I am really proud of my ability to articulate myself, partly because it took me a time to get here.

When I was young, I didn’t say much. I tended to observe and listen to the world and found talking to be, extra or a lot on top of the worlds of information I was investigating engaging and deconstructing around me. I remember being around 5 years old sitting in the back seat of my moms dodge green caravan staring up at the sky. The sky was filled with wispy clouds, and the sun was shining on a warm spring/summer day. I was perplexed as I stared up because I couldn’t fathom the reason behind my existence as “me”.

Why, I pondered, had I been given or decided to or happened to exist inside of this mind, this body, to see through these eyes? I stared at the sky fervently hoping and wishing that it would deliver to me some answer to the why of my existence. It seemed, perhaps unnecessary for instance that I couldn’t see through any one else’s eyes, and I had to then ask this quiet teacher, whether anyone was seeing hearing or experiencing my reality at all.

I recall feeling, in a literal sense, as if the entire sky was going to swallow me up, and then looking away to avoid this. What words did I have to express this wondering at my young age? I thought, perhaps the world will show me, and so, I watched. I listened, and I read everything I could touch.

I learned how to carve English into art and existence into something potent, pertinent, and fascinating. Still today I find myself overwhelmed with experience, sound, emotion, history and sensory realities, and I still will sometimes go without words for a time, only observing again

Only seeing, from within.

The feeling is like holding a soft egg in my chest, throat and face, sometimes it’s in my arms, my back, my legs …my tongue grows heavy, my hair feels weak.

When I attempt to push past it, I find the stress of walking up a sunny hill. When I relax and allow it, I feel the bliss of floating on a lazy river after a long hot day, just as the sun thinks of setting, while holding a perfectly tempered drink. I sometimes pondered at the term selective , at how much it has to do with ideas from people outside of me, because what is selection when one is self harm, and the other..never truly hurts anyones being at all.