I’m turning 31 this week and there’s a lot on my heart with the approaching solar return.
In Numerology, the number 31 adds up to four (3 + 1). The day of my birth, 22, also adds up to four (2 + 2). Four is associated with hard work and conscientiousness.
I relate to these themes emphatically. The past few years personal, and collective circumstances have pushed me to limits and breakthroughs I did not fathom possible.
Some moments were crushing. I struggled through periods of depression, enacted difficult, but necessary boundaries with family, and a sexual assault obliterated a newly earned sense of faith saying I would always be okay.
These experiences taught me that no matter how much you try your best, there will be points life shoots you down. It gave me a realistic understanding that taking care of my well-being doesn’t prevent awful experiences from happening. It requires courage to keep going, despite them.
But there were so many joys. Joys, that lifted me from the depths and stretched the capacity of my heart to give and receive. I adopted a sweet, force of a cat who is my number-one teacher of unconditional love. I laughed, dance, shared and was held with many of the communities I’m in. And while there were lonely moments, I was never alone.
Around this time, I like to reflect on my journey. I came across a piece of writing I did almost two years ago, where I described the possibilities and strengths that come navigating living in this era.
I’m sharing here it here, in this newsletter, a mantra, an offering, to honor that while there’s always a long way to go, how special it is, to witness how far you’ve come.
I became free when the world shut down. When time slowed itself to days in the apartment, I dove within, excavated traumas, secrets, pieces of DNA. It took 27 years of living, a pandemic, an awareness of a country founded in systemic racism, to bring me forth from my shame and re-birth me into the Evan who is.
Stories of folks around contained narratives of struggle, addiction, relapse. For me, it made everything real. It deconstructed all of my prior habits and above all, it gave me space.
When you recover, space from what was, IS the hardest step. Here is where I got to sit quietly, for days on end and lay on my floor. I would cry over the good times. I mourned over all the acting out, the hate within that drove me to seek validation and love everywhere besides inside.
These moments quietly looking at the ceiling were hard. Pondering mortality along with the rest of the world, made me feel more connected to society than ever before. And this painful connection also seeded this new, true, Evan.
I think about walks at the park, talking to myself. Crafting stories with my brain and heart on what could be and where I might be going. Sharing conversation alone at night with the crickets birthed a new companionship that said when there are times no one is available, I, in fact, still am. I am always available to myself.
Actually, not only this, but I am also available to those younger selves who need someone. I am able to reach out to those Evan’s, send them my love, when it was needed so much back then.
What really, really, allowed me to burst out, as the unshakeable, empathic, intentional, soulful Evan, was when I began to unravel the false narratives the country I reside has embedded into not only mine, but my ancestors programming. The programming, the policies, the inequities that seeded cycles of struggle, unworthiness and shame, so deep they seem almost impossible to unwrite. But just like in addiction, the first step to change is awareness, and space.
I gave that to myself. I saw the call of my angry Black and brown community. I was shaken, not even needing to watch the news, I understood the message of this moment. This fake story that has been written for centuries. And now, it is my responsibility to transform it. To begin new tales of inherent belonging, radical self and communal acceptance.
And my true freedom began when I saw, loved and understood myself as an already whole, kind, sensitive, imperfect, worthy soul. Connected to god. Connected to everything.