vegan donuts

I drove to another island, another city, just to get a dozen vegan donuts. I would drive quite a long ways to get something I could eat that’s not just a salad. This bakery was filled with so much love and acceptance, it honestly almost made me cry. And everything there was vegan. I mean not just one vegan donut option, or even two, everything. And boy did I go wild.

There are days, months, years sometimes, where I feel like the only true thing I am born of is trauma. The type of trauma that’s grown to be normal. The bread you eat, the water you drink, the leaves you gaze at on trees. You’ve normalized it because there is no other way to cope with such a thing. It is easier to look at it in wonder than it is to look at it in fear. It is your friend, not your enemy. Because to live in the same space as something that is against you is dangerous. It is not home. It is no type of comfort or love. It cannot hug and it cannot care because those are the very core of what trauma destroys. No, it’s much, much easier to let it become as common and as normal as brushing your teeth every morning and every night.

Have you ever been in a place where all of a sudden, without any premonition, you suddenly want to be anywhere else, preferably a place that’s comfortable, warm, and familiar, but pretty much at that point anything will do. I experienced this today for the first time in a long while. It sort of shook me to my core and I wasn’t so sure what to do with it. It felt as though my entire body locked up in some sort of deep sadness that just slowly spread numbness and apathy throughout my cells. And it wasn’t until i finally said: “I want to go home” that I realized I was sad. That I was conflicted and distraught and feeling awfully displaced and maybe somewhat unwelcome.

This is very rare, but recently I’ve been feeling that I’ve just been living through everyday, not living, just living. It is very hard for me to normalize “average” days, and it makes me feel scared when it starts to become my normal. This is a huge reason why I travel. I decided several years ago, sitting in an ICU room, not as a nurse, but as a patient, that there is no way in hell I am ever going to not completely live every day. There is no way I will settle for ordinary. So, everyday I try to seek extraordinary, newness, wonder; in different ways, of course, but I want to learn or see or experience or feel something new everyday. And so far, I’ve done a fucking fantastic job at it. But today, at a park with the greenest grass and the fastest dogs, in the rain and the wind, all I wanted was to be anywhere but there. Curled under a large blanket and sound asleep, preferably. I’m not sure what triggered it, maybe it wasn’t any one thing, but that moment of recognition and isolation made me want to run from every new experience I have the potential of receiving. It made me want to lock myself away in a tight closet with only quilts and old books, a space where I could just be. I wanted every person I love surrounding me, but to also be completely alone. For ears to hear me scream and for my screams to be totally silent. I wanted to be as large as I could be while also wanting to be entirely invisible. My cells felt stretched and strained.

Sitting on this couch covered in dog hair that I’ve spent most of my nights on while we’ve been in Washington, I realized that comfort is wonder. Simple is wonder. And it wasn’t as though I had doubted that, but it took on a new shade for me today. I love living simply. I’m a minimalist and prefer simple everyday living and loving, and yet, I think I’ve gotten mixed up along the way in believing that in order to be extraordinary and see extraordinary, you must live that way. When really extraordinary comes from rawness and realness of humanity. And it is not raw and real to always feel and think extraordinarily. Often times it is in the messes, the accidental u-turns that bring you to a wide open beach full of seagulls and crabs, a restaurant foreclosed that opens an alleyway to a pub with boardgames. It is these little surprises and frustrations that make me the most excited to live life and let go.