Kingsolver

In a podcast interview Barbara Kingsolver shot these words right through me:

“I have all of those people I’ve ever been still in me, many of them very unhappy. I’m a happy person now but all of those unhappinesses are still in there.”

My jaw dropped as the words barreled through my body. I had to stop the car, pull over in a McDonald’s parking lot as the implications came on and on.

Yes I am lonely, and not exactly where I thought, where I wanted to be at this point in my life. But what if the bulk of my own unhappiness is just the echoes of those past unhappy mes still lurking on the inside, their traumas amplified by the reverberating whispers of the unhappy selves that lurk in my DNA, passed down through the generations and swimming in my marrow?

What if the main reason that I could not get out of bed this morning is purely the muscle memory of those past people, ancestral and self, who have made their homes within my tissues? What if the only things stopping me from reaching the full power I possess are the ghosts of failures back through time linking arms to block the way and raising voice in chorus to drown out the voice that is deep and truly me?

The thing I must remember, is that ghosts can be walked through and choruses are only sound.