The season of answers
The season of answers
The future is looking bright✨
This image is from an artist I recently discovered on Instagram: @iuliastration. Her work speaks deeply to me, because it illustrates beautifully what it means to be human. The above drawing perfectly encapsulates what the last few years have been for me personally, and I believe, for us as society collectively. We’ve all gone through a long period of fear and uncertainty, a never-ending question nobody had the answer for.
And now it’s a new year, and I can’t help but be hopeful. Even though it’s scary to hope. What if we get disappointed again? What if some new horror is laying in wait for us? Do we dare to expect good things to happen, or is it foolish?
Whenever I’m at a loss, I look at nature. And I see peaks and valleys, high tide and low tide, starless nights that are pitch-black and nights lit up with countless stars. I see seasons of growth and seasons of hibernation, howling storms and the sun coming out from behind the clouds, droughts and summers full of rain. I look at my cats who are fierce mouse hunters but also sleep 16 hours a day, at my dogs who can easily run 20k but also lie contentedly on me for hours, not moving.
I’m reminded that we contain multitudes. That we go through phases like the moon. That nothing stays the same, not the good times and not the bad. That we will fall, and it’s up to us to decide if we want to get up.
My husband used to jokingly call me the eternal student. I’ve studied three completely different subjects, going from Forestry (dropping out after 3 years to come to Canada) to hospitality to becoming an x-ray technologist, spending a total of 6 years in post-secondary education. But even after I left school I still felt like a student, feeling like I knew nothing.
I remember reading advice in my blogging days about growing your blog by offering courses, teaching others what you knew, and thinking to myself, to quote Ruth Langmore, I don’t know shit about fuck.
Up to now my life has been a series of questions, of me trying to get a handle on it somehow. It wasn’t just a few years of asking questions - it’s been decades.
But something has shifted over the last year. The questions have slowed down, and some answers have started to appear in their stead. I stopped chasing someone I was not, and started paying attention to who was already there. Things I’ve never understood before started making sense.
I’ve heard many times that the answers to our questions can be found inside ourselves, and I never knew what that meant. Maybe I was too young, or I wasn’t ready, or it had something to do with regularly consuming a mind-numbing substance - probably a combination of the three.
Now I seem to finally have made it to the next stage of life, the one where some answers are sprinkled in with all the questions and uncertainties and “wtf am I doing?”-moments that have marked pretty much all of my existence thus far.
I think the most important step to entering a season of answers is to stop lying to yourself. I never lied on purpose; it happened unwittingly, and mostly by omission. Until about ten years ago I wasn’t honest about who I was. I had too many secrets to hide: my mental illness, my insecurities, the nagging sense that I wasn’t quite “normal” enough. Shame, guilt and an all-consuming confusion about who I was were my constant companions, and they don’t make good allies.
The list of things that made me feel wrong or unworthy was a long one: my need for alone-time felt selfish, my reluctance to have kids abnormal, my disinclination to cook dinner every night lazy, my indifference to put on make-up was a sign of “letting myself go” (very unfeminine and bad), my utter horror at drop-in guests felt like an overreaction, and my frequent tears and bouts of despair like the attention-seeking behaviour of a drama queen.
It wasn’t until I started slowly, one blog post at a time, to explore who I was that I started on the long road to self-acceptance.
I didn’t know that we are born complete. I thought that we are shapeless blobs that need to be carved into someone worth loving, and that it requires a lot of work, sweat and tears to get there. It then requires constant vigilance and upkeep to stay that way, and if we slack off or stop trying so hard, we will immediately lose value.
It’s not difficult to find the source of my belief: it’s literally everywhere. It’s how I was brought up, it’s what society tells us, it’s what I hear when people talk. We need to be hard-working, good-looking, nice, polite, fit, selfless, successful, giving; we need to be mothers and wives, career-women and domestic goddesses, easy on the eyes but at the same time not take up too much space.
I’m not trying to be someone else anymore. I’m returning to who I always was - the person I denied myself to be for so many years. It’s a homecoming, a settling down, a nesting.
There are some big changes ahead this year: my new book coming out, the move, and some health-related stuff I’ll talk about in an upcoming post. But more than anything else, I want to thrive this year. I want to feel strong, empowered, calm, joyful, and most of all: grateful.
Grateful for everything I have, for the person I am, for the people in my life.
Is it foolish to hope? To make goals and dream big and hope for great things to happen?
Not at all. It’s foolish not to.
We were in a long season of hurricanes and storms. But now the clouds are clearing and the sun is coming out again.
The future is looking bright.
❤️ Miriam