Written September 2022, Calabria, Italy
I’m too exhausted to reflect properly on my experiences thus far, but exhaustion itself has a way of speaking for me. It strips away pretense, leaves only the barest bones of truth. And lately, that truth has been pressing against me like the springs in this sorry excuse for a mattress, needling into my back, reminding me that I am, in fact, here. Fully, undeniably here.
I’ve been thinking about how the only way to truly know anything in life is to live through it. Not to think about it, not to plan it out meticulously, not to daydream about all the ways it could unfold—but to step into it, raw and unprepared, and let it unravel around you.
And I am unraveling. Or maybe, I’m just being reshaped.
Right now, my skin is greasy with sweat and salt, my head is a dense fog of exhaustion. My hands are raw, torn open from pulling ropes, my fingernails are shattered, my toenail is gone, my body a patchwork of bruises. I feel stupid half the time because I don’t know the right sailing terms in English. I fumble, I misunderstand, my brain swells with too much information and somehow retains none of it. This is not like sailing a little boat on a calm lake. This is something else entirely. This is a beast, and I am a mere mortal trying to keep up.
The days bleed together. I coil rope, scrub the deck, set the sails. I try to take orders while my brain scrambles, flailing like a headless chicken inside my skull. I scrub toilets, mop floors, change bedding, fill up fridges. I do a fuckton of dishes. I tutor. The worst days stretch into twelve-hour marathons of physical labor with barely a moment to breathe. The words barked across the deck are sharp and efficient, and I’m trying to get used to this kind of commanding communication. There’s no soft encouragement here, no gentle hand-holding. Just orders. Just movement. Just getting the job done.
I had all these creative ideas, projects I thought I’d pour myself into while out here, but every single day I find myself too wrecked to do anything but exist. My body is spent, my brain too fried to form coherent thoughts. And yet, even in this haze of exhaustion, I can feel something shifting in me. Some lesson being scraped into my bones like the barnacles we chip off the hull.
I think what I need to learn from this experience is what I’m okay with. Where my boundaries are. What I’m capable of. I have a bad habit of ignoring the microtriggers inside me, the small voices that whisper, this isn’t right for you. I bulldoze over them in the name of resilience, of pushing through, of treating my life like one big trial-and-error experiment. And maybe that’s the only way I know how to move forward—by trying everything, by seeing how it feels in my body, by letting the experience itself be my guide.
So maybe that’s all I’m trying to say: you might think you know what you want, but you really don’t. Not until you’re in it. Not until you’ve lived it, breathed it, worn it down to its most unforgiving truths.
And right now, those truths are leaving their marks all over me. But maybe that’s the point.
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