Look at the images above. How does your life feel right now? Left? Right? Middle? If we’re being honest, most would say middle. We have come to believe that it is the human condition to be in constant angst. Relationships ending. Losing employment. Moving house. Death of a loved one. The glue that held the pieces together is gone and we fall apart. We’ve been conditioned to believe that falling apart is a bad thing. Be strong. This too shall pass. We’ve got to keep it together. And if you can’t? Fake it til you make it. You’re only as good as your last win. Life is about the pursuit of happiness. What if it wasn’t?! What if we truly made it okay to not be okay. Up to now that has been something we say as a platitude when somebody is feeling emotions we classify as being negative. There always seems to be an air of condescension about the way it's said. I don’t know about you but my reaction to that is usually, “No. It’s not.” Nobody really believes that it’s okay to not be okay. We all just want some magic trick to be okay again. Well, here it is: Learn to celebrate falling apart. Yes. Seriously. CELEBRATE FALLING APART! I am lucky enough to have friends who send me messages like, “Hi Kamy. Checking if you’re fine?” Not the trite formulaic, “How are you?” but a real opportunity to consider IF I’m fine. My response may not have seemed fine at first glance. “I feel like the reality of our situation will finally kick in when the last of our stuff arrives from South Africa. Up to now, everything has felt surreal. There have been many moments of painful homesickness but overall it feels almost like I've been watching from a distance while somebody else lives my life. Now I have to accept that I have no home to return to in South Africa. The part of me that still lives in the home we owned in Johannesburg has to be laid to rest and I don't know how to do that. It feels like my soul is splintered into so many pieces I'll never feel whole again.” I have felt that feeling of disconnectedness from my life many times before. The first time I had no frame of reference for the fracturing of my soul. I was 13 when my sister died. It felt like a piece of me died with her because it did. There was a part of my soul that lived for the moment I came home from school and went to hug her and tell her about my day before I went off to play. That same piece of my soul lived in the moments I lay in bed reading to her from whatever consumed my brain at the time. Even the parts of me that poured through the encyclopedias lived for her and the goal to become a neurosurgeon to help people born with cerebral palsy. In my limited understanding as a child, I thought that if I could fix her brain she would be able to play and have fun and do all the things I could do instead of lying in bed all day every day. That part of my soul didn’t know how to process her death. Soon after that, I tried to commit suicide for the first time. In hindsight, I see the beginning of that connection between recognizing the death of pieces of my soul and wanting to physically die. I have experienced that feeling many, many times in the decades since then. It was first labeled as manic depression, then later as bipolar disorder, and finally depression. For a lot of people, these labels and the accompanying medication are useful. Others feel overwhelmed by the diagnosis and the labels begin to define them. Every single one of us has felt that fracturing of our souls in some way. The way we deal with that is not only unique to each person as an individual human being but also to the life experience we have gained in that time. 49-year-old me is a completely different person from 13-year-old me, or even 48-year-old me. How much more difference is there between me and a separate human being? There is no right or wrong way to process our life experiences. It is what it is for every one of us in an infinity of possibilities. Yet, underneath all of that is an overwhelming commonality. Regardless of the causes or circumstances or reactions we all feel a similar range of emotions. Every single person reading this has a visceral reaction to that phrase, “A FRACTURING OF THE SOUL”. We all feel it deeply. It resonates with every soul, taking us all back to specific points in our lives. Those points are usually associated with great pain and suffering. It seems natural to want to avoid that pain and suffering. I cannot tell you how to live with it. I can only share what I have come to understand, and sometimes even remember to practice myself. Who we are is not one eternal, elusive whole to be discovered. There is no need to find ourselves. I tried to find myself - on a Kibbutz, at the bottom of a bottle of vodka, in experimentation with various drugs, in meditation, in relationships, in parenting, in activism… in the end, I had to face the fact that I had never lost myself. I was just exploring different pieces of myself. Some of those pieces have stayed. The part of myself that believes in love is still very much alive. I’m not talking about the Disney princess happily ever after crap. I’m talking about universal love, the kind of love that inspires kindness and compassion. That one is a fairly constant piece of my soul. It doesn’t negate the piece of my soul that feels anger and frustration. There is a piece of my soul that is exploring the reality of living in Greece and seeking identity and definition in this new home. It is currently trying to make peace with the piece of my soul that still exists in the first home we ever owned. The piece of myself that still needs to nurture my daughter as a child is figuring out how to reshape itself around the piece of me that recognizes her as an independent adult who no longer needs my 24/7 devotion. Every soul is infinite. Pieces of ourselves grow and shrink around our life experiences to make way for new possibilities. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Therein lies the magic (and the angst) of falling apart. We get so attached to the feeling of being whole the way we were that it blinds us to the possibility of being whole in a different way. We look at each individual piece of our souls as they are ripped from the fabric of a reality that no longer exists. Every moment of each memory is a bittersweet torment of what was and will never be again. We want to cram every piece as it is into the plan for the future. How do I live if I can no longer be a mother in that exact way to two of my own children and all the gorgeous humans they brought into my life? How can I live without being a strong active warrior in the war against sexual violence? How can I live if I’m not the sexiest person in the room? How can I live when I can’t drink a bottle of vodka in one sitting without passing out? There are so many different things that we think define us at different times in our lives. The pain comes from not recognizing when it is time to let them fade. The whole doesn’t have to die when a part is no longer relevant. When I feel suicidal now I ask myself what parts of myself have outlived their usefulness? Which of my habits or definitions of myself need to die? When I fall apart I look at each individual piece of myself and decide which of them need to be laid to rest and which ones have to flex forward into the future. I left so many pieces of my soul behind in South Africa. Every single book in the 11 boxes that I gave away contained a piece of my soul and as they find new homes that piece of me goes on to grow or fade into the lives of the people who love them as I did. The toys that held the love of moments of carefree joy with my children have taken that energy with them into their new lives. I imagine somebody finding my beautiful vintage dressing table and falling in love with it as I did. There’s a family sitting at the dining room table where we shared so many special dinners. Maybe they even have a jigsaw puzzle going under the tablecloth like we always did. Everything I’ve ever touched, everywhere I’ve ever been, and every person I’ve ever loved, contains a piece of me, just like they’ve left a piece of themselves in me. The boxes that will arrive in a few days contain a multitude of those pieces of self and soul. I will be forced to examine every single one of those aspects and decide what will fade into the background of my tapestry and which will be spun anew into bright vibrant threads in the front and center of the future. For the first time in my life, I am looking forward to it as much as I’m dreading it.
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KarmillaWhy can’t I be pretty and a feminist and a mother and a healer and an activist and an educator and a warrior? Archives
March 2024
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