Something reminded me the other day that I’m not 24 anymore. By reminding me that I once was. It was an oddly sharp realisation. A pang in my heart. 24 sounds so fresh to me now. Now that I’m 27, which is the age impressive people seem to be. I recall many times in my life where I’ve admired the achievements of relatively young people, and found out that they’re 27, and thought with relief that I still had time to be impressive.

Of course I know that time isn’t up. But it’s hard not to feel a bit behind when I’m filled with ambition. Ambition but, I guess, not enough direction. I had a lot of things I needed to figure out before I could start figuring out that part. And now I’m going to have a massive new exciting challenge in my life in the form of a tiny human, and it’s very feasible that I will lose track of my personal ambition for a while.

And that’s okay. And I remind myself that that’s okay whenever I think about it. And I can be quite kind to myself these days.

But still, I’m not 24 anymore.

Below is the last, unfinished, (until now) unpublished entry of my travel blog turned confessional of 2015. It doesn’t mark the end of the story – it’s likely the story of the three months I spent in America will remain unfinished like so many other stories. It doesn’t really say anything terribly important, but there’s a level of honesty that makes it worthwhile to me.

I remember hearing an interview with someone where they talked about writing from the scar instead of from the wound. How it is so much easier to do that. It’s easier to admit the past you was fucked up than it is to admit the present you is fucked up. It’s also easier to frame something as ‘lesson learned’ than ‘I have no fucking clue what to do’. Writing from the scar lets you feel wise. Writing from the wound makes you feel exposed. This was written from a very freshly healed scar, with very friable tissue. I feel like it deserves to at least make it into a post, however late.

There were periods in the past, say, year and a half, when I, as I termed it in my journal, found myself ‘quietly obliterated’. The most intense experience of this happened somewhere between buying my plane ticket to the US and leaving everything behind. But the emptiness overtook again at intervals, and one of those was while I was staying with Blossom. I tried to stave it off. I tried to be fine. But there is no halting obliteration in progress. I attempted to function like a normal human while all my thoughts became petty distorted echoes in my head, enveloping me in a fog of noise, until I finally folded. I’m sure it looked like depression, if anyone was looking, but it wasn’t depression. I was simply being confronted once again with a truth I needed to accept. That what I wanted didn’t matter. That I was at the mercy of this gigantic, omnipotent, expansive universe within which everything was created and destroyed. That I knew nothing. And that I could choose to fight and suffer, or surrender to its greater wisdom.

So, a battle raged within me, while outwardly I did very little of anything. Instead of writing in my journal about quiet obliteration, I wrote about being okay but not okay, being sick of the story, and getting started tomorrow. Trying to convince myself that I could totally be a normal human and add some value to these people’s lives while I was here.

I spent time in the pen with their new horse a couple times a day, but I was scared to start any ‘real’ training because, ultimately, I’d lost all faith in who I was. I didn’t want to risk leaving them with something worse than a blank slate, and I was only there for a week. I tried to recreate the horse-vision I’d had at Mustang Camp, but I didn’t have it in me anymore.

I attempted to short-circuit the whole thing by reactivating my OKCupid account and reaching out to one guy to tell him I was a little bit in love with him. ‘Just a little bit. Nothing to worry about.’ I said this specifically for two reasons. I wanted to test my crazy judgement and find out if I could get away with what I thought I could get away with. And I wanted connection. Fast. Now. Before it’s too late. Keep me human. The guy in question responded with equal enthusiasm, and some bold suggestions were made, but it petered out pretty fast when logistics wouldn’t play. I can’t say I was especially bothered. So I felt oddly surer of my sanity, but back to teetering on the edge of self-imposed isolation.

This wasn’t what I’d imagined when I’d been galloping through Santa Fe in my mind, but I couldn’t even face the thought of going there right now. Blossom’s house became my sanctuary, but I was filled with shame at that. I mostly tiptoed around, trying not to alarm any of the army of toy dogs who resided there, because I couldn’t face the noise. I retired to my room with excuses of writing to do or plans to make. I avoided people frequently because I didn’t know what I could say. I wasn’t being the kind of guest I wanted to be, but there wasn’t really anything I could do about it.

These posts are not highly crafted – they’re mostly streams of letters flowing from my fingers that I grant a cursory edit to before hitting publish. Whether they should be or not, I can never totally make up my mind, but whether they will remain so is pretty definite.

Occasionally I entertain the idea of cleansing the world of them. They’re clumsy and impulsive and inconsequential. Perhaps they’re a reflection of my sense of self right now. Yikes. But I also find myself drawn to them. There is something within them that deserves to exist. Moreover, it’s something that deserves to be nurtured.

There will be time for editing and planning and structure, I’m sure. There will be time for crafting. But for whatever reason, this isn’t it. This is the raw material. I don’t know why it wants to be on display like this, really, but it does. Different words come out in private. Indeed, I regularly find myself treading over well-worn paths in these posts, but differently. So onwards I go.

Yesterday I was thinking about consciousness. I guess I think about consciousness quite regularly, but yesterday I was specifically considering consciousness in relation to my current pregnant state. I was pondering the fact that I have or am the same consciousness I always was, even during pregnancy. That this life altering period hasn’t altered that. There is a core identity there that hasn’t been changed. And once I give birth, and this entirely new consciousness is born into the world at large, I will still possess that same core.

A lot of things have happened in my life that I thought would change me. And they did change me. Often very radically. But I have always been me, and I will always be me. Even if I one day forget who that is. If everything was stripped away from me, including all my memories, knowledge, beliefs and thought patterns, I don’t think that core could ever change.

And there is something truly comforting about that. Often huge change can seem frightening. Terrifying, even. Paralysing, on occasion. When we don’t know how life will look on the other side, or how we will come out of the process, it takes a lot of courage to step into it.

But there is a thread running through our entire life, including the part we’ve yet to live. On every other side we will still be experiencing everything through this same consciousness. It is the only consciousness we’ve ever known, and the only consciousness we’ll ever know. No matter what, we will always have ourselves. Even if everything else is taken away, we will always have ourselves.

At least as humans. Either side of that, for sure things get tricky, and for sure that would be a topic for another post.

Several years ago, I fell very irrationally in love. Doing so dramatically altered the course of my life, because my sense of self, my beliefs, my perception of reality, all shifted quite violently. Falling in love on that occasion turned out to be very important for me.

But time and all things moved on.

Now, with the dust more or less settled on the newly constructed landscape, it’s compelling to look back with an unattached gaze at how that fall came about. To be sure, I obsessed over the details at the time – it couldn’t be helped. But I also consciously ignored them whenever I could, understanding that there was some process going on far beyond the reasoning of it that my soul just needed. To try to understand why was too much like trying to escape it. But I digress…

My point is this: Because I ignored the details to a large extent, I am able to examine them without the tarnish of a thousand previous visits.

What do we see in another person that causes us to love them? What do we see that causes us to desire them? How much do our circumstances dictate our connections?

It’s clear that I made assumptions about another person, and those assumptions framed my opinion of them. And I will never know if those assumptions were correct.

Assumptions are inevitable – as much as we may try to reserve judgement on somebody, we just don’t work that way. And no matter how intensive our communication, it takes a long time to get to know someone, if we ever really do. So we have to operate on a whole host of assumptions in pretty much every relationship (or interaction, even) we engage in.

What is interesting to me is that I would make different assumptions if presented with the same information now. And I have no idea which assumptions are more accurate.

On the one hand my perceptions could have been clouded by love, or loneliness, or hope…on the other, it’s possible that I, in fact, fell in love with a moment of serendipitous clarity. I probably like to think that it is both.

As part of my endeavour to drag myself out of inertia yesterday, I started reading ‘Awaken The Giant Within’ by Tony Robbins. It was time to start a new book anyway, and it seemed like, as unpalatable as the idea of trying to be better was to Exhausted Yve, Tony Robbins was probably what I needed.

I read the first chapter, with a nap in between if I recall. It didn’t fire me up or anything. But it started to trickle through. And at some point, it started to feel like I might be able to do something with my day today.

Then I had a load of weird nightmares last night. I woke up in a sweat with a racing heart, having just cried out desperately ‘WHY DOES EVERYTHING GET RUINED?’ after I refused to eat an undercooked egg my mother had made me, leaving her inconsolably offended. And for some reason, all the dread and fear and worry about all kinds of stupid shit flooded into my being as I lay there trying to recover at 4am. And I thought today was probably crippled.

But then I calmed down and fed the cat, and had some cereal and read some more. And I went back to bed at half 7 and had some better quality sleep. And the Yve of today was alright after all.

I read somewhere recently that almost all of our failings and frustrations in modern life are just down to our lack of good quality sleep affecting our mood and decision making processes. I’m only sleeping in hour long bursts most nights right now so that sounds like a pretty handy excuse for me.

But even with that and whatever else working against us, with a bit of self-awareness we can still make a choice to be better. Maybe not our best – that might be too much of a stretch – but better than we are right now. And if we keep choosing that, even in the tiniest increments, we will probably get to some place good.