I used to think that it would be an unraveling: that moment of “this is happening now and I can’t stop it.” I used to think that it would be a coming apart like unmooring, there being nothing I could do. It would be the all of me, flung into floating particles of acquiescence, the endless deep below me of uncertainty and lack of control.
I used to think it would be that easy, I suppose, that gentle. The crossed-wires I call masochism and the strange cravings for dark could be pulled apart, sorted into separate threads and made smaller. Then, there would be something that I could point to – look: you can see where those once wove together. You could put that back together exactly, if you wanted, the twists still visible, the ends maybe even still clinging as one. It wouldn’t be easy, but you could do it. Given enough time, you could.
I used to think it was an undoing. It is. But it’s not the kind I thought.
No, it is not a sorting out or a separation. It is not a coming apart.
It is an unknotting. It is a deliberate taking apart of what I have carefully put together. Now it is another thing, another thread. It is the string it was at its core, the knot as if it never happened. I can knot it again, and I likely will — but it will be a different knot. I cannot twist it up straight to where it once was; I cannot re-make it in any exact former image.
It is not a breaking-down of my self as it is, was. It is a breaking apart of my illusions of control.
Or call them illusions of sanity. Illusions of grandeur. Illusions of consent. Call it what makes sense to you.
Yes, that’s it. Not an unraveling but an unknotting: careful, skillful, intentional. The destruction not of a mess, but of something that used to be exactly how I’d planned it — with nothing there to prove that it really once was so.