I feel like I’ve finally made it to a place approaching integration. I setup my music studio once again and now have my little command center set up for doing my schoolwork and other online work. A piano keyboard, MIDI controller, two Korg analog synthesizers that I’m just barely learning how to use, and studio monitors on one side, and my desk with laptop and ultrawide screen on the other. My little loveseat draped with reversible pea green and forest green velvet across the room from the piano setup and just to the side of an audiology booth I somehow managed to score last summer from an audiologist’s office for a hundred dollars, whose window peers over the loveseat. A little whiteboard calendar above the monitor, a large whiteboard for tactile to-do task lists leaned up against the wall behind my laptop that needs some double-stick tape or magnets to affix to the wall later. A supersoft fuzzy black area rug covers the floor and soothes my nervous system when I run my feet across it. Ambient lighting draped across the ceiling, glowing pink symbols of a treble clef, two eighth notes joined with a beam, and, in my opinion, the best emoji to be invented in the twenty-first century, a play off of Maurizio Cattelan’s heart hands in his debut self-portrait artwork Family Syntax: 🫶.
It feels right. It feels good. It feels like me, like I’m finally home. Here, completely, in my body at once, at the same time. In a room that I set up exactly the way I wanted it, where no one is allowed in but me (and the occasional sneaky house cat). Safety, security, and a sense of calm, even under overall conditions which are not the ideal I dreamed of, yet are undeniably comfortable, and for which I am very grateful.
I practiced music for a few hours, working on covers of Passion Love and Bells in Santa Fe, then did some minor mastering adjustments to an original song I have been working on since January. I am about to take a break outside, get some coffee and breakfast, then come back to finish my schoolwork for anthropology. I have a couple textbook chapters to read, a lecture and some video transcripts to read, then a final to take. After that, a paper to write and complete, and then I will be officially finished with my first semester back in college after surviving … well, near death, to put it bluntly.
I have much to be thankful for, and in this very moment, I realized this is what I wanted, what I dreamed of one day doing when I was locked away from the world, prevented from learning the things I wanted to know. It doesn’t look like how I thought it would, but when I think back to that time, I did not really have a vision of how it might look for me, because I could not even see the way forward. I just hoped that one day I might be able to make it.
And now, I can say that I did.
Here. Now. Just as I am.
I can practice music and that dissipates stress and exerts physical energy, which then clears my mind and primes my body for my schoolwork. I work on schoolwork until I need to take a break and go outside for fresh air, a quick walk around the neighborhood, maybe a bike ride, or just a couple feet to the right to burn off emotional steam with synthesizers. Sometimes when I make the time, I ride down to the beach and have a meal in the sand. I’m still rebuilding regular pathways for physical exercise, but what I have right now is the closest to equilibrium that I have gotten since my independent life was ripped away from me in 2010, but, we will not time-travel for tragedy’s sake today, only referencing this to close the loop.
I am here right now. I am alive right now. I am nowhere else but right here. I am so happy to be here.
I must continue forward, and I must write here as much as possible. For decades of censoring myself and feeling unworthy to even exist, now, I must let my words run free, run untethered, neither too close to the sun but neither buried in the sand. It was given to me to feel that there is always some future point that will be worthy of true love, true care, true attention. But we live now, and moments in the future may never come, and so we must harness every moment and live it to its maximum capacity. There is no need to second guess myself any longer, no need to restrict my own consciousness into fragmented spaces, hiding away like a squirrel’s treasure through a long winter for a spring that perpetually moves further away. This is the true test of my self’s integration now, to just be here.
Writing for the sake of writing, because I love the feeling of it, the blank page and the tactile feedback of a comfortable keyboard, and the groundedness of remembering learning to type thirty-five years ago on a Brother word processor. What a joy literacy and language truly is, the simplest act of symbolic shapes combining to encapsulate ephemeral emotions, approximations of subjectivity, like an ever-flowing stream always just slipping past the smooth rocks of memory and time.
I will never let anyone steal me from me again.
Cover image: Coffin Bay, Australia, by Chaz McGregor via Unsplash