The Feeling Chasing Me

A photograph I took that makes me think of this feeling.

Some time ago, after the greatest dark night my soul has ever seen, I moved back to my hometown. I didn’t think I ever would, but life often surprises us with plans we never made.

Ever since then, I’ve been bombarded with memories of what used to be and no longer is. Businesses that have changed ownership more times than I can count. All the things that happened here, things that shaped me, things that held me and things that changed me, forever. Lives that feel like many, and like perhaps they belonged to someone else. I stare at my old apartment building, longing for the days when swimming at night and playing with friends was the most important thing on my mind.

At any given time, I can choose to drive around town and feel or remember something. I haven’t decided yet whether or not this is an option I want. I remember climbing trees, and digging through the building dumpster, looking for treasure. I remember the hardness of it all, the trying to make it through, the deep compassion, and watching my mother closely. I remember the good and the bad, the wonder and childlikeness that I so longed for; the innocence that once gone never comes back. As I dig deeper, searching for that innocence, I question if it ever existed, and if it did, why it remains elusive and hard to find. I search for it often, but like a ghost, it runs when I chase after it.

I think about the $1.50 my mother gave us every Friday, on payday, for the vending machine at her place of work. That soda and candy bar brought so much joy, and maybe now I am realizing where my attachment to Diet Dr. Pepper came from. Life was easier, and also hard, in the way it is when you are a child with so little control.

The Feelings in this town chase me around like bees swarming honey. Some are sweet, and others bitter. But even the sweet ones come with a sense of being haunted. It’s a strange thing to live in a town where most of the people who lived here, who were part of your story, are either dead or have moved on. Moving back feels familiar, but also like trying to fit a growing foot in an old shoe. I suppose the old shoe is not meant to be kept, but to be let go.

The very act of coming back older makes you wonder where your place is. You feel disoriented and unsure of what to anchor into, because the reality that you once anchored into has evaporated. Maybe this is that midlife crisis I’ve always heard about but never believed in. The one where you question every detail of your life, measuring to see if all still fits, then having to look it all in the face and decide what you have the energy to change, and whether or not you have it. It seems that quite a few people on this platform are going through, or writing about their own midlife crisis. I am finding however, that it doesn’t feel as glamorous as I would have hoped. I was under the impression that I would get the impulse to buy a motorcycle. Isn’t that the stereotype? It feels more like walking through a thick fog where you can see parts of things emerge, but never the full picture. There is however, one image that keeps calling my name in the distance, through the fog. It is of my beautiful God, not in the sky, but on earth, watching me here and now, guiding me to and through the crisis.

It does, at times, feel a bit like struggling for an energy you aren’t sure where to access, and not the kind that gets you out of bed, but the kind that forces you to make big change. I joke around often, and more times than not, I am not joking. I am 41, but my emotional age is 180. So even if I think 41 is too young for a midlife crisis, 180 is not.

Life has a way of aging us, not just physically, but internally. Both beauty and adversity take slivers of time with them as they pass, because each of them comes with a cost, something we must give away.

God is guiding me toward something. I realize I write the word something a lot. And though, I’d prefer for him to just scoop me up and drop me on the other side of knowing what that something is, he reminds me often, in my having to go through, that if you take shortcuts in life, you will always have to circle back to the same mountain, again and again until you face the thing that needs facing. So, I’ve decided it’s more efficient to slow down, let go, and embrace whatever storm is calling my name. I am aware that this sounds kind of silly, using the word efficiency with the word slowness, but I am realizing more and more, that to slow down, and learn not only to tolerate stillness, but to love silence, is the real efficiency.

It is strange to be in a town where so much has happened. It feels like the very air, and passing of time; the emptiness that stands in the place of the people who filled it with love, is its own presence, its own ghost, clouding new memories with old ones; overlapping time. And so it seems my anchor is God indeed. Since I live so much of my life in spiritual now, as opposed to the physical, it seems fitting. More and more he becomes my anchor. And how beautiful it is that he holds all that has emptied this place of its love, the people who are no longer here; he is my connection to them. He not only fills the space now, but is the space itself. And always was. I just needed time to figure that out.

When you have been surrounded by so much loss and death, the objects around you become like friends, houses and old things I mean. At least for me they have; the wisdom and advice one craves can’t be extracted from them, but with one glance, their beauty does something inside that has the power to instantly make me feel better, to soothe an ache. The places in this town that conjure up memories have become decorations holding space for new things. They create an opening. Perhaps that’s what this town is doing for me now, acting as a backdrop, a background for my transition, as the old me finds her way out, the new me embraces and accepts not only cold hard change, but hope that all things are being made new.

What is your emotional age?