Walls come tumbling down

Maestro is making our walls beautiful, as he always does. But I never knew they were becoming cages until I left for an afternoon walk. I am fortunate in my isolation set up. I still have human contact – hell – I have great food and fucking too. But isolation messes with your head, and it’s messing with mine, as I’m sure it is with you too. Each meltdown according to our particular idiosyncrasies and desires. I miss the din of a happy cafe and the smell of coffee when I’m writing. Watching the flowers bloom in my neighbourhood. The micro tingles on my senses from the world around me that wasn’t so scary a short time ago. I miss chatting with Eddie and Andrea at Starbucks at the train station while they prepared my peach green tea. I never knew what comfort those people, smiles and interactions provided until it vanished.

I’m an introvert so I assumed, as did a lot of my friends, that I would weather the solitude better than others, especially extroverts. But simple dichotomies and straight lines rarely tell the story. I loved my alone time when it was scarce, and now that it’s plentiful it’s suffocating me. Once I recognized, however, that I put this particular suffocating bag over my head, I went about taking it off. With the help of Sarah Beth‘s yoga and binge-watching The Blacklist (I love binge watching shows with a predictable enough plot such that I can write at the same time), I started putting a plan in place to keep my shit together. It’s not a complex plan. Basically, go all-in on the work and exercise. Strengthen my body and mind. Write the stories that need to be written, that are percolating in my brain. Move forward even if it means face-planting the first few steps, because those wounds are easier to heal than the ones caused by quicksand. Stop talking about the projects on my list and start doing them.

A writing instructor once told me the key to finding some truth in your writing is to access the dark places in your head. You just need to be able to find your way back out again. So the stories I tell about rediscovering my pussy, exploring my sexuality and embracing it with Maestro’s guidance have remnants of those dark places. There were and continue to be excruciatingly painful moments. I would be lying if I said anything different. Pushing your boundaries causes wounds. But any good story needs a second act, some conflict for our protagonist to overcome. So it’s time to get out of the dark place and let the sunlight help heal those wounds.

There’s still pleasure to be found in our two-metres-apart-world. I won’t let fear, paranoia and stress throttle me. I hope, when our collective cages relax, we’ll remember that the world isn’t a scary place. People aren’t scary! And for now, I see the beauty in the spaces in between the bars, and not the bars.