sunflowers inside

If I told you I knew already, from the start, this would end like this – you would say I’m self-fulfilling prophecy. And maybe I am – but sometimes you look at something, and you already know its end. It’s “oh I’ve been down this path before, I know where it goes”. And even though I knew it wouldn’t end well, I kept going. Is that my fault or yours? I had the thought this year that I had finally woken from a nightmare, but I couldn’t decide what was better – to know none of it is real and finally break free from it? Or the ignorance of believing everything is out of your hands? Obviously the first, but I miss the bliss of the second option. The belief that none of this has anything to do with me – I am but a hapless passenger on this raft and it heads straight for a waterfall. What do you mean I can jump out? What do you mean I have to swim? Isn’t it better to float, isn’t better to accept the inevitable?

 

It's so much harder to acknowledge that this is a negative thought pattern I’ve created for myself – that at one point served me, but now no longer does. This is a piece of code I run to feel better about something that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s obsolete, but what if the new program isn’t as good? Isn’t as effective? What if it crashes the entire system? So what? Is that worse than falling off the waterfall? No one tells you how hard it is to unwrite the beliefs you have about yourself and your life, no one even tells you, “Hey, that might not be wholly accurate of what life is like”. No one tells you you’re going to turn 25 and your brain chemistry is going to change. Your old coping strategies won’t work anymore, and you will have to uproot everything and start again. It won’t be a choice. It’s living your life thinking you’re a succulent – minimal effort, little teaspoons of water and poor soil, only to discover you’re an incredibly picky house plant that needs water every second day, plant food and to be rotated in the afternoon sun so your leaves don’t burn. And you think, “when did I change?”, only to discover you were always the house plant, you just convinced yourself your needs weren’t important. You told yourself if you believed it hard enough you were a succulent.

 

One of my favourite poems is the ‘Sunflower Sutra’ by Allen Ginsberg, about a sunflower blackened by the grime and dirt of a railway track and urban pollution – but the poem is a reminder, “You were never a locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!”. My favourite part is in the last stanza: “We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we’re golden sunflowers inside.” We are golden sunflowers inside. We forget how our environments can twist and change us but does not fundamentally change who and what we are. Sometimes we need to a reminder, and to listen to the reminder. Often, we see the red flags, the check engine lights, and we think, I don’t have time to unpack all that – let me just keep going. But if there’s anything I’ve learned those things always catch up to you, the car breaks down and suddenly you can’t move forward even if you wanted to. All this to say, I loved you very much, and of all the people to teach me this lesson, I’m glad it was you – but my heart aches for a future where we could have said, ‘let’s not go down this path, let’s go this way instead’. How lonely it was, to realize we were heading two different directions, even though I would meet plenty of new people, old friends would greet me with warm hugs and new friends would emerge as pillars of strength. I found myself, caught between the known and the unknown and decided I could no longer do what I’d always done and forced myself down an unfamiliar path. And I hated it, I dug my heels and tried my best to resist this – but it was a wave and now I can’t stop, I just have to see where it goes. I’ll miss you, but the person you knew was a liar. She didn’t even realize she was lying to you because she was lying to herself.