This Skin

Kindness to this skin I live in has been an overarching thought this year.  I’ve drifted beyond the question of popping the whitehead or not (spoiler alert: I usually pop it), and asked deeper questions: are the words I am saying sinking deeper beneath this skin? am I the best version of myself with the skin-covered beings that surrounds me? Am I hydrated? (if so, what by?) Could I have gone to bed three hours earlier last night?

How many milligrams of caffeine have I had today? Do I realistically have the stamina or the recovery time needed to pull an all-nighter? Am I reflecting on areas of possible growth without dwelling on my shortcoming?

Am I truly living in the present, or am I living in spite of my past?

I had an anxiety attack on Christmas that left me in a limbo of crying and shaking for hours.  I don’t understand my body sometimes, but anxiety is an unpaved freeway I am still learning to negotiate. It’s okay to cry, to have a reaction to everything around you.  It’s okay for the holidays to not be as joyous as the media has depicted them in holiday classics.

Kindness to this skin looks like mapping my anxiety and possible areas of crisis. Setting an alarm for when I need to get ready for bed, planning out meals, hydration, assignments, and giving time for the weather, the attractions, the friends, the foes along the way. (There’s really nothing like a text from your ex the night before a major term paper is due, which you just started.) I’ve learned that third year feels a lot like driving at night, in the heavy rain; knowing your destination but never knowing the roads that will lead there.

This Voice

Still with me? (This is a question more for me than you, honestly.)

I’m learning to be more intentional with my vocabulary, but with that comes a lighter tread in my voice sometimes. I have grown more conscious of the space that my voice takes up in certain spaces (white privilege, male privilege, settler privilege, socio-economic status based privilege, able-bodied privilege et cetera.) I am on a continuing learning journey of when to hold my tongue; when my voice does more harm to the conversation than good.

With that I find a certain passiveness has formed within myself, where it has now become easier to not say anything at all in most situations where perhaps I really should participate.  The result: I am somewhat resentful at myself for what has become my overarching silence.

This voice struggles to articulate thoughts, metaphors, creativity.  I think a lot of it stems from a pattern of self-deprecation as a certain style of writing that I ascribed to for a while (see: “How to Be a Hot Mess”).  While satisfying and easy to play off as a sort of satire, I find that this particular path became a sort of manifest destiny above anything else.

Ultimately, I am my worst critic in all of this and I think the fear of judgment, of saying the wrong thing, of not reaching anyone and feeling alienated scares me as a writer, and living in that zone finds me producing nothing.

This Year

This year found me starting a relationship with myself: my health, my body, my pain, my tendencies, my wrongdoings.  It’s a hard shell to crack, and the majority of the time I didn’t like what I saw within.  For so long I had focused on the exterior; how I came off, how well I was liked/admired/respected, what my wardrobe choices said about me, what my resting face said about me, if I was pleasing to prospective romantic conquests. The interior is a whole other galaxy of planets, comets, meteors, lifeforms. It is the grey inside of a Lucky Charms rainbow marshmallow that I am learning to paint vivid colours this year.