I cried. My eyes out. Til my soul hurt.
By: Virginia Sada York
Tags: Work, Relationships, Personal Development, Spiritual Growth, Learning And Development

I cried. My eyes out. Til my soul hurt.

Spotted gum forest, Mystery Bay, New South Wales shed their skin in layers, like we do.

I didn’t anticipate the impact writing would have in my heart and body.

Well yes I always read madly as a child. And all the way through university — kinda had to, doing a degree major in Literature. I didn’t actually read EVERY page of Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, but it’s probably safe now to fess up!

So I read. I wrote long journals. Daily. And wrote poetry. Still do write poetry — hopefully a little better these days though I am still learning on that front. Art is like that. It teaches you, the more you hang out with it.

Back to crying…

So I knew I would eventually write a book and I am deep in that now, gathering my leadership book, The Poetics of Leadership, and planning to publish it in early 2022. Recently, as a kind of warm up exercise, I had the chance to write just a 3000 word chapter in a book, about writing a letter back to your younger self.

And this is where writing has flawed me. I have written ads, newsletters, video scripts, book jacket blurbs and articles for clients for so many years in my first career as a book editor, then PR person, then senior corporate communications executive.

But I didn’t stop — oh yes, “I can write “ I told myself innocently — to consider how writing about your OWN life, your own material would be such a shake up. Imagine looking back over 20 years ago, and writing back to THAT person. That version of yourself.

In my case, that means I chose to wrote to me, at 35 years old. At first it was finding my groove — what is the story that wants to come out, watching ideas flowing onto my Notes app each day and gathering themes slowly. Then in full flight, I penned away. Well typed like the wind, as I do. Of course, double the word count.

I STILL remember one of my high-school teacher’s acrid comment on an essay — “ very good writing Virginia but too much WAFFLE”. That is why I am practicing really short succinct paragraphs.

I am trying. I am.(sentences too!)

So I am watching my emotions bubbling, my memories flooding back, tears and vivid dreams that wake me up all disturbed as I write and cull my chapter, as the days go by. All this was only over a couple of weeks. I think. It became a blur of words, ideas, and memories like ghosts.

Finally I am sobbing, gasping in upset, falling apart, adrift from my now life — feeling and remembering the vivid pain of that time — the torn rift of my first marriage ending so painfully. It was palpable then, and somehow now returned. I used to say I feel like a siamese twin, rent apart and bleeding where once there was another.

For three days I wept and dreamt. Adrift and unanchored from my normal now life. I was transported back to another era. So curious how palpable it was. Time warped, my spirit was elsewhere, though my body here. I had business to finish up, it felt.

At 35 the confusion was intense — starting out a new, fully adult life single, when I had been in a partnership my whole adult life since 17. Facing a monster work life with endless deadlines, a voracious pace and demanding often uptight internal customers in our huge skyscraper professional services firm, I could barely breathe, or process, or take in the immensity of the pain.

And then the breath-taking call after about a year to escape the skyscraper of chilly demand, and start my own business, still with deadlines, adrenaline and different demand. But thankfully I learnt to meditate and the profound martial art of Aikido came into my life, so how to centre moment by moment became a life practice. Great tools and lots to practice still as I go on, remembering how to re-gather myself daily as life goes on with its challenges.

Many more chapters of life can be written — opening and closing after 7 years with 7 staff my busy vibrant comms agency, later buying land on the far south coast of NSW, training in somatic psychotherapy, commuting for a decade or more to the city for work, running an art gallery, and more. The recent past I fondly know, like the cut in the timber grooves of my forest life

But this sleeping dog, the dormant snake, the unopened cocoon that had held and protected my psyche from the remant layers of pain of that utter despair time when I was 35 … when I didn’t know the axis of my life at all, just writing one chapter had made it all flood back.

I think of this experience like a cosmic clean-out, a chance to let go of another layer of the past, a skin like the mottling bark that peels and pops off the spotted gums each summer in the blessed coastal forest area where I live.

This next transformation in my life is taking me back to writing, but in a new skin of me. I feel lighter. I got to bless and release and let go those terrible days. I learnt so much in the next 5 or more years. I came to ground, found my path, found my sanctuary. A final farewell to that age, as I determinedly choose my ripening path into the days my heart and soul are leading me to dream and create.

Thank you writing. You are becoming my next teacher.

I will be brave, vulnerable and true with courage in my heart and wisdom in my eyes, as I tread into the huge forest of writing days ahead.

8 June, 2021