I invite you to reflect on a new beginning that was meaningful for you. You might think about a literal beginning: new job, relationship, state of being (pre-child to parent, singledom to marriage). You might think about a new conviction, habit, or a crucial choice you made: when you decided to stop apologizing all the time, that summer you actually started meditating, or the day you stopped drinking. Tell the story of your new beginning. What did it make room for? Why was it important? How did your new beginning lead you to where you are today?
I've never written about this before; I've written about my time at the hospital, have written to Quincy, an elderly lady whom I shared a 4-bed ward with, I've written to my family and friends, important people, about my hopes and dreams I never want to forget. But I'd never written about the experience of 'emerging' itself. It was almost as literal as a new beginning, a new life could be. My mum likes to describe it in these few ways: "like some screws, some wiring got replaced or renewed", "a new person", and then she'd say as an after-comment "my angel, a sage".
I was 16 and what I thought was just a really bad flu found me waking up in a hospital bed. It took about 3-4 days for the doctors to figure out what was wrong with me, add to that a MRI scan (made me really excited), and an injection into the base of my back to extract my spinal fluid. And then they found it- I had a brain infection, 'meningoencephalitis' as a result of a bacterial infection. I was also badly overdosed with meds from my neighbourhood doctor. I don't go there anymore.
Anyway, I can barely explain the state that I was in during my 7 days in the hospital, and even for about 2 weeks after getting discharged. I woke up weak, yes. After all it was a near death experience, my mum said I had to be brought into the resuscitation room. But after that it was like I had a completely altered perspective to e v e r y t h i n g. I could look around my hospital ward and thoughts completely uncalled for would burst into my consciousness. I remember feeling very sad, I was struck by the things I was seeing. Like them reeling Quincy out of the ward in the middle of the night - she had problems with her heart or lungs I can't remember. Like all the families coming into visit, the sullenness that filled the room. I felt these things overwhelmingly, in unprecedented clarity. But it was also like I didn't hold on to them. They came, lingered as poignant as they were for a while, and then flew away. I didn't forget that these sadness-inducing things existed, the sadness that was potentially paralysing just dispersed without becoming apathy, because when I reached such realisations again the sadness would return and the cycle continued. In the moments in between, when the sadness was not there, boy I shot to the moon. Everything was new and exciting. When I was pushed on the wheelchair to take my MRI scan it was the best fun of my life. I felt the draft of air through my hair, liked going through the hospital corridors, saw the MRI scan contraption and heard the music they played while I was in there and it was wonderful. My friends and teachers came and visited me, my sister watched an episode Keeping Up with the Kardashians with me. Each feeling that arrived was iridescent and glittering, thoughts I had never accessed before I plunged into.
So that was when I started writing poems, quite ferociously. I wrote them all in the notes on my phone, and I don't remember having ever been into writing poetry that way before. I felt deeply, put it all down as best as I could. When I got discharged and rested at home, I continued writing. I wrote that poem to Quincy, that 7-page letter to some of the most important people in my life with none of the vulnerability that I feel today in writing my heart out to someone. I told my mum that one day I want to have a book of poems published and I would donate some of my proceeds to charity and I found and saved a bunch of organisations I wanted to help. I meant it, I had no doubt that it would happen one day. When my mum told me that she had friends who could publish my book I cried right then and there, and she gave me a big hug. The weight of the world barely exerted itself on me then. My memory of it is blurred but I remember that- that I genuinely believed that there could be no obstacle formidable enough that could stop me from my heart's desires.
I had an inkling that quality would not be one to stay. It was one of the things I wrote in my letter, the letter. I haven't read it in years but I think I appealed to them to help me remember. To remind me of my unstoppability, the boundlessness of my ambition, the depth of my wonder and feeling. And yes, it didn't stay. My ambition is often threatened by fear, and time has hardened the edges of the tender faculty of feeling. But I don't think it has all been washed away... I fear but I still dream, and I work hard in the name of those dreams. I am a little more cynical, but I still can't help myself sometimes, from feeling 'too much'- a statement that the me then wouldn't have conceived of, but still. And I have kept the activity and almost instinctual love for poetry and writing. In some ways I think that experience had plunged me into the world of words without a floatie... I went all for it with no particular aim or audience. It was just for me, just for beauty.
So it was like a new beginning. In an almost supernatural, magical sense of the phrase. I will look back to that experience as an endless source of hope and happiness, a reminder to myself for the capacity of uninhibited love and courage, of inspiration and fresh air. A new beginning that lingers on clichés, of emerging on the surface with an enormous breath, where the rays of light did not refract and it was all so clear.
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