There is a very clear before and an after. 2019. I call everything after that my second life. Building a second life is harder than building your first.
It’s the one that starts after the conditioning is uncovered. The one after the foundation you had been handed crumbles because it was never yours to begin with. The second life is the one that’s truly on you. With eyes wide open and deliberation. It is the intentional one, the scary one, liberating and raw. So raw it sometimes feels like living with your skin inside out.
This is from a journal entry six years ago:
For most of my life my roots were planted outside of myself.
A country.
A god.
A husband.
A culture.
Friendships.
My Work.
My Reputation.
I lost all of it.
What happens next?
Who am I without all of those things?
Where do my roots get nourishment now?
Who will they nourish?
What do roots mean when you can’t find new ground to plant them in?
What do roots mean when the ground turns unhealthy?
What do roots mean when you no longer relate to the earth you come from?
I can't deny the soil that has made me grow this far.
Every shade and texture of it is a part of me.
It was all necessary to make me, even in its ugliness.
It's not the soil I chose. It's one I was born into.
I uprooted myself, found new ground, decided where to dig, plant and grow.
This freedom is one of the most precious discoveries in life: that the roots I come from are not a final sentence. That first and foremost I can be rooted in myself, not in anyone or anything else.
I belong to me.
There's a price for that though:
Feeling perpetually lost.
But as my friend
And so I let myself discover that belonging to myself is not enough.
It can never be.
It’s a nice sounding pop-psycho Instagram quote, but it doesn’t hold up in the real world.
We need roots in something other than ourselves.
It is tempting to look for that in a god.
Something that cannot be seen, cannot be questioned, cannot be proven - something like that can never disappoint you, right? It’s a safe bet.
But I want my roots to reach deep into what I can see.
What I can touch and feel.
I want roots in places.
I want roots in people.
I want connections with a heartbeat.
Roots after all, are a living, breathing thing.
Roots are real. They require real space.
Roots endlessly fascinate me and I love to know about other people’s roots:
Tell me, what do roots mean to you?
Where are you planted?
What waters you?
I want to know where your bones have landed, where your feet have sprouted, where does life flow through you?
How did you choose your soil?
Hmmm! It seems that it/they choose me. Once I committed to my journey and my roots, I have learned that it is better to let things choose.
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell