The Ledge

It is the walk along the ledge of my mind when I’m faced with the question, If you only had a little time left with your life, what would you want to be doing with it? I’ve walked this ledge a lot. It’s an excruciating place to be. But it’s at this ledge - the same one I’d leap from to end all the pain - that the leap is made toward something radically new. It’s at this ledge that I’ve jumped off of in order to make bracelets for a living, go marching off into the wilderness alone, live a life of travel and radical freedom, and do all the things that if I wasn’t desperate to try to find a reason to stay alive, I would never have made the leap off the ledge in order to go do.

These past few months have brought me to this ledge again. And now, limping into a town 200 miles outside Portland, the check engine light on in the van and flickering in my mind, with this black wave of loneliness building in front of me and about to swallow me whole, and no family to turn to, for the first time I’ve made the leap to reach out to people who don’t walk away. If it was not for being pushed to the ledge and fearful of what waited at the bottom, I never would’ve forced myself to reach out to some of the people that I’ve been reaching out to lately. I never would’ve fallen completely apart to some of the people I’ve been falling apart in front of in a way that was reserved before only for family to see. But pushed to the limit, I simply had no other option. And because of it, I think I may be leaping into a new world - breaking free of the patterns that my brain has been conditioned to since childhood and were leading me to continue for the rest of my life. A world that’s safe, supportive, and that I don’t have to run from but instead go to.

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