The Long Journey Home

"If what you're doing is your passion, it should come like breathing. It's that natural."

-- Oprah Winfrey

This.

It comes like breathing. It runs through me, spilling itself when I first say hello. It makes up who I am, who I've been and who I will become.

This. It's me living.

At so many points in my life there have been things that shook me, things that left me feeling like I was falling indefinitely (which is, believe me, worse than hitting the ground). And at all these points there has been something that I can turn to and lose myself in. And as I've grown up I've returned to this. Taking things in and then, using myself; whether or not there was an audience.

This is everything that I know.

When I am here, in this place, I get to close my eyes and be more honest than I could ever be in real life. It's not about putting on someone else's skin, it's not about being a professional liar.

It's about, for once, just being completely and utterly honest.

With the people in the space, with the people watching, but mostly, with yourself.

Here, I can trust myself to be. I can trust myself to think. And I can trust the person beside me to be listening and to respond just as honestly.

I am aware of all the things I don't know, and all the things I want to know. And so, I keep at it. Clawing my way through boxes, through spaces that transcend time and all the things that we think we're sure of.

I spent the whole of last month fretting. Close to tears and on the brink of insanity. Hating myself for wanting something so much.

But I suppose it'll always be like this- I'll always want this so much more than I'd feel like I deserve. Always.

Today was a surprise and my, it was pleasant.

I'm happy, I'm excited, I'm deliriously settled and relieved and yet almost bouncing about. There's so much I want to do, so much that I simply cannot wait to take in.

I've been promised of the hell that I will go through and back, of an intensity that will break me, of worlds and worlds of things and cultures and techniques that I know absolutely nothing about but then will be soaked in for three months at a time.

I have been made guarantees that I will cry, I will wish it wasn't happening and I will doubt and question my strength and ability.

And from what I already know; I know that this will open boxes. That this requires stripping a person down to nothing and finding oneself at one's most naked and vulnerable.

But I trust where I'm going, I trust these people, and most of all, I trust this.

So here I am.

And I'm saying I want to sit here and soak it all in. Soak and absorb it and be fully, completely and utterly invested in this. Bring it. Bring it all.

Fill me, break me, piece me up and build me up again.

So when I find myself spilling, when I find this seeping from my pores as my breathing catches in the dimming of the light, seconds before the curtains fall, I will look out at an audience watching with glassy eyes and bated breath and know, and know, and know, just like I always have,

that I've found my way back home.