Disconnection and Finding Our Way Home

How going away brought me back to myself

This week I finished reading Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and found myself captured by this paragraph toward the end:

In the book I am writing I talk about my connection with nature — how, during my traumatic childhood years, I would spend hours outside, barefoot and wild in nature. How it became the only place I felt free. How it became the only place I felt safe. How I lost that connection when I left home at such a young age and had to become an adult with all its adult responsibilities when I was barely more than a child myself. How many years later — during the deepest, darkest, earliest days of my healing — I existed in complete numbness; dissociated from everything and everyone. How it was nature that broke me. How it was nature that healed me.

I recently spent a week in Brisbane for a self-imposed writing retreat after months of feeling frustrated with my lack of progress at home due to endless interruptions and distractions. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t find words, I couldn’t find the emotional depth I needed to write. I thought a week away from people and responsibilities and the daily grind would allow me to reconnect with myself.

Except, it didn’t.

I felt just as disconnected there as I felt at home.

Because even though Brisbane is a city that overflows with charisma and charm, it’s a busy city; a hurried city. After a number of days of being surrounded by concrete and buildings and roads and traffic and sirens and construction sites and people I found myself agitated; restless. Though blue skies…

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