My Words Confirm I Am Here

If you don’t know about The Wall, it is a book about a woman who finds herself in an area that is cut off from everything else by an invisible wall.  She can see through the wall that life on the other side is ending.  People have all frozen in place and eventually begin disintegrating.  The book never explains what happened.  Its focus is on the woman’s shock, lethargy, and then her drive to live and her struggles learning how to do that.  The book was a powerful (hidden) feminist tale about a woman who was disconnected from all the things that society had expected of her – all the things she thought she had to be/needed to be.  For the first time in her life, nothing and no one defines who she is, and the story is about her discovery of her true self.  The book is fascinating as it follows her life as she learns to grow and harvest and establishes relationships with former farm animals on her side of the wall, including her beloved cow, Bella.  Bella is her everything for many years. Not just providing milk but providing companionship.  Oh, when Bella dies! 

The book is written in a diary style, with the woman intentionally creating a record of her life.  It fascinated me from the start, as we never learn the name of the woman.  As she writes in her diary, “No one calls me by that name, so it no longer exists.”  That’s a blog for another day, as that took me on a brain tangent about who in this world truly knows my “name.” 

The most impactful takeaway I had from the book is the reasoning the woman has behind writing her story.  She acknowledges that no one will ever read it, and she questions why she should even bother.  She makes a statement – maybe I am paraphrasing, but it was close to – “I am here.  I matter.  I have something to say.” 

That came along as I was losing my identity into that of caregiver.  My husband no longer communicated with me, and I had devolved from wife/friend into the person who cared for his body.  I knew I mattered in that sense but had lost my ability to know who I was outside of that.  Then along comes Marlen’s words.  And I started writing.  Every day.  Words that were always meant to be, and always will be, private.  A declaration that “I” continued in the face of the experience of that time.  That it didn’t matter that the writing was just for me.  The words needed saying, as they were “me.”.  They were an emphatic statement that I was still there. When time passed, and I was alone after my husband’s passing, I kept writing.  Those words were my continual, evolving link to who I had been and who I was becoming.  They were me, talking to me.  Sometimes casually, and sometimes at the deepest, most intimate level.  My soul shouted out, “I am here.  I have something to say.”  Like the heroine of The Wall, I was defining who I was outside of the expectations of others – even outside the expectations I had previously had for myself.  My words, as they had for the woman in the book, were my acceptance that the moment, and then the next moment, mattered the most.  That I didn’t need to seek beyond that.  That I had everything I needed to survive and flourish.  My words reminded me it was all about choice.  The choice to live and thrive.  And, most importantly, without holding myself to anything but doing just that and seeing where it took me. 

Earlier in this post, I mentioned that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the most important book of my life.  Let me correct that.  It was … up until the three years that I lived inside my personal experience of The Wall.  Both books were about personal responsibility and the power of self-creation.  One is about what that might be in society and in relation to others; the other is about gloriously and powerfully evolving separate from those influences.  And here’s to dystopian stories … because our lives are a series of dystopian events, where the world as we know it comes (slowly or abruptly) to an end, and we find ourselves in a landscape of scattered pieces and remnants.  What of them do we pick up, repair, and cherish?  What of them do we accept as no longer valuable?  Or, more dramatically, totally useless in the present? 

And in the middle of all that, how do we declare we remain … we matter … we have something to say. 

One last lesson from The Wall.  It … just … ends.  We are left not knowing if the woman continues to thrive, or whether she is indeed the very last human being.  We are with her, witnessing her day-to-day life … and then the friggin’ book up and ends.  How about that for a lesson that it is not about the plots and plans we make for the future?  It is about living fully and to our most deep possibility in the present.  We will all arrive at our it-just-ends moments (including the big one at the end of it all).  Life changes, relationships change, our bodies change, and our society and communities change.  All that matters (if we are brave enough to accept it as the heroine of the book did) is who we decide to be during it all.  We are here.  We matter.  We have something to say.