Andie.ink

For most of my life, I thought my narrative was supposed to be created by other people. I floundered in my own identity. It was easier to look to those around me to tell me who I was.

Instead of finding answers, I found emptiness. For years I lay cold and broken at the bottom of a deep deep deep cold and dark cavern. My cries echoing out and bounces back to me unanswered. My parents, the church, my friends, my lovers, my therapists all stood at the top of this hole screaming down with answers so garbled and jumbled that none of them made sense. None of them a workable solution to get me out.
They stood there assuming they’d put me down there to protect me. To save me from some greater threat. Some of them still believe this. They still believe it’s best for me to lay silent and dying.
But all my life I lay there screaming for them to see me for who I was without the cover of darkness. Begging them to love me more than my adoption story. After 34 years of being cold, lonely, broken, empty, and naked on the bottom of that dark, wet, cavern floor, I’d waited long enough.

I stood up and something sparked inside me. A small flame burned inside, and I started walking. Spelunking through crevice after crevice. Fighting my way through each cavern I discovered, going deeper and deeper down. Facing each new dark cavern and finding my way through them made the light inside grow brighter and brighter until now it almost fills each new dark cavern I find making my steps easier and lighter.
I’m still down there. Trying to find the way out back earth side.
I know now.

It is I who makes my own narrative. I don’t have to ask permission to speak it. I don’t have to look to them for the answers to say. I don’t have to read their script. I don’t have to look to the editors of my life to write my narrative. I’ve left them still screaming down into a cave I don’t inhabit anymore.

I’m healing. My light is getting brighter. One day I will find my way out of these dark recesses of cold earthen rock and I will join the stars. Maybe then they will see my narrative flickering. Maybe then they will be quiet and stop telling me who I am.