Reconnecting

Hello all,

Welcome back to our peaceful, chaotic, and messy shores. I hope you’re feeling healthy, happy, alive, and overall everything positive. It has been quite a while since we last connected together through a journal entry… almost a year I believe… fucking crazy. Over the last year, life has sped up more than I could have ever thought. I’ve started a few new ventures, I’m a step closer to where I want to be pertaining to my degrees, I’ve started getting my foot in the door within my career… overall, I believe that I’ve truly been feeling that “happiness” that everyone talks about… or at least fleeting moments of it. However… I’ve also been grieving… but we’ll get into that later. Probably not in this entry. Truthfully, I never have a plan or anything already pre-written when I write these little entries. That’s where I find excitement in them. They allow me to move myself to a place, both mentally and physically, where I let myself feel over and beyond the ocean’s waves. I let my fingers move across the keyboard to string words along that resonate with whatever I may be feeling in that moment, day, or decision between if I want to let my rage get the best or continue begging God to redirect me, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately.

Aside from that… I believe what has been the strangest part about this last year is realizing how much I’ve changed without really noticing it happen. I’ve experienced days where I’ve awoken and have no longer felt the need to explain myself, give a reaction, or convince people to understand myself or things around me. Growth is one of the strangest elements to our human experience because we often imagine it to be some dramatic uproarious moment where suddenly everything clicks into place, but truthfully, most of the time it happens quietly. It happens in the silence between the ordinary days, in the skin we quietly shed and leave behind on the shoreline during our long walks on the beach, and in the winding roads that carve valleys into us before teaching us how to keep moving. I’ve realized this slowly. Actually, I honestly didn't realize this until the other night when I decided to sit down and fumble through the writings I’ve penned over the last year. I believe in our last journal entry I wrote that since the release of my first poetry book Upside Down I wrote over fifty poems…that number has definitely doubled…almost tripled. I won’t get into that right now either, I’m planning something for another time, but what was intriguing to me about these poems is that they all reveal one element…growth.

I think what surprised me most about going back and reading them was realizing I wasn’t just revisiting words I had written during different seasons of my life, I was meeting the versions of myself who had created them. I was seeing the fears I once carried, the wounds I tried to protect, and the pieces of myself I eventually learned I had to release. Maybe that is the strangest part about growth… becoming who we are meant to be often requires grieving who we once were. Some parts of ourselves have to be left behind on the shoreline, old fears, old wounds, and old versions built around survival rather than truly living. And maybe that is both the beauty and cruelty of growth: we become more whole by allowing certain pieces of ourselves to disappear completely.

If you stuck around this far… I thank you with everything in me. So much time has passed since we’ve connected in this way, but I am genuinely excited to begin sailing these waters again. Writing poetry, these entries, and having the ability to connect through words fills me with a gratitude that I could never fully express. There is something incredibly special about sharing these little pieces of myself with you… So, until next time, continue sailing these beautiful, chaotic, and messy shores, and I’ll meet you back here next week for more…

With great love always, 

M.H. John