God is shaping me
Octavia Butler's notebooks, the body keeping the damn score, and this house I made a home
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I find my body remembers everything, especially from when I was nine. This was the age my mother lost her second parent, when she was only thirty-nine, and when I felt myself change as a person. From the inside out I learned to be in my body in a new and different way, to express and hide joy, and to trace the way god was shaping me.
Sometimes I look around my house in disbelief that I did this, that I made enough money to buy it, to make it look beautiful, to care for it so well. Just to be alive as an addict my body sways in disbelief. My plants are not only alive, they’re being repotted into bigger vessels to grow new leaves. But the body really does keep the damn score and suddenly I wake up from a daytime fever dream and remember I am not nine years old, I am thirty five. A thirty five year old did all of this and I am an adult. I work to unblend with young Cody to see what is right in front of me.
The crisis of adulting is not one I do alone, I find many of my friends and peers find themselves in this same predicament. I look for others past and present to get clues as to how to do this, what to plan for, how to look within to find what I know to be there.
Last week I had the psychedelic experience of getting to sit in the Huntington Library and comb through multiple boxes of Octavia Butler’s notebooks. Her actual physical real life notebooks with all her lists and wishes and dreams and notes. It changed me in a way I knew would happen but also didn’t expect.
I opened the first box, took out the classic blue covered five star three subject notebook, and the most famous words appeared. In the silent library I burst into tears.