I Am Heavy.
My heaviness remains - call it luggage, call it baggage, call it a burden, call it a blessing. Call it what you will, but it's present and tonight, my arms are aching.
I don't like to get into the personal specifics of my heaviness, because it's private and mine to bear. I've met other people going through the same circumstances, I've been lucky enough to help a couple, but I've never wanted to burden other people with mine. Perspective is my saviour, my religion is detachment from myself, and my circumstances.
Tonight I learned a huge lesson, and that lesson is vulnerability. My heaviness is my own, and no one else deserves to have it thrust onto them to carry. I put myself and my fears and my walls before the importance of someone else, and in doing so, I pick up another suitcase.
I see a lot written about "Being Happy" and I'm a strong advocate for the pursuit of happiness - chase it, run after it until your legs are sore and your ankles bleed. When what cannot be said is wept, and when pain becomes concrete and real in your being, when it ceases to be emotional and becomes physical and unchanging, happiness is the only way to spread that heaviness. If I wasn't happy, I'd have so much heaviness I would be crippled. You have to lighten yourself to make room for the pain, leave the cracks open and sore to let the light leak in somehow.
"You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
And meanwhile, the world goes on."
People say that a problem shared is a problem halved, or something like that. I don't completely agree. The support I've had from my close friends and family over the years has certainly been comforting - we've cracked jokes, laughed at my heaviness, decorated my baggage with pretty things and tried unpacking it and packing it in a different way, holding it in a different combination, but the weight remains the same. It's taken me years to jiggle it into a comfortable place.
From today, I am going to be vulnerable. I'm swapping my heaviness out of the designer cases that made me feel better; more accepted as a person and in society, and putting it right back into the ugly old crumbling cases it came to me in. Sorry for the abundance of metaphors.
This is me. I am flawed, I am heavy.
But I am also happy, I am light. I have a heart which is overflowing with happiness, and I have extra to share, if you want in? If you don't, that's okay too. I hope you have a life that's light, always.
