I smell like someone else.

I smell like someone else.

It is sweet. Her scent lingered on me enough after one hug to last hours. It’s something I want to smell for a long time. It’s sweet and something I want to live within but also want to get away from after too long. For now, it’s lovely though.

I wonder why I keep going. I ask this a lot. It’s a drive, it’s a necessity. Sometimes it all gets so hard and challenging and dark and I wonder what it’s all for. All the blocks and all fo the effort. Wanting things to just feel easy again. Brighter again. I am reminded that there is pleasure in the act of creating itself, and I have made my life into my art. There is pleasure alongside the struggle. There is depth and richness nad beauty alongside the strife and the practice and the breathing. There is so much that makes me feel like I want to shut down and there is so much that makes me want to keep going. There is so much I know that is not my own that I have carried with me after every interaction. Things I know I have the power to alchemize, so I carry it until I have the time.

I know my time with this must come to an end, yet a friend reminds me of the suffering and I feel as though I can’t get away. I’ve loved myself in a room that I don’t know how to get out of and it’s a parallel experience to you and to you and to you. It’s something that we all know, for these writings are reflections of something so many experience that they become channels of the routes through. Sometimes I feel exhausted in it, wanting to just complain. To vent, to get it out. I write and all fo that dissolves so that when I am with others I can simply be with them in everything they are experiencing.

I notice cravings. For love, for distraction. For someone to pull me out of it. It feels like grief, and it feels like exhaustion, and it feels like burnout. It feels like I am an immensely sensitive soul just trying to get through with enough of me left to hold it all together. I know I show up well for others, I know what I give, and I know how I help them to be seen and understood and held within all that they experience. And, on top of that, I am reminded by my friends to try out being more selfish. It feels wrong, yet it also feels right. Sometimes I want to just sleep it away, run away from it all: the responsibility, the bills to pay, the debt on my credit card, the bombing of innocents across the ocean. It makes me want to latch onto something and to bite, and it makes me want to move, move, move, fidget until something settles. That is never the answer, though. To try and get away from the thing that makes me squirm. When my safety is not at risk and simply a situation or a conversation or an energy is making me antsy, the only real option is to stick with it. Stick with something until clarity pours forth again, and I have my sovereignty back amidst the chaos.

I want to cry and I want to scream because I feel weak and I feel helpless like a newborn baby without any protection. I get tattoos to cover my skin in armour. I feel like my hands are too dry, and the keys are the only thing that knows me. This life forbids comfort, yet I know many who know it as if it is their left hand. They cultivate it and they live it. And I don’t know what to do except to not give up. To just keep on enduring, keep on trucking, keep on going.

So many seem to know pleasure like they were built to live nothing but it. I know discomfort like it’s a third leg I was born with. I know that there are thought forms and realities in which I am not supposed to say such things, as to not create more of it, but in this one all I want is to write the truth of my experience. To write what I know and how I have lived and what has been the truth for me for some long time. Sensitive and highly initiative in a world full of disillusionment and abandonment of self. A world that does not care about individuals or momentary actions and only on the product and whatever is the end goal. It throws us sensitives to the side. It cuts out the vulnerable, seeing them as weak, as not fittest so therefore not built for survival. It makes everyone who is not the biggest and the boldest and the most dominating seem like scraps of nothing. Things to be walked all over and taken from. Abused and neglected at the hands of those who hold the autonomy to move through the world without feeling every nuance.

It feels like an unfair system. I wonder what i have done in another life in order to be bestowed with such privlidges as this. Hyper empathy, hyper sensitivity. Hyper awareness of everything around, within, and beyond me. All the time. I wonder what i must have done, who i must have wronged, who i must have hurt in order to be the one who lives this on my day to day to day to day. Yes i also need to recognize that it is a gift. And how i so desperately want people to take me out of it sometimes. To bring me to some brighter shores, to dance me round and let me rest, for the nighttime is only full of more waves, dreams and processing and other lives galore. It is a gift, and it is also something i have had to learn to live with. These three legs of mine walking alongside all of the two legged. They look at me strange, i looked at myself strange for a while. I retreated. I went into the woods. I spent months in solitude. Now i love my third leg. Because fuck it, if no one else will then i better do this for myself.

I love it because it allows me to know life to a degree that none other that I know experiences it. Synchronicities and pure mystery within every moment. Divine understanding, deep soul recognition. Pure magic coursing through my cells. Though it is mighty uncomfortable and sometimes I want to just fucking give it all up. Wanting it just give up, give up, give up, give in and lay down and never get back up again.

I write the story of the woman who sat next to me. I feel it all as if it were my own. For in it I understand. I understand everything for that matter. Everyone that is. Their perspective, and what they came from and why they are the way that they are. If I do not write it, alchemize it, transform it, it will fester and grow like a toxic mold that will eat me and all others alive.

It is my only solace, to know my own voice, to hear my own words, and to recognize my own story. My own experience upon this page. It brings air back into my lungs after hours of holding my breath. It brings feeling back into my feet, it brings a desire to keep going.

Sometimes I know I have to uphold my shields stronger than others. I wonder why no one taught me when I was young. I wish they had. They hadn’t known how to. Why was this life the one that was designed to be so difficult?

It allows for me to ask the things no one else will, because when I’m in the space of your story with you, all that we have to guide us to the other side is our curiosity. All that we have is our threads of light that you left down along the way that ask to be followed and picked up, brought back to wholeness.

I used to dissolve into other people so much that I lost everything of who I am. I gave it all away to them and they were cool with it, until they had their fill or until I decided to go my own way. They didn’t like that so much, the being told “no” from someone who had fed them and given them everything for so long. It’s a long and exhausting process of reclaiming enough of myself back to finally hold tight to who I am to say no to another.

I feel as though I float in the darkness until I see someone in need and I go to them and I help. And then I carry onward, not attached, no one’s. Floating, drifting. No tether to anyone or anything other than my soul and this moment. I know it’s not the best approach, but it’s something that I can offer. To be in it fully with you, no matter what it is. This is why my friends say I need to be more selfish, to keep some for myself. This I do, for this is what I have learned.

This is all that I have, me, this moment. I have many who love me but very few who meet me down here on sustained visits. So I travel alone, and that is okay with me. It is okay with me because this is what it is.

Not that I don’t ever wish for something more, but I have found acceptance with the reality of what things are. And yes, it’s unpleasant at times, but it’s bearable and it’s livable and it’s okay. And the more that are living in the light, the more that we are thriving and helping the world. And if this is how I can give this to others, then that’s a blessing beyond measure.

I know my time will come, to dance in the light for longer periods. But for now, the moon has risen and the stars are out, so I shall instead bask in that. For however long I need.

I love you, until next time, my friend. You are magnificent as a star. You are brilliant as the beetle, you are perfect inside and out, and you do not need to be afraid of what you see inside yourself or in the world around. I am with you, and you are never alone.