I'm not even back from Australia a week, but already I'm longing for the sweet pause that is disappearing from your own life. The funny thing, is while I was in the Outback, seeing more stars than I could ever dream of, kicking up red dirt, I really missed home. Now, I arrive home only to realize things have shifted in my absence, I'm less sure of everything in my future than I thought I was, and I no longer feel like I have a place anywhere.
I think the need to belong, whether it's in a family, a group of friends, at work, or within society as a whole, is pretty strong in all of us. Sometimes I feel like with me, it's both a fuelling and destroying force. When I'm something to somebody, when I feel needed, a lot of my insecurities melt away and I'm happy.. But when I feel like I'm on the outside, anything good turns bad, and everything bad turns worse. My future. My body. My relationships, or lack thereof.
I had a weird moment today, when I was helping move some things into my kid sister's apartment. She's moving to the big city for school, and living with our cousin. If I go through the motions and get into baking school, then get the cajones to drop out of university, there's a chance I could be living there too in the third, unoccupied bedroom. The place was nice. Gleaming hardwood floors, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances. Glass coffee tables and enough light. I felt sick to my stomach. The place was nice, but it wasn't me.
I missed my apartment in Montreal. With the excessive stairs, the uneven, creaking floors, the little back balcony. The art on the walls and the vintage trunk for a coffee table. The neighbors downstairs who play their music really loud at 3AM on random weekends. My apartment. Where I knew I had a place for myself, because I had made it. The girls already had some of their furniture moved in, none of it really suiting my own tastes, and I could imagine months and months from now, that it wouldn't be so much that I moved in with them, but that I would move in AROUND them. I know this is ridiculous. I know that if I had to suck it up and put in the work and the sacrifice to get what I want, I would. I would move into that apartment.
But until that moment when I saw my potential future, the small empty spare room in someone else's apartment, shit, someone else's life, it finally hit me how much I was going to be giving up if I had to make the move. Montreal will always be better than Toronto in my heart, today just clarified that.
My insecurities and uncertainty only ran yet more wild when I realized later in the day that I don't even feel secure in my place in Montreal anymore. My friends there have been building their beautiful lives in my absence. OBVIOUSLY, I mean, I'm not an egomaniac, the world wasn't going to stop when I was gone and I knew that. But still.... The fear that I'll return there, only to stand on the sidelines, only to be nothing is...rampant and strong. That I don't have a place at all... I was so anxious and irritable and heartsore over all of it, I passed out for 3-4 hours, hoping the feeling would disappear. It didn't.
Strong ideas that I don't have a place in the now, and I don't know anything about my place in the future.
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