My home is named Threshold
Nov. 20th, 2025 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormFinally finally, in this time when I'm alive but might easily not be, when how much longer I have to live is fully uncertain in that it might be a year or it might be fifty, when I'm no longer chained to a hormonal cycle that drives every emotion, when I've learned to observe through every turn of that chaining, when I've withdrawn nearly completely from the constructs of human socialization, when I've come back just far enough to remember that humans abstract things and give them names, I'm learning the names for the things my younger self felt.
I'm learning that terror has been normal for me for so much of my life. I've layered it over with secondary emotions, turning fight-or-flight into drive-or-independence. In love it always manifested as pain. In joy it manifested as grief. I've coaxed it into submission with every tool, dissociation, presence, distraction but it lay underneath still.
And at the same time I'm learning this immense joy and gratitude at being alive. For so much of my life I've thought, I've had such a good life and it's been enough that if I were to die today it would be, well, enough. I'd be grateful for what I'd had. And this is bonus time for me, alive-time I have only because of the direct and unwavering support of many people. And I'm grateful for it and I also want it to continue. I want more days and more. I want to watch the acorns I planted this year come up, to see every year how much they grow. I want the trees I plant to get big enough to hug.
I want to see what happens as my soul unfolds into this world I never expected to exist, into not only the impossibly perfect haven I have here for myself but also into this incomprehensibly raw and complex and shattering world I live in. I want to know how I come to terms with these humans existing as the do, not ascending like those pseudo-narratives of evolution but instead struggling like a storm on the ocean. I Want to understand how I first cope and then accept and then love this piece of the natural world in a moral way, where I believe every piece to be important.
I have confidence in myself that I'll grow and learn and unfurl and densify and somehow both end up so far from myself I wouldn't believe it but also so much myself that gravity pulls my own self in and begins to effect the world around me.
Time is long! What if this is the midpoint of my learning myself? Who would I become?
Will I always be scared? Will I always be grateful? Can I learn to superimpose those, instead of swinging one to the other? What would love look like for me, after more years like these? Could I recognise it?
I could barely move today, too many things happened at once and I can't form them into a narrative. I had counseling and Siri came and laid on my arm, purring, the entire time. Whiskey sat on the other side of me, purring. I talked with my counselor about my need to anchor myself in a narrative and my lack of cognitive ability to do such a thing now, of the way I can only write or talk my way into it anyhow, of how I have no one I can stand to perform reciprocal emotional work of that kind for in my life right now. The cats purred. I talked, disjointedly, careening from significant point to significant point. I didn't manage to web them together as I always used to, but I could revisit them under a listening ear and that was as much as I can get of what I needed right now.
I can't weave all those threads. I can barely hold a single thread. I'll find some way to make meaning and I don't know what it is. Maybe I'll carve porcelain into jagged cliffs that I'll flow with sparkling colour and call it a cup. Maybe I'll run back and forth playing with the dog, forward-back and to-and-fro. Maybe I'll lie on my back on the ground overnight and grow roots into the ground for real.
When I'm here I'm not as scared. That evacuation in 2018 when I'd just moved in and had to leave I was so scared every moment that my soul couldn't live in my body. If it was a movie it would have had red lights and an alarm blaring so loudly everyone would have left the theatre. Since I came back from that I've only left my land through choice, knowing I could come back. Years layering on years create trust that I can be here, can keep being here, and so I am. Right now, tonight, writing all this, I am led to wonder: if I stay here long enough, will I maybe ever stop being scared? Will I lose my terror? And if I have no terror, maybe I'll no longer need a narrative.
Maybe I'll be content as a heart beating, skin leaking sweat or heat, fingertips and pain or pleasure and awareness of variation in sounds and air currents. I get there sometimes.
I'm learning that terror has been normal for me for so much of my life. I've layered it over with secondary emotions, turning fight-or-flight into drive-or-independence. In love it always manifested as pain. In joy it manifested as grief. I've coaxed it into submission with every tool, dissociation, presence, distraction but it lay underneath still.
And at the same time I'm learning this immense joy and gratitude at being alive. For so much of my life I've thought, I've had such a good life and it's been enough that if I were to die today it would be, well, enough. I'd be grateful for what I'd had. And this is bonus time for me, alive-time I have only because of the direct and unwavering support of many people. And I'm grateful for it and I also want it to continue. I want more days and more. I want to watch the acorns I planted this year come up, to see every year how much they grow. I want the trees I plant to get big enough to hug.
I want to see what happens as my soul unfolds into this world I never expected to exist, into not only the impossibly perfect haven I have here for myself but also into this incomprehensibly raw and complex and shattering world I live in. I want to know how I come to terms with these humans existing as the do, not ascending like those pseudo-narratives of evolution but instead struggling like a storm on the ocean. I Want to understand how I first cope and then accept and then love this piece of the natural world in a moral way, where I believe every piece to be important.
I have confidence in myself that I'll grow and learn and unfurl and densify and somehow both end up so far from myself I wouldn't believe it but also so much myself that gravity pulls my own self in and begins to effect the world around me.
Time is long! What if this is the midpoint of my learning myself? Who would I become?
Will I always be scared? Will I always be grateful? Can I learn to superimpose those, instead of swinging one to the other? What would love look like for me, after more years like these? Could I recognise it?
I could barely move today, too many things happened at once and I can't form them into a narrative. I had counseling and Siri came and laid on my arm, purring, the entire time. Whiskey sat on the other side of me, purring. I talked with my counselor about my need to anchor myself in a narrative and my lack of cognitive ability to do such a thing now, of the way I can only write or talk my way into it anyhow, of how I have no one I can stand to perform reciprocal emotional work of that kind for in my life right now. The cats purred. I talked, disjointedly, careening from significant point to significant point. I didn't manage to web them together as I always used to, but I could revisit them under a listening ear and that was as much as I can get of what I needed right now.
I can't weave all those threads. I can barely hold a single thread. I'll find some way to make meaning and I don't know what it is. Maybe I'll carve porcelain into jagged cliffs that I'll flow with sparkling colour and call it a cup. Maybe I'll run back and forth playing with the dog, forward-back and to-and-fro. Maybe I'll lie on my back on the ground overnight and grow roots into the ground for real.
When I'm here I'm not as scared. That evacuation in 2018 when I'd just moved in and had to leave I was so scared every moment that my soul couldn't live in my body. If it was a movie it would have had red lights and an alarm blaring so loudly everyone would have left the theatre. Since I came back from that I've only left my land through choice, knowing I could come back. Years layering on years create trust that I can be here, can keep being here, and so I am. Right now, tonight, writing all this, I am led to wonder: if I stay here long enough, will I maybe ever stop being scared? Will I lose my terror? And if I have no terror, maybe I'll no longer need a narrative.
Maybe I'll be content as a heart beating, skin leaking sweat or heat, fingertips and pain or pleasure and awareness of variation in sounds and air currents. I get there sometimes.
