NEVER BEING
Who am I
on the other side of this canyon?
I can no longer hear your voices,
feel your lifeblood beating in your heart,
use you as my anchor.
And suddenly, I find my compass.
It’s my blood.
It courses, it flows, it points
like the river I just crossed,
and then,
it ceases to exist.
I’ve grown numb and hoarse to the world,
to myself.
Forsaking my being for doing.
Forsaking my being for doing unto others
as I’d like them to do unto me.
Even now as I write this
I wonder how I’ll present it.
At a meeting,
to you, to her…
How will the fruits of my actions,
the depths of my soul,
be tasted by others?
By those who I love?
It’s so hard to give that up
because I taste it with them,
sweet sugar dripping from my lips
to mirror theirs.
Always mirroring.
Never being.
Some Context from the Author:
The “meeting” that I mention in the middle of this poem is Co-Dependents Anonymous (CODA. And I did end up reading this poem aloud, during my second or third meeting.
I am codependent. For me, that means I have a lot of trouble getting in touch with my body to understand what I’m feeling, what I want - instead using my strong empathetic radar to pick up on what others are feeling, what they want, and spending a lot of my time solving their problems instead of my own.
When I moved to Seattle in January of 2023 (a shit month to move to Seattle, btw), I was thrilled that I didn’t know a soul in the area. Finally, I could wake up and do whatever I wanted each day, without other peoples’ needs coloring my perception.
I wrote this poem in the throws of my comedown from what other people want from me. About a year later I’ve made a lot of progress, but I’m still very much in the process of getting in touch and staying in touch with my lifeblood, my intuition, my internal compass. I expect this will be an alignment process that will last the rest of my life.
I enjoyed listening to you reading it
Love the poem!