finding home for my deep feelings

before I left New York and began this nomadic way of living, I lived with male romantic partners for more or less nine years, since I was nineteen. whenever I felt sadness or anguish or any of the deep, turbulent feelings within that I couldn’t quite understand, they were (more or less) there to hold me, comfort me, tell me everything was going to be okay. there were many days when I couldn’t hold the weight of my own feelings — so I gave it to them to hold. some days were very, very bad. maybe my child self was saying: I have all of these deep and dark feelings. will you run away? do you still love me? am I still worth loving?

I think one of the deeper reasons I left New York was so I would have no choice but to hold myself, be alone with myself, face myself, make a emotional and physical home for myself — wherever I am. now I’m alone in this tatami mat room in a small town in Japan, and I still must face my feelings everyday. I still feel their weight in my chest, sinking into my stomach, and I greet them like old friends — like birds visiting my being.

a few days ago, I noticed a sinking sadness that started to fall on me — like snow — around five pm, just after sunset. it was a variation on a feeling of existential loneliness, of having so many scattered deep friends and exquisite connections, but no safe place for my heart to lay down — no country to call home, no land and no peoples to which I felt like I belonged. this truth was exposed. perhaps this was why, for so long, I sought belonging and home in a person, in an romantic love that I could surrender and fuse into. but I know now: this is my time to face myself.

and then, as the days passed, I realized something. I realized that if I am truly present with my emotions — my five pm sadness, my existential loneliness, my anxiety, my longing — if I simply give them the spaciousness to be, if I truly hold them in my body, they begin to shift and change. the emotional energy becomes kinetic; it becomes a creative energy. it has charge. if I don’t resist the texture of the emotions, and instead, I ride along the wave of feeling, then, it becomes a form of momentum.

because, now, I am not “giving” my feelings to an intimate romantic partner, a human other, — now my feelings go within, through a process of transmutation in my body and being, and then, with a bit of coaxing, they are released out— in the creative process, as catharsis, as creation.

my art becomes my vessel, my home, my non-human other to which I give my deep feelings. and when I give to it, I feel so full. I feel so free, so expansive, so abundant. then, I see how, over time, my art gives back to me — in the form of small echoes in the distant mountains, or in ground-shaking reverberations I feel deep within.