This was originally a YouTube video. The link is at the end.
Hey all. It's been a minute. The minute brought to you by my being consumed with training for a new volunteer gig. And that minute is ladened with many thoughts and fears. Which is what I want to address.
This may be just a bit light on specifics since I don't want to call out organizations. I will call out my thoughts and feels about this and all the angst this has spawned. Truth be told it's still doing the angst thing. Perhaps this video share will tamp it down a bit and enlighten me. When we share out loud our words, thoughts, feels, and all become 3D images. Sentences we can see more clearly and learn from.
As the title states I'm trying to find my own way. To reach a clearing emerging from my grief journey of deep shadows, fallen trees, bits of light filtered through the branches, the scent of decaying leaves, and mud that fights me on my journey. Right here I will admit that I'm not sure I've reached that clearing. I do see some light and open meadows. I've been fooled before.
This journey began when Donna was diagnosed and three years later died. There is a full record of all I've done on this journey. I hold no resentment toward what I've done since then. More perhaps toward what I didn't do. Or should've done. Ahhhh the joy of 20/20 hindsight. I could wax on wax off all of that. It's not material to the here and now. What's material is the volunteer gig I started at the beginning of the pandemic. It was new to me. It was focused on helping and supporting those in crisis.
Training for that back then was hard. It made me doubt myself but as the Byrds sang on "My Back Pages" "Ah, but I was so much older than I'm younger then that now". I did it. I graduated. I began to help others. Three now almost four years later all the fear at the start. All the hard work. All the training. All the time doing it has become glacial. No rush of joy. No highs of success or lows of failing. Over time and my collective experiences become rote. I kept doing it for the meaning and purpose it served me like a warm blueberry muffin on a cold morning. Comfort and calming the gnawing of my emptiness within. Was it enough to sustain me?
Maybe eight months ago I felt stale doing this. My game was not being upped. It was good and I did with passion but it was rote. I didn't understand what was going on and why. I mean like higher power shit speaking to me telling me time to find your own way. Move along little doggy. At the same time there were a cascade of minor ailments tied to exercise overuse. Which is another way of being told your expiration date is looming.
I'm not prone to drama. Well not that I'll share with anyone. All my drama is in my head alone. Though some of you who know me may just laugh cuz I be all whiny and shit. Nah I do keep the drama in my head on loop at times. This was not all that dramatic. It was the chorus in a Greek tragedy helping me to see something was up.
Around that time I thought maybe if I upped my game it could help me break out of this horse latitudes without a breeze to fill my sails. I applied for another volunteer gig doing the same work but it was for a varsity team. I applied. I was interviewed. Accepted for training. I just completed training. Bravo huh? Not so fast.
Four weeks of training. Zoom classes and a lot of reading. Throw in quiz's for fun. Intense. Role play too. Less the work intense and more the realization that what I thought was a foundation from the previous gig was not. Yes I understood crisis counseling. Yes I got the importance of talk and sharing etc. All of that. That foundation I thought could serve me. Did not in the least.
I've had to toss out all language I used previously. All the rote and learn new behavior and skills. It's a much higher level of work done with deliberate goals, plans, and outcomes. It's smart and so well done. I'm stoked and ready except for the fact my self doubt and self worth reared up like a wild stallion flaying its front hoofs trying to trample me. There was darkness I felt. A lot of serious darkness. My self-worth issues became center stage like never before.
I never considered myself one to struggle with anxiety. I give anxiety I don't have it. Or so I thought. I'm caught in the undertow of doubt and fear. Not fear of supporting those in need. Fear of letting down the organization and its mission. This is all new to me. Fear of failure. My imposter syndrome is on blaster mode. The only saving grace of this is that I see it and in my way want to succeed. Still I question it all. Not all just me. Which brings me to this.
Finding my own way. In short leaving Donna and my grief behind. Not forgetting her and all I've discovered in my journey. I am finding my own way which is the only way a relationship can last. Becoming independent of grief and becoming what grief has taught me. The light that entered me though my grief wound is not just external but my own light. To be the me I want to be even if I fail. Or as Camus noted in Sisyphus We need to fill our hearts with the struggle, know that it is within that struggle that we find true purpose.
In Chloe Cooper Jones's memoir "Easy Beauty" she has a short passage about a Japanese concept ma. Ma is the idea that the space, the gap, the absences between two objects, two ideas between sentences, words, breaths, held as much importance as the things themselves. Donna believed that when she designed. It is the white space that makes and ad work best.
So here I am in that space between my loss/grief/Donna and me. I'm standing in a clearing alone in that moment. A moment of change of growth filled with fear and promise to find new.
Here is the YouTube of this post.