QUESTIONS

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow earns the title of the first book I finished this year. Which is not the accomplishment it sounds like, four days into the year, as the benefit of starting it weeks before the old year ended and the deadline imposed by the library’s expiration date and the quietness of the new year holiday all conspired to make that happen. You aren’t behind if you haven’t finished, or even started, a book yet this year. May you simply enjoy the ones that find you at exactly the right time, which is part of the magic of books.

There’s some superstitious part of me that wants to grasp onto the idea that something about how I start the year, or what I’m thinking about around the new year, will foreshadow or hint at how the rest of the year will go. And right now, what I can’t stop turning my attention to are thoughts of healing. 

For several years now, my New Year’s energy has turned toward repairing my relationship with my body. Maybe that has something to do with the cultural fixation on bodies around this time of year, but what I know is that every year I hope that THIS will be the one where I end the year free of wanting my body to be anything other than what it is. Or that this will be the year that I can let my body lead the way in all things, that I can give up trying to control how it exists in the world.

Although that hasn’t happened yet, I don’t want to discount the progress I’ve made. I honor the ways I’ve come to understand her, to interpret the messages she’s sending me. How many times it’s taken for me to realize that questioning her only makes it take longer for me to approve of her voice and her needs. And someday soon, I want to write more about my relationship with her and the journey we’ve been on together.

But for today, what has my attention is how we (and I mean me) haven’t been taught how to heal, or repair, our relationships, especially to ourselves. And if my ultimate hope for the year is to end it feeling even more myself – more accepting and delighted with myself, I need to know how to repair my relationship to myself. This is the answer I’m seeking, these are the tools I’m committed to finding.

Which brings me back to the book that I just finished. There is a student in the book who asks of her video game designer/teacher, “How did you get from there to here?” Meaning: how did you go from being a person who wanted to do something to the person who actually did it? Also, this is my eternal, unanswered question. 

I want someone to give me the answer. I want someone to make the chasm smaller between where I am now and where I want to go, between the person I am and who I want to be, between the art I want to make and actually making it. I want to know how do you get from hating your body to loving it, how do you get from wanting to hide to letting yourself be seen, how do you get from being stuck to being free.

And yet, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself in the past few years, it’s that no one else’s answer will make sense to me. The only way forward is to live into that question, to hold on to it until the answers appear. And if I ever had to answer that question, I doubt that my answer would make sense to anyone else. But in a paradox, I also know that I can’t shoulder the burdens of the questions alone. Community is the one answer I know is true – sharing and holding have to be part of the journey.

This year, I’m not setting resolutions, but holding tight to the questions. How do you heal and repair? How do you get from there to here? And maybe at the end of the next twelve months, the com*post will be littered with the answers.