A Series of Change

I always believed that I was fearless in the pursuit of change. And I still do. I believed I was so adaptable to life — listening to the podcasts, learning the words, absorbing the phrases. Mel Robbins said "let them." So I let life.

I did whatever. Moved wherever. Because I believed that I could — that I can — because isn't that the point? To travel. To broaden horizons. To experience different cultures, people, places. That was — is — one area of my life that I am so fiercely proud of and protective of. My ability to consistently change, move, create.

My uncle recently called me industrious. I had to Google it. But I liked it. And later, stuck in St. Louis because my bus to Albuquerque was cancelled, I told him: "I'll never be this courageous again."

He replied: "You watch too many movies."

This is the same man who told me he lives vigorously through me. And I know that. I feel that.

But I'm slowly and uncomfortably realizing something. Regardless of how amazingly I can brand it — how courageously I call it, how adventurous I believe it to be, how much I tell myself my Sagittarius Mars ignites a fire within me to move to the beat of my own drum — I know there is an underlying avoidance to something.

An avoidance of a feeling. Of attachments. To people. To places. An avoidance of opening up.

My mother and my granny can sense it. I think that's why I fight so fiercely with them — because I'm afraid they know. They know that I am running from something.

Because the sad reality of it is this: the moment I slowly feel like I'm building community — slowly find people who accept me, slowly feel as though someone is beginning to see Shardane' — is the exact moment I have to burn the bridge.

And not just the bridge. The entire world that resembles them. That place. That feeling.

Starting over has always been easier for me than sitting inside one drop of comfortable emotional vulnerability. So the series of change continues.

Sometimes not even because I've outgrown who I was. But because I need to leave behind the version of me that felt something — the version that was getting close, the version that was becoming known.

I don't have a resolution for this. Not yet. What I have is the honesty of saying it out loud — that the thing I've called freedom might also be the thing I'm most afraid of: staying.