The storm will pass

I don’t often try to write in the middle of the storm.. or at least I don’t try to write anything that may be worth reading later. But this particular storm I’m in feels like it has something to say, so I will oblige and open the gates and find out what it wants to convey.

In my own internal mythology I use this story again and again: A couple of years ago during Hurricane Zeta, in New Orleans, there was a point when the eye of the storm sat on the city and lingered for a while. After spending the day inside, gently hiding from the wind and rain, suddenly the entire neighborhood and I wandered out front to witness the stillness. The skies were bright orange and you could see the bands of rain all around. You could feel the electricity still in the air but right in the middle it was calm. I’ve come back to this moment so many times when I am presented with my own inner storm. I can choose to get lost in the bands of rain, or I can stay put and wait for it to pass. It’s not an easy choice but when I can mange to make it, or even remember I have choice, I come out much less scathed.

I’m usually vaguely aware of what the storms are these days, “You are unloveable. You are too weird to exist. You have no friends. Nobody likes you. You are wasting your life. You are wasting your time. You should be different. You should be different. You should be different. You should be different.” It’s often variations on a theme but nowhere does it tell me I’m brilliant and that I should keep doing what I’m doing. Nowhere does it say that I’m lovable and beautiful and vibrant. No, this voice, this storm, is prettttttty darn mean. I’ve edited the real content to make this piece PG-13.

Sometimes watching this storm pass can be very exhausting. It takes a lot of work to stay in the center. Sometimes I just try to pass the time doing other things, all the while feeling the wind at the door. But other times I need to hunker down in full awareness of what is going on. In times like this, times like today, it is easy for me to accidentally open the window and get swept away. When the howling is so loud it becomes like a siren outside my house, beckoning me, calling me, summoning me to follow it through the streets and neighborhoods of my mind and I have to consciously remember to look away. One howl is shame, another howl is fear, this howl is dread and existential annihilation, and that howl takes me to sudden psychic death. I know these paths well and used to spend hours of my years aimlessly wandering down Howls Lane. I can’t do this anymore. I just simple can’t. I don’t think I would recover at this point. Somehow I got lucky when I was younger that even if the roads were steeper and the callings much greater, I still found my way back. Somehow I managed to get out alive. I don’t know if I have that kind of stamina any longer, thank God. Getting older has its gains.

On a sunny, stormy, perfect New Orleans day like today, I am still slightly unclear what all this noise is about, but I do know is that nothing is okay—I don’t want to be alone but I don’t want to be together; I don’t want to do that but I definitely don’t want to do this; I don’t want to get up but I don’t want to lie down anymore, either. Simply nothing feels okay. And simultaneously, everything is peaceful. How can this all be? The great paradoxes of life are such a mystery to me.

All this would be incomplete if I didn't also acknowledge that these storms are part of the great exodus of erroneous belief systems and that are actually, in some ways, very, very healing. I can catch glimpses of the narratives as they fly by my window and every once in a while I do need to pluck one from the sky and find a trusted friend and discuss it over. I do need to share about what I'm going through, I do need to acknowledge this pain. I can't simply wish it all away or pretend it doesn't exist. But the difference for me these days and that I do my very very best to not make it personal. When words of a negative phrase catch me in the face I can try to remember, with the help of a friend, that it gets stuck to me for spiritual growth but actually this noise, this storm, this maddening-mental-insane has nothing to do with me. I can keep my chin up and believe in myself. I might be bloodied and drooling, but that chin can go up, dammit.

So I say all this to say, it’s going to be okay. Maybe I just need to say this to myself and that’s fine, but the world is in increasing states of unrest and the best I can do is attempt to be one more stable person on the path to the unknown. All I can do is ground myself, knowing I am not the only one that feels this way, and that maybe I have something to offer. All I can do is remind and remember that the storms, no matter how great, eventually pass, and even if there is wreckage, I can still choose to remain in the center of the storm, open my heart, and be forever transformed.