Put simply: comfort should mean safety. but it does not.

Wow. Nobody said this MFA was going to be easy. And it’s not. I’m tired, and my scheduling game has had to be ramped up to the max because I find that I forget things so easily. I think it has something to do with traveling so deep into the work, that sometimes it’s hard to pull myself back into the present, into the reality of living.

This is a good thing—a good problem to have. I am a writer who likes to go deep. I know this. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s because I was raised underwater: that is to say, in spaces – mentally and physically – that is rarely spoken about—places where the real and the unreal merge and blur lines. There is no real demarcation of what happened and what didn’t happen, which sounds like a memory.

Helene Cixous says in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing:

“There are two ways of clambering downward –– by plunging into the earth and going deep into the sea –– and neither is easy” then she says: “perhaps we must imagine a descent into the earth that is not feet first […] when we climb upward toward the bottom, we proceed carried in the direction of –– we’re searching for something: the unknown”. (5)

What I’m trying to do is go where fear has taken over. I am trying to access the areas where others have not because that meant “climbing upward toward the bottom” because, on the one hand, it acknowledges just how far down one really is, and on the other hand, the uncertainty of safety beyond the low. Because pain and suffering and untruth can be comforting. We find comfort in any place we occupy for too long. I’ve seen this as deceptive on the part of comfort. Put simply: comfort should mean safety. but it does not.

I was comfortable in so much toxicity for years. I grew up in the aftermath of a tragedy, which meant my roots were riddled with things that would hinder me, which were detrimental to my flourishing. I can see that today, but I couldn’t see that for a long time because I was in it. I had made a kind of reality in that non-reality. I had fleshed out a kind of person, amongst the false muscles and the half breaths. And strangely, I remember early on understanding something was not quite healthy, not quite resolved, not quite real with what I had around me. Which is to say that fear was constricting many throats and closing doors on many hearts around me, and I found myself running back and forth between rooms and pushing open windows, trying with all my might to bring the freshness of earth inside. I failed a lot.

I failed a lot. Today I get to see the failures and the self-pity and the arrogance of my thinking that I could bring fresh air into spaces that weren’t made for it. I recognize that sometimes it’s not about saving things but letting things die for the earth to mash it up and let it grow anew. You can hold onto something so tightly and not realize you killed it a long time ago.