difficult spaces.

There is a familiarity for me in the difficult and complicated spaces. Even though I know growth has kept me from repeating some of the negative behaviours and triggered responses, old habits die hard, and the very last of them linger still. The people we attract, have always been for me the marker and trajectory of where I am going, and I am grateful for the growth the last decade has afforded me. Stability has something I have always been averse to, but as age catches up with me, it’s all I ever want.

I was talking to a childhood friend in the last few months, and within our conversations, I realize that much of the instability of my childhood and adolescence, continues to invite a complicated insanity to temper it. That for many of my friends who have spent a majority of their formative years in a stable and continuous environment, where everything they know is all they have ever known, there is a soft comfort that I envy and people like me continue to crave. A sense of belonging that perhaps I know I will never completely find, or a stability I will completely be happy with because I have learnt to walk on the line, and breathe within the space that skirts the side of true belonging and pretension.

The difficult spaces for me exist within the intersectionality of what my current life has come to hold, against a past that saw me choosing against the things I have come to know. It is not the heavy conversations that we have learnt to pad our psyche against, or the resilience that often leads to a stubborn and numb heart with continuous feeling, but the dichotomy of inhabiting two spaces that often live in contradiction to each other. Where you can be a nomad and still find a home, or an insider that doesn’t belong.

Perhaps that is where faith comes into play. A belief in things and an assurance of things we cannot see. That within the permanent instability and wrestle of it all, we find a faith that sustains us within our difficult spaces, and through that learn to love ourselves a little more, and give ourselves a little grace and compassion along the way. Perhaps it is the own outpouring of my own faith that finds me within a wrestle that will never end, and as I continue to walk it, remind myself that the most integral parts of ourselves are the hardest to untangle. Old habits run deep roots, so let love and hope lead the way.