Why I Needed to Move Across an Ocean to Find Myself

originally published on Medium.com

Last year, I moved across the Atlantic from small town South Carolina to London, England. I had just graduated from college and was bewildered at this wonderful adventure I had managed to stumble into — London has always kind of had a knack for finding me (but more on that later..).

I get teary-eyed thinking about all I’ve managed to overcome in the last ten years and how seventeen-year-old me would never be able to guess what was up ahead. I spent my teenage years deep in the grip of anorexia, pummeling myself to the ground every day in an effort to do, to strive, to achieve, to climb. And by doing so, I also buried my true self somewhere deep down inside and made sure to numb out her voice with every decision I made. It wasn’t until my second decade on this earth that I fully came face to face with my demons and told them I didn’t want them to rule my life anymore. I was ready to do the work, I was ready to overcome.

What I didn’t realize, and what I don’t think I ever would have realized if I had never become an expat, was that while yes, I did turn down the road to recovery, I had still wrapped it all up in the mission of “doing,” of catapulting myself forward into this new, bright life without pausing to unlock the door to myself I had slammed shut years before. When I tried to tuck away my extremes in an effort to heal myself from one thing, I simultaneously hid my depth. I numbed the sharp edges and blocked out my heart’s whispers because I believed I couldn’t trust them. And that was only repeatedly reinforced by culture, by my relationships, by what I saw modeled for me out in the world.

Moving to London was glorious. Moving to London was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Even though I spoke the language, everything was different. I had all familiarities stripped away, all of my comforts and safety mechanisms were no longer accessible. I was in that weird early-20’s limbo between school & “real life,” and in the midst of that I needed to somehow figure out how to do all of the adulting things — like paying bills, apartment hunting, bank accounts, direct debits, getting sick thousands of miles away from your mom, shopping for lightbulbs, dealing with heartbreak — all on my own and in a foreign country.

I won’t lie, my first year was difficult. It was like this alternate universe of the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Every time I walked down the sidewalk my love affair with this city began all over again; I didn’t know it yet but that tugging in my gut every time London made eyes at me was my sweet inner voice trying to break through. But I also experienced a thorough breakdown in the actual sense of the word — not some dramatic, loud tantrum, but a silent collapse.

A Course in Miracles teacher Kenneth Wapnick said, “We should be grateful for all situations that make us the most uncomfortable, because without them we would not know there is something unhealed in us.” My numbing mechanisms worked until I pulled the carpet out from underneath them — with no firm ground to stand on and every dial in my life switched to CHANGE, I was forced to feel, to become.

London has been an incubator for self-discovery. It has been an exaggerated time for “space” (over 4,000 miles, that’ll do it..) and a sped-up period of growth where life has thrown me all the painful lessons I’ve been avoiding for so long, the messages I’ve only been buying into halfway.

In his new book To Shake the Sleeping Self, Jedidiah Jenkins says, “I have learned this for certain: If discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning.” This discomfort, this massive uprooting, has forced me to look myself straight in the eyes and confront my shadows. We are all just collecting stamps in our life passports, and it’s up to us how we interpret this multi-colored roadmap. What really matters is how we use all the pinpoints, all the destinations and wrong turns and delayed flights and unpredictable hardships, to inform our story.

We all need to lose our way sometimes. We all need to have our phone die on the outskirts of Copenhagen, on our first solo trip abroad, and then we all need to spend the rest of the afternoon blissfully lost, encountering Christmas markets and beautiful, blonde locals with bicycles and kind words. We need to taste the sweetness of time unbound, we need to feel the wildness of uncharted territory.

In my case, I needed to be stripped of all conditioning and all familiarity to discover what was left — me. I was so obsessed with seeking that I forgot how to appreciate stillness, the kind of pause that only really sets in when all of your programming is thrown out the window and you are looking at the world with the eyes of a newborn. I was racing along the track outlined by “should,” “would” and “could,” but the piece that I was missing, that it took literally jumping continents to discover, was this: No matter how hard you seek, there really is no “finding.” There is just a constant unearthing, a continuous process of discovery that is always simultaneously coupled with loss. Our story is ever unfolding, and every “aha” moment signifies a beginning, a march ahead, rather than a definitive end. Our deepest sighs usually proceed our most profound realizations, whether we understand it in the moment or multiple passports later.

Recently, I was walking in the park (God bless that park, which at this point could more aptly be called my place of worship) just like every other Sunday. But this time something was different. My heart felt sad and my body felt heavy, my limbs like lead with each step, but something in me resisted this narrative of pain. I felt a soft breeze on my cheeks and just like a soft sigh, a voice in my heart said, “oh…here she is.”

Here I was feeling heavy, feeling the weight of all the lessons of the past year threatening to break my foundation. But instead of shattering, I noticed myself shedding — slowly releasing the hurt which I refuse to let make a home out of me and unveiling everything that I actually am:

I am all of my incredible accomplishments, my beautiful family and their undying support, I am my signature burgundy coat and my “I’m-a-lady-and-I-moved-to-London” Kate Spade handbag. I am 15+ addresses in the last four years, an Ivy League degree and a predilection for 19th-century poetry. I am the trauma of a severe eating disorder and the battles I waged every day for a decade to reach the pinnacles of overcoming. I am my heart, so precious in its unbounded optimism and deep ravines of feeling, I am the grace of my ancestors and the excitement of my future children. I am the heights of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the depths of Lake Keowee, and the breadth of the endless rolling Carolina hills. I am all of this and choose to see it as the absolutely bloody brilliant HONOR it is to have this life.

I am my own destination. And every day I am closer to coming home to her.

Reflections on an Equinox

Photographer: Aneta Ivanova

This season has been one of seismic shifts and also agonizing stagnancy. My muscles have torn from the bone, my family has been thrown to opposite ends of the world, we have swam in the darkest depths of the mind, and held weights so crushing you'd never think you could bear them until you just do. My brain has flitted from the stratosphere to the very core of my being (where the door is still mostly closed -- but unlocked!), my cells have literally attacked each other because they don't know who the enemy is and who is safe, my heart has cracked open wide, and yet still -- here I am.

And what a beautiful gift, to be served up so much persistent hardship that it sticks around long enough to morph into the vessel of its own demise - the wall becomes the wrecking ball, the ice becomes the pick, the thick mud becomes the plough, the absolutely unpredictable, unfair, unimaginable shit becomes the life altering circumstance that shifts your view of the world, and of yourself.

I don't know much, but what I do know for certain is that humanness that our world is so worried has been lost is still very much here. I know this because if I dig around in my pain, if I press where it hurts, my eyes open wider. My heart bleeds with empathy and my lungs expand with an understanding and an undying hope that in these ashes we are born.

How is it that in the midst of so much hurt I can still experience sweetness? That I have been given arms that are capable of holding an eternal heaviness but also of suspending space and time, twirling above my head as light as a feather, floating on the wind and the whims of my ageless soul?

I'm baffled every time I see a sunset because the end is so beautiful.

I never thought that it would be when the school gates close and after the diplomas are handed out that I begin to learn all of the lessons. But I have taken more notes, digested more information that is seemingly impossible to process, highlighted and underlined and crossed out and erased and rewritten and earmarked more moments of my life in the past two years than I ever did as a student sat at my desk.

We are made for dualities.

The both, and.

The moment when the Sun crosses the celestial equator and everything is perfectly in line, for a fleeting moment, suspended between summer and fall. The limbo in between the seasons where it's too cold for a T-shirt but too warm for a coat. The light is lingering, we still meet for drinks outside cafes in the evenings but then the sun dips earlier than expected and the goosebumps on our arms hurry the conversation along.

And I sit here, alone, watching the sky turn pink and fade to black. And then the Moon, she is full, she is bright, she is strong, she is resolute. And I realize, I am not afraid of endings. In this emptiness I am waxing, not waning. 

In my darkest hours I've been ripped so far apart that finally there is space for the light to come through.

And this, I hope I never forget. I hope I never let fear dominate the narrative that love so deeply wants to fill.

xx mm

On The Moments That The Words Don't Reach

(I went to see Hamilton this weekend, and YES, the show was incredible, and what has really shaken me to my core is the song about the Hamiltons moving uptown.)

Learning to live with the unimaginable.

What do you do when there is nothing to do?

When the shadow has taken root deep in your heart, made it it’s home.

You welcome it, you make its bed - but you leave the door open. You let it come and go as it pleases, acknowledging when it’s there but letting it live somewhere else from time to time.

Oh, you again.

Learning to live with the unimaginable.

And that’s just it, the unintelligible difficulty in it all -- you cannot imagine, you can’t conjure up an image to go along with the description --

Psychologists reveal that language is a fundamental element of emotion -- words make meaning, dialogue can conceptualize. Images cut straight to the chase - no need to process a word, just an image flash brain registers and body feels.

There’s an article in the Atlantic* --- “Do you feel something less strongly if you don’t have a word for it?”

I don’t think so. Maybe you feel it even more strongly, because it lingers, you can put a finger to it but not a name -- oh, you again.

Just as chemical compounds (e.g., NaCl) emerge from more basic elements and possess attributes that their constitutive elements do not—NaCl (sodium chloride, or commonly, table salt) has properties that are not reducible to either sodium, which is a member of the alkali metal family, or chlorine, which is a type of halogenic gas—psychological compounds such as emotions are more than the sum of representations of the body.**

You can’t empathize, you can’t summarize, you can’t describe in enough detail to invoke in the other person that kind of heartbreak that rips through your veins and creates a canyon in the middle of your spine. A canyon that sometimes quakes with so much might that you are forced down to your knees, forced to simply grit your teeth and endure, as the shivers tear your very foundation further apart.

Gentle, how to be gentle.

This is the lesson I am learning. This is the task I am giving myself in order to prop the door ajar, to let the shadow come and go, dancing across the walls.

Soften, don’t let it lock you up inside.

Oh, it’s you.

But alas, here, too, is me.

 xx mm

*https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/the-book-of-human-emotions-language-feelings/420978/

**https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4396134/

On Cities

“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.” 

― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone 

Here we are, a tangle of bodies, a mess of dreams, a web of plans and to do lists and uncertainties, all navigating this maze of streets and sidewalks, the never-ending stream of transportation, together.

When I breathe in, the man in his reading chair next door waiting for the kettle to boil exhales. When I wake up to the sun, the wandering souls out on the street behind are just returning from a dance with the night. While I am paying my electricity bills there are people down the street struggling to make ends meet, there are sleeping bag-wrapped bodies in every train station. While I can’t pry myself out of bed on the down days, there is laughter echoing against the lampposts from those who have seized the adventures of the day.

Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about the strange human experiment that is a city – all of us piled on top of each other, just trying to carve out as much space for ourselves as possible. Sometimes I feel like I’m suffocating; every venture out my door feels like drowning in a sea of strangers, gazes, looks, other people running errands.

My heart craves stillness. My brain doesn’t lose momentum because the background noise never stops, there is no Off button to the City.

But on the other hand, there is something so intriguing, so utterly intoxicating, about the shared pulse of this place – when the sun comes out, I feel connected to millions of other souls whose hearts are beating a little bit faster, our cheeks flushed with warmth and the fleeting optimism of sunshine in April.

When I can’t pull myself out of my head as I’m walking down the street, just wanting to be back home under my duvet, I see three little children riding their bikes down the sidewalk, giggling and flashing their smiles like today is the very best day, and tomorrow probably will be, too. And I feel my lips curling up and my heart burning for the sanguineness that fills childhood to the brim. And suddenly my walk home becomes lighter, I am pulled out of the negative self-spiral and placed back into the universe where we are all connected.

There are days when I simply can’t bear facing another stranger’s face. I think maybe I feel collective energy so deeply that the city can sometimes be an overwhelming complexity of intensity and forces that are coming from every direction, that are hitting my ribcage from every angle and making their way into the chambers of my own heart.

Do I put my armour on every day before I leave? Or will this also block the serendipity, the chance encounters that become stories, life-forces, pivots in our path?

You don’t know loneliness until you’ve been surrounded by 8.78 million people and still felt excruciatingly alone.

When that tree down the road has begun to blossom and you want to show someone its beauty but there is no one, but simultaneously everyone, and you feel the urge to just shout about the lovely blooms to the next person who approaches you on the sidewalk.

But then the other night, as I was walking home, I paused in my tracks and smiled at the fickleness of it all, of my on-again/off-again relationship with cities. The sun had set and I was looking up at the moon, no headphones in, just listening to the sirens and the chit chat and the slow beat of the speakers down on the high street where a man was rapping to a hip-hop/reggaeton track outside of the station. I was passing by this cute white row house that I’ve always admired (because of the perennial orange berries that climbed along the black wrought-iron fence surrounding their front garden) when I heard the heart-wrenching tune of a violin melody spilling out from an open top-floor window. I stopped walking and closed my eyes, listening to the melancholy hum of the strings, my own private concert.

And I took that moment and tucked it away in my back pocket, for all the times when I will inevitably feel lonely again. For that moment, I was connected to that solo musician in the top left window of the white house I admire every day on my commute home. I don’t know him/her, although maybe I have passed them before on the street, or in the Yogurt/Cheese aisle in the Tesco down the road, or in line for the cash machine that’s next to the flower stand (the flower man only takes cash).

So I sit here, reveling in the duality of it all. I can hold both; the suffocation of the people & the buildings & the never-ending noise and stimulation together with the beautiful serendipity, the eternal opportunities, the communal highs and lows, the joining of sighs and umbrellas opening and windows flying upwards to let in any faint hint of spring.

I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I know where I began (in empty fields, on sprawling lakes, climbing the bluest mountains). And I (kind of) know where I am now – living amongst millions of other people’s beginnings, middles, and endings, aligning my timelines with theirs, sharing this space to grow and fall and mess up and hit life milestones and phone home and build a new home and try to find a decent patch of nature every once in a while..

I don’t know if its harmony that we are living in or chaos, or some sort of blended chaotic harmony that both pulls me apart and stitches me back together again. But for now, this is where I am. And may I continue to be rooted firmly, in the midst of it all.

“Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” -Thoreau

On Eclipses

Crescent moon shadows during the eclipse on my grandma's porch

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of eclipses. Anyone who knows me knows I was obsessed with the recent complete solar eclipse that could be seen across the U.S. My little hometown happened to be one of the places where you could view complete totality – the pictures my family sent are absolutely breathtaking.

It is just such an overwhelming concept for me to fathom – we were literally able to witness space in action; for a few minutes the world paused and recognized just how teeny tiny we are, how little control we have, how the moon can block out the sun and there is absolutely nothing we can do about that.

After the fact, there were loads of articles on “the loss of productivity” during those 2-3 minutes, the net millions of dollars lost because people took a moment to pause and look up. As interesting and noteworthy as those articles may be, the truly noteworthy aftermath of the eclipse was put best into words by travel writer and (a personal fave) inspiration guru Jedidiah Jenkins: “..the fact that our country is suffering a divided conscience, a broken heart, and a polarized confusion like nothing I’ve seen in my life…and the sky would go black, inviting every single human being in its path to stop for a few minutes and gaze, is a bit of a miracle, a cosmic gift. And it sliced right across the whole damn country as if on purpose.”

Must we let things go fully dark before we figure out how to (re)approach the light? In a solar eclipse, the moon totally eclipses the sun. There is no half-assed exposure, no smiling to hide the pain, no blanket of light to cloak the rawness of the shadows. This covering can only happen at a new moon, in an alignment called syzygy, when the Sun and the Moon are in complete conjunction as seen from the Earth. That last part is interesting – it’s all about perspective. The planets and the moons are in constant motion every day, but sometimes it takes a physical representation of this to stop us in our tracks and remind us that the Sun and the Moon are a team of forces working within us, simultaneously.

This incredible wonder of the universe was visible to our inconsequential human eye. That is just about the definition of awe. But, as Shannon Ables of the Simply Luxurious Life said, “We can’t wait 99 years for nearly 3 minutes of awe…Do we need to be told when something is significant? Do we need to be witnessing the beauty with millions of people for it to be an event worth slowing down for and savoring?”

I think not. As I’ve moved into a new chapter of my life, I’ve experienced a lot of friction between my “old life” and this “new life.” In this new life, pretty much everything as I previously knew it has changed – my home, my physical location, my family, my employment status, my schedule, the foods I eat, the currency I pay with, my healthcare system, the way I pay my bills, my proximity to the ones I love, the type of life I have to lead. Again, I was expecting this and am not complaining – rather, I’m emphasizing the fact that no one actually really knows what they are getting themselves into or knows how they will deal with the results of their decisions. You can plan and prep all you want, but it comes down to just making the decision and having a strong foundation to weather the aftershocks.

The only constant, as is usually the case, is me. Here I am again, navigating through a tumultuous ocean with the trusted strength of my own hand, the compass in my heart that I’ve worked so hard to strengthen and calibrate.

So if I am not to capsize, all I have in my boat is myself and the love and support of a few beautiful, loved humans who have volunteered as my life vests, to lean into. This life requires a lot of energy, mental and physical, and I’m trying to learn how to expand my days. I’m practicing lunging deeper to get the full experience of being, pushing myself to jump to the next lily pad, even though the last one seemed pretty comfortable. Stretching out time and breathing in deeply until the sun has moved behind the earth. At the same time, I’m trying to work out the delicate balance of simultaneously knowing when to scale back, giving myself the permission to sometimes just do what needs to be done and let that be enough. How do I know the difference between when I’m pushing myself to my limits because that is the life I crave and when I am pushing myself as a form of punishment or avoidance, when really I just need rest?

It’s a delicate balance. A syzygy. One that sometimes can be seen on the outside, a full eclipse, obvious distress, a physical change. But, as I was reminded by Dr. Jeremy Goldberg in one of his most recent (very aptly time) Long Distance Love Bombs newsletter, “Remember, it’s how it feels that matters, not just how it looks.”

My mom told me that during the few moments of complete totality, the temperature dropped about 7 degrees. It was lunchtime yet completely dark, the crickets came out, the animals went to bed. In the same way, my 180 degree change has made me stop in my tracks and really dig deep – what do I want, what feels right – to remind myself of the winding road that led me here. I am strong in my convictions, and very in tune with my body, and sometimes what I feel inside and know to be true does not match up with what I hear, see, read, scroll through on Instagram..

But, ultimately, it is about how it feels. It’s that connection I crave, that voice bouncing back at me from the dark cave walls. Like the moon literally blocking out the sunlight, forcing the world to pause, sometimes a soul just begs to be brought to the surface – especially when that soul has repeatedly been denied access to the light, has been brushed into the shadows either by its physical human home or other relationships or life events. The only way to recognize when you are shhhsing your own voice is to pay attention to how stuff feels (poetic, yeah?)

Liz Gilbert says an artist is “anyone who walks through the world saying don’t erase me.”

I create because I want to be seen. By others maybe, but also by myself. My authentic self is yearning to escape the stifling, the shoving away, the quieting, that it has repeatedly endured. It wants to feel what it feels, not just when it is convenient. It wants to love so fiercely and feel so deeply, sometimes to an extent that is beyond everyday human experience.

And the incredible thing is, we all have the capacity within us to allow ourselves to be seen. Whether it’s through creating, speaking, connecting, growing deeper in our relationships, leaning into our hardships, moments of awe and pivot surround us every day, if we choose to notice them. There is it again – the balance, the cycle.

I recently read a piece by Connor Beaton, author and inspirer, in which he said “Isn’t it mind-blowing how many of us pay for truth, connection, and reality—but don’t show up when it’s right in front of us?” We crave buzzes and likes and taps as some kind of artificial connection, we drink away our realities and constantly subscribe to new fads, diets, drugs, training programs, yoga classes, and beyond. But if we haven’t already quit/cancelled/dropped out, when we begin to engage with these new things, we are actually only halfway plugged in, because the other half of is busy looping into some new promise of “connection.”

“The worst thing we can do as a seeker is to sign-up for everything and show up for nothing.”

If you crave something, get it. Just that one thing. Savour it. Pause, and then continue.

If you commit to something, whether it be friends or a work assignment or something else entirely, give your all to that thing. Engage fully. Pause and immerse yourself.  The rest of the world will always be there; all of the things waving for your attention aren’t going anywhere.

Serve the people who show up. Show up for them.

And above all, recognize that we all hang in a delicate balance and the moon and the sun don’t really care about our earthy desires – both the Sun and the Moon out there in the solar system and the ones that reside inside each of us, representing our brightest highlights and also our darkest corners.

I don’t know about you, but I am so, so tired of resisting the universe. Of questioning my gut, of caring about how much space I take up in this world. I want to be comfortable with the space I inhabit, to let my voice echo off the walls, to cherish the opinions of those I care about AND to honor what I know to be true. Energy spent on the opinions or thoughts of some colloquial, undefined “others” is energy well-wasted. I’ve spent a lot of time as a planted seed, building up confidence and watering myself with honesty and love so I can burst through my skeleton shell. I want to honor that time that was taken, those experiences endured, by imbuing the time I have now with intention and purpose.   

My life is such a work in progress, but if there’s one thing I know, it is that I am not content with scraping the bottom of the barrel of existence.

This eclipse shook me to the realisation that sometimes you really do just need to let things go fully dark – feel the full gamet of emotion – in order to fill yourself back up with the most energizing light. Just make a decision, do the thing, without knowing how it will play out. But – make sure you allow yourself the space to feel, expect there to be some whiplash and don’t beat yourself up about it.

One of the most cherished pieces of advice I’ve ever received from my mother is, “You can’t pour from an empty cup.”

And maybe life is about figuring out what exactly it is that fills your cup.

Once it’s gone pitch black, once your tank is on reserve fuel, you must take the time and give yourself the space to “top up your glass,” as the people in my new home country say. Jury is still out on how to do this without internal judgement and without feeling like you are teetering on the precipice of an existential crisis, but hey, at least I’ve made it one lily pad further.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but it’s something. A well-deserved pause.

 

On Heaviness

a cloud is an iron weight
a feather is a ton of bricks
when you're anchored down
to an immovable heaviness.

Crushing weight on the lungs makes every breath a bit harder, a bit sharper. Breathe, breathe, (I'm told), but this is no easy task - a stone tied to a leg pulls the body deeper, deeper under.

Life is so excruciatingly beautiful sometimes its almost too much to handle; yet still I must push aside the heavy black curtains to let the light in.

I run, I jump, I dance, I twirl in the madness of it all; my chains drag along making patterns in the sand.

The wheel creaks on; the grinding grinding grinding makes rust.

Sometimes I wonder
should I just stay inside
if bathing in the sunlight sears my flesh
and waltzing in the rain opens my wounds?

Alone alone you trudge on.

Warm, sweet shower licks your tired body and kisses you with steam / hot tears roll down the cheeks, hidden.

You must be strong
you must be strong
gain composure
for another round

but who is being strong for me?

a pit
in my stomach
a bird
locked away
wings clipped
no flying today

a thief in the night came, took everything you gave.

Alone alone you trudge on.

You must be strong
you must be strong
gain composure
for another round

but who is being strong for me?

xx mm