Behind the scenes: twenty-one - a poem (Part 2)

Exploring the lines of the poem, twenty-one, from my book breaking open - a healing journey back home.

To recap, the poem:

21, on a wide river
skating on thin ice
it cracks
sharp edges
cut through my flesh
I’m open
vulnerable
for the first time.

I have written a lot about this year. I started a memoir course in 2018, and much of my writing from then is around this time, exploring the nuances of what led me to this place and the juxtapositions that time has given me.

It’s an interesting experience revisiting this now, today, the 20th of February 2024 (nearly twenty years later), because in some ways it feels like another life, and in other ways it is still one of the pivots of the journey I’ve walked, so let me unpack a few of the lines…

on a wide river

At twenty-one, in many ways, it feels like you have the wide expanse of the world ahead of you. Or that’s what people see for you anyway. Also, to be in the middle of a wide river can feel overwhelming because it takes more energy to get to the ‘safety’ of the banks.

skating on thin ice

Without even realising it, I’m dancing with a level of stress and self-imposed pressure I have no idea is about to crack me open to a whole other way of seeing and being in the world that is painful and shocking at first, but in time and in retrospection, becomes a gift of its own.

it cracks

sharp edges

cut through my flesh

I’m open

vulnerable

for the first time.

For the first time in New Zealand I am ‘forced’ to be vulnerable with those around me who care for me and are offering their help, their grace, their kindness and a hand to hold. For the first time in my post teen, post school life, I am bare in my vulnerability. Even though it cracks through to another level and I am ‘forced’ to accept help in a different way, and to be seen in the messy parts of myself, it is not a feeling I relish at the time.

It will take years to unravel the threads of shame around my messiness, my realness, my humanness (and I wonder if the process is a life-long one), to the current me who feels the growing joy and connection that vulnerability and openness brings me in my relationships.

Do you remember the first time you had no option but to break through to another level of vulnerability?

I have shared a longer piece written in January 2018 when I had just begun my six-month memoir course with

Brooke Warner

and

Linda Joy Myers

about the time of this diagnosis. One of the turning points in my life if you will.

Here it is: