Awakening

I fell into a daze

The moment my head hit the slate tile

A blur of unconsciousness

When the world went black

And darkness became all I knew

The seconds faded into minutes

But I was unaware

There but not here

Would I stay or would I go?

Spiralling through shades of grey

The inner whirlwind of my own making:

Somehow it had brought me here

The emotions unacknowledged

The pain hidden away

The black box of despair

Culminated in a broken brain

An accident —

Or a Wake Up Call?

Then suddenly

A white light!

Calling me back

Like a flicker of remembrance

Her voice illuminated the void

And animated the emptiness

I followed it home

“I’m coming!” ...

Eyelids flicker

Orange

I could see it and I could taste it

The juice dripped down my chin

It’s nectar restoring homeostasis

After my blackout

And she was there, holding me upright

The voice that called me back

The white light whose very presence

Had summoned me from the darkness

I had chosen to come back

I had chosen to live!

But soon reality set in:

I was not fully me anymore

My brain was battered and bruised

And my tender patches of purple flesh

Told the story of the fall

Bed rest

Months of it

Doctor’s orders:

“No reading

No writing

No music

No movies

No sudden movements

Or excessive emotionality

Oh—and try not to think.”

Try not to think?!

He must not know my brain

For it never stopped thinking

I then became enveloped by a darkness

Of a different kind

Starring at my pale grey ceiling

In a semi-conscious state

As the hours turned into days

And the days turned into weeks

And the weeks turned into months

I lost the hope of the white light

And at times resented its salvation

Was it better to be here and not there?

My mind was not my own

And when I tried to bend it to my will

It rejected me

Punished me, even

With pain and with confusion

Pulling me into an ever-deepening darkness

But the roots of control

Ran deep within my veins

And the narrative of perfection—the only one that I permitted

Was slipping through my fingers and

Dissolving from my grasp

And yet I gripped

Relentlessly

Clinging to a former notion

An expired perception

A version of self

No longer accessible

A shiny golden illuminated figment

Of my imagination

She was fading

But I wouldn’t let her

So I struggled

And wrestled

And fought

With myself

And my demons

Whose shadowy figures

Had been obscured until now

By the veneer of radiance

I had used to hide my broken pieces

But the struggle

Did not help me heal

It kept me stranded

In a stasis

Of my own making

Damaged brain

Tormented mind

Perhaps only one of these was new

Did I ask for one so I could see the other?

Undoing

It began then...

With that single thought:

What if I am the architect of my life and somehow I knew I needed this?

Blessing in disguise?

Overused phrase

Resented idea

But what if this recovery WAS meant to be a gift?

What if it could be?

A foot in the door of possibility

Initiated resiliency

S l o w l y

A yellow spark reignited

A glimmer of light

The hope of a darkness transformed

The Great Renovation commenced

The structure of my being began

To take a new shape

Demolition

For reconstruction

And it took months

And it took years

And it took courage

To face my fears

For there were many

And their voices were loud

And their tentacles strong

And when I gripped

They gripped back

Newton’s third

Creating an impasse

Shrouded in shadows

But reaching for light

Sometimes straining

Sometimes striving

Sometimes failing

Despite my trying

Or because of it...?

She remained in my sphere

Throughout it all

The lady of the white light

And her voice returned

To guide me through the darkness

In new ways

The struggle, she would remind me,

was mine to create or dissolve

The freedom I was seeking

Would not come through force at all

I must learn a new way

And it started with

Acceptance—

of all that I was

and of all that I wasn’t

and of all that I’d lost

It was real... the loss

But to succumb to it

Or transcend it?

That was the question

She told me

I had to embrace

All I abhorred...

My weakness

My vulnerability

My limitation

My need

My failure

My brokenness

My wounds

My shame

Embrace it and go THROUGH it

Or drown

And be consumed

By an image of myself

That was never meant for permanence

But that would become immortalized

Through my attachment

“Sink or swim...

The choice is yours

It’s time to find

Your Light”

And with that

She let me go

Into the blue foreboding waters

Of dark menacing hues

And on many days it felt

As if the sun was standing still

In a universe removed from mine

But the dawn on my horizon came

In many layers of nuance

White light refracting

Into a sky of dancing colour

Pinks, purples, yellows, and oranges

Cascading upon my inner canvas

Calling me back to a life

Beyond the shadowland

And eventually the air felt alive again

And my existence less of a burden

So I began to explore my inner parts

And the brain that had been broken

Began to mend

And the one that housed it

Began to heal

And the vacancy beneath—

The facade of the golden girl

Began to fade

Into a face more becoming

One of flesh and of truth

And the shiny golden thing

Became a real thing

And I started to create a world where

Every part of me

Would be allowed a space at the table

And I wrestled less

And allowed ease more often

And the blinders that had always

Veiled my eyes

With illusion

Peeled off

Layer by layer

And I came to know myself

In many shades

And the shadows became friends

Messengers vs. Foes

And the mind that had been

Constricted by one version of reality

Found its liberation

In a new realm of possibility

And my world began to expand

And my person began to evolve

And I started to Wake Up from an unconscious slumber of another sort

Because of a fall on the floor

And a bump on the head

And a descent into the darkness

And a white light calling me home

I found my Self

And saw her truly for who she was

A being of both Light and Darkness