seeking, always

i say to a lot of people – i’m constantly seeking. seeking, always. i’m always looking for more ways to understand not only the world, but also to understand ultimately myself.

for years, i felt like everything was really out of control for me – i didn’t understand my own emotions or my own place within the world, how i related to other people, or how i understood my life, the things that had happened to me, and how to even make sense of it all.

when people ask what i mean about this, i always say, “i’ve lived an interesting and slightly bizarre life” and i mean that. my experiences have been vast and varied. when i was only newly nineteen, my closest friend at the time was murdered – stabbed to death in the culmination of a love triangle gone wrong. i was not yet twenty when i was giving statements about the horrific and gruesome murder of my friend. i sat in a court room as a boy i knew was convicted of killing this other boy i knew. i never got any help for it, you know? there was no counsellors, trauma therapists, EMDR or internal family systems therapy talk, no blogs or youtube channels to check in with about it. the cops just sent all of us who had witnessed our friend die over and over on shitty CRT security footage over and over in that court room, just out into the world to figure it the fuck out on our own. just head on out and raw dog life. and i couldn’t vocalize how i felt, because i didn’t understand how i felt. i didn’t have the words inside me to say, “this traumatized me, this was horrific, this changed how i feel about the police and the justice system and fairness and life and god and this will impact me for the rest of my life and i don’t know it yet and i don’t know how exactly, but in that moment, i got extremely fucked up”.

so, what did i do? i acted fucked up.

i drank to the point of blacking out, i became aggressive and started fights with other girls at the bar, i started fights with boys and men much larger than me. i swore and yelled and got high for the first time and grew my hair into dreadlocks and stopped shaving my armpits and pushed people away and drank shitty champagne out of big bottles and wore angel wings and glitter to parties and made myself into a menace. i did all this because i couldn’t or at least, didn’t know how to stop and say, “i feel so lost, please help me”.

i look back at that version of myself, in the fairy wings and flower crown drinking 151 proof rum straight in a van with strangers, and i just see a child wearing the horrors of the world alongside crystal necklaces and festival wristbands.

i told myself at the time that i was honouring the memory of my friend, by doing the things we had planned to do together, but looking back now, i doubt severely he would have wanted us all traumatized and fucked up, drinking our guts raw and our minds into oblivion. i still wonder about some of the people in that group of us. i see a few from time to time, you know? we don’t talk about it. we don’t talk about the blood on the checkerboard floor or the fact that there was no plaque to honour our fallen friend. just silence and nothingness. i wonder what happened to all that evidence – the bloody clothes, the huge knife, the footage, the 911 calls.

i did EMDR in 2021 for many sessions over my friend’s murder. i still feel kinda raw about it, but not as raw as before. next year, will be twenty years since he died alone on that gas station floor.

i think about him sometimes. like right now as i type this. would we still be friends? would he have kids and a cute wife? would he live his dream of playing in a band? would he dance pow wow?

so much went wrong on that day. i lost my friend and too, i lost my innocence, and myself, for a while.

i know now that this all inadvertently led me to who i am now, but it is sometimes difficult for me to look back on those years of the grief, the loss, the sense of loss and being lost. i look back and feel grief for what happened to him, for what happened to all of us.

i hope we all continue to seek and find ourselves. it’s really never too late.

i’m walk the path to myself in the same filthy cotton dress from sweatlodge, my blundstones on my feet, blood on my hands and in my mouth, and i’m carrying a braid of sweetgrass..

but i’m still the girl that sold coffee at the gas station, still the girl that sat in the court room with dyed black hair and bangs, still the girl with the dreadlocks and the champagne and the angel wings. i keep all those girls safe. the princess i’m looking for must be in another castle, and so i keep looking, keep seeking.