Sometimes, growth feels a lot like falling apart.
My blog is (obviously) titled Mitten to Mountains. As the years have gone on, the reverse has been increasingly difficult.
In the last few months in Washington, I have been putting together the pieces to construct a new sense of self. My relationships, my professional choices, my environment, and my wishes and dreams have been converging into one fluid current; a new iteration of self, a whole new phase of growth.
And then that current sped right down a waterfall.
With a lot of rocks at the bottom.
I always knew that returning to Ann Arbor brought with it, a degree of a sense of regression, but I suppose I thought that I could surmount such a trap with all of the growing I’d done.
Some things never lose their influence. Within days, I was grappling with a very inherent sense of feeling 15, compounded by parents holding onto histories and assumptions from that age. Needless to say, it brought up some tension.
If change is constant, its understandable that we get anxious or desperate when our environment and the people we spend our time with so drastically changes. It can feel a lot like loss. I quickly discovered just how challenging it was for me to be here, to engage with a world that was so separate from the life I’d just come from, and not feel like I was letting that life go, devaluing it, or taking a step backwards.
My visit home ended up being less of a vacation, and more like homework. But as I prepare to fly home today, I can leave feeling like the work that was done here was necessary, the visit not in vain.
When I’ve come back in the past, there has been a lingering sense of attachment to the ego of who I was here. Walking down the streets, I’d associate with my adolescence, absorbing an air of narcissism. I’d unthinkingly get into arguments with my parents and take the haughty high-road approach without looking at the roots. However, this time, I didn’t feel the need to have anything to do with the person I’d been during my upbringing here. I was being inundated with cues and links to that person, but instead of just staying awash in the emotions of that, I began to look at what did or did not serve me anymore.
The whole experience was kind of like unpacking old boxes that you always said you’d take the time to go through but never did, and now you’re wondering why you have half the stuff. This involved trying on a lot of new ways of communicating ideas or feelings about why I was or was not holding onto things.
Two weeks later, after yelling matches, crying, introspection, reconnections and heart-to-hearts, I finally feel like I’ve gone from the blurry double-vision of a ghost life, to a more rejuvinated, sharp-focused sense of my self and my trajectory.
Momentous self-growth occasions almost paralyze me. I get really pumped and then terrified by my own spirit. Perhaps terrified isn’t the right word…overwhelmed, maybe. I wrote on this sensation a few weeks back, in regards to positive life experiences and emotions:
“…Like, when I have a good day, its not just a good day. I want to cry and dance and write and emblaze the moment in the stars. When I recognize the wonders of it all, I have a panic, almost. Like wanting to stop time because I feel I'm supposed to honor all of these amazing bits and pieces I'm noticing.”
When it relates less to experience I have and more about just inner reflections and growth, I’m trying to get better at trusting the essence of that growth as being ever-present, not something that I feel the need to cling to, for fear that I will somehow lose that wisdom. And through this visit, I feel like I have taken a strange, backwards ride from feeling lost, to feeling even more strongly in my center.
When I return to WA, I will officially be starting my adultling life outside of AmeriCorps. I will be moving to Portland, working as an in-home senior care-giver, and discovering how I’d like to build my life in that context. I’m no longer in school or a program with “holiday breaks” or “summer vacations”. I’m really not sure when I will be returning to Michigan.
However, now I know that I can leave, not with scraps of unraveled yarn, but with a Mitten that fits perfectly to keep me warm in the Mountains.
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