Lately, I’ve been feeling my age. Not in the physical sense. Luckily my bones aren’t loudly telling of their thirty-six years—though sometimes, on cold mornings, I can feel the quiet weight of them bragging. No, I’ve been feeling my age in an intellectual sense. I’ve been thinking about all the wisdom and memories I’ve accumulated, how they’re collecting in what feels like my brain through vivid rememberings and hard-fought lessons but they’re actually on my body, making my movements, directing my steps. An example of this on a simple level looks like me always washing my strawberries (even the organic ones) because of the one time I got food poisoning from a handful of dirty ones. On a deeper level, it’s having an inner knowing that I’m always changing so it’s not wise to make promises to others that a future iteration of myself won’t be able to keep.1
I’m feeling viscerally this month that I’ve lived a lot. I’ve seen multiple trajectories of my life fizzle and be re-routed toward something else (and I’m in the midst of the biggest and most serious fizzle/re-route at this exact moment). I’ve seen many parts of me, pieces that I swore I needed to keep alive to survive, die and become composted into new ways of being, and the grief of those things dying is as palpable as the relief of having new and different choices. I’ve had many moments this month so far where I’ve looked around and thought, “Whose life is this?” Where I’ve been isn’t where I’m going2 and there’s so much joy in that. There’s also a lot of fear.
I’m not a religious person.3 But if I was, I would lie prostrate at the altar of change. This is a deity I know well, one I feel like I was born to learn from, worship, be cracked open by. I’ve sacrificed myself over and over again for change’s blessings, to be seen in a favorable light by transformation’s pleasing eye. I’m devoted to change—my own and others—because in my experience, it’s there that we actually live. For me, being devoted to self-change is not about being a better version of myself. It’s about becoming more me. It’s about feeling more of my aliveness.
I forget that feeling my own aliveness isn’t just about the sweetness or sensuality of a moment. Sometimes, it’s about feeling fear or uncertainty, giving those feelings space to breathe and resonate in your body. There’s aliveness there, too. The wisdom I’m learning now is about being with those feelings (fear and uncertainty) and not letting them or their vivid memories overtake me; not letting them steer me away from becoming more me.
This month I’ll be trying to tap into my resiliency, vigor, and will to stay in my aliveness. A lot of questions have been answered these first five months of the year but I’m still living with certain questions that continue to stump me. Some of those questions I don’t necessarily need the answers to. And some of them are quite literally making me crazy with their answer: "Ev’Yan, you gotta live the question to find the answer.”4 But there is one question that I know the definitive answer to, one that I posed here:
“Whose life is this?”
The answer: Mine.
The playlist I made for you this month is a continuation of what I’ve been ruminating on regarding change, fear, and the body. On it, there’s songs from Jimi Hendrix, Earth, Wind & Fire, and BADBADNOTGOOD. If you’re a paid subscriber (you are a gem!) you’ll find the playlist below. I hope you enjoy it. :)
If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy this month’s (and last month’s) playlist and other writings from the archives, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here.