Navigating mental health during quarantine has been difficult. I have never felt more isolated. I have never felt more conviction. As with most immense and transformative events — there is no evidence of this quiet revolution. There is just me documenting a moment, futile like trying to keep water in the cusp of my hands. There is a crack in every surface. A tear in every fabric. I am residing there: in the broken parts that are actually, upon arrival, more honest than anything.
The avoidance strategies and defense mechanisms I refined for years have dried up. In this stillness I have to confront so much of what’s been dormant. No, what was buried alive. What was buried so that I could stay alive.
Narrativity is how I learned to establish some semblance of security despite all of the precarity around me. The stories I told about the world became my world. I became a story teller because that’s where I could be in control. Growing up it was: “I am going to work so hard so that I can get out of here.” And then I got out, but then another there become another here became another there became another here. And i kept running to the noise to drown my intuition. And I worked so hard, my body it broke.
So much of what I want and what I am feels impossible. But what is impossible is only what cannot be imagined. And what is imagined is only determined by the stories that are being told.
I think this is my way of saying — I am trying to learn that what I feel isn’t necessarily what is. I am suspending one story for another. I am learning how caterpillars must digest themselves in order to transform. In their remains there are imaginal cells, discs which activate only in this self-destruction. They hold the blueprint for every part of their new body.
I am learning that sometimes transformation requires self-annihilation. I am choosing dissolution over disassociation. I am becoming undone so that I can be remade again. It hurts.
