In, not of
Yesterday I felt compelled to write a short and cryptic post about finding myself with a new outlook. Didn’t really have the clarity to put it into words, so perhaps - some might say - I should’ve said nothing until such time as I could say something clear! No. This is my space for doing what I like, and I like to put down a marker for what feels like a big step for me.
I was raised to be suspicious of “authority” and I learned well. I also have a well-honed bullshit detector. So when things got crazy at the start of the pandemic, I was in a constant state of mental arousal. Over-stimulated by, and highly sceptical of, Government messaging and the media on one side, and exasperated by the “They eat babies” QAnon nonsense on the other. But I’m an “always sees both sides” person, and I couldn’t help but keep an ear open for statements that felt and - after some deeper reading - turned out to be true, from either side.
As time has gone by, the amount of truth coming from the powers that be has sunk to virtually nothing. Meanwhile, the so-called conspiracy theories that got lost among the lunatic ravings about Lizard People and baby brains, have continued to float gently to the top of the Oh Actually It’s True pile. This isn’t just covid; this is everything.
What is also true is that once you start seeing that happen, you can’t stop seeing it.
I spent much of last winter asking, “What is reality?”. To cut to the chase…it ain’t this. This society; this culture; these “facts”.
During my journey through peri-menopause and the early days of post, I began to feel the stirrings of the attitude so often ascribed to older women: I don’t care what you think. Not about me, or - if you choose to, or have to, subscribe to this version of truth - anything much else. You go right ahead and live your life and I’ll be over here living mine.
These are the women in Jenny Joseph’s Warning. The women who do what they know to be right, not what they’re told. The true wild women who have reclaimed their pelts, their joy and their life.
But like so many transformations, it happened in waves. I stepped into the shallows of releasing the opinions of others many years ago, but was quickly carried back to shore. Stepping back into that ocean, which looks deep and unsafe, I kept getting a little further out before being washed back to the land. It’s taken all this time - and I’d got very used to the ebb and flow, to the point there I thought it was as far as I’d ever get - to get past the surf.
Yesterday morning, flashing back to a time in my extreme youth when I knew myself to be an outsider in the rural community where we lived for a while, I recognised those feelings in myself, here and now. Somehow, I am now permanently out in the ocean, where I decide how and where to swim, float, dive, free from the influence of people whose judgment is clouded, at best. Or, to use the image I went for so clumsily yesterday, I found myself outside the city in the valley, and living on the hillside. My compass has changed.
Here, there are less creature comforts, but more creatures. And I am one of them now.
A loved one who has a deep Christian faith, said yesterday that there is a concept within it of being “in the world, but not of it”. That’s where I am now. Everything is the same and everything is different. For ever.