It has been idle months since I last wrote here. I have been restlessly resting, waiting. The time has finally come. Tomorrow I leave this house. The next day, I leave this country, and perhaps I will never return.
I have been often dejected. This trip to Ireland has felt like a great big mess. I studied well what was little challenge to me - I allowed myself to be reclusive and stick to the company of a couple closest friends for the most part. I have often felt depressed, and struggled to remember what good I am. I have often felt like a failure. I set a time, though, and decided I would let myself be still until it was time to move again. I have at times utterly hated the stillness... but sometimes I have been able to sit still with some serenity and an ephemeral scrap of patience.
I have set myself to rest so that once it was time to move, I would be ready and eager to, and would appreciate the energy and newness. I worry a little and wonder more whether this bid to control the ebbs and flows of my energy and my stillness will actually work. I have never been good at planning and deliberately choosing these things. But then... once upon a time, in the life I grew out of, I think not being good at it was a necessary excuse for resisting the clamour of oppression which would have insisted I do things their way, not a way I could choose for myself.
Those days... are over. I do not need to be helpless in order to excuse disobedience from an unjust authority the same way I needed to once with mother. I believe I have been learning to let it go.
In that, at least, in those ways, self-searching still, digging deeper in trauma and questions of identity and complexity; in those very particular ways I have not been idle, the time has not been wasted. And indeed my closest, dearest friends have been a great resource to me, in listening and tolerating and sometimes understanding.
And so, the silence is broken, for now.
Ireland is over.
Let the next segment now begin.
