When it’s time to dig

I know it’s in there.

The haunting, the desire, the voice you can’t unhear.

I hear it, too — louder sometimes than others. It is the best, most annoying and infuriating and blessed thing I’ve ever heard. It is life. I can’t stand it, usually. Is this enlightenment? Is this awareness? It doesn’t feel like I expected. It feels like losing my shit.

What is this thing with feathers that perches in the soul?

And why is it covered in so much crap?

Time to wade into the muck so I can find it, see it, maybe hear it long enough to remember what it tells me.

I don’t know how I know, but I know it sings of my salvation.

Let it out, release it, bring it to light: because I am fucking tired of this poverty of living — rearranging internal boxes of bullshit, falling again and again into helplessness and victimization and situational self-pity and codependency and waiting on something amazing to happen.

I want to be the amazing thing that happens.

But also I’d really like to numb out, take it easy, let somebody else do all this work of shoveling out the shit. But that doesn’t work. I’ve tried it. You open up the doors, let somebody else come in to do the work, and they end up bringing in their own loads of crap.

I’m the only one with a shovel here.

I don’t know what my truth is yet but I’m going to find it.

The cliff I jumped off was the cliff of finding out who I really am and what I really want and that’s what I’ve been doing for what seems like a long, long time.

Nothing is more important.

Also, nothing is more terrifying.

Self-disintegration, turns out, is the road I have to walk toward my own long-buried identity.

The path itself is predictable: What’s the thing that makes me feel safe, that wraps me up in an identity I can easily label, quickly define? That’s the thing I need to walk away from.

See? Simple.

The path feels chaotic not because the step to take is unknowable or confusing. No. It feels chaotic because of all the voices swirling, all the screaming of emotions and ego and expectations doing their best to keep me from hearing the one voice.

The deeper voice.

The only voice in the whole shitstorm that is actually mine.

The voice that I actively avoid. The voice that I bury with busyness. The voice that I muffle with distractions.

The voice that never screams, never demands to be heard. It whispers. It sings. And in the quiet moments, when the distractions fade, I hear a note. I hear the rhythm of it. And it wakes me up and shakes me open and terrifies me like nothing else, and I want to run away, and I’ll die if I don’t hear the whole song.

So I pick up the shovel.

And I keep digging my self out.