I write to find out what I’m thinking.
What I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Joan Didion

“You have your words,” G said last summer. She’s right. Most of my writing is silently, unabashedly, purely for me; pen and paper are my best friends. They take me in, listen, and somehow write me into peace.

Words have not always been so important; their role has grown as my access to myself has, through them. Looking into the past, I see how words were the access point to my peacemaker, my guide, my father. If I could explain myself to him, I could be heard. If I could be heard by him, I could feel an ease settle into my soul. I was not alone, even if the conditions did not change. Our exchange of words gave me legitimacy, identity, truth.

It was from this root that I began writing to my baby son and daughter. I will tell you everything about me you might want to know. I will listen. My words will be here even if I am not. Words seemed like an obvious currency.

But would this coin would work with G being dyslexic, dodging reading at every turn?

If I had a mother who wrote down her story, her secrets, her SELF, I would have snuck into her closet and read every printed word again and again. I tried. I did. But they were Dad’s words I found. Letters to her.

Proof that he loved.

“You are nothing but a snoop.” She caught me. Always searching for something.

I want to know, Mommy. I want to know about you.

*

I turn back now to last summer when G attempted to explain what had happened. With few obvious clues to the outsider, she found movement, and in the finding, discovered her home, her language. Movement through contemporary dance is her truth, and I see how she arrived. She always has been comfortable in her body despite a desire to perfect it. She has an athlete’s mentality with an artist’s eye and heart. In the background, she has been curating all of these elements for years. It makes sense.

If anything, she relates more to the non-verbal world of music than to my enchantment with the search for the perfect phrase, my silent delight when someone hits the nexus of spoken or written authenticity. I don’t get music without melody or the apparent “other world” musicians enter to find their sound. And I certainly don’t get dance. For me, a body is an annoying cage for this earthly side. It feels when it shouldn’t and doesn’t when it should. It fails when I need it and succeeds when I could care less (with the notable exception of giving birth and having milk, the second time). I don’t get a sense that my body represents me any more than my name or social security number.

However, to my delight, G’s dance coincided with a returned comfort in my company. It was a joy to have her back, even if it meant almost full-time driving from campus to studio and back again, several times a day, often starting early in the morning or late into the night.

In November, she applied for a semester-long program to study contemporary dance in New  York. In December, we moved into a Brooklyn sublet.

She danced. She mastered the subways and sourced her favorite food. She danced some more. With all of this energy came an epiphany: she wanted to move in with her dad.

Sometimes love is action. Sometimes it is non-action.

*

Even though the scenes were not mean or angry, they were full of difficult truths about a need to self-identify and separate. It hurt like crazy. While working through the early part of this hallway, I stayed away from sharing my words. What would I say? How could I explain it? Like other dark times in my life, I turned to questions of meaning, purpose and spirit. Each round I go deeper into discovery, I emerge lighter, even though there are days when it’s hard to believe.

Coincidentally, several of my most difficult chapters have occurred in settings that have brought me enormous sustenance, and New York City in all of its boroughs feeds me everyday. I never imagined I would have another chance to live here, a place I rejected at an earlier, less opportune point in my life. Having never lived alone as an adult, it’s curious that I’ve landed somewhere I perennially think of myself as an individual—not erstwhile child or partner or parent.

In the country, despite its freedom of space and movement, people tend to define you, often at your expense: “there is Cressey. She is…” Whereas in this city, in particular, you define yourself (and you can re-define yourself anytime you want). Five minutes here and people call themselves New Yorkers! Here is, in truth, a huge group of people from all over the world. These huddled masses create a sense of anonymity along with great feeling of liberty, acceptance and empowerment.

*

When I was a little girl, I did not imagine myself in a fairy tale nor did I fantasize about a dream wedding, partner or family. But there was one thing I knew I wanted when I grew up. I called it wisdom for lack of another word. I wanted to know. And I wanted to be someone people could come to if they wanted to know, too.

There is ample pain on this pathway, but it is also flooded with love in unexpected places and a brilliant light that never sleeps.

I am learning to breathe free.