Blank Page

Photo by Katrin Hauf on Unsplash

I had put away the typewriter, but have been staring at a blank page for some time. The inspiration I had found during my month-long travels quickly dissipated as I settled back into the rhythm of grief-stricken depression coupled with COVID life. I say it’s rhythm but the state of being is anything but rhythmic. The unstructured thoughts and oscillating emotions leave you in complete disharmony. I had connected with myself with help from nature and was feeling inspired by what I saw and how I felt during my travels. Removing that type of stimulation and continuous motion caused me to go inwards again, and not always in a healthy manner. And the world order was not giving me an opportunity to balance things out, as I felt trapped inside this mental state. I did not have much to pull me out of my mind, and the emotions it can control, to give me a little break from thinking and sometimes overthinking about life and my search through it. The travels did what I was hoping it would do at that moment, but it turned out to be a temporary fix. 

I've always found inspiration in discovery; about myself, the world, and the many paths I've been on or what was lying in front of me to take. Being "lost" on this journey we call life was part of the appreciation I felt about living. When I came back from my travels, I realized I was lost in a different way. I wasn't sure what part of me was left from the experience of losing Brynn, and I feared that I would never look at the world the same way, with the same curiosity, joy and wonderment. Therefore, I was not lost in the journey, but within myself. And with each day that I remained in this state of mind, I felt I was getting further away from the person I knew. It’s like every feeling I had experienced, reminders of who I was, and the hope towards the future I started having, simply disappeared.

The poet Rumi once said,

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” 

I found this quote particularly relevant to where I had been. I was seeking to understand who I was and am after all of this; seeking to rediscover the many emotions I was capable of experiencing that I felt had left me. But I was looking externally for it. I thought nature could inspire me with joy again, and it did for a moment. But the realization, but more so the reminder, was that it wasn't the experience or event that made me feel joy or happiness, but it was how I approached the experience, and more importantly the way looked and experienced the world.  

I tend to be hard on myself and this may be because I put a lot of importance in seeking to understand who I am. So, when the journey that is grief and healing, which has its own timeline, and a non-linear progression controls your being, anger ends up becoming the primary emotion that controls you. But anger by itself is not an isolated or unique emotion. It’s an emotion that comes when you’re overwhelmed by some other feeling. For me, anger was really around my inability to reconcile where I was hoping to be vs. where I was. I wanted to laugh the way I used to laugh; I wanted to be playful again with life as I had been for so long, and I wanted to feel good again for being exactly where I was at that moment. The desire for this had never hit a wall so hard in the month of October, a time that elicited two different memories and emotional responses to them that were on the complete opposite end of spectrum. I was fearful leading up to it, and I wonder how much of the fear was caused by my own doing rather than the moment. It was certainly the combination, and this is where self-reflection becomes such a powerful tool in helping me develop awareness in dealing with the many ups and downs of my world I am inevitably going to experience.

And then there was the blank page. I kept staring at it day in, day out, not able to come up with anything to explore through. What it really signified was that I wasn’t really exploring anything about myself… I wasn’t searching for anything - perhaps just waiting for it to find me. I’ve used writing throughout this time to help structure all of the thoughts that go in and out of my head. It helped put words to a feeling or experience so I can understand them better. It helps me to reflect about the past; see where I am today, and provide glimpses of where I may be heading tomorrow. I had put a pause to this for some reason. And as I type away, thinking about this journey I’ve been on the last few months, I am realizing how far I have come in my healing process, something that I was unable to see in October when I fell hard. It’s been a slow process of discovery and learning, and I am now becoming more aware of the changes about myself by the way I respond to life, people and my own struggles. One thing I am discovering is that time is not necessarily healing my wounds, but it’s unveiling the person I am becoming because of them. Certain wounds can not be completely healed, unfortunately. Those wounds eventually become scars… the scars that remain a part of you and who you are.

But my finest discovery during this time is a new meaning of love. A love that has no physical connection. Love that has no reciprocation or moments that drive the feeling and desire of how you look at someone. It’s simple, pure and somewhat undefinable energy that’s within you. It is love that I started experiencing when I started letting go of the physical connection I shared with Brynn, and started focusing on the emotional bond we had that was about how we felt inside about being together - a bond that cannot be severed. Now that bond is manifesting in beautiful feelings that may come from a fleeting moment, like a memory, an experience, or simply how I am beginning to look and approach the world. What is becoming evident within myself is that personal growth I’ve been experiencing is not because of the loss, but because of all the things I have learned from Brynn and the relationship that is making me put the effort in wanting to discover more and improve as a person. That relationship was about a combination of two people who were life-long explorers of the emotional world, and the commitment to our inner transformation. In order to answer the question of who am I after all of this, I just had to remember who I was before it all.

That blank page... a signification of being empty and lost, is turning from what I can’t seem to write to what would I like to write? What is that next chapter and where will it take me? I have no idea at this point, but what I can say is that I am looking at that blank page differently, through the eyes of someone that has the creative freedom to take it anywhere. The book we call life is interesting, as it has no real theme. You can’t sit down and say this is what I am going to write from start to finish. But you just have to sit down and write, and see where it takes you.

-Troy