writing & wayfinding: vol. 7
return
I’ve built a nest in the left-most corner of this restaurant. Nearest the cake display, I am often visited by children with outstretched fingers; wide-eyed and desperate for things they’ve never even heard of. Hungry for everything, accepting of very little. I’m amazed at their steady excitement despite how often they discover they hate the mush they’ve put into their mouths. How immediate their discernment, never asking if they’re allowed to dislike it, never bending towards pleasing or pandering or politeness. Just screaming, throwing, refusal to finish. A smile returning the moment the cake they’ve begged for is successfully hidden from their view.
Brilliant little scientists – so willing to experiment.
I’ve built this nest over years, visiting only to the cadence of a cross-country flight. Always, I bring too many books, a separate journal for each type of thought, a handful of dried out pens, and enough time to watch the tables turn three times over. I’m still sipping on cappuccino foam that's cooled much further than room temp when groups of women in their 70s begin ordering, proudly, one glass of pinot. I know I’ve overstayed by the time they begin to inch past their original constraints. I leave behind stacked dishes and thank-you note receipts in exchange for my voyeurism.
A fair deal, I’ve decided.
I quite like my nest untouched. It allows me the privilege of Making Shit Up. I get to decide the life the owner lived before he got here; theorize about his obsession with Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, decide that the new young man that began working here is his grandson continuing on his legacy. I am immersed in a world that is not mine and still get to feel like I belong because my two cheeks have worn this seat down over four consecutive years.
Lately, still, I’m feeling the tingle of knowing eyes each time I linger there for too long. A wondering. An I recognize this person but can’t place her.
There is a fine line between this pseudo-knowing and the inevitable breakthrough. The moment where someone will ask me if I’ve been there before. To which I’ll cower away in shame while saying yes, many times. A cowering that is not necessary, I know. This acknowledgement is the first step to any actual connection between people, to place. And yet I feel myself turning away. Looking for the exits.
I’ve been reflecting on my need to flee, and, similarly, my habit of building nests in the back corners of places I love without ever introducing myself to a single person in them.
Both things stem from the same origin point: it is absolutely terrifying to be known. And worse, to feel accountable. It is much more exhilarating to build relationship on top of place — to watch it, tell stories about the people and the history, and slink out the back with pockets full of reflections, trading dollars or time but never anonymity.
To be a nameless observer means I get to feel like I belong without ever finding out if I really do. I belong here because this is my seat that only I know is my seat. The ink stain on the leftmost corner of the table from the day my pen exploded and ruined my favorite pants, the person who works on Wednesday and Friday mornings who I can exchange knowing glances with — an occasional, friendlier warmth to my “hey how’s it going!!” Territory marking. I am meant to be here because I am here.
In many ways, it is a beautiful thing to be so unknown. We all need the space to recreate, retreat, to be the mysterious entity floating in the background. Necessary time away from being a canvas for others to paint onto; returning brush to your own hands.
But I am growing weary of building a whole life around this feeling; around my stubbornness against the sayings and doings of others. I’m being made aware of the, lets say, unfairness of this. How being inconvenienced is a part of being in community with others — even and especially if that inconveniencing is the discomfort of growing past old patterns.
I’m learning, after returning to a place and community for over three years, that perhaps there are more fulfilling things than to be untouched by others. And, to my absolute horror, that I was not actually as unknown or un-felt as I wanted to believe.
Its all a convenient way for me to avoid doing the vulnerable thing of asking do i really belong here? Further, to avoid the discomfort of deciding whether or not I really want to.
How mortifying to be told no! Five and twelve-year-old me already learned that lesson, and they have held it down long enough to ensure I (twenty-five) never, ever ask.
In therapy, however, I’m learning about Opposite Action. Doing the thing that your body and brain are absolutely screaming against doing (within reason) just to prove that it Wont Kill You, or whatever your flavor of that is.
So I’ve become curious about Return. And then I got to do the really incredible thing of exploring it with a room of strangers, as well as some folks who have chosen to return to this workshop each month. Framing and prompts below. Hope to see you at the next one or the next and the next after that. Cheers.
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Return
What is a place that has a relationship with you?
When have you felt truly known? How did it feel in your mind, body?
What or where have you been longing to return to? What waits for you there?
Is time a necessary condition of being known?
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In a culture that necessitates escape, numbing, endless consumption or else drown under its unforgiving current, returning, accountably, is the bitter medicine to the sickness of modernity.
Returning is a muscle built each time you choose presence, connection, and inconvenience over the ease of escape.
Returning to place, to community, to self, to ideas, honors the bi-directional nature of relationship. It is a show of understanding that we are not only enactors of our will unto others, but that we are equally changed and related to in return.
Until we know each other, we cannot tell or see what else is possible.
Until we are accountable to each other, we cannot bring what’s possible into what is.
|——————————————-|———————————————-| met known accountable (safety) (belonging) (dignity)
When talking with a friend to plan for this session, she told me about how the three pillars of our primal needs are safety, belonging, and dignity. Dignity.
I found that quite interesting; theorized about how our need for dignity must have developed later in our evolution. That it is evidence of our need to be together, to be in good standing with each other, to do things that others regard esteem-able in order to consider ourselves worthy of esteem.
I find that when hiding from the prospect of being known, I throw myself into the band aid fixes of work and over consumption to scrape up any semblance of the belonging that I seek. If I am working hard or if I am able to consume these things that make me feel seen, why do I need to do the scary thing?
The answer, I’m finding, is that because much like a the benefits of a cold plunge (lol), returning and being known provide a sense of belonging that sustains long past the act itself. It gives you an opportunity to feel dignified in your ability to Show Up and Contribute. It gives you a chance to change and be changed; to be kept alive in the truest definition of life. To change and be changed over and over and over, rather than frozen as a fixture in the background — running out of corners to crawl into to avoid the light.
There is so much space to become when you are not afraid of being seen in your return, in your desire to be somewhere, in your clumsiness of trying to be so.
Gone goes the guilt of the voyeur, the silent echo of are you wanted? do you belong?
Gone goes the aversion of mirrors, the neck strain of turning and hiding.
I can’t say whether you will belong everywhere you want to, but at least the chance to find out is much more freeing than the constant question. The chance to unstick yourself and go off in pursuit of the places to return to; ones that you want to pour into and that pour back into you.
I believe, firmly, that so long as we are driven by these things, by our need to be safe, wanted, and dignified, there will always exist avenues for us to actualize those needs. And if there are not, then, hell, we need to know that so we can start creating them. The only way we will know is if we do the courageous thing and look, ask, see for ourselves.
Return return return.
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Prompt:
Write a story, poem, letter, song, etc. from the perspective of a place/time/thing you return to often. How would it describe receiving you?
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[Reading List]
Immortality - Milan Kundera
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences - Bayo Akomolafe