This weekend I met Fahida and we moved towards my new life together then left each other at the gate, with a smile and a commitment to have tea sometime.
I'm not sure we'll see each other again.
And you thought I was kidding when I said all I need now is a van and I'm working on it, huh?
It's on
I landed in a place at the end of 2021 exhausted and fragile.
I was fortunate enough, in the final hour, to find an amazing woman who was also in a difficult situation. She was trying to run a pretty big home, pay the costs of two late teens on her own and needed to rent the entertainment area at the bottom of the house to supplement her income.
After hearing some of my story she was kind enough to forgo the prerequisite deposit and to let me take the place for a lower rental than she'd advertised on a month to month basis until she found a permanent tenant.
As it turned out we had a lot in common.
The couple of months until I found something permanent lasted for almost a year.
For the first two weeks after landing there, I spent a good deal of time double checking the security gate and the shutters were locked.
It was like that.
Or should I say I was like that.
I had no idea how traumatized I was until I managed to remove myself from a high conflict situation just enough to vaguely begin to get my feet back on the ground again.
I'd been running on adrenalin, cortisol, on and off anti-inflammatories and a f*ck this attitude, in between pretty severe depression, for around two years by this time. So the come down was pretty harsh.
The exhaustion hit me like a ton of bricks as soon as I felt safe enough to slow down a little.
After around two months of arriving at this safer place, I remember having my first moment of "normal" in a very long time. And it was the strangest sensation.
I sat quite still when it happened to really enjoy the feeling. To breathe the moment in and to savour the sensation of calm and rest. The forgotten sense of safety. A moment of peace. The way things used to be. A past life.
A past me.
It was gone again in a few minutes but it was then I knew I'd be able to recover. Up until that moment I honestly believed I'd never come back from the experience at all. I was that different a person. I was that detached, removed and dissociated.
And, by this stage, I'd kinda accepted this somewhat cold, new but not really there me after some months of actively trying to address and fix the trauma.
Those some months had unsuccessfully extended to some years.
But we humans are fuckin' resilient creatures.
And I know now...
that healing takes time.
It takes as long as it takes.
And there isn't a way to make it go any faster than it goes.
I learned, at the same time, that the same can be said of grief.
The small but not really escape to a place that had just enough space, both geographically and historically, from the environment I'd been treading water in for some years... began to bring me closer to myself again.
It began to move me forward into some kind of future.
It makes sense that it's not possible for a person to heal in the same environment that is hurting them, yet it is so difficult for some of us to simply walk away.
Isn't it?
I did eventually... when the denial had lifted enough for me to see that I had to leave certain places and people behind to survive.
The hurried landing was the final exit. An exit not on my own terms and without much time to find a new place to live. Two weeks or ten days as far as I remember. You can understand, then, why this accidental, interim landing place in a beautiful suburb...
was a blessing and a gift of sorts.
So I vacated my little home and found a peaceful, safer place to live for a while. But it still took me another almost year to feel strong enough to move towards a life that I've been yearning for, for many years.
Not to repeat myself, but I will because you can only imagine how surreal this feels right now...
but this is the weekend it finally happened.
I've been planning the move for some months.
Well... really... my ex life-partner and I talked about finding somewhere quiet, easy, peaceful and safe to make a life together five (or is it more now) years ago.
But my own dream of doing this extended even beyond that.
I love being on the go. Movement brings me an immense amount of energy and peace in equal proportions. I feel most alive on a road trip, windows down, music on, landscape rushing by and the wind in my hair.
The destination really doesn't even really matter.
It's the sense of adventure, possibility and freedom I adore.
And probably the unburdening of responsibility... for just a while.
Some of us have an over developed sense of responsibility and it stifles just about any life out of a human being after a time.
So my partner and I talked about van life quite a bit.
And we also talked about renovating an old bus into a mobile home.
While I was the dreamer and "excellent ideas specialist" that were mostly randomly blurted out "what ifs" and "imagines"...
he was the expert planner, logistics master and doer of all things practical.
He made sh!t happen.
As fast as I could dream it up at times.
In fact after I showed him the van life thing he moved on to buses converted into mobile homes pretty quickly. He messaged within a few days of the conversation to say he'd found an old bus on sale up in Gauteng and that it was affordable.
But I had a child that I was mostly solo parenting. I had daily school runs and responsible parent functions. I had a demanding small business. And the life that I dreamed of still seemed too radical and impossible to pull off. Plus I'd only being throwing some ideas around. Right?
In truth I was just still too afraid to live.
I was still to afraid to walk away from the standard, expected, this-is-how-we-do-it, shallow, soul destroying daily grind.
I was afraid of the judgement.
Or the ridicule.
I was afraid of the unknown.
So, despite being almost constantly stressed out and mostly miserable, I continued to repeat the same routine and behavours every day...
without even considering the fact that there was little to no chance of anything shifting because it was me that refused to change.
I probably would have died at my desk if some pretty bizarre stuff, completely outside of my control, hadn't unfolded. Some crazy sh!t that put me into a position where I finally had to choose.
Love or money. Principles or being liked. Justice and truth or safety and comfort.
The thing is... I didn't even realise at the time that I what I really had to choose between...
was freedom or death.
Never really knowing who I truly was, when it came to the crunch I chose a path that, ultimately, resulted in me having to face every fear I had experientially.
I was forced to discard most of the life that I couldn't seem to walk away from to survive. And I ended up walking towards a future that I only ever half imagined other people living.
This happened incrementally, in many ways, over these last three years. But just this last Friday was the day I finally let go of the last bit of fear and stepped in the unknown in full.
Here is what I have left to carry with me, these days, after once furnishing and running a large three bedroom home on my own and mostly single parenting (and paying the larger portion of) two kids.
This... three boxes of toys and two small boxes of kitchen stuff.
And honestly... it still feels as though I'm carrying far too much.
So some of this will have to go into storage.
I'll be traveling light while I look around to find the place where I can make a life that's more in accordance with the who I always was.
The me that was forgotten.
The me that got lost along the way.
Right now I'm in an area, around 45 minutes away from the city, that is the entry into my future.
And yes. I had to use a shuttle service to get this far because no car, remember? Farhida brought me out here. A driver for a company suggested by the ever marvelous landlady who appeared suddenly from the heavens.
On the drive Farhida and I shared life stories and intimate details. We connected along the journey. As I do. Because what I also know is that life is too short to f*ck around and waste time on small talk and pretense. Ever.
I do hope I get to sit with her again for tea sometime.
But I hope even more that I'll be on the road by then as well.
I simply could not throw away the Lego, the box of books that are keepers or the extra guitar though.
I'll probably need a van or something.
Still workin' on it.
I was going to write about a crazy weekend I once had for @galenkp 's marvelous Week 121 of the Weekend-Engagement concept but this poured out instead.
Also... this weekend's prompt led me down memory lane, into some extended research, digging through some old files to find an expired passport, to some sharing of epic music with some very old, very dear friends and now more investigation into what looks to possibly be a bigger story...
More to follow.
Isn't Hive brilliant? 🔥
Hardened Dreamer
Mother
Warrior
Determined Dancer
and Stargazer
still...
Beyond fear is freedom
And there is nothing to be afraid of.
To Life, with Love... and always for Truth!
Nicky Dee
and Photo by ActionVance on Unsplash.
Fight Club image created with Create a Meme
All other images my own.