My favorite new beginning has kept me alive
The winds will carry me and I will ache for morning again // #TheIsolationJournals
It started with a promise to embrace the unpredictable. A promise to relinquish control and trust that the weather might carry me through the wind or push me back to shore or spin me in circles, but eventually, at storm’s end, it will ease me down on my two feet once again.
My favorite new beginning—it began with a risk succeeding an almost-finale to life. It began with my decision to quit my last job.
I remember walking into the newsroom one day, my eyes and throat a glance, a touch away from tears and quivers. I remember finding the first person I thought I could confide in and unloading my pain onto them, desperate for a push out the door. I needed thicker hands with thicker skin to guide me out, to convince me to trust the gut I didn’t know I could trust. How could I trust it? After all, that same gut had pushed me to the brink, too.
But those hands I’ll never forget.
I would wake up the following day, the day after those hands held mine with compassion, and I would walk back into the newsroom with my two weeks’ notice and no other job prospects waiting for me.
My job was a fine job at a fine paper dedicated to its defense of community and of truth. But I couldn’t separate my heart from the news. I couldn’t read of another mass shooting, another hate crime, another lie from the president of the free world without my mind and body crumbling. I couldn’t bear to carry the news of stranded strangers across oceans. Every little string of bad news became a burden. And my shoulders have always been weak.
My favorite new beginning, you see, began with a risk that left me without an income, without a plan, and with insurmountable guilt. What privilege I had to be able to say goodbye without faltering onto the street. What privilege I continue to have.
But this risk—it also gave me my first taste of excitement. It animated the limbs I’d been dragging around for months. It changed the weight of the font on my to-do lists from bold to light.
Every morning onwards, the world felt conquerable. The pen was in my hands, however I wanted to tell the stories I needed to tell. And the stories have been pouring out. Stories of truth, of fiction, of fiction that reveals more truth than truth alone. Words have been assembling as if they’ve been in line for centuries, just waiting for a chance to break free.
For months after this new beginning, I ached for morning, dreamt for the sun to rise a little earlier. I yearned for short sleeps to nourish me enough so I could wake up and continue writing without reins, without an obligation to the news or algorithm of the day.
The current state of the world has been depriving me of the thirst I had just three months ago. But writing this, remembering the joie de vivre of what morning can be—I’m feeling at ease. I’m feeling hopeful. I will love the wake-up again.
—fiza
Prompt from Georgia Clark with #TheIsolationJournals, a 30-day creativity project to help make sense of these challenging times. Join in!
I invite you to reflect on a new beginning that was meaningful for you. You might think about a literal beginning: new job, relationship, state of being (pre-child to parent, singledom to marriage). You might think about a new conviction, habit, or a crucial choice you made: when you decided to stop apologizing all the time, that summer you actually started meditating, or the day you stopped drinking. Tell the story of your new beginning. What did it make room for? Why was it important? How did your new beginning lead you to where you are today?