being myself

on turning 36 and having all the answers

Another day of heat, of sun that dries and shines and makes my eyes hurt. Another day of what feels like sudden thirst. The ground is cracked in caverns running across paths and hillsides and every scrap of naked soil. The earth begs for green and cover, but alas it is bare.

It feels it won’t end, like the solar panels will be the only winners here, like we’re in desperate need of hoses if the garden has any hope. It feels like we haven’t seen the rain in forever, and yet I know only a moment ago we were bemoaning the endless wet. The mud and slop and rain that didn’t cease. Has it been a week? Two? Longer? Time is a funny thing. It stretches and compresses, moments lasting lifetimes and months gone in a blink. A year, nearly, gone in the space of a breath.

I scramble for purchase as it all slides away, proverbial sand in the hourglass I cannot hold. It’s all taking way too long and happening far too quickly. It’s been so long since…and there’s no time left. Push and pull, the moon’s grab on the tides and the spinning of our rock. It’s big and small and terribly odd.

People say that time is a construct, a man-made idea. But age is not, seasons are not. They have always bookmarked passages. I bookmark them in years since. And right now the rearing up of years since is strong.

We have lived on our lovely scrap of soil for three years. Three long short years. It feels like forever and a moment ago and it’s all a bit much to fathom. All the things I thought we would have, would be, would feel at three years in are still an end-of-the-tunnel light. It’s gone too fast and taking way too long. Was I overly optimistic or just foolish? The dreamy garden is still miles of dry clay dirt away. The house is half walls and mostly roof, a not-yet-fleshed-out skeleton of dreams.

And my own self? About a million years and ten thousand miles from where I wanted to be. Is this the price of lofty goals? If my to-do lists were short would I be able to cross off every item by the end of the day, instead of stare at a few measly lines through words? If I wanted less, would I feel more accomplished? Perhaps. But perhaps, absolutely, that’s never going to be me.

I’m thirty-six. My birthday passed with little fan-fare, which is exactly how I liked it. Another day, another reflection of self. Stronger, though, this year. Who am I/Why am I/Where am I. And for the first time, I’m very sure of all the answers. I cannot express exactly why this is, but it is. And to finally understand who I am is, to be frank, bizarre.

It’s not about a title, or a job, or a ‘meaning’ to my life. It’s about the core of me, of who I am, and what I seek in life. I have spoken, for years upon years, since I was old enough to think into the future more than a moment, in what I want to be terms. The girl, woman, I wanted to be. The wife, the mother, the writer, the homemaker I wanted to be. Like it was something to work towards. Like I was something else now, and one day I would be all those things. It wasn’t about driving towards goals, it was about a separation between all the things I idealized and what I am right now.

Funny enough, while my life feels a little like a scattered mess of instability, I am finding that in this moment I am the most absolute in myself. We tend to do that, to separate who we are from who we want to be. Instead of I want to be said in the same internal tone as I want a million dollars, what about I know I have it in me to be. Or I already can be. It doesn’t mean that I actually am, currently in this exact moment, the wife I ‘want’ to be. It means that it isn’t some ethereal possibility, some Schrodinger’s self. It means that I already possess the capacity, the ability, to be exactly who I am – who I have always ‘wanted’ to be.

It’s semantics, surely, but words are as critical as the intentions behind them. I know my flaws, my imperfections, are plentiful, and my gaping maws of shortcomings could swallow oceans – because I’m human. Because I’m still working on digging down to the core of myself. Why it’s covered so thoroughly, I couldn’t tell you. But I know that in new habits formed, I become more and more myself. And in that, more the woman I want to be. Not by stepping outside myself, changing myself, or casting off an old self. Instead, by letting that which sits in my soul to finally come out.

It’s radical, or maybe not. It might be logic to others, but to the workings of my own grey matter, it’s new age. It’s a fresh perspective. It’s the kind of lightbulb moment that might change my whole self, whole life. Not in leaps, not in shocks, but in the little moments that make me a better person. The moments when I feel most absolutely who I am.