Chelsz

This is a field note entry that I wrote during my travels of summer 2024.

It was meant to be an entry recording the beautiful day I had, but as you will read, my mind wanders rather far.. but, doesn’t it always? Reflecting on roller skating and bears suddenly had me questioning the process of healing.

The only edits are formatting it into paragraphs… I assumed you wouldn’t love the one insanely long paragraph format of my journal.. and of course typos.. which I’m sure I missed a few..

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After the pizza pop up, we went roller skating and omfg, so much fun. So much of the fun here feels so pure and genuine and authentic. People are less anxious about being bad at something here than at home, less anxious about what others are thinking. I don’t want my writing to make it seem as if the people here are free from anxieties, depression, and insecurity, because that’s not the case, they’re just different about it. 

It feels like it did in high school hanging out with a group of friends. Just doing whatever. No plans. Taking it day by day, truly engaging with one another. I know I’ve said this a million times but the lack of distraction people have when you’re spending time with them here is truly beautiful. To just sing and be silly and no one is recording. They are just making funny voices and sounds and existing. 

It’s a sort of freedom I forgot existed and I don’t need the photos and videos because the memories and connection are truly enough. Riding around in a car with these guys is so fun. Singing 90s and 2000s music, marveling over the amazing scenery, laughing.

It’s everything. 

Kate almost hit a bear with her car. We were driving to Kyle’s after skating and a small bear sprinted across the road and no one was anxious or scared or upset or worried. They thought it was cool! We laughed and went on singing BARE naked ladies. 

Freedom. 

I keep wanting to say “I wish life could be like this” but life is like this, at least for this moment and it’s another one of those moments in my life that help me continue to believe in something better. A better world, better people, better relationships, better fun, better education, better connection with nature, better earth. 

Better, better, better. 

And I don’t quite mean it in the way of progress, at least not in the traditional sense. I’ve been thinking a lot about the book I read at LEF, “the progress paradox”. I feel like progress is too often about finding and/or creating something wholly new. People think we need more and more and I think Ego has a lot to do with it. I know I’ve fallen victim to it. 

I made this. I invented this. I thought of this. 

But the collective human consciousness can only contain so much. As there is more and more, new and new, we loose and loose the old and old and often with celebration, which feels weird to say because it’s not wholly true as we can observe through people’s relentless efforts to hold onto arbitrary and sometimes harmful traditions. 

But like, the comforts we keep introducing, I suppose that’s what I’m talking about. I slightly expressed this to Mariah, telling her I feel comfort makes people weak and she called it a patriarcal way of thinking, which is valid, but I also think trauma harms people, so pain isn’t the exact answer. I think life should be in the middle. You should be at ease and find peace but you should know how to adapt and overcome tough things. You should know courage and curiousity and a sense of adventure. 

I feel like the question of “why” and the drive to find out is something so purely human. But just like much of our generational knowledge, that drive is being lost and replaced and I think it’s deeply impacting people. I have so many friends with dreams or ideas or wants that they never bring to fruition, something again, I am also guilty of. Their excuses and ways of thinking could keep me up at night if I let it. Many are entitled. “Why don’t I have xyz by now?” “Why don’t I live where I want?” “Why don’t have I have the job that I want?” With no action towards change. It’s just this dry anxiety inducing state of being stagnent. 

Is it fear based? 

Is it reinforced by our mental health crisis? Our politics? Our laws? Our relationships? 

It’s like with my friends who are so immensely impacted by the political state of our country and the world. So impacted that it ruins their day. They ruminate. They obsess. Scrolling tik tok, staring at screens, sitting in their rooms, at home, unhappy about what they don’t have to the point it stunts them. But I remember what that’s like, even though I’ve been shedding that part of me for years now, but remenants remain, like stubborn flakes of skin, like a scab you just keep peeling just to see that underneath that it’s actually still not healed, but you keep peeling it, just to check, because sometimes fresh new skin awaits under the scab and the scab was just there as a reminder, but when the fresh new skin isn’t there, what are you peeling it for?

What are you peeling it for if you know that peeling it could potentially prolong the healing you are so desperately waiting for? Do you peel it simply for the knowledge? Just to check? “Am I healed?” You continue to ask yourself despite your very soul whispering back “probably not, please just rest”. 

Do you peel for the sensation? Peeling a scab doesn’t hurt enough to say so, but you still feel it. Is it perhaps a compulsion? A habit from your childhood that you just can’t seem to break? Do you with shame toss it in your mouth because you like the taste or that small flavor of iron and how it brings you back to when you were a gross disgusting child? Does being a gross and disgusting, disgusting puny and naive child, does it remind you of the freedom you’ve convinced yourself you’ve lost? 

Freedom you didn’t even see as freedom at the time? 

Maybe though it’s just aesthetics. You’ve lost the comfort of just being and fear someone may see your scab and they too now know you’re not healed. You’re no longer alone in your pain, you’re wounded, you are seen and instead of finding comfort in being known, you hide away in fear of their judgement. 

They don’t know why that scab is there. They don’t know you continue to tell yourself and you will run away, you isolate, you clench to the hyper independence that our culture has taught you. The vulnerability is too much. 

You’re probably right though. 

Some people will only see that you are wounded. They will only see your pain. You’re right that some people will just assume. The presence of pain and flaws is enough for them to feel they understand enough to know you, understand enough to draw a conclusion. They project. They try to control you. They tell you how they feel and even sometimes how you feel. 

This reinforces the pain and the fear. You hide it with a bandaid to no effect. So you wear clothes to cover it. Now no one will know. You think perhaps they will see you as you without the wound. They can’t judge if they don’t know, but they still do. 

So you hide and you hide and you hide. You are okay. You got this. You don’t need anyone. You don’t need them to know, to know you, to see your pain. But if you let yourself get stuck in that, if you keep hiding and never healing, you may never find something else actually does exist. That the world doesn’t have a strict rule on how it all works and while your experiences are reality, there are other realities to exist.

There is a person who will see your wound, see the scab. You might plead with them. Reassure them as you’ve been falsely reassuring yourself. “I am healed” you tell them. But they don’t question it. They don’t need to see under the scab because to them it doesn’t matter if it’s healed underneath at all because they see the scab but they also see you and your eyes and how you look when you’re excited. And through your eyes they see your soul and they don’t look away. They could never look away. 

They are human nature and the simple act of just being.. and so are you. 

They will know your wounds and then your life and then every part of you until there’s not a piece or you physical, emotional, spiritual being that in which has not felt their love. They will shower you with their very essence. They will fall down like rain onto all that you are. They will wash you in their intensely deeep care for you and they won’t stop. 

Their love will pour like the storm that flooded the earth. 

Except this time the waters of god pour off the earth. 

Their love will flood the sky and the moon and even mars and as far as Caprica. It will then flood the ever expanding void of space into the largest ocean to ever exist until it is all that exists and as the water runs on your skin, as the storm continues to fall, you finally see, you finally start to actually believe. 

You say, “am I healed now?”

And then you look down and as the water flows, it gently washes away the scab, and you see it, the fresh new skin underneath.