What We Reflect Through
“We learn not from what we go through, but what we reflect through”- Emily P. Freeman (Sydney Paraphrased Version).
Reflection is a buzzword in my head almost always. I love reflection, I crave reflection- as a naturally poetic person, I love the notion of themes and visions and ideas and all the little, magical parts of life wrapping up in an imperfect, yet meaningful bow. I crave it. Reflection is when my writing is its sharpest yet softest, marrying all my best parts and equipping me to move through life better than before. It’s the skeletal system that holds me together as I write, process, speak, and type out my heart into chapters, seasons, and themes that feel so familiar to my inner author. It’s the nerves that push me forward, refine my reflexes, and remind me when heat or chill is gnawing at me far more than I noticed before.
But it’s also often an expectation. A skeleton I transform into bars of iron- ridged and fixed and heavy- as I feel that I am behind, that I’m missing something, that in the midst of the speed and intensity of the current season- I may be losing something precious. In that posture, I wither. I almost 180- my reflexes more focused on catching imaginary meaning butterflies instead of savoring what is already right in front of me.
It’s this space- this odd dichotomy- where I’ve found myself tossing about the last while. Things have happened so quickly, changed internally while seeming stagnant on the outside- requiring an announcement, some verbal declaration of starting action, climax, and conclusion- to make them real to those who can’t read my mind or haven’t been privy to every processing podcast episode.
There’s been a lot that’s been too personal to publish. As much as I advocate for sharing your work, I also know the importance of the unseen words, the quiet hours, the times when it is only you, a keyboard, and your soul- sitting in the freedom that you must perform for no one and that this is a truly safe space. A lot of my silence- on the blog and on social media- during 2020 stemmed from my need for these quiet hours. Now it’s just that the things I’m processing feel more shareable, feel more suited for the void’s eyes. But there’s still a similarity in both then and now’s lack of true narrative structure. I have no idea what the starting action is as I’m living it- and in the rising action I can hardly name the climax. In the falling action I may not know a conclusion’s coming. And even after said conclusion- the theme, the meaning, the point of it all- that may be years in the making for me to tell the story that season truly deserves.
I feel that I’m constantly in motion- and I adore that. I adore the shifts and moves and jumps and leaps and even long walks as I slowly scale this jungle gym of career, aspiration, and potential. There is so much to do that the weight of having some much to reflect on feels like another unfair expectation on myself. It feels like too much to ask.
As I debate what to share next, what to try next, what to advocate for clearly, what to market, what to put to words- I’m choosing to trust that my body carries reflections that it’ll show me in time. That the season will come where I put the pen to paper or the keys to document and together we begin to unravel all that’s growing and changing within me. Maybe, like I have before, I’ll look back and discover that I captured and savored and marked the times of change far more than I thought I did- leaving lists and ideas and photos and phrases scattered about for me to string together later.
We have so much more time than we realize and may we stop putting more pressure on ourselves. We are here simply to exist- and to grasp that which brings us back to how things actually are- their beauty and brokenness- and to slowly unravel and bloom as we do. One step at a time.
