“…death does not always wait for the heart to stop beating. Often, the soul draws its last saving breath before the body draws its last breath of air.” -(a quote from my English term paper, spring 2010)-
In the spring of 2010, I lived on an Army base on Oahu, near the foot of the Waianae Mountain range. A quiet, wooded road cuts across the base, and over the mountain, through Kolekole pass. Over the course of a year, the 4 mile incline from my house to the top of the pass became a weekly refuge for me; a hike through a bit of rainforest where I could find some calm, and think clearly about ways to navigate a life that was steadily eroding underneath my feet. Near twilight at the end of a sunny day last April, I ended those hikes when the chaos of my life breached the boundaries of my sanctuary.
When I started on that last hike, my head was a storm raging with all the things I could not get control over. It built inside me until, halfway up the mountain, I drew a breath that would not reach my lungs. I remember sucking desperately at the air and only feeling it not go in. I was suddenly failing at the most basic function of life: breathing. That had never happened to me before. Of all the things I had ever let slip through my fingers, I had never failed to get that one thing right. I drenched my head with drinking water and stomped in circles. The constriction in my chest eased up. I caught my breath again. I briefly evaluated my options: there was only one. I turned and continued on.
Death comes in many forms, and it is not the death of the body that concerns me the most. Life is lost, suddenly or gradually, when we stop living it from within. When everything we do is a response to the world, and we stop being true to ourselves. Fighting the world is not living. Hiding away from it is not living. Surrendering your autonomy and allowing the world to wipe its ugly boot on your backside is not living. Somewhere on the edges there is vitality and substance, but for me it has been a difficult balance to maintain.
For most of my life, I have wasted my energy trying to please or pacify the people around me, always trying to feel acceptable. In September 2008, I took stock of the sum total of my lifetime efforts, and this is what I was faced with: An emotionally barren marriage that, to an outsider, looked like a sweetheart’s romance; A disparate family that looked like a functional unit; The creeping realization that I was already dead.
I had created an illusion of life through constant animation. I was actively involved in my church, in my kid’s activities, in trying to motivate my husband to help me fix our marriage and our family, in a series of attempts to lose weight. And I was numb; nothing reached me. I had been trying to find my spirit, fix my marriage, raise acceptable kids, and lose weight since becoming a wife and mother at age seventeen. In 2008 I was thirty-two, and I had rolled my stone up the hill so many times that I didn’t believe in life anymore.
Suicide comes in many forms. I had never given more than a passing consideration to the literal kind: I have always been too curious, waiting on the next thing coming around the bend, even if it might crush me. But, when I searched my situation, and myself, I realized that I had been taking part in a form of passive suicide. I evaluated my options. The safe thing was to continue pretending this was acceptable; answering to myself meant doing everything that looked wrong. There was only one option I could live with: I quit trying to fix my marriage. I quit volunteering to lead activities. I stopped running the show, jumped into college full time, and started taking care of myself.
When you make drastic changes, not everyone will thank you or consider the situation improved. Stagnation is foul, but it’s comfortable and some people adjust to the smell to the point that they can’t tolerate anything else. As I made changes, my life became divided. I estranged myself from friends I love to avoid unanswerable questions. My marriage ended. Last May, I left Hawaii and came back home; a place you can never go back to. In the short space between the epiphany and the epitaph of my previous existence, I earned 38 college credits, lost nearly 150lbs, and found myself. Or, at least I can see myself now, just below the surface. I won’t try, in a single blog entry, to account for all the events of the past two years. Here and now, in February 2011, I’m still sorting through left over pieces, and learning how to breathe.
I’m taking up this blog for that purpose. I still have a list of things I need to answer for, to myself. One of those is silence. I’m very comfortable in the seclusion of my own thoughts. It’s easy to retreat there and sort through the chaos on my own. This gives the appearance of peace, which seems to be acceptable, but I’ve found that keeping it to myself means never letting go.
The most important lesson that I have tested, and found truth in, is that stagnation is death. Life persists in risk and progress. If you have a storm raging about you, it will always find your refuge. The only place you can really survive is at the center: the calm, focused eye of a hurricane. If you have a storm raging within you, it’s the same. This is life, in the midst of chaos, and it’s a difficult position to maintain.
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