a reckoning

wrecking ball by Graphic Enginer from the Noun Project

There's been a reckoning, hasn't there? A shaking and breaking of the table at the top of this year, all the way to the bottom. For me at least, that's what it's been.

And before this, I had a routine of reviewing the year in December, trying to find a silver lining in and amongst the chaos of 365 days smashed together. But I don't have it today. I only have an acknowledgement that we've been pushed and pulled apart so much, that who we are now and who we were, have become entangled and we are stuck.

This isn't new for me though. My identity has been a malleable thing for as long as I can remember, often anchored in the ever continuous trek to find home. What it means, what it doesn't, who I am with and without it. Mostly without.

But in that journey of discovery, this year has been revolutionary. Which is to say that it has been more like a wrecking ball to a standing building without a solid foundation. The bones of the structure were not sound, so destruction was inevitable, and now I'm faced with what to make out of what’s left.

See, I have rediscovered a lot about my upbringing, my familial relationships, the ones that exist and the ones that are merely just ghosts of expectations. The latter often haunts me, the former a solid thing that carries trauma, no matter how many times I try to reshape it. The impact has become smaller, has withered over time, but never quite disappeared. And I've been trying to make my peace with that.

But there are gaps, or fractures in who I think I am sometimes, or who I've been, what I've grown up in and around, what I've missed, what of me is still missing. These are the things I've been grappling with of late, and recently a new discovery, a sort of reaffirmation of a fact I always knew about my origins, reared its head and tossed me upside down. But to reveal it right now would be premature.

Right now, it's still just rage and anguish and abject disappointment. Raw emotion that I cannot translate into coherent words. But later, later on I will.

For now I'm trying to pull myself together by going directly into the eye of the storm and hoping that everything I have learnt up until this point, will help me make it through to the other side.

And then maybe I'll find a way to deal with it, with the reckoning.

Inspiration: The Last Tree | Being Farmed