divergence.

I can’t deny the feeling of preparation that has been happening in my heart. It began with a decision I made almost a year ago, to start anticipating the unknown. This week, I find myself wrestling a nervous system that has decided to tip itself over the rails. The anxiety and panic attacks have grown larger and mirror what I once felt in 2014 when I ended an unhealthy relationship, and I struggled to find purpose in Canada. 

Today I find my heart wrestling with a decision my body made months ago, a decision to actively choose safety, and to sit intentionally with the kind and type of stress I am actively willing to push through, and stress that I have outgrown and need to leave behind. Stress is stress and the challenge of living with the after effects of trauma is how trauma is triggered when I least expect it to. The hardest thing for any trauma survivor to endure is the thought of returning to spaces we have outgrown, the spaces that we have overcome, and the weight of triggers that once held and pinned us down. 

Today as I sit at a coffee shop on Vancouver Island, I feel the weight of the heaviness of my being, battling the release of what my body has not been able to feel in the last little while. In the past week, I have felt grief like I have never felt before. A heavy weight in my heart that wants to break into tears, but nothing comes but a gentle smile; a freight train of feeling that I have learnt to avoid. Lately, I have noticed the volatile swings of an overactive nervous system, that has been primed into survival mode, as I walk others out of their own modes of survival. I catch myself in moments of quiet panic; at a quiet glare, or stare, that sits on the edge of fully felt paranoia and irrational fear. On Wednesday,  I caught my hands tremble, something that they haven’t done in a while. I clenched my fists with a hope that the quiver would soon grow to pass. A gentle break, away from the stillness that I have come to project; the cracks within a growing weight of being. The realization that this little life can no longer be sustainable.

I sit today metaphorically curled, knees against my chest, hands pressed against my thighs as if to rock myself back into a comfort it has once known. I close my eyes to the sound of a gentle wind and a ray of sun that breathes life once more in a being that is trying to put himself first once more. Hope exists, just fleetingly, as survival continues to push towards another day.