Above Water
When I was a little girl I had this intense fear of drowning. My mom used to say that I must’ve drowned in a past life because I had a strict four inch limit in the bathtub and refused to let water touch my face. In the pool, I refused to learn how to swim or leave the shallow end, shaking my head adamantly at any requests to do otherwise. I knew I wasn’t ready.
It’s important to understand that I was not afraid of water. I don’t think I ever feared water as much as I feared not knowing how to not lose myself in her. I loved water, being in her and being around her, and felt drawn to it as I played on the shore of the beach as a toddler or drank water out of the hose.
But with that love came an understanding and acknowledgment of her. Water, one of those four primary elements, is depth, emotion, and intuition, and as much as that called me, my intuition, or maybe the water herself, said that the full force of it was something I was not yet ready for.
So I waited, familiarizing myself with her, watching her, entertaining her, and befriending her in my own time, understanding the intricacies and possibilities of the shallow end before moving on. I wasn’t ready for the full force of it until I was eight, past the point of most of my peers, finally engaging with what I had spent a long time observing. Even now, I still can’t open my eyes under water.
A few weeks ago, I was in the arms of someone I’ve been seeing for a few months, and I left with that familiar pit in my stomach. I kissed him with both feelings of dissociation and a desire to kiss my way into something, but I was only playing a part, partly for him and partly to convince myself that if I keep trying, then maybe I can get some of those things I truly crave on a basic level.
But sometimes when I leave, I sense with clarity that this is not truly what I want and desire on a soul level. The inner parts of me are craving intimacy, depth, and a familiarity with someone that feels like you have always belonged at the same chosen dinner table together.
I have always yearned for that unconscious connection and karmic intensity that accompanies those familiar to us, our family sometimes by blood but often by choice, but my story thus far has only included visitors, some who reappear and mean more than others, but visitors all the same. They knock on the door and I open but they are not here to stay.
The truest part of me does not wish for more from the visitors themselves, most of the time that is, but something and someone else entirely that I can’t seem to reach. A stranger out at sea that requires a version of myself I’m closer to becoming but that isn’t fully formed. Sometimes it feels that maybe I’m rowing the opposite direction.
I hear my intuition loudly saying that I want more, that I am unsatisfied with this revolving door of visitors, but I can also look back and say that I haven’t been ready for what it is that my intuition knows I truly I want. And I have tried. In fact, I have a habit of sticking things out and trying to make the puzzle piece fit out of determination. But that never works.
I think a wise part of me, a loving protective grandmother part, has instructed me to go only as far as I have because if I had actually fallen in love before this point, I don’t think I would’ve had the skills or personal perspective to not totally abandon myself. My experience alone with less serious relationships showed a tendency to silence myself, make myself small, and obsess over the desire for others to like me. If I had fallen in love, I think there’s a high likelihood I would’ve been trapped without the instincts to get out.
Sometimes I feel shame that I have not moved beyond the visitor. I feel guilt that perhaps I’m betraying my inner-knowing, that these feelings are telling me to stop. At the same time, I also have always felt the need to keep going, to put myself back in the ring and try again, even if I know that it’s not the ultimate ‘thing’ I am looking for pretty early on.
I also feel guilt and shame that I haven’t been ready, and by ready, I do not mean unwilling or cowering, though that line can be blurry and I’m sure it plays a part as well. By ready, I mean that certain developmental stages must occur before it’s possible. Like I child who must go through certain psychological, emotional, and physical stages to reach the next stage.
In many ways, it feels like I’m learning to swim all over again.
When I was a little girl, I knew that I belonged in the water but I also knew that I didn’t have the knowledge or capacity to swim in the deep end yet. My instincts didn’t scream to not play in the water and it didn’t say to sit passively and watch everyone else play. I knew I still needed to be in the water, but I had a certain threshold, a certain area to conquer first. It was only by playing in the water, by playing the shallow end, that I was able to gain certain skills and test certain boundaries before moving on.
I think that the range of situations I have found myself in, all of these visitors, have served as a sort of necessary initiation, a shallow end that must be explored and mastered in order to form me into the person capable of what my intuition is pointing towards. I have to first learn how to respond and completely be myself with these visitors before I am even capable of the type of love that I want.
I have realized that the way I learn and get to that thing is through active participation and experience. It may look messy and I may repeat some patterns until I break them. It may not look like the thing I want yet, either, but the way I get closer to what my intuition knows to be true is through direct engagement with the things that scares me in incremental phases. I have wanted to skip to the end, but developmentally, that is impossible. You cannot get there in a straight line.
I am actively learning that my intuition can be saying something that is true, but it also doesn’t mean the full realization of it needs to be true in this exact moment. It is simply an arrow, pointing you towards the right direction. Sometimes that looks like drastic action and sometimes that looks like steps. You can’t force yourself to jump off the diving board before you’ve learned how to hold your breath under water.
With love,
Zoë
