On Questions and Answers

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 

Currently, the path I’m walking down has asked me to take some pretty dramatic turns away from the life I always thought I’d live. And as I walk, I’m reflecting on how 2019 is shaping up to be a year that answers.

In rebuilding the structures of my new, creative life of freedom, a huge challenge for me has been holding on to faith. Stepping off a linear path, even if it was to a destination I was ambivalent about at best, in favor of a much more free-flowing existence has been… an adjustment, to say the least. I often analogize it to Jell-O after the mold has been removed. You can remove the mold, but the gelatin will still hold its shape. I’m out of the world of super-achievement in the academic sense, but old habits die hard.

It’s hard to hold on to faith that the work I’m putting in to my creative dreams will one day bear fruit. At the same time, the very nature of what it means to bear fruit is changing for me. I’ve done the work of defining what success looks like for me, but I live and write situated in a world that holds very different values than the ones I espouse – and I’m not immune to the messaging, either. The siren song of accolades is just as loud in the literary world.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” 

-Hebrews 11:1, KJV (italics mine)

Faith, for me, requires letting go of this narrative that I am in control all the time. When I take a step back and breathe, I realize that I’m actually in control of shockingly little. I remind myself of this not to abdicate responsibility for my life, but to ground me. To remind me that I do not make the sun rise or set every day. I don’t control the day’s weather (best believe if I did, it’d be 81 degrees and sunny, all day, erry day!). The world does not rise and fall on my shoulders.  I am just one person and I believe that I have an impact to make on the world, but it may not be as grandiose as I once expected it to be.

I’m expecting 2019 to be a year of answers. Lord knows there have been many years that have questioned, but I’m in a place now where I feel deeply rooted in the direction in which I want to grow. And that in itself is the first answer of many that 2019 has already gifted me. I’m trying to spend less time worrying about how much time it took me to get here, because 1) I’m here now, and 2) the path of self-discovery is by far the most meandering one I’ve ever been on, let me tell you. Instead, I’m reminding myself that direction is more important than speed and aiming to slow down and create space for the answers to continue to flow my way.  And as I cede control, I give myself space to simply receive what is for me, what has always been for me, to accept the birthright that I have never before allowed myself to claim. 

Glinda the Good Witch: “You can still be with the Wizard, what you’ve worked and waited for… you can have all you’ve ever wanted!“

Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West: “I know. But I don’t want it, I can’t want it anymore…” 

-“Defying Gravity,” Wicked, the Broadway musical, added emphasis mine

It’s terrifying and liberating, but I’m dreaming new dreams now.