The Beginning, Middle & End

Time is a tricky thing, it is not nearly as fixed or as linear as we might like it to be. With this musing in mind, I realize that this isn't the beginning of a process of healing, because everything that I have done up until this point has been an exercise in trying to make myself well. So maybe this is kind of a middle, a sweet spot I have found myself in thanks to the gentle (and not so gentle) coaxing of many of the beautiful people in my life.

But as my granny would always say, "Some people have to feel to learn, and Kimmy you are one of those people." Never content to learn from observation, I had to touch the sizzling surface of the iron, had to pick up the scorpion by its flicking tail, had to climb defiantly to the top of that volcano - had to do all of these things to sometimes learn the simplest of lessons (which I find are often the most complex). I could only do things when I could make the choice to. I think until you are ready, choices made under pressure won't stick. It's kind of like rubber cement, you gotta let it dry, you apply the wetness and you have to wait for time to pass for it to get sticky - in fact for both sides to be sticky. We all, as a community need to be ready for one person's choice before we can make it stick. All the pushing together in the world won't do a damn thing, cause once you release that pressure, everything falls apart.

But in other ways, this beginning marks a definite end for me. It marks the end of suffering in silence, the end of the illusion of 'fine' because I am sure that these are all tools that are used systematically to break our spirits.

I was watching 'The Lottery Ticket' and they described that prisons in the U.S. look at the literacy rates of Black Boys in grade 5 and from that are able to determine how many prisons spots to make available...

It is so intentional the enslavement of Black, Yellow, Brown and Red people - criminalizing them, placing them in prisons to continue to maintain the illusion of the 'American Dream'. Not for a moment, have our countries stopped existing on the backs of slaves. And I everytime I tell someone I am fine, when I really am not - everytime I internalize shame that isn't my own, every single time I tell myself I need to be better, stronger, faster - (which if we can look at the effect those values have had on our world, we would know immediately that they are all wrong to apply in a vacuum) when instead what I need to be is honest, softer, slower...

I know that we deserve better than all of this.

And so I sit here at the beginning, middle and the end embarking on a short journey to heal, to ask questions, to be patient and forgiving. To love and learn how to be loved. To protect myself, to learn new tools, to change and to grow.

And to everyone all at different places in their journeys, I wish us all the best, the honest and the divine.