Chapter 66: F*** You, 2020!
2020 has been a relentless shitstorm of a year. Can we start with that? Does anyone disagree? Leave now if you do. Just kidding, although, really, please let me know if you’re having a good 2020 and I’ll work on cloning your mind.
2020 started off for me with a separation from my now ex-husband and a solo trip to Thailand, where I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I arrived home to two brain surgeries, a diagnosis of malignant brain cancer, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. This was the easy part.
2020 continued in its unrelenting fashion with a global pandemic, a divided nation with serious leadership issues, unbelievable acts of racism and civil liberties injustices, riots, an enormous oil spill, massive wildfires, travel restrictions, social distancing, horrendous unemployment rates, a surging national debt, and an impending mental health crisis for many people who have been isolated in their homes for months.
Thank Goddess herself for food delivery services, rescue dogs, and technology.
2020 has taught me many lessons. In the past seven months, I have discovered that I am a 29-year-old divorcee who flunked Midwest American society’s expectations to have a perfect marriage with children before age thirty. I am a spiritual practitioner of Buddhist dharma who flunked Midwest American society’s expectations of being a perfect Christian with no questions asked. I am racist, not because I hope to be or choose to be, but because I was raised and educated in a Midwest American society which indoctrinated me with incorrect ideas about race that I am actively trying to unlearn.
2020 for me has been a year of unlearning and relearning. A year of unlearning what an imaginary perfect wife is supposed to be in order to learn what a real, happy independent woman is. A year of unlearning to follow religion and relearning to follow spirituality. A year of unlearning the implicit biases I have been accidentally learning my entire life in order to actively learn how to be anti-racist. A year of unlearning how to solely invest my time and energy into my career and relearning how to invest part of myself into my own wellbeing, into writing, into reading, into running, into being.
2020 has shown me that not everyone is comfortable with the idea of unlearning and relearning. It makes some people uncomfortable to imagine that a different idea may actually be a correct idea.
As I sat at home yesterday replanting my orchid flowers (a wild and crazy day), I noticed how one of my most beautiful orchid plants was literally suffocating underneath the dirt. The purple, beautiful flowers blooms growing out in the open drew my eyes away from the cramped, strangled roots underneath. The roots had grown rapidly since I bought this orchid a few months ago. Instead of small roots with room to expand, I saw tangles of long, thick roots. Roots literally bursting out of the soil, scrambling to escape their shallow home.
This is the inside of my mind in 2020, I thought.
My messy, turbulent, unsettled mind is the roots of this orchid, desperately trying to escape from a planter that is not big enough anymore.
If we stick with what we know, what we have been told, what we think is good enough or true enough because it is what we were taught, what is on our news channel, what is expected of us, we will keep our tiny roots. We won’t ever need a bigger planter because our roots are settled, content, unwilling and unable to grow.
When we unlearn, when we challenge our notions of what is with what could be, when we say “this isn’t right” or “this doesn’t feel right,” our roots grow. Slowly at first, then rapidly.
When we are willing to unlearn the comfortable to learn the uncomfortable, our roots grow. Suddenly, we realize the planter that has been holding us comfortably for so long is now suffocating us. What once helped us grow is now not only stopping us from growing, but literally killing us.
It is easy not to grow. It is easy to stay as a small orchid with small roots in a small pot, always listening to one point-of-view, watching one news channel, reading books written by one race, staying in one ok relationship, believing one religion because our community believes it.
It is hard to grow our roots, to take our indoctrinated and repeatedly learned “facts” and examine them deeper. To say, “My marriage isn’t working and it needs to end.” To say, “My symptoms are not normal and I need to see a doctor.” To say, “My depression is not just sadness; it is killing me.” To say, “I will likely stay racist until I actively try to unlearn what white Midwest culture taught me is normal.” To say, “I’m not happy with the career path I planned and I’m choosing another.”
As we do these things, our roots grow deeper. They grow until the planter we are in, the safe one we were raised in and have lived our life in, is so tight we feel asphyxiated.
Yesterday, I took my poor suffocating orchid out of its small planter and put it in a large, spacious planter with room to grow. I know this will make my orchid lose its blooms. This happens when you replant an orchid. The blooms die quickly in the new environment. The plant will go from superficially beautiful to raw, bare, and ugly for about three months until it blooms again.
But I know, three or so months from now, that orchid will bloom again. With its bigger, deeper, rejuvenated roots, its blooms will be tremendous. The blooms will be bigger and more colorful. The orchid will continue to bloom magnificently until it has once again outgrown its safe and reliable planter.
And so it goes, on and on. Like this orchid, 2020 has made me realize in every possible way that the planter I was living my life in was suffocating me. I think many of us are starting to feel this way. Instead of keeping our small, safe, dependable blooms and ignoring the painful feeling our roots are sending us, let’s bust out of our small planters. Let’s unlearn the shit that keeps us safe and relearn the truth that brings us life.
This won’t happen once. This will happen over and over and over again until our roots are too big for any damn planter in the world. The only place our roots will grow freely is out in the open earth, free and wild and beautiful.
Fondly,
Courtney B
©CB2020