Notebooks and Knowing the Self

On the first day of the new year, I spent hours looking back at all of my notebooks from 2020: calendars, daily plans, unfinished projects, and journal entries. There was elation and pure bliss during strange and sad moments. Bursts of intense, untapped creativity met with extreme aimlessness. And by the end of the year, grief and loss that I can only compare to my teenage years. Hopeless depression filled the pages. Entire months just missing. Weeks only whispers in my memory, unable to be conjured to conscious thought. 

I’ve kept a notebook since I was something like 8 years old, recording my daily moments. As a teenager, the pages sagged with cut-out collages, song lyrics, and depressing diary-like entries. My friends and I would sit around, get drunk, and read my latest each time it was complete, and they’d always tell me they knew the pages would be published one today. It’s one of my fondest memories from young adulthood; one of the only still crisp and sweet. 

Somewhere in one of those Lisa Frank notebooks is a line that came to mind recently during a particularly dull, tedious day. It went something like: ‘Some days are just for finding your new favorite song.’ I can see it there, on the page in bubbly handwriting, a fragile consolation for my pre-teen boredom. 

Yet as silly and simple as the statement is, it’s a wise insight for my messy thirteen year old psyche. It impresses me today. What I really meant was, find gratitude, little Lizz. Can’t it be enough that you made it today? That you know yourself a little deeper? 

♥♥♥

Gluttony, Baby 

My most intimate sin of the seven is gluttony. I’d much rather wrap my grubby little fingers around the highs and the lows than rest comfortably in contentedness. Navigating an insatiable appetite for excitement has been both the North Star of my life and my collapse, ad infinitum. 

At the bottom of bottles, I’d crawl out of my apartment door begging the morning sun for more. Limes littered the dining room carpets; salt laid around the perimeters of the kitchen as if for protection. Back then, the only demons I was conscious of were deep inside—and from them, I wanted no defense. I welcomed them, instead. Why would you leave out a lover? Why not see where they take you, after all?

I understand the self-sabotage my gluttony has caused me. In an endless pursuit for more, peace can be hard to come by. There is never satiation. Yet, my restlessness, a pull towards the new, the more, the better, has kept me alive. I am sure of that now. The incessant seeking pulling me from despair, from grief, from tragedy, from trauma. This part of me, this ravenous, greedy hunger… So much a part of me that I hardly noticed it… Yet, it carried me through.  

I see, looking back, even my lows were highs, because I took them as low as I could get them, too. The point, unconsciously, was to stay away from the middle. To be untamed by satisfaction. Even in my youthful ignorance, to rest in mere happiness, for me, felt like drone of a defeated heart monitor: Flatline. Death. (Content, even today, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” –Aldous Huxley 

I had a piece of this quote written on my bedroom wall when I was a younger, among many other scribblings. I see myself there in a teenage dream, laying amidst the black Sharpie sayings, purple streaks in my mousey brown hair, all choppy bangs and spiky bracelets. I see the cotton, comfy black shorts that I still wear, and a band T-shirt, probably Leftover Crack or something. I see the notebooks scattered about, cutting and pasting on actual paper, twistable crayons cradling her legs. I know, somehow, back then, she knew me, too. 

♥♥♥

The Weight of What We Know

What is this fear that often surrounds the Truth? I want to believe it doesn’t exist for me, but I’m just like you. I see her lurking there: intuition’s subterranean, sultry conscious contains the utmost personal accountability. My dear friend, Sarah, helped me see this. She said to me, “I don’t get to have awareness without facing it head on, without learning to untie the fear that surrounds it.” I understood completely. We are humbled in our knowing; we must gather courage. We must find within us the deepest Trust in who we are.

I see the ways I couldn’t hold the responsibility of this, little teen me. The ways I dodged my insides, at the worst of times, physically throwing them up to become smaller and finding substances to numb the gnawing passion in my chest. All the subtle ways I shrank, hid, compartmentalized, and shoved myself into tiny little boxes. Theirs. And then, always, bursting at the seams, eventually: an angry, rebellious punk, burning it all down. 

But the truth of what I knew, of who I was—and am, still—is found in the quotes and collages I keep tucked away in a wire basket filled to its brim of colored notebooks. They have kept me close. Who I am and always have been is there in the way I still love to dye my hair; in my unremitting reasons to fight for freedom. In my endless anger for oppression. I see her in my old poems, full of direct rhymes and silly lines, and in my new ones. The echo of my forever present voice.

I see, now, even without the knowledge or self-awareness I’ve acquired, even without 7 courses,  50 self-help books, 500 therapy sessions, and 3,000 insightful Instagram captions (all these numbers rough estimates, of course—but not far off), I knew myself. 

The beauty, then, was that I didn’t analyze it all away; I just tuned in. I didn’t try to figure it out; I just honored my ways and let them lead me. The tragedy, of course, was some of the places we went: desolate basements, the arms of toxic lovers, Baltimore city shops, the thrilling throws of addiction. 

But was it? A tragedy? For better or for worse, I listened to the call of my aching heart.

And I have been taken care of all along. I look back and I see God, Mother, Spirit, My Beating Heart with her hand on my shoulder, so soft and gentle the touch that I didn’t even notice it there. The shoves gentle, even. The grace—the radical, limitless, ceaseless grace—entirely unearned. 

Today, I am in awe and in love with the ways we never change, the ways we are always chewing bubble gum with our legs propped up on the wall, listening to Britney Spears CDs and planning weekend outings. The ways we are still inclined towards an innate style; the ways certain colors cover our insides. The ways we are in our hearts’ command all along—our silly, romantic heaving hearts. Yet now, with more aptitude towards the accountability to take care. Now, so in love with Self, we bow. Yet now, we hold. Now. We listen.  

Just a few version of little me. ♥