I can feel it coming before it actually hits me. My chest seems to tighten and my throat feels like it is being squeezed shut but I keep running around doing life. I get more and more restless and there is an awkward sense of disconnection that grows and spreads throughout my body. I can’t yet touch it or explain it but I know there is something inside of me that desperately wants me to recognize that it is there.

The more I ignore the feeling, the more disconnected I become from what seems to be my real self. When my legs move, the movements don’t feel like they are mine anymore. The life I live doesn’t feel like it is my life anymore either. So I slowly start to realize that I am going to have to acknowledge my hidden knowings somehow. The problem is that I am not ready. I don’t want to hear them, let alone actively hold them in my consciousness. I don’t want to feel their impact, because what if these renewed realizations are too much to take… like they usually are.

Eventually the knowing wins, because I can’t keep living a life that doesn’t feel like mine. And as always, with the knowing (which is of course still surrounded by a great deal of question marks) also comes an overwhelming anxiety and grief. And with good reason, because it really is scary and it does hurt. So then I panic and I cry. Until I calm down again and try to go on in a direction that feels more like my own again. But it’s a lonely process. I carry around the feeling that my deepest truth remains unspoken and that my lived experience remains unlived somehow.