[To listen to the audio version of MYTRUTH click here]
There are so many things they don’t teach us in school. So many things that even if we were told, we wouldn’t understand because we’d lack the knowledge and clarity of experience. When they tell us to find our passions, discover our purpose and “do what we love” what they aren’t telling us is what going on those journeys will cost us, how they will challenge us, how before we step into the light we’ll have to endure the night.
I HAVE THIS THING FOR QUESTIONS
I used to believe that there was an answer to every question and it was part of life’s meaning and purpose to find them, but that’s not it at all. Sometimes the questions are the answer and not all questions are equal.
LIFE IS ABOUT UNEARTHING THE SOUL-QUENCHING QUESTIONS.
The questions that, when you finally stumble upon them, bust your heart, mind and soul right open. The ones that the universe has been waiting for you to ask. Life is about the questions that beckon you to decide who you are, why you are and if you’re not already pointed in its direction, shift your whole perspective so that you’re aligned with your “true north”.
I am a recovering over-thinker and incessant question asker. My questions have questions, and then those have more questions. So a few years ago when I tuned into an internal stirring---an itch, an uneasiness---and after unsuccessfully trying to figure out what the feeling was, I landed on this question. And I’ve never let it go.
WHAT ARE YOU YEARNING FOR?
Now when I say “you” I use it in the most ethereal of senses -- you as a spirit, a composite of emotion, feeling and energy. It’s a “you” that has nothing to do with the body or mind, but the “you” that is in it’s essence all nerve endings and soul. My response to that question is one I am just now able to put into words.
When I was 16, during the summer before my senior year of high school, I took advantage of an amazing opportunity to participate in a six-week summer intensive with The Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. Those six weeks turned into 13 years. Two years ago I decided to leave New York and come back “home” to California.
I put home in quotation marks because “home” is so much more than just the place where you are born and raised. Home is the place where you discover who you are, what you’re made of and what you’re capable of. Home is where you experience your firsts: love, heartbreak, failures, success, dreams and nightmares. Home for me was New York, where I discovered all facets of me and became a woman. But New York City was also where I lost pieces of me, pieces that, when I asked myself the soul-quenching question, “What are you yearning for?” I realized I wanted back. What I yearned for was a former me, fearful but fearless, naïve to boundaries and impossibility.
I YEARNED TO STOP CHASING WHAT WAS RUNNING FROM ME AND RUNNING FROM WHAT WAS CHASING ME.
After much back and forth, and a mild break down one winter night on a street corner in Soho, I made the decision to leave everything and everyone that I’d come to know, a city that I’d grown to love and a life that I belonged to, had grown into and, over the course of 13 years, had made my own.
Now, when asked why I left, I altogether abandon the sugar-coated reply and say, “I left because I was dying,” because one day as I began thinking and questioning, I chose to acknowledge a truth that had been tugging at me:
AT SOME POINT I HAD BEGUN TO MERELY EXIST, INSTEAD OF THRIVE, AND THAT FACT WAS ONE THAT MY HEART AND SOUL WERE BREAKING OVER.
That move, to date, was one of the biggest and hardest challenges of my life. Bigger than leaving home at 16, harder than walking away from a career as a ballerina, bigger than getting through and graduating college and getting my first job, harder than leaving that first job after eight years and striking out on my own, harder than choosing not to have my first conceived child, bigger than ending a relationship with the first and, up until then, only man I ever wanted to marry, have family and share a life with.
This was not a move that felt soul-quenching, instead it was devastating. At least it was until I realized the move was a life pivot, a leap I needed to make exactly when I needed to make it.
This past fall/winter I went through what felt like one of the darkest periods of my life. I felt lost, empty, weak and alone. I felt like a person who had just underwent Lasik eye surgery and instead of coming out seeing 20/20, I ended up nearly blind. Everything was hazy, my faith in my choices, my vision, my purpose and myself was waning and I doubted every ounce of the woman I had become. I felt like I had no place, here at home in California, but I also had no desire to return home to New York because I knew I was no longer meant to be there. In hindsight, I realize this dark period was a slow and steady cracking; the dissolution of the woman I was, the woman I needed to leave behind so this new version of me could spring into existence.
I stumbled upon a quote, author unknown, that describes this period perfectly:
“When you find yourself cocooned in isolation and cannot find your way out of the darkness, remember that this is similar to the place where caterpillars go to grow their wings.”
Eventually it was because of, and through the cracks that the light seeped in, and while I’m not yet flying, I can feel my wings coming in, my vision clearing and I’m becoming more than I believed I could be.
I’m becoming the woman that I was destined to be.
My father is Nigerian. More specifically, he is Yoruba. The Yoruba believe that people live out the meanings of their names; that names are like spirits, spirits who would like to live out their meanings. My given first name, Eniafebiafe means the one to be loved like (or by) the air. Isis, my first middle name, is the Greek translation of the Egyptian goddess Aset. She was the goddess of magic, wisdom, renewal, healing, power, love, marriage, motherhood and the deads. Adedyo, my second middle name, means crown of joy. Adunola, my third middle name, means crown of wealth and Adewale, my last name means the crown has come home.
This is so much more than “my story.” It’s my destiny. If my life thus far and my journey these last two years, the two years since I’ve been back home, have proven anything to me, they have proven that the universe has my back. I am loved like and by the air. I have the power to manifest energy and create my own magic and my heart and spirit will always yearn for joy because to them, joy is home.
I’VE LEARNED THAT WEALTH IS FREEDOM, THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE, TO STAY, TO LET GO, TO UN-BECOME.
As long as I go in the direction of my yearning, I will always find home.
I share this, my reality and truths, because I believe we are all living different versions of the same stories and even in the dark, and often because of the breaks and the cracks, light will find its way in.
- Eniafe Isis, The Amplifier
