Today.
It feels like a spectacular floaty, peach cobbled dress, with oodles of shoulder draping; breezy wings to billow behind as I descend down a long staircase.
It feels like I can do it all with a wink and a smile.
Like that sun is hung just for me to warm the top of my head and the roses of my cheeks.
I have never, ever felt as good about being me as I do right this moment, and to think it is only going to get better the more baggage I hurl out of the window, smashing it onto the tar – clothes flying out everywhere in a trail behind me as I go.
It has nothing to do with any tedious daily events, or who I am in the company of; what I am supposed to have reproduced by now or where I lay my head.
It has everything to do though with waking up from a long, long slumber. Opening my eyes and seeing how strong I am and how easy I can be where I need to be. Slipping my toes from the comforting hammock that held me and my worry, my sadness, my fears down onto the cold floor.
Cocooned for so long; wrapped up in a sea-weedy, salty ocean of blankets and comfort and warmth as I thrashed around kicking and fighting it all endlessly - before finding myself giving in.
Flopping as I floated and bobbed along on top of it all, lifelessly. Curling up at the end of a hard day of dealing with what I had become. Pathetically submissive; submersive. To be suffocated by all of it for so long, years and years in fact. So completely exhausting all of my bones and my aching tired muscles. Knowing that what I was immersed in, was an overwhelming and heavy feeling of being totally out of control and totally unable to dig myself out of the giant hole I had fallen down.
I have been so miserable - deeply miserable, for so long.
And I did not even know it.
I didn’t know you could still laugh, and buy raspberry tea and pick apples and wash your hair with pretty shampoo and be so completely miserable.
I didn't know people saw me so much worse than I ever saw myself.
I didn't know you could wear a fancy dress and dance under the lights and not realise you were still invisible.
I was only miserable within myself, about myself – everything external was just dandy, delightful, dreamy. Inside though it was concrete - heavy, sad concrete that weighed me down for a long time. I had put on the brave face, the lipstick, the clothes for so long I started to believe that I was just fine. Then I rubbed my lipstick off, smudgy and thick and I instead hid myself from everyone. I tricked myself. So much so, I didn’t even know I was playing hide and seek. Saying no to anything that involved people showing up as assessors, of the damage I had done to myself.
It hurt my shoulders the most; the weight of the failure; the weight of the complex intricate things that made me; and the weight of…the weight. It was all about the way I held my weight – tied it down under a microscope and focused on it forever and a day.
It all was about the way I held my failings – forever and a day. Holding myself down against my will. Exhausting.
For the first time ever I have reached a point where I have fought myself and won; I have put myself first and it has worked. I have been able to see my way out of an impossible situation. I have found my old self again and at the same twirly, giddy moment I have found a new me I have not met before. Whenever I said 'oh no I cannot face you with this face,' I meant I could not face me.
I always thought I was an outsider - my whole life. Never fitting in, never truly belonging, always watching from the sidelines wanting desperately to be wanted, for someone to hoist me up on a pedestal even but for a moment.
I know now how brilliant and bright and god damn good I am.
I am not a stretch and pulled cartoon. I am a Matisse, a Klimt a sparkly Van Gogh!
I have peachy, billowy chiffon all around me. Life couldn't be any better.
A B-52 Bomber, dumping the bags and crap and the weight as I fly.
I am the lightest I have ever been.
No need for a cocoon today.
Emma Kate xoxo