“Why don’t you let yourself feel good?” she asked, lying next to me, her fingers in my hair.
The attention on me, on everything I was and wasn’t felt like some far off light through the window.
I laid in silence with the city glowing over us before answering, “I don’t know.”
I did know.
That next weekend I took off for the ocean with my grandfather’s words ringing in my ears. When the rest of the world doesn’t make sense, the ocean always seems to.
I needed space. The walls of Seattle were closing in like trees in a forest and I felt like a sapling trapped beneath them needing light. I thought the coast might have some sort of answer for me, some sort of breath. Exhaling my own, I risked the disappointment of it not having anything and loaded my dog, Finn, my camera, and a brown leather journal into the jeep then hit the road.
Tires turning across sand, after three hours’ worth of driving and personal development podcasts, I followed the coastline up north until the last of the cars, and then mine, disappeared into a cloud of sea fog.
“Where should we go buddy?” I asked. His ears perked up.
“Yeah, I don’t know either.”
It’s been two and a half years since I moved to the Pacific Northwest. I was only supposed to be here for a few months when I first arrived. You’ll know it’s time to move on when you feel like you’ve grown all you can. Another anecdote of wisdom that drifted through my mind when I needed it most. I moved almost every year after hearing it, until I reached Seattle. Something about the city kept proving that it still had lessons for me to grow with.
Pulling the car around so it landed perpendicular with the shore, I put it in park then rolled all the windows down. Cool wind and sand blew across my dash. Finn whined from the backseat to play fetch.
“All right bud, let’s go,” I said.
Opening my door and then his, he darted out, flinging sand everywhere.
“What did we come out here to find?” I asked. He sat for the ball. I chucked it down the beach. “Space.”
For a decade, learning and growing meant occupying new spaces. Over twenty-five countries and states worth of them. The words were true, every bit of me evolved with every place I went, but the question still stirred: why don’t you let yourself feel good?
Before I decided to travel across the states and spend a few months here and there, I had a job offer in New Zealand. For a kid from a small town in Florida, it felt like a dream come true, but I couldn’t take it. I had just returned from living two years abroad and I wanted the adventure back in my life, but I couldn’t stomach having another one alone. I got tired of seeing beautiful views but not having anyone to share them with. Traveling through the states was my compromise. I’d be close enough to home, my family, to make it count, to be there for the big life events. I’d find the adventure partner I always wanted. I ran away every time one got close.
Then I landed in Seattle. It’s my way of being near the mountains and the ocean, I told everyone. Even if it meant driving three hours to play fetch at the latter. Somewhere in the first year the outside space seemed to stop mattering. Inside me I had words that needed out.
Signing up for my first writing class since school, I walked in ready to finish the manuscript that lingered in my mind since beginning my travels.
“Consider this a safe space to share your thoughts and words,” said the teacher in our first class. A safe space, I heard that exact phrase a year later from a therapist through a screen. I broke down in our first session, then left it thinking, damn, this guy is good. A safe space. My words needed space. I needed space.
Opening the trunk of my Jeep, I hopped inside and grabbed the journal and a pen. With the ball in his mouth, Finn nudged his sand covered nose into my leg, drool dripping everywhere.
“Give me a minute,” I said, tying him off to the back hitch.
Taking out the journal and a pen, I stared at a blank page trying to determine how I felt. Thoughts began fighting to get their responses heard first. All of them egoic, most were too harsh to put on paper. They concentrated on everything that was wrong with me. I had already lit a list like that on fire a few weeks ago to add some drama to the practice my therapist suggested to me. It proved effective, but I was looking for something else. Shutting the journal, I took my shoes off then grabbed my camera and the end of Finn’s leash.
Since starting therapy, an ebb and flow of peace and shame has washed over me. Before starting the sessions, on one drunken night, all of my biggest insecurities came to a head, and I was left standing drenched in the dissociative life I had been living. After years of keeping thoughts and feelings in, I told an acquaintance I hardly knew at a Halloween party about some of the darkest places my life had been. They were lines I had never told anybody, but ones my mind had been playing on repeat for years. It was like my soul was begging to get out after being held under for so long. A week later, I signed up for my first session.
For an hour every Monday I spewed words that had been built up over the course of my life. It was like my inner chatter had its mouth taped for decades and was finally being given a chance to speak. For an hour after the first session, I had no internal dialogue. I felt high, in the moment. This relief of inner silence then extended to days, and even weeks. Then, once the majority of the thoughts had spiraled out of my consciousness drain, I got a real first glimpse at the foundations of how my mind operated and how things had gotten rearranged and misconstrued.
For nearly a decade, when I experienced happiness or excitement, my brain learned to process it as anxiety and panic. Any time I got attention or a compliment, it came with cynicism and self-doubt. When I experienced pleasure, my brain matched it with shame. Physical connection and sex came with hidden motives and distrust. Due to past narratives and the lack of space I gave myself to explore who I was, all the seemingly good aspects of life became tainted with shadows of toxicity and guilt.
Overwhelmed by what felt like self-betrayal, I took a step back at feeling anything at all, which meant taking time away from the most beautiful opportunity we’re given: being human.
Walking closer to the water line, Finn jolted forward with the leash dragging me into where the waves crashed. It was freezing cold. Jumping up, the water shocked my feet and ankles then sent a surge up through my body. Finn jumped around and barked unbothered; he was having the time of his life.
In the gloom of the fog, I started laughing. Egging me on, Finn bounced around splashing and doing his best to communicate that he wanted me right there with him. I was having the time of my life. Then a wave of grief hit me.
For so long I wasn’t letting myself be happy, or sad, or excited, or loved, or me. I wasn’t diving into my emotions because dissociating from them felt easier than the vulnerability that I perceived they gave me.
Earlier on in my life I grew up as a boy interested in philosophy and writing, the culture that surrounded me called me sensitive and questioned my masculinity. Following that, as a boy trying to discover himself, I faced a situation in a key part of my development where I was sexually manipulated, the message I told myself was to be ashamed. I disconnected from my body for years. Further into adulthood, after contracting a parasite on one of my trips overseas, I began having issues with my digestive track. This caused a disturbance in my brain gut connection and cascaded into a series of neurological events including panic attacks. I got one every time I felt excited, or happy, or anything above apathetic. I learned to avoid the pendulum of emotional states. My brain learned to fire a different way. It learned, but it wasn’t always that way, which meant it could relearn.
One thing I began noticing once I started sharing my story, was that the spaces in between the shame were far larger and filled with gratitude, love, and pride. For the first time in my entire life, I felt proud of myself. It was if the clouds that darkened my mind and memories were wisping away with each word to reveal a life filled with brightness, one that vibrated on a higher energetic level. I felt compassion for myself for the first time. My brain was doing the best that it could to keep me going — to keep me alive — and though it learned some unhelpful habits and associations, it carried me through. I was doing the best I knew how with what I knew at the time. Then I learned to give my mind and my past some space.
With the space, came a feeling of grief. Not the grief that comes with sorrow, leaving me in a forlorn state, but the kind that brought me an intense feeling of appreciation, and compassion. I was grateful for the boy that turned into an optimist because he believed in better days. He believed in learning a different way of being.
Watching Finn splash around, I jumped in with him and went for a swim. When the rest of the world doesn’t make sense, the ocean always seems to, said my grandfather’s voice in a mind that felt freed. He passed away just over a month ago. In my last conversation with him I asked him how he was doing and he told me, today sucked, but that doesn’t mean tomorrow has to. He gave himself space every day.
Dripping and covered in sand, Finn and I walked back to the car.
Opening the trunk, I picked up the journal and scribbled:
Why don’t you let yourself feel good?
Taking a breath and looking out at the waves, I turned to the paper again and wrote:
Because I wasn’t taught to, but I’m willing to learn.
Then, as the sun started setting, I loaded Finn up, hopped into the driver’s seat, and closed the pages. Setting the journal on the seat next to me, I thought about how the very first words I wrote in it were when I moved away from home. I didn’t know it then, but through all the places I passed through I was looking for a safe space to share myself, a space for becoming. Driving along the beach that day, and because of all the days before it, I began to feel like I found it. I began feeling like the space within me was what I was looking for all this time and, because of that, every space could feel like home.