Tuesday 24 February 2015

I Am Heavy.



I Am Heavy.


For the most part - I am light. I am quick, nimble on my feet. My heart was born with a tap, labelled "happiness" - worn and torn over the years, sometimes empty, sometimes overflowing. Broken, and restored back into working order. My body is damaged, and will remain so, but my spirit is rose-tinted, Rosie-tinted if you will.


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. 


5 comments:

  1. Strong image and word maker. Hoping you'll find even greater ease as time carries on, Rosie Hardy.

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  2. I like to think that everything is part of this great balance, and sometimes the scales aren't even. But we try. x

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  3. Mmmm maybe I read a lot between the lines, but it made me think about the final lesson from Ketut to Julia Roberts character in Eat, Pray, Love, that she is so scared of allowing someone in and losing her happiness and "balance" that she simply shuts the guy out and Ketut tells her:

    "Sometimes to lose balance for love is part of living a balanced life."

    Hugs!

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  4. "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."

    I'm not sure what heavy load you're carrying, but that's a beautiful and apt description of how I carry on despite the burden of multiple very painful autoimmune diseases. I hope your burden gets lighter very soon.

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  5. Hi Rosie,

    I'm not sure what your believes are so this could be very wrong or weird to you, but there is a chance that the haviness you carry is from a previous life. People can be influenced by their previous lifes in many different ways. As you are still the same soul sometimes the heaviness you had in a previous life was so heavy it continues in your next life. Without you really understandig where it comes from, which makes it even harder. There are lots of story's where 'regression therapy' really helped people to overcome fears/weird feelings or even things like eczema!
    I really hope that this WILL help you!! Because you seem amazing and so fun to be around. Xxxx a Dutch Girl

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