*This essay has taken the longest time, starting as a series voice memos on a journey in February as realisations hit me like lightning bolts. But then the reality of what I was admitting to myself hit and like so many things that demand vulnerability - I retreated from the story. Maybe it was too soon and maybe it is still too soon. But some words and essays float around haunting me until I get them out. So here is a story about what was lost and found on the road to Everything.
Early morning, Saturday.
I’m leaving on a road trip, something that feels familiar and foreign. Foreign because for the first time in a long while, I’m going to a place essentially alone. When the original plans fell through, I decided I would go anyway and spend time hiking trails unfamiliar to me. This feels brave and bold somehow - after two years without travelling alone and in the context of disappointment, to set about choosing my happiness and joy regardless. Somewhere along the way of the last two years, my sense of loneliness on the road has overtaken my confidence in my ability to be enough for myself. So this is calculated choice and practice, to follow through with my plans and push for confidence on the other side of aloneness.
These thoughts alone might have been enough to contemplate on the car journey but often self-reflection is the loose thread that cannot stop unravelling until it is all undone. And I’m following a hunch, a little beacon of intuition that says there’s something on the road ahead for me to discover. I cannot tell if that intuition is calling me to the Road, the destination or the people waiting on the other side but it calls, long and insistent.
The Road.
I remember this road from before, mostly in the pre-dawn and autumnal mist that bathes the Waikato in late March and April. I have followed the lines of this river many times, a groove worn into the landscape stretching out past the curves of the Bombay Hills and beside the mighty Taupiri mountain — travelled over and over. I have seen the sun rise at least a hundred times on this road and measured it’s changes in decades now. I have known it as the Dreaming Road. It might also be muscle memory that as I guide my car through her familiar bends, I am prompted to pull the thread, to do a little more unravelling of why it feels so brave to take this road today. That is what these drives have always been, long moments of Dreaming and possibility. Still, it has been a long time since I last drove this road and about the same length of time since Dreaming changed for me.
Directions.
After you head south along the river, you turn east after Taupiri. The stretches are long and straight through pasturelands and crop fields until a series of dog-leg intersections; tiny quick turns that feel more like slalom gates and sweeping 90 degree bends. When I first started driving this way, it was a country backroad and now it’s signposted, as much a highway as the main road through the city it bends around.
Along this road, I dreamed of a life amongst the trees - an orchard and a vegetable garden beside a river or a lake. I dreamed of the open kitchen with the long, wide table and a walk-in scullery. A potager garden and spaces that effortlessly welcomed people to stay a while. In that dream, I was never alone.
I drove this road relentlessly, always inspired about the future to come and believing that one season would easily migrate to the next. I was certain I was doing the right things, at the right time and so surely dreams, whispered like little sacred prayers on the Dreaming Road, would eventually come to be.
There is much to be said for changing direction and taking the path unknown. It’s hard to lose something you never held securely or tangibly in your hands but somewhere on the road I chose, one of those surprising intersections caught me by surprise and the familiar road became the unknown. Sometimes right before a car crash, you see people let go of the wheel — left to the mercy of road camber and velocity.
In retrospect, I can see it all in slow motion - the intersections that changed my course, the things I dropped and lost and the shame I picked up instead.
Stop, short left turn and quick turn right. Speed up again.
In the first part of our lives, we learn the system that works in our context and live by it. I knew to work for love and acceptance. I knew to have no expectations or even less. I learned by working hard, I could win a certain kind of worthiness. Until that first intersection and I lost my belief that I had earned worthiness of what I dreamed for. I worked hard and lost it anyway, what had been the expression of purpose and meaning. I gave wholehearted vulnerability to it and that became my undoing.
After the first change in direction, you pick yourself up and use the same system you previously relied on. You try again. You fill in the pothole on the road and keep going. A little bit like a burn though, if you keep pressing newly healed skin against the flame, eventually you feel nothing.
Soft bend into the right-hand corner, quick left-right turn.
The human capacity to keep trying in the same direction is remarkable and I know some of why we do it. We read stories where perseverance is made a higher moral principle above changing our minds or choosing a different path. So I choose perseverance. Every time the road didn’t lead to Everything, the beliefs ingrained on my heart told me to try harder, perform better, be better. I kept believing that perseverance would forge the road ahead until I ran out of ways to try again. I lost direction on the dreaming road until I gave up dreaming altogether. I fell into the numbness.
Let me tell you about shame:
I’m going to write this clumsily and probably come back to re-write it a dozen times. From the first people who read this to the last, I will have written some of the pain out of it but for now the power of vulnerability is more important than the beauty of perfection.
I have carried the shame of working so hard to find love and a place in the world and failing to do so. I have carried the shame of my desire: the desire for the Everything. And then I have carried shame, not believing I’m worthy of the Everything. Shame, the great silencer, pushing honest desire into the background and demanding I choose Enough over Everything, as if Enough is some pious high ground.
I have catalogued my imperfections and argued against my own worthiness for Love, a dozen times and another dozen more. I have cajoled myself into a life full of hope but empty of belief or expectation and when I have bravely (or so I told myself) leapt wholeheartedly into the Enough, I have found unimaginable further loneliness at the end of that road. Once you have dreamed of the Everything, it is impossible to replace Everything with Enough. Enough is not enough. And that is the crucible of shame - I am paralysed to admit all that I want despite not believing myself worthy and paralysed to accept anything less.
The Big Bend
I’m reaching the big bend, where the Dreaming Road turns from pastureland into wooded greenery. Today I’m driving past the lake I knew so well and further south into the forests. I’m planning to hike around a lake and push myself into the dark water. I’m joyful, despite the internal cataloging of shame, in part because I am in muscle memory. My eyes drink in the landscape where I used to dream and so I cannot help but immerse myself in it again. I can feel my heart cracking open, inflating from the inside. There is freedom in realising these summer realisations of what sense of worthiness I had lost are the very pathway back to finding it. The easiest way to keep the dream of Everything alive is simply to stay on the Dreaming Road.
There is a fine thread, a stitch in the flesh that comes quickly, pulling the carved out pieces of you back together between the revelation and the action. I spent the tears years ago, seeing how I had traded my ability to work hard for love for worthiness. Deeper still, the cut that revealed how I work for love because I could not rely on beauty. I recognised the abandonment of my father and how it changed the way I believed I must give away expectations. But in the long stretch of time between that insight and taking this drive, I did not stitch it back myself. I left those pieces undone, still lost in the Neverland. So many lost things on the edge of the Dreaming Road.
Now on a warm, glowing February morning I am picking them up again. Stitching the healed pieces together into some new whole. I cannot stop smiling as I realise I have found my way back; onto the Road to Everything.
Past the lake, take the lefthand turn and on toward the Glade.
In the earliest days of taking that Dreaming Road, I stopped at Lake Karapiro. All my dreaming roads led to there. But that was an age ago and today, I admire the sun sparkling on her waters but drive on. The road extends and I am taking the lefthand turn through the prettiest glade I know, onward to new destinations. It’s been years since I travelled to these lakes I used to know as a young girl. As the road drops down between the hills, I see the shimmer of the lake against the backdrop of tall pines on the rugged slope of the hills. I laugh out loud because the scene reminds me so intensely of Seattle, the place I have tried to move to for an age. Enough lived in Seattle not once, but twice. I keep laughing into my hike around the lake, shaking my head with the dark comedy of it.
I have spent ten years or more chasing Enough, looking for some other version of water, mountains and tall trees when all along this place I already knew, is so close to the Everything I used to dream of, just a little bit further along the Dreaming Road. Sometimes you can only see what you are ready to see.
I lost my sense of direction, along with a few misbeliefs and facsimiles of the Everything. Tears and smaller, constrained dreams. I needed to lose some of what was lost along the way of the last ten years, to make way for the certainty of my own worthiness, the beauty of my reflection. Perhaps I had to lose my way in order to shake off the rest of what I was carrying.
On a warm Saturday morning, light dancing through the glade and my heart racing, my blood feels fizzy and my whole body alive and electric. I am lighter than air, rushing through the Redwoods that welcome me back and the lake that envelopes me. After a long detour, I have found my way back onto the road that leads to Everything, myself included.