks are forming.

Reality breaks, breaks in the system of control.

The wild inside me yearns to stretch its legs, to scream at the top of my lungs, to roar, and to claw at the ground.

The worker shell that I am wants to lie down, defeated by the complexity that is this world. I’m pushing my brain and body beyond their human limits. I wasn’t meant to go this fast, to compute this much information, to absorb this much change.

Only when I slow down, only when someone disrupts this go-go-go, does the illusion start to show cracks.

I’m walking away from social media, as much as possible, only to be available in real life. I don’t need likes, hearts, retweets, or followers, and trust that the right people will show up.

The further I get away from this complexity, the more old memories emerge. They live in my body, not in my mind. This overly complex world got way too complex way too fast. It demands that we numb our bodies and stay in our heads. In trying to fix my psychology, cognitively behave, and to be productive, I’m addressing mental health (or illness).

But instead, perhaps it’s an illness of spirit, a disconnect from my life force energy.

Maybe that’s why I’m always exhausted.

Maybe that’s why it takes so much coffee to keep going.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to be on the go constantly.

It’s time to sit down, lie down, and let the earth bring me back (no hidden code here either, metaphor of returning to a time when we were all connected).

Part of my healing has been to listen to music and songs that bring back a remembrance of something before living in this system. Here are a few of my regular go-tos; maybe they’ll spark something for you.

Thank you for reading this far, sending my love to you.