Circling Back to Self
I’m 21. I’ve never had a serious committed relationship. I’ve experienced crushes and a series of people I’m “talking to”. A myriad of my time was spent pondering over the past. My romantic life has been inconsequential and friendships are up and down and in and out. I can’t handle the hollow inconsistent relationships. Conversations would start with a politeness like “hey,how are you?” and end with “All you ever talk about is what you’re going through. I don’t think this can work.” When I finally stopped shaming my self by being truthful about how I truly felt, I released control of perception, perfection and permission in order to gain a self-assuredness. Rain will always fall sometimes it sprinkles, others showers. You can’t shame rain into being snow. My truth will be regardless if I acknowledge it, though friendship is not sustained in ignorance. My greatest superpower, is being a human tower moment. Anything that is fraudulent falls at my feet. I have been pushed in a moment where I have come to the clarity of loving myself.
With my bodies inconsistencies and POTS overtaking me, depression at times overcoming me, I have learned to lean on the constant of love, which to me is the commitment of care, compassion, trust, respect, and whimsy(it often takes shape as a bridge between affection and pure connection). Even communicating this feeling required a massive amount of energy, empathy,and time. I have learned to extend myself past people pleasing and toward my own spiritual growth. bell hooks™️
In this time I learned that healing isn’t linear. It’s very much a circular process of reconstruction, realization and recognition of your body systems. As I tap into emotional and physical bodily reactions, I empathize with more than my body. I open myself up to an evolving growth that inspires a courage to keep going.
In these past eight-12 months, I have leaned into a loving relationship with myself, soul and inner child. Not quite rushing past ingrained boundaries but leaning into a waltz with my wants and needs, it has been fulfilling. I found myself outside of my suffering and seeping inside of a joy that I haven’t been introduced to before. It’s like I’m having a conversation with all the sides of myself in all directions, but there’s finally a flow, a finality of entropy.
I’ve haven’t been writing poetry at the rate that I used to. I found myself reflecting on a defeated feeling in my chest. It wasn’t a loneliness, nor the ire of being misunderstood but a hollow place where consistency used to lie. What do I do if I don’t write, or if I burn out, or if I’m too tired to carry on, or if I don’t want to reposition my process of connection right now? All I want is connection or is all I want is vibrancy? I started to paint, abstract, on a canvas. Using all supplies that I already had or cheap supplies from the dollar store or wherever I could find something that I was drawn to. Colors that inspired me or introduced something new in my spirit.I became confident in my approach, detailed in my efforts, so i purchased a sketchbook, I paint it in there I draw and I figured out my flare. How I like to hold the pencil how I like to be seen, figuring out shape and form. How things best look on a two dimensional surface, examining the vitality between this fragile state of learning.
I never stopped to think why I ceased creating art. When I was younger, I always had something to draw with. My Nana has a scrapbook filled with my drawings. Some of them are still on my Papa’s fridge to this day. I remember being an impassioned artist, loving my creations, showing them to my friends and teachers. I would draw on the back of my assignment sheets, portraits of my friends in fifth grade. I even drew a portrait of my crush and gave it to him (how scandalous). After I suffered a head injury (for the first time) at 12, a concussion, I came back, incredibly behind in school. A month and a half of missed and late assignments not only did I have somehow finish late work, I also had to catch up with the current assignments. I was behind and drowning. In this season of remembrance, I’ve been peacing together the truth. I was discouraged by my art teacher. I was put up against other students and my art was discouraged. I felt academically challenged and mistreated by the world. During a series of health challenges, and depression. I put down my pencils, crayons grew dust, and books started piling on top of them. Art that was once my passion was in stuffed in a drawer mistreated and forgotten. Artist make art, even as our hearts are torn apart, we’ll play with a turn of phrase. Poetry became my playground of possibilities, painting, later, my port of passion.
It would be laughable to assume I started writing poetry for money, though that’s what people think. I started writing for myself. I started writing to understand my mind, wants, and needs. The most important part of me felt neglected, my natural inclination towards creativity, so I had to be the one who allowed the silent part of me to speak freely. Painting somehow felt bolder, more certain. I could revise a poem and I’m sure I could paint over a canvas, but I was proud of the work that I produced not as a machine or a business owner or someone who aspires to be a capitalist, but as someone is exploring her passions.
Like so many other of my peers I’m at home with my family so everything is being seen. Everything is being processed by the eyes of those most familiar to me. I begin to find my voice. I begin to position myself out of patterns most familiar to me. I have days where I can’t create when energy only comes to me between 12 and three. When there’s a musicality wrestling in the trees and birds are chirping as the skies are shifting from dusk to early day.
My confidence grows as I expand. I share with people who I’ve never met before. I’m doing inner work so I can flourish as I was meant to. I write down affirmations until they are no longer abstract but absorbed by my soul. I listen to my body and write wants on my mind. I’m learning by releasing this stagnant cycle and inviting newness into my system. It feels dangerous to get to do things I’ve never done. To explore in ways you’ve only seen and never experienced, to journey through the deep tunnels in the recesses of your mind not knowing what you’ll find on the other side.
For so long, I’ve been repulsed by the thought of change. I never wanted to be an artist, maybe that’s not true. Maybe that’s all I ever really wanted to do, but that’s never what I said. It’s not the story that was told and that’s certainly not the picture anybody placed upon me. I was encouraged with everything that’s in to harness my creative energy to academically withstand anything that’s been thrown at me. I was not raised by people who often gave up or gave in, at least that’s what I thought. Everyone has a challenges, hopes and dreams. Everybody wants to do something that they weren’t able to do. They decide to commit to the smarter thing, the easier thing. The settling down thing, or getting the job that’s going to best provide for you and your child.
I was raised by strong women, people of magnitude and courage, but that doesn’t mean they ever got to do what they wanted to do with their lives. I said I wanted to be a doctor. Everyone called me Dr. Sanai. I wanted to heal my Nana. Help my Great Grandmother and do my part to treat healthy whole society, but I realized while being a patient at Lurie’s Children’s Hospital for chronic pain and POTS(postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome), I hate hospitals. I hate hearing children, scream and cry, I hate hearing the alarms go off every two seconds in fear. I hate the rush, the panic, the pace, and how my pulse feels anytime I step foot into a place like that.
I feel deflated in hospitals, tired, and overwhelmed, I don’t wanna work in one. I don’t want to be the person that has to tell someone like me that there’s nothing more that they can do.During my diagnoses the beginning of my “healing journey” I started writing poetry. I finished and rewrote my early poems at the tender age of 17. My second poetry book, the book that has grown me up has been sitting and waiting to be revealed not necessarily because I’m scared of the revelations, that this time forced me into overcoming, but because there was more of a spark that I was missing.
The first book was rushed beautiful, but messy. There are things in volume one that I wanted that I didn’t have and since volume two was taking it sweet time and things were up in the air, I wondered to myself can I make this book a story that I was always meant to tell? Can this be a manifestation of wholeness? Can I finally breathe and break down between the seams of all that’s been drowning me? That’s when I took my break, A hiatus for painting a release from poetry. Shifting mediums, scared the crap out of me, but because of my Nana’s archives, which kept my early childhood art well preserved, I realize that painting was where I started, and this process of medium shifting became much more circular. Poetry still happened less frequently maybe every couple months I would write something that inspired me. When my great grandmother passed away this past April, a wellspring of energy burst through me, it manifested in tears, timeouts, and poetry.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Did you know you could turn stories untold into visions that unfold into kaleidoscopes of clarity?
My Granny knew how to alchemize all the darkness into light her might could frighten even the toughest neighborhood titan.
Sometimes she could stand and when she could, she would tower in her stature, confident in holy power.
She could reveal what needed to be healed, prodding your psyche her eyes twinkle excitingly once you follow her line of questioning to a point of understanding.
Her voice deliberately inviting all the masks to decompose into residue.
Who is freeing you from the storm?
Who is guiding you home to port?
Parting the pride of posturing flies-the pollinator investigator re~invigorates your spine.
She dives into your mind before you had the time to weed through your words, as they are slipping into slop.
Your ears and arms and eyes fly away to focus on pictures and passed time.
She won't let you fly away until you freed yourself of your mind, until next time she'd declare, only after you kiss her goodbye.I hadn’t spoken to anybody in months prior to her passing. I knew I was witnessing something that I didn’t want to witness. My body had a habit of caving in on itself. I knew she was deteriorating. She kept offering me wisdom shaped like stories patterned by possibility. She offered me a way, to envision the connection of life. Thought -idea- action. The first comes from all consciousness, think of it like a well spring of knowledge in the ethers, God-source energy that allows us to tap into an idea which is the realization of energy, and what’s following is a combination of thought taking that creative energy into explanation, a culmination of wills, the action that takes thought into form. A bridge into reality.
This is why I believe people buy into ai. The thought of expanding consciousness without the pain of process is seductive. Yet, in that lust for production we drain our energy(art,effort,time,) into the machine.
I realize now, that I’d rather be an amateur and a multi passionate artist than scared stuck in stagnation. Her wisdom awakened me. She gifted me a love derived from dreams of freedom, self-determination, a deliverance of devotion to the creative soul.
In the wake of authoritative dreams fracturing yet festering hate, harm and hunger, we persist in our stories. We dictate how we grow through our resistance by pushing past the fear of persecution. Sometimes I ask myself how can I relate my love to an action committed to change? I’ve landed where we all have, donating, sharing, and speaking yet I feel called to cultivate an integration. My world is positioned in the In-betweens of everything, poverty and power, passion and position, but if you live your life wondering in a windstorm of what ifs, the thoughts will never dissolve. They weave through the seams.
As you ponder your passions, sit still to perceive where your minds at. In this stillness you allow yourself to be overcome with the truths of all you’ve done for the benefit of your becoming, beloved, belief mirrors minds. Through all the days spent in longing I spent years believing there is more to come. The slowness humbles me I am one with all things, integrated with the wild wind. Wisdom is in the receiving.
In the moments when self doubt erupts out of the silence remember; these patterns are asking to be acknowledged how will you answer the call?
