Glittering With Cynicism

& Tarnished With Intolerance

Have you ever pressed your cheek into the blooms of a bouquet of roses?

His kisses are like that,

smooshing back with a soft sturdiness; I have to fight the urge to fall entirely forward.

I can tell he likes it when I attempt patience.

Patience has never been the most accessible value for me to mine from the caves of my potential. It clings to the tunnels that run through me, insisting I can make do without. Leaving me to give up and resurface with petulant jewels, decorating my persistence with sparkles of clever when calm would have more than sufficed.

The energy I waste on fretting is monumentous.

I’ve spent a lot of energy stressing and coping these past few weeks. It grieves me that I was seemingly more productive and interested in myself during the days of old when I was not sleeping and coping with cigarettes and recklessness.

Coping like that back then fueled an interactiveness with the world at large. And I loved interacting with the world at large, testing the boundaries of every edge I came to. Problem was I was so fueled by fury, energized with hate and hopelessness, that I didn’t mind how destructive the story I was writing could get.

In the Fall of 2020, I took a hard turn into prioritizing my holistic health above all. It became evident that wellness for mind, body, and spirit was the only battleground I could impact in the war against disease and lockdowns. But like all things, even an aim for wellness wields a double-edged sword. I’ve grown, but I’ve also become sheltered in that growth. Sheltering my existence from the cruel and pervasive tendrils that being part of most of society exposes you to has shielded me from key motivators… like being part of society.

In light of these recent years, with the awakening I’ve gone through–regarding the mainstream narrative systematically reaffirming appalling socio-political norms–it is clear that pushing the limits of this human container I embody in such a way that I once did will never again be worth making myself further susceptible to the fear tactics the mainstream media employs.

I have an extremely delicate mental health system to regulate, and the truth is I can only survive all of these apocalyptic threats we’ve encountered if I don’t become again dependent on the grid systems working to lock us into their game.

The aggregate of how I cope now isn’t a picture of perfection; I could certainly spend more time exercising, learning, volunteering, creating, cleaning, yada yada. But at least my practices are immensely less woeful for me and those around me than anything I did as a youth or young adult. And while I do still consider the taste of cold steel on a regular basis, I know better. I choose to turn my thoughts away from it instead of letting the ache of suicidal ideation roll through my life like irrefutable thunder.

Shutting the noise out, I again launch an umbrella of at least I am doing okay to hide my sorrow-filled skull from those ominous spikes of lightning.

It’s great that I’ve grown, but I yearn to grow past this point too, to shed these glittering rings of cynicism that have allowed me to accept the world as it is and instead excavate the mounds of patience I indubitably need to rise into my most magnetic, charged, delighted and experiential self.

Patience.

I need to be patient with the world. I need to be patient with others. I need to be patient with my family, my goals, my activities, and both my day-to-day and long-term objectives. Moreover, I need to be patient with myself, and with the slow process of developing the habits I need to be a more aligned me.

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We have everything we will ever need already within us. Step by step, I descend into myself, looking for a way to bring back with me the minerals I seek to soar. I must unearth these wisdoms. I must integrate their practice upon my surface. Step by step, I descend into myself.

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I am two months into weaning off of my anti-depressants, going from 300mg to 150 in December. I probably have about one month to go until I’m out.

I started on Lexapro when I was 14 and got off when I was 21. It never worked, really. Not entirely. I was never okay. But without it, life was a lot more hectic and explosive, too. I finally found a working cocktail of pharmaceuticals when I was 27. Wellbutrin has been a saving grace.

I’m almost 33 now. It’s time to move on. As I put away the pills, I find myself clinging to my umbrella of complacency rather than anteing up the quality of my coping mechanisms–at least I’m doing okay.

I forgive myself for this. And in this process of writing, I edit and re-edit the extent of my forgiveness.

By this time next year, I hope to have a different story for you about how my relationship with the lightning is going. I hope to be quicker on my feet and more active with my dodging while holding trust, calm, and energy to hope for, build towards, and genuinely believe in a better world.

Photography by Courtney McCullough, 2016

Aloha nui loa,

Julia