living in victoria bc

You’d Think I’d Know to Listen By Now…

/ kaley walls / Leave a comment

I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason and, by the time you reach the end, you’ll realize that everything was really always connected all along.

The universe knows better than me, so why do I keep trying to outsmart her?
The universe knows better than me, so why do I keep trying to outsmart her?

Every person you meet and every experience you have is like a paving stone, if you will, something that gives you a footing while the next stone is in transit. In my mind, it’s why we end up with these pauses in life. Those in-between times. Nothing is seemingly happening, but so much is happening beyond our scope, aligning for when we are ready to step off of where we stand.

I tend to get awfully frustrated in these moments. Usually I’m coming off of some kind of emotional rollercoaster and I’m goddamned good and ready to blow this popsicle stand and get on with things. I have discovered, however, (or am discovering) that the pause is absolutely necessary. Fundamental, really. Without it, we might leap before the next stone is laid and miss whatever experience or person is meant to bring it to us.

On a good day, I have next to no patience. I want the universe to adhere to my timeline. And in those moments of hostile frustration, I swear, if I strain my ear, I can hear her (the universe) chuckling. In an air of, “yeah, okay, sweetheart. Let me get right on that for you.” I usually have to run through the cycle, stomping around, cursing, gesticulating wildly, until I weary of the trudge. At which point clarity usually descends and I can let it go. Restoring my trust in the universe and that she truly knows better than me.

You’d think in 31 years I would’ve learned to sit back and accept the in-between times, regardless of how I feel about my own readiness. Enjoy it. Absorb it. Feel it.

But no.

I still flail about for awhile, exhausting myself. And for what? The universe always does what she wants anyway. And I mean that in the purest sense. If you believe in her, she won’t lead you astray.

Things just may seem foggy for awhile until the answers do show up. But they do show up. In my experience, the answers do show up. Even if in unexpected or silent ways.

They say patience is a virtue and, lord help me, I do not have it in spades. But I try. I forget my way almost every time, but I do try. And that has to count for something, right?

k.

How Loss Shapes Who We Are

/ kaley walls / Leave a comment

Loss is a funny thing.

For starters, it’s an immensely individual experience. Six people can live through the same tragic event and come out with six mind-blowingly different experiences. Hell, there will be six different memories of said event. We might be able to relate to each other, using the event as common ground, reaching out and around each other, but sometimes, loss leaves us alone. Isolated. Even in a room full of people, you are simply tied to your experience, wondering if you will actually ever break away.

Loss, Sadness, Goodbye

While the good helps shape who we are, sometimes I think it’s the losses that give us the most.

Losses can be big, small, in between. You may not even recognize what you’re experiencing as loss. Sometimes you only realize it’s a loss after the fact and after you’ve put some serious time and space between where you are and what happened.

I think we have this tendency to consider death as the only real loss in this life, but that’s just simply not the case. We experience varying degrees of loss on a daily basis, some leaving a bigger impact than others. Sometimes you don’t even realize the string of events that have led to this feeling of calamitous loss until you’re looking back down the road wondering how in the hell you got here in the first place.

These last five months have been a fucking roller coaster for me. Well, 2017 as a whole, let’s just say. Some great things, some really exciting things, some less great things, some terribly awful things. You know, a good mix. But it wasn’t until I really started looking at the last 10 weeks, really, that I’ve started to realize the amount of loss I’ve experienced in a relatively short amount of time.

Some things you just don’t see until you’re looking back.

And it’s not a fucking wonder that I’ve made a Kaley-shaped dent in my couch and have only ventured outside when I needed to. While some people turn to the world when they’re going through bouts of stress or emotional strain, I turn inward. I turn away from people, from the world, from just about everything. I eat my feelings, and that usually means beer and cheeseburgers sans vegetables, so all in all, a real great kick to my system. My brain gets so fucking loud that I lose myself in Netflix to disconnect and shut things off for awhile. But that lifestyle is habit forming. It becomes my go-to reaction, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. Well, not even necessarily. It’s not a good thing.

But the good news about smashing along rock bottom and exploding into several large pieces of myself is that I get the chance to put things back together. Maybe better this time. Maybe not. That’s the joy and curse of these opportunities, the unknowing. On more than one occasion in recent days, I’ve cried enough to leave myself with swollen eyelids and a constant burn around my irises. But I’m purging. I’m getting that toxic, negative load out of me. I’m fighting through the internal mayhem, setting fire to what needs to go down in flames.

But with that purge comes loss. Experiences, relationships, friendships, connections will all morph, change, alter. Sometimes they can make it through and grow with you, and sometimes they can’t. Sometimes they come back, and sometimes they don’t. I’ll tell you, though, it’s brutal when people come back, but they’re just not sure. (So, be sure, eh?)

There’s this quote I have that says, “we live life forward but understand it backward.” And I’m not sure that there’s anything more true. Moments or experiences act as triggers which tumble down entire shelves of memories, bringing things you’d tried your damnedest to forget into stark clarity, forcing you to confront some things that you thought you’d simply take to the grave.

Are we better for it, for having to face those things? I don’t know. I really don’t. From where I’m standing at this particular moment in time, I honestly wish my shelves were still intact, everything neatly packed away in their appropriate boxes. Leaving me to live my life in peace.

But is that truly peace, or is it just a false sense of security? I find myself trying to make that distinction, make that decision. Do I step outside of the rubble and step into the version of myself that has absorbed these losses, morphed into something better, maybe something stronger? Or do I patch things up? Duct tape a piece of soul here, super glue a crack of heart there. Neither seems particularly appealing.

Loss comes in all shapes and sizes, but usually the holes it leaves feel dark and heavy.

And all to familiar.

I’m scared I’ll never be the same if I step forward, out past this demolition scene. I’m scared of what kind of person I will be, that maybe I’ll lose or leave something behind that I’ll never be able to retrieve.

And maybe that’s the biggest act of bravery, those timid steps we take into the light, not knowing whether we will truly be better or worse for it. Not knowing what waits for us on the other side. Running the risk to achieve the great, right?

Only time will tell.

 

I Don’t Write Every Day. Ever.

/ kaley walls / Leave a comment

It’s true. I don’t write every day. Hell, I barely can write a couple of times a week. Over the years, I’ve tried my damnedest to, at minimum, journal every day because, well, at least that’s something, right? A quick synopsis of my day, or a commentary on some trivial event, or a kernel of some thought I need to unpack. I string the days together for awhile, do a really great job of writing in there every single day.

Then, BAM! Six, or 16, days roll on by, and I lead off with, “Well, so much for that run,” or some variation of “Man, I’m really bad at this writing thing.”

writing, creative writing, creative process

When not writing is still writing.

I spend a lot of time berating myself for not being a “better writer,” wondering why in goodness’s name I can’t do this “right.” My voice of self-criticism is an awfully loud one, and I think she has the power to scare away my inspiration, my will to write, my desire to create something different.

And then I read this article this morning from Electric Literature, answering a reader’s question on whether he or she is still a writer even if he or she doesn’t write every day.

And the resounding answer was, “Yes! Of course!”

The article is broken down into things you can do while you’re not writing, that ultimately help your writing, and it really spoke to me. When I’m not writing, I have more time for reading, for experiencing, and for thinking. Any and all of those three things can serve for fodder for future scribbles. If I’m not reading, then I’m not challenging and expanding my writer’s tool kit. If I’m not experiencing, then I’m not living life and giving myself something to write about. If I’m not thinking, then I’m not percolating new ideas or patterns or coming to absorb those readings or understand those experiences. And if I’m not doing any of that, well, then, what’s there to write about?

Creativity is, and always be, an incredibly individual pursuit. What works for one writer completely stalls and holds up the next. And let’s not even talk about the process of the third! It takes all kinds of crafts and artists to bring beauty into this sometimes (okay, often) ugly world, and the comparisons between two artists is something that hampers that beautiful, creative offering.

At the most basic level, each of us, every single human on this piece of rock, has a story and we’re all trying to figure out a way to explain it and/or share it. The creatives feel their stories, experiencing the words or the music or the drawings individually and completely. So, if my story and creative process is unique, then how come I’m so worried I’m “doing it wrong?” In theory, there should be no wrong way. Because, in the end, it will have culminated in something worthy of being in the world, even if I took a different route to get there, right?

So, I’m told.

But still I struggle with this feeling of being a fraud, even with a double major in Creative Writing and English Literature. I literally majored in writing and reading and still, still, I find myself fighting against my creativity. To the point that I’ve wondered if I am even a creative person at all or if it was a lie I told myself.

This article this morning, though, released a weight I didn’t even realize I was carrying. I do things differently than other writers, but that’s okay. That doesn’t make me any less of a writer. Because when I do write, it feels so good, a tantalizing piece of my soul that I can play with, hear what she has to say. It’s a cathartic process that somehow clears the debris of my muddled brain and gives me some semblance of clarity, especially if I’m mulling over a specific trouble or quandary.

So, while I might not write every day, I do still write. I do turn away from my craft when the rest of my world gets overwhelmingly chaotic, but I always, always come back to it. And maybe that’s the point: it’s my returning that makes me the writer, not so much the fact that I don’t write every day.

What’s your favourite way to get back into your writing process? I’d love to hear it.

Until next time.

-kw.

 

The Beauty is There; You Just Have to See It

/ kaley walls / Leave a comment

My condo is pretty small. 475 sq. ft. to be exact. My one-room oasis decorated in hot pinks, oranges, and purples. Some reds are in there, too. It faces almost perfectly west, but my wall of windows look out at a a dirty white stucco building with powder blue metal awnings and the bottom quarter of the dirty white painted sapphire blue. It’s home to a seafood wholesaler who believes in receiving full 18-wheelers with air brakes at 3:30 a.m. and starting diesel refrigerated trucks at 6:30 a.m. It’s loud, it’s disruptive, and, in the summer when the heat is just right, it smells like the insides of a fish. My beers on my patio don’t taste so good on those days.

But, just over top of this building’s roof line sits the top of a tree. And in it lives dozens of those blacks birds you see flying in crazy, orchestrated clusters as if they got caught in wind gusts. (Or at least I think that’s what these guys are. I’m no ornithology buff.) But more than the simple beauty of the top of this one grey tree, perched over something drab and arguably quite gross, the sound of these birds talking to each other, singing, calling, speaking makes me stop for a moment and open the patio door a little wider.

I think every day there is something beautiful to behold or experience. Something that permeates our senses and reminds us that, even in the most ugly of days, there is something worthy of our love or admiration, something that makes us pause in our busy, chaotic, sometimes-negative lives to appreciate and acknowledge that subtle, warm feeling spreading through the left side of our chests.

Maybe that’s a idealistic notion, but I do firmly believe that this world is a beautiful place. We just have to look for it sometimes. We’re so conditioned to move at a mile a minute and accomplish and fit in as much as we can in a single day that taking a moment to appreciate the cluster of wildflowers poking up through a crack in the sidewalk could be easily skipped over.

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Every day there is something beautiful to see and appreciate.

In a world that demands our attention to the most negative of events first, it’s sometimes really easy to adopt a hardened exterior to absorb all of that negativity rather than choose to set it aside and admire this beautiful, incredible, miraculous world in spite of that negativity blitz. I’m by no means a religious person (a pretty staunch agnostic, actually), but I do believe that this world is a miracle and it deserves to receive our admiration, for something as simple a bird’s song to as complex as love and happiness. A moment each day to just stop and marvel at the exquisiteness all around us.

This world is an absolutely stunning place. And we all deserve those precious moments to stop and see it.

What’s one of your recent moments that you stopped to see the beauty?

k.