un·moored | (of a vessel) no longer attached to a mooring • (of a person) insecure, confused, or lacking contact with reality: this freedom can make people feel unmoored.
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without a meaningful connection to self where i could anchor my purpose, i spent years deriving my sense of purpose from other people. people who saw pieces of me, but could not see the whole me. people who provided moments of belonging amidst moments of neglect. people who never asked to be what i was asking them to be- my mooring in this world.
how deeply capitalism taught me that i need to be at the port, trading and doing commerce in order to exist.
how deeply codependency taught me that i need to be at the port, being seen and validated in order to exist.
yet when a storm rolled through, whatever unstable mooring i had attached myself to, would surely break- some faster than others. and with the storm still raging, i’d tether myself in terror at the next port, person, place, or thing that promised to hold me until the morning.
it was frantic. it was desperate. it was fear.
one day, a storm came that was so strong it destroyed everything close to me. the moorings broke, all of them. it was black for many days and i lost track of time. when the sun broke through the clouds, i was in the middle of the sea with nothing and no one in sight. the thing i’d avoided so intensely for so long- had happened. i was alone.
but there was no fear. in fact, i could finally breathe. i was free.
i thanked the horizon, the beauty of the rolling water, the birds, the whales, the glimmering reflections, and rest.
and after many days of tethering my gratitude to those things, came a knowing- that directly below me, 10,000 leagues under the sea, was my anchor. an anchor created at the beginning of time. so deep that i could not sense it in the shallow waters of the shoreline- that i needed to meet myself out here to feel it stretch- to know that the bounds of my anchor were designed to give me space- to give me a capacity to go where many vessels can not. to understand how gentle dusk can be.
i believe deeply in my deep sea mooring in being at the center of the morning mist who rolls across the seascape, adorning each feathery tip of the gull’s wings.
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