If you remember going through the ‘Lost and Found’ dumpster bags in school, you might know it was like sifting through an old treasure chest, awaiting to find gold. Pick up, put down. Pick up, put down. All of which was not yours as you left aside what was years worth of stuff, until you found what you’d been awaiting for – a part of you. Once you found it, along came a warming rush that ran through the body— alongside the mouldy stench up the nostrils. Some might call this a feeling of relief or safety. 

Funny enough, nothing has changed since my childhood  —  legs in the air and head first as I boldly claim the deep dive in search for stability in a bag of emotion labelled ‘Lost and Found’. 

Spoiler Alert: The contradiction discovered among the great expectation on life with all its twists, turns and run-arounds, is we greatly yearn for consistency with the full understanding there will never be any. 

I have expected that God would give me that one break. I have expected there was a God. I have expected my body to find health. I have expected family meant love. I have expected those who said the word love meant it. I have expected friends to behave as such. I have expected lives around me to outlive my own. Not only do I have blatant control issues, but unreasonable expectations on life to be —simple. I only further discovered coming into thirty years that beneath my control issues was my over analysis.

Lost were the days I had become deeply ‘ghosted’ by my expectation on myself, I now pondered on the greater meaning of my life, finding there was nothing to discover but an avoidance of my reality. 

Found was the acknowledgment that by my haunting of all I had replayed in my mind, I discovered how to find stability. 

Each moment I had spent magnifying and untangling every knot that I tied so beautifully in my mind, amplified only more guilt from the parts of me that made me so human.

I found a way to bash down the pillars, whilst I created them for myself. I had simultaneously lost the joy of living, yet exhausted myself trying to seek it. Yet, this was not where I was ‘supposed’ to be. I continued to look around so I instead made a life that I could run from. I pulled myself into more non-existent truths and tugged further into my own hurts. 

Deeper in my dumpster bag, I surrounded myself with those that were still telling me to dive deeper, question and always look in. 

It was exhausting because I thought I refused to acknowledge what needed to be expressed inside of me, my ‘shadow’ self. I also began to do this to those around me, just as any domino effect happens. As I look back, I see now that I walked around thinking that either I or someone else always had something to express. This was a hard way of living and could turn one to feel anxious if they create the idea that there is always a problem that needs fixing. 

We are not born as cogs in the machine of life. 

How do you feel now?

There was a time where I decided to acknowledge that no one will ever be able to understand what went down in my life as they had never been through it. I also can never identify another’s.

My life was not taught to me in school and if it was, I would have flunked as badly as I already did in the past. I felt exhausted, being told to look at life as some arithmetic class to study and prep for. 

My stability began when I could recognise that not everything needed to be questioned, had a meaning or needed an answer.

None of us here have the answers.

How do you feel now?

With that, I found more stability within myself than I thought anyone could give me.

I wish for anyone who needs this, finds this.