These ordinary days

Ordinary days are not ordinary at all. 

I have longed for them my whole life.

I watched other people going about their everyday business, seeming to be okay. I saw them managing the ups and downs and joys and grief of this life, able to work and laugh and love and hurt and still seem to have their equilibrium. I wanted that so badly. I wanted to be okay, just like them.

But I wasn’t okay. I went through the same motions as those people living ordinary lives but I never felt good. l never was able to access simple happiness because there was too many layers of hurt and trauma between me and the hours of my life.  For so very long, brutal darkness was only a breath away.  It wasn’t ordinary or normal. It was often terrifying. I was too hurt, too broken, in too much pain, to experience any real sense of of “okay”. At the heart of it, I didn’t believe okay or normal or ordinary was even possible for a person like me.

But lately, after more than a decade of deep internal work, I can finally say I really am okay. It’s extraordinary.

Last weekend, I had a day at home in Wellington with John.  It was beautiful. We didn’t even leave the house. Stayed in bed until noon, kissing and talking and drinking coffee and making love.  We gardened.  He cooked. I did the dishes. We both read. Later, we sat on the couch with the cat going back and forth between us, watched Taskmaster and Succession.  Later still, we went to bed again.  I got to be in the delicious dark with the man I love with such passion and calm.  I had no nightmares. I didn’t wake up needing to turn on the light to make sure it really was John in the bed beside me.  There was no hurt at all in the twenty four hours of that day.  Instead there was quiet, calm and sustained pleasure, without shadow. I was okay, the day was okay. It was more than okay. It was ordinary.

I have weeks in a row of ordinary. Where nothing feels awful.  Where I don’t cry, except in lovely response to a tender word. I take pleasure in the birds flying in the valley outside our window, in the sound of my son’s voice as he asks how my day is, in John’s hand on my leg as I drive.  These pleasures are simple, and I feel them, deep down to my bones.

When I was much younger, I thought this kind of ordinary was available at any time, to anyone, to everyone else but me. But of course, that’s never true.  If you’ve been broken,  or are grieving, the motions may be the same but the internal experience is clouded and the pleasure can’t be felt clearly.  The world is at best grey, but is most often dark storm-cloud black.   Every single one of us experience grief and pain to some degree. But take note, the degree of it matters. When you hurt too much, you’re not normal anymore. Things are no longer ordinary, and it takes everything you’ve got to ever be okay again.

Now, I am okay. I am ordinary.

It makes me cry as I write this, to use the word ordinary in reference to me. It’s one of the most remarkable achievements of my life, that I am finally inhabiting my hours in this way. These ordinary days of mine are rare, bright newly-found treasures.

So, I made this artwork, in celebration.  There is my shining happiness set down deep within it. It’s a record I made for myself, to remember this time in my life when I first felt really truly okay.

Yes, the seasons will turn.  A darker season will inevitably come.  This is life.  Made up of harsh and delightful weather, coming at you at different times but in equal measure.

But once you’ve felt what it’s like to live your days like this, you don’t go back . It’s your new default.  So when the storm comes, I’ll be ready.  It’ll be a storm within an everyday life, instead of a ray of sunshine within a constant winter.

How very very fortunate I am.