They say you can't go home again. I'm pretty sure that's true, because the you that left, is never the same you that comes back. This me is, now, almost seven years from the me that left Austin Texas in January 2001.
How can anyone leave Austin, Texas, those who get there and stay, wanna know.
I got too tangled up. I started chewing off my limbs. I still have cracks in my teeth from the frustration. I was literally losing my mind.
I didn't care to start losing anything else.
Like a caught animal, I just started lashing out. Then I realized it, and tried to isolate myself, to save anyone from harm. It went on for a short while, but I cannot thrive in isolation, especially with another person too close for comfort. That relationship was never exactly on solid footing, but neither of us knew the difference. Too dumb, too young, thought we were so damn smart.
My personality has difficulty with intimacy, and especially trust, in the best of situations.
No one who is uncomfortable with themselves, can truly let another in. Think of being ashamed of your house when you let someone in. You keep them in the rooms you feel comfortable with.
I had a couple of very nice guest rooms, and most of my friends thought that was me.
There's a whole house here.. I've thrown a lot of antiques out the windows, but am sure there are ever more relics and dust bunnies to discover and either redecorate or simply let go.
Let go, my teacher used to say. Just Let Go. I had one of the most beautiful and honest budo teachers out there. He said he was teaching aikido, but I'm not so sure any more. He was the hammer, and the mat was the anvil. I was the faulty steel.. folded a thousand times and still needing honing. My teacher now, does that well.
I've been through multiple processes now, and this steel is, now, simply naked.
I've found a place where I don't have to hide any more. I have a partner who delights in drawing every aspect of me out. He is fearless in that direction, and excels at being fearless, for others.
I have a profession where wierdness is celebrated, I live in a culture where I am an outsider, and therefore not expected to fit in. Like many other outliers, I am more comfortable in a foreign land. I'm already strange, therefore, to be a stranger in a strange land is actually an ease, for me. At least until memories have faded, and I have changed enough to be almost a foreigner, where I was once at home.
But for now, I go home in a few months, and I am feeling terribly, terribly naked. I dreamed, back when I began bodywork, that I had stepped out of a full medieval suit of armor and walked into the woods, and when I looked back at the armor and where my feet had fallen, flowers grew. They grew out of the armor.
Part of the concrete psychophysical process of Rolfing is to find a way out of the defenses we all put between our soft selves and the terrible world, if we perceive it that way, growing up. I certainly did. And now, headed back to the world I grew up in, I am honestly feeling a trifle nervous. At the same time, I am also thrilled.. that I will see it all, perhaps, with these new eyes.