Sometimes when Whit wakes me up in the night, I feel like I am swimming towards his voice through extra thick, viscous water. I often feel a little unsure of the direction his voice is in in the first place, and it is definitely an effort to focus on it and to locate him. That’s how my thoughts feel lately. I feel swamped, like I am struggling against a strong undercurrent to even stay upright. My own inner voice, by which I am trying so earnestly to set my direction, feels thready, weak, and my own fragility feels insurmountable.
Life sometimes feels like I’m wading through murky water barefoot. I never know what will be underfoot next, and often it is a prickly or pointed shell, unknown slimy seaweed, or a spot where the water surprises me with its eddies, threatening my balance. Once in a while I have a sudden, sharp flashback to a sunny day in the spring at Princeton, at freshman year houseparties, when I jumped in the large school fountain with my friends. We were all tipsy and laughing, but there was a moment of concise clarity when I remember feeling the coins that littered the bottom of the shallow pool with my bare feet. For a moment, alone and silent amid the screams and giggling, I was acutely aware of feeling the dreams and wishes of so many strangers under my feet.
The great majority of the time, though, I’m here, and not there, and I am walking on and through much less pleasant things. There are lots of changes on the way for me. I can see their colors glinting from beyond the horizon: already the light of my life is filtered through their unfamiliar prism. While I feel an occasional flare of excitement, I also feel a lot of fear, settling like chilly dust in the bottom of my stomach and of my thoughts, pulling both down with an unavoidable heaviness.
Every step feels like an effort against the water’s weight. I traipse clumsily through my days, trailing my familiar cloak of tiredness and sadness. I am working so hard to be patient for my children, to stay open to the ordinary life that has carried such glittering gems in its hands, but I am not doing a very good job. Even yesterday, when I finally noticed that the world has burst into an exultation of spring, a riotous celebration of new life and potential, I felt it in a muted way, as though I was seeing through the mesh of a screen window, everything slightly obscured and traced with gray.
What I know now that I did not before is that as persistent as the water around my ankles is, as unstable as it makes me feel, I will probably not fall. As distant and faint as the voice calling me forward sounds, through the fog that swirls inside my head, I will probably not lose it altogether. This constellation of influences and feelings, whose coming I cannot predict, makes me unsteady, but it has not yet toppled me. And so forward I go, one foot in front of the other, trying not to startle at the unexpected sharpness of shells and pebbles under my feet, into the wind, head bent forward, trusting, trusting.
(even re-reading this before publishing, I feel aware that I am whining … and feel the need to say of course, of course I recognize my tremendous good fortune, my privilege, my luck, my health and that of my children … yes, yes, yes, and I mean to draw no parallel between the agitation of my mind and the very real perils that many people find themselves in)
I loved the imagery of all those coins and dreams. Hope is our greatest gift, isn’t it?
Swimming toward a child’s voice in the middle of the dark night. Oh yes, that’s an image/moment I can so relate to. Feeling things in a muted way? That’s a feeling I can also relate to. Some days are hard and I see myself living just on the edge of the world. MY world. But if I’m lucky, I snap back before the day goes to hell and my kids AND myself pay for it. I snap back optimism. Happiness? I don’t know what it is. But instead of finding myself standing on all the coins, I’m the one throwing them in the water again.
Oh Lindsey, please know that this is not whining. This is giving voice to what so many of us, no matter what the life situation, feel over and over. You are, my dear, a sensitive soul and in the very act of openly examining your heart, you make it so much better for all of us.
And no, chances are you will not fall. There are too many of us walking with you…
No not whining, and the comparison to others comes from those old voices that demand some sort of perfection from us. Just raw, open honesty about the difficulty of swimming upstream towards a voice we can barely hear. Sometimes, when it all gets so viscous that I can barely move, I find I need to rest, and nurture – to mother the confused and scared little girl inside. The future will reveal itself soon enough, even if we stop moving toward it for a time, and those shards of color will form an unexpectedly beautiful picture. But art isn’t created just from the light and bright, it takes the dark and the shadow too. Keep swimming, but rest if you need to.
“And so forward I go, one foot in front of the other, trying not to startle at the unexpected sharpness of shells and pebbles under my feet, into the wind, head bent forward, trusting, trusting.”
Beautiful images, word pictures, created here, Lindsey. I know you’ll get through, too.
I can feel the murky water reading this. I hate that feeling. But I hope that the changes you anticipate make it easier to walk through. ANd, it’s not whining if it’s written this beautifully. Like I always say to my son, it’s the TONE that makes me cringe. And your tone? Slow and beautiful. But not whiny. 🙂
I wish you would delete the last paragraph. It’s unnecessary. You and I have talked about this before, but murkiness is murkiness. Sadness is sadness. Stumbling is stumbling. Struggle set in the city of privilege is still struggle.
You write beautifully. Let that be your present day fountain, okay?
xo
I loved that description of your feet feeling the coins (the hopes and dreams of others) in the fountain. Beautiful!
I feel underwater most of the time. Sometimes I think it’s enough just not to get sucked into the undertow.
I always liken this feeling to standing on the beach while the water swirls at my feet. I feel like I’m going to fall over, but the current actually plants my feet deeper in the sand and I’m more stable than I was at the start. We need the murky to see the light, need the instability to find the balance. Hang in there.
Big hugs to you. I love the image of you standing in the fountain, feeling the presence of every wish beneath your toes.
xoxo
Your reflection of the coins in the fountain is amazing. The imagery of the murky water and pebbles, perfect.
As to your last paragraph, no matter where or what we are, there will always be others more or less fortunate, but that does not make our own situation any less important or less dire.
Ditto to Aiden. She’s right.
So come to California.
Let me add my voice to the chorus of readers here who can confirm that this piece reads as introspective and reflective and not as whiny. And I too love the image of you in the fountain at Princeton. So beautifully written.
I look forward to reading more about the changes ahead.
xo
Agreed; Aiden has perfectly said what I feel as well.
What always strikes me is my ability to identify and relate to your emotional experience. I am a Midwesterner, having gone to a parochial school, then a lesser state university. An interstate whirred not far from my childhood back yard. Night was never dark; neon lights lit the sky in place of the sun. I have no passport. Yet the depth, the description – the heavy waters, the pull, the mud – it is distinctly recognizable.
Aidan – my apologies for originally misspelling your name.
While I agree that the last paragraph is unnecessary, still it’s a paragraph after my own heart so at least I know where you’re coming from. Really, I appreciate this entire post—it brought to mind a scene in “The Sheltering Sky” where the heroine experiences a feeling of awakening aliveness mingled with loss and sorrow in a fountain, thinking about moments from her past that are so much a part of her that she wouldn’t be herself without them, yet they also felt remote and distant.
Namaste