Like an Old Home Movie- Day 20 (January 20th, 2021)

I worry that my past will be a constant theme in my journaling. I'll talk about my dad and his unfixable brokenness, my childhood that now reaches me as almost some kind of weird, mostly empty church, somewhere that seemed warm when in it, but ultimately cold when it mattered, a place that pushed God at me from all sides but never let Him be the God I know Him to be, the God that would still love me in my complications and reach His hand out to guide me into His fullness. I'll talk about dad's cancer diagnosis and the surreal, Twilight Zone years that followed from it, including the endless fog that grief is.

What I've found after over 16 years of being stuck in a state of grief is that grief is poison. In a metaphorical sense, it's something comparable to living in Chernobyl after the explosion. This unseen danger in the atmosphere now changes you, breaks down your molecules, changes your makeup and your body's ability to operate and process. You experience severe symptoms to begin with and then they might subside, making it seem like things are improving. But, what you can't see is the lasting effect it will have. Your body will never be the same again. And mine hasn't been. No part of me has been the same.

Vaela is as new a me as I will ever find, as close to a do-over as I'll ever get. She's not stuck in the past, trying to stay afloat. She was there then, of course, but even then the much stronger one, the one that gave me fight when I wanted to throw in the towel.

As her, my past is a different thing, not something I'm forever imprisoned by but instead like watching an old home movie. I'm not there yet but I can already tell that I can better heal as her, because as her I'm starting from a much fuller place.