Wherever I Go

This week, I've been walking around the lake at the nearby state park. As I start my walk each day, I'm weighed down by the emotional work I've been doing since I quit my job and moved across the country; I'm weighed down by pain and anxiety and shame I've been processing for the past five years and, truly, my entire life.

Wherever I go, there I am: Arkansas, Los Angeles, Nashville. And, so it is, that today, I'm on this specific trail.

This trail must be tended often, because it's safe and clear. Except for a few stumps and signs with arrows, it's hard to see human intervention. I crunch over brown leaves and small sticks, and I step around roots of trees that refuse to be tamed. The only sign of a ranger is in the things not found on the trail. Larger trunks lay at the side felled by nature and moved a safe distance away. In the chill of winter or the slog after a rain, I can imagine a ranger making his way around the lake. Then, every night, nature tries to take those same trails back as animals build their homes and winds wash over the lake.

I walk farther today than I've gone before, tracing the beginning of the route I had already traversed as it meets the path unknown to me. In that moment, my physical path matches my emotional journey; I have been treading paths I thought I'd conquered to get to a new place I've never seen. I've been cleaning out branches and leaves. I've been lugging the same old logs to move them aside. Again. I've been clearing paths in my emotional life only for them to be taken back over in the night. And it's been exhausting. And unfair. And hard. Pain and grief and shame don't really disappear. Trauma from my childhood doesn't go away because I found a way to get through it and live my life today. I have to do the work tomorrow. And the next day. For the rest of my life.

Some days, I get farther down the path than before. Often, I have to sit in the pain without making much ground. Other days, I wake up, and I am at the beginning. The path I made yesterday has been overrun with the debris of my hurt and feelings of failure and unworthiness, and I have to clear a new way around the roots.

When I feel defeated, starting at the beginning of pain I thought I had processed or stumbling over an emotional hurdle I tell myself I should have seen coming, I try to remind myself that the most important part is showing up to do the work--especially when my biggest instinct is to shut down, to turn around, to run.

But, today, I lace up my shoes, and I show up.