the first winter

The first flight.

The first heart wrenching goodbye.

Not only to my family but to my home, everything I had ever known.

I was a young girl, hopes high, heart in sorrow, trying to be so strong. Holding back every tear, scared that if I let even just the smallest amount of feeling in, I would be on the next flight home, tail between my legs.

That kind artist who sat next to me in flight. I remember him telling me that he had been away for work, and he had been drawing pictures for his two beautiful young daughters. I would focus so intently on his pencil strokes, just breathing in the moment, not on what lay on the other side for me. I would tell him of my journey across country, of my two suitcases full of everything I now owned and of my terrified heart. His words stick with me to this day. “Spread your wings, follow your heart. I know how scary it feels, but you must do this.”

I would spend my nights curled up in bed, crying. Never ending waves and rough waters swelling in my throat at how far I felt from home, and myself. Back then I thought I was searching for success and a career. But now I realise I was searching for me, the real me. The me beyond where I grew up, my age, sex, body, name, and the labels others and I had associated with who I was. I felt encaged and bound in a life that wasn’t ever really mine. I had been chasing and running all in the same.

I got what I wanted, to be stripped back of everything I clung to, essentially through the confronting unfamiliarity of the concrete city around me. I was a coastal girl, from a big, warm, comfortable beach home. And I would sleep on the floor for 4 weeks before I found a place more permanent. The sounds of the city would keep me up at night and remind me just how far I was from the quiet, salty beach air in the West.

Sleep deprived, coffee was my lifeline. Like an endless dark day just waiting for a glimpse of sun ray over endless ocean waters, I was lost, hoping for the day I would awake and it would all feel okay.

I moved just before the winter. It would be dark, cold, rainy. My mirror to the storm deep in my bones. I would search far and wide, for me. I would bury myself in my job, acting classes, food, coffee. I had no idea really what I was doing.

If only I could whisper in her ear, younger me, and tell her that one day I would wake up and it would feel okay.

And that one day I would realise with tears of joy, that home is not a place. It is right there with her, between her head and her toes.

That it didn’t matter what she did, or where she traveled or who was around her, that she could come home at any moment.

And that if she was uncomfortable and scared, then she was heading in the right direction - closer to herself where she would learn to nurture every part of her wholeheartedly.

I would tell her I am proud that she just allowed herself to surrender and feel it all.

I would tell her she would fall in love when the winter ends, first with herself and then with every season and then with a boy that was kind.  

But that would mean I would have to tell her just how much harder it would get.

That the boy she fell in love with would not love her anymore one day and it would hurt so bad she would want to die.

That she would question her path over and over that she would nearly give it all in.

I would have to tell her that saying goodbye to her family would never, ever get easier, for the closer they got in her growing older and wiser, the more their hearts would ache.

And then I could tell her, that through it all, she would rise again, stronger and more open and brave and loving and giving than ever before.

And that all winters will end, so the spring flowers can bloom and shine no matter who walks on by.

“There is a rhythm within me, and I am within this rhythm. ”

— DONALD M. EPSTEIN