Grounded: My Life in a Word (continued)

Parts 3 and 4

For parts 1 and 2, see this post.

Part 3

I sit on a rock at the edge of the creek, looking out at the gentle rapids surrounding me on three sides. I breathe deeply and wiggle my toes in the damp sand. Light dances on the water. Tears stream down my cheeks.

Crying at the water’s edge is nothing like crying in your car. It is expansive and soft and tender. Your sorrow has everywhere to go; it washes off of you like mist carried on the wind.

I am twenty-two, eight years older than the child who received a diagnosis after collapsing at a musical.

This year, I have begun to hear a voice.

When I listen to it, I become grounded, like a sapling firmly rooted, gathering nutrients from the earth, or a worn stone nestled into the land, solid and sure.

There is a formula I’ve discovered, to hear it.

It goes like this.

I feel bad. I feel an angry snake trapped inside a wooden box in my chest, coiled and ready to strike. I want to crawl out of my skin.

Instead, I put in my earbuds. I hit play on a playlist whose title is just an emoji. Winky Kissy Face. I set off into the woods.

The playlist is full of soft songs with steady beats. They all have the same descending bass line. G, F#, E. G, F#, E.

I walk, ideally barefoot, ideally for at least a mile.

My path takes me down an improvised mountain biking trail, across a creek on a fallen log, and through a meadow of tall grasses where the deer freeze and stare at me or huff in irritation.

At some point during the walk, the snake begins to uncoil, loosened by the rhythm of feet and melody, and I realize it has been squeezed tight to hide its wounds. I let myself feel the hurt. I begin to cry and cry.

I let out all of the thoughts I have been holding back. The sad thoughts, the angry thoughts, the insecure thoughts, the scary thoughts. I blubber and fall apart. I am snotty and puffy and unkempt.

Eventually, I get to my destination. It is a triangular patch of earth at the confluence of two creeks, the water flowing away to the east. I call it The Peninsula.

I get out my journal. I write down all of the messy thoughts, record the fear, the sadness, the anger.

And then, beneath all of those thoughts, there is the voice. It is clear and confident and strong. It talks in all capital letters. It sounds like me. YOU ARE LOVED, it says. YOU ARE ENOUGH. And I can finally hear it. I listen to it. I believe it.

The voice bubbles in my head as I ride my bike to my new job at the Greenbelt pool, blasting Nicki Minaj as I blow through stoplights. I sit in the lifeguard chair and feel like a fish in a bowl, surrounded by glass on all sides, watching the same few people enact their private, daily rituals, swimming back and forth, back and forth. I am teaching myself to swim butterfly and reading the same books until the covers fall off.

The voice grows stronger as I choose to stop pushing through undergraduate classes and start massage therapy school, where I am touched and taught with gentleness and intention. My classmates cradle my head and help me memorize every muscle in the human body.

The voice gets louder as I move in with true friends, the kinds of people who would rappel out of a window on a ball of string with you. Instead, we choose to go rafting and play board games and eat breakfast together. I eat a can of beets and a can of carrots and two eggs every morning because it is easy. They tease me about it every day. The kitchen crackles with laughter.

The voice gets clearer as years of therapy start to take hold and stick to me a little. The words of the kind woman who tried to guide me through high school come back to me in a new light as I see a stern Buddhist nun at the nearby counseling center who doesn’t take any of that “achievement” bullshit I have been fed my whole life.

The voice gets more powerful as I learn to reach out to the people who love me without conditions, like a houseplant growing toward the window.

One day, as I sit in a drizzle at the Peninsula, the voice bursts into my mind with a golden light. It is crystal clear.

I follow the formula whenever I need to be grounded. It carries me through my twenties.

After I have listened to the voice, I sit for a while looking out at the water flowing away and stay in that soft, warm, glowing place for a while. I allow new layers of skin to begin to form. Eventually, I get up, wipe the dirt off my clothes, and make my way home.

Part 4: Epilogue

I have a pillow now that is covered in tiny wires. They weave through the pillowcase and into a long cord that wraps around my legs at night as I thrash in the dark. It ends in a single prong, designed to be shoved into the big hole in the outlet on the wall. The pillow is meant to slough off the extra electrons clinging to my body, to channel them into the earth, to neutralize me. It’s supposed to have the same effect as standing barefoot in a pile of mud. To become grounded, like a live wire tamed. The doctor said it might help with the pain.

Stories don’t normally end at the end, and I have once again found myself in the middle. In May of 2023, I got sick with COVID-19 and never recovered.

Some hard things have happened. I had to move out of my apartment and into my mother’s house. I had to leave my job as a massage therapist. I had to stop doing physical activity and start using a wheelchair. I have to live most of my life from my bed.

Some good things have happened, too. I completed three semesters of graduate studies in social work. I have learned new creative skills, knitting, painting, drawing, and writing. I have had the gift of time with my family and those friends with whom I have stayed connected. I have slowed down, settled, deepened.

I am grounded now in a very tangible, physical sense. My body is tethered to the earth and it is not a long leash. I made a bucket list recently, and the first thing I put on it was “climb a really tall tree.” I have no idea when, or whether, that will be possible. I am not well. Long Covid is not a known entity. There is no prognosis, no cure. That is hard.

I am also grounded in a deeper, spiritual sense. Not always, not every day. But more than ever before. I have weathered the illness with more stability than anyone expected, most of all me. I have found happiness and even joy in my circumstances.

I may recover and look back on this time as a road bump. Or it may be my reality long term. Like I said, I am in the middle. I cannot know. I do know that, if it weren’t for the versions of me who lived through all of it– from the adventurous child to the lost young adult, to the spiritually seeking twenty-something, I would not have the resilience, perspective, or self-compassion I now possess. And for that, I am grateful.

And for that, I am grounded.