marilynwargo

[marilynwargo]

I stopped writing for a while. I removed myself from the internet for over a year and a half. I starved myself for five months until I remembered what it was like to look forward to the morning. Because of it, I discovered flavors taste differently depending on your company. I cried myself to sleep and lost count of the times I reached out to family asking if they could tell me something they loved about me. I danced with strangers. I boarded fourteen flights and came back a different version of myself upon every return. I stood before two dear friends and married them. I witnessed miracles in hospital rooms and grieved inside the walls I felt safe. I made a best friend, lost a best friend, and mourned the ones I forgot in the process. I sat on a wooden floor as two women from foreign countries told me I was being led to joy and everything was a blessing in disguise. I cried some more. I made appointments, a lot of them; some to take out loans to buy a van, to start a business, to get therapy, to buy medicine. I spoke in front of crowds. I prayed with a man and my idea of love changed. I lost myself in books and let music touch me from my soul to my toes. I walked across mountains. I shook the ground beneath me. I practiced gratitude. I admitted my faults. I began writing again. I promised myself I would make myself proud.

You never know you can be your own best friend until you look back and realize it was you who you needed all along.

[marilynwargo]

For the most part, I’ve chosen the right people. The people who strengthen me; the ones who accept, who really listen, and who guide without words. But there are shovels embedded in my bones as I am known to dig for light even when they feed me nothing but filth.

I had someone once tell me that the very best thing about me is also the worst: to find the good in everyone.

I’m sharing what I’ve learned because writing it down helps me to reflect, remember, and move forward. Here’s what I’ve gathered:

Take notice of what your surroundings are telling you. There is a difference between a person expressing what they want from you versus a friend reminding you of who they know you are capable of being / Be conscious of what comes with change. It is free-flowing and expected. But when it is you who experiences it, the people and things around you may withdraw. This is not reflective of you; you are surviving and it is necessary for YOUR growth / There is also a difference between a person who tells you they love you versus a person who respects you out of action. Words are powerful (always) but behavior is the loudest testimony / Remember, not everyone experiences feelings to your magnitude. Not everyone has the capacity to love the way you do. That doesn’t mean they don’t love or feel, but you do not have to tolerate less when you know you require more. More honesty. More eye contact. More respect.

You are worthy because you are alive and experiencing all the lessons life has brought you.

You are worthy of truth and of the people who want you to know it.

You are worthy of people who stay.

[marilynwargo]

It is not all love and peace and fervor. It is not always keeping yourself afloat in a torrent of grace or narrowing your eyes at a blanket of untouched snow.

Sometimes it is collapsing and seclusion and darkness. Sometimes it is burrowing your hands into the center of your existence and trying to make shelter out of each deflected cry.

Sometimes it is receiving a message. One that comes from her as she shouts “I love that you’re kind and sweet. And [that] you laugh at me. And that you don’t wear pants when you sleep. You’re so nice and so sugary!”

We go through things. We survive.

And as I learn her, it is she who heals me.

[marilynwargo]

Breath

sharpens the blurs of this body.

Breath

returns me to my art.

[marilynwargo]

If you’re lucky, you’ll have your heart broken. You’ll let your body slip from your memory because shock takes over and your bones are better off broken. You’ll see the sky disguised as faces and wonder when you stopped living for yourself. You’ll have to learn how to pause; how to breathe; how to close your eyes without separating two parts: dust and thought.

You will clutch to truth, as you always should have, but we all forget and you’ll have to make up with yourself over and over again. Someone will tell you that you don’t have to forgive a person in order to move on [and if they don’t, I’m telling you now]. You will recognize your Shame Shields resulting in learning you. Take a breath. Absorb that thought — you will learn you. How often do we remember that to change is to widen and what better treasure could we give ourselves?

Eventually you will learn the art of saying goodbye and not fading. Things and moments and people will become significant again. Cloudless, anew.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have your heart broken only to realize you are love and you are alive. It will be freeing, this idea that you are leaving yourself only to discover you are right where you are. And you will finally see yourself for all you are worth: everything.

[marilynwargo]

Thirty

This is the age I had always wanted –

The age of steady hands and settling into a shaken identity. The days of correcting those who mispronounce my name, because bloodline deserves a voice and I still have one. It is saying “I am” after being told I look tired instead of swallowing it alone.

This is the time I make room for suffering but give courage a close seat beside it.

I find my belly full often – from large laughter, untimely meals, and close contact. I can freely admit I love hugging people but respect those who do not [learn your space and who is allowed into it].

After years of unpacking and packing, I know what I identify as home. It is somewhere between living four seasons in a day and marrying music with movement in all corners of a kitchen.

There are things I’ve learned wholly. I know I am easy to love by those who choose to, that my short fuse is three breaths from a better understanding, and my skin is worth committing time to. I now know the deepest richness is experienced through gratitude. And finally, I realized the careful ones end up with paper cuts on their knees and deceit on their heart, but the forgiving ones, we end up free.

I smile at how big and small we can all be in a single moment.

This moment of turning thirty is mine and there is a loveliness in sharing it. There is a loveliness in being gifted this many years of life.

[marilynwargo]

It’s possible to experience beautiful, soul-shifting moments and have sadness deep in your bones. You can walk freely with grace in one hand and grief in the other. We are all hiding so much. We are all surviving stories just as remarkably as we are building new ones.

—Marilyn Wargo

[marilynwargo]

How many times do you choose you? How many times do you throw your hands in the air and grab hold of your face and life for once? Have you ever soaked your gums in wine long enough to forget how tinted your teeth become with people who celebrate your laugh, not critique it? Instead of asking ‘who do I want to be?’ have you ever asked yourself ‘how do I want to live?’ Do you know the difference? Is your space sacred? Or do find yourself knelt in prayer at the feet of strangers who only stand while you are below them? When will you start asking questions? When will you stop apologizing? When will you look at yourself and not be ashamed? Of everything you’ve learned and everything you can do with it.

Marilyn Wargo

[marilynwargo]

this life and these adventures.

[marilynwargo]

You spent your life screaming underwater. A suppressed cry beneath twenty something years of write-ups on your skin. You were nothing more than a rough draft. Incessant edits. Black outs and stand-ins because any word other than ‘you’ was tolerable, legible at least. You changed your life to fit into a backseat. A glance in the rear view mirror only to make sure your cries weren’t becoming distractions to others. Tell me you see what is happening? This shift in your bones because love, to you, means they have permission to break them. You were not born beneath earth’s surface so why do you listen to the people who keep you there?

Marilyn Wargo

[marilynwargo]

Mary Oliver as photographed by her partner, Molly Malone Cook - 1964

[marilynwargo]

I am unsure why we suppress feelings. Why we don’t treat our screaming red ambiances as the warning signs they are. We yield; sew our mouths shut. And the thoughts sit forcibly in our stomachs like we’ve become a bowl and little versions of our past pile in rocks one at a time. We do not heal from our silence. Silence is only known to wrap itself around the keeper’s throat and suffocation is the single outcome. Speak, I say. Shout it loud enough you see it escape your lungs. Break boundaries and leave the cleanup for later. You cannot somersault around your feelings and expect a standing ovation. But you deserve to recognize the sound of your own voice when you choose to use it.

Marilyn Wargo

[marilynwargo]

[marilynwargo]

What is old to you? To my friends, it is 30; which is quickly approaching for some of them, already passed for others. But if I am being honest with you, I will tell you that since I was a young girl, 30 was the most stunning age and I wanted it to be my next stop around the corner after buying a Screwball from the ice cream truck on that old dirt road. . A lot of people think I’m odd for admiring that age. But I like strange. And at 27 with a birthday drawing near, I revel in it like a fountain of youth with coins from my ancestors spewing out toward my fingertips. . It is not the number that is appealing to me -- when did we give numbers magical powers? It is the air around those who turn it that seems clearer. Like they finally sifted through their bullshit and took a hard look at their adolescence, childhood, teen years, and twenties, threw it on a shelf, and said “okay, I understand what I’ve seen and experienced, but I know, now, what to admire and what to walk away from.” . What is old to me? . Old, to me, would be letting go of the youth that runs through my veins and becoming what everyone else wants of me. If you are tempted to let age dictate where you should be in life, I hope you refuse it. Grow old into your wisdom but remain young in your soul. . Because of my job and bills on the kitchen counter, I am an adult doing the same thing the rest of the adult-world is doing: wondering what the hell are we actually doing? Because of my lack-of-cellulite, I am one lucky teenage bitch who really just laughs since that has nothing to do with my diet or exercise and everything to do with my mother and father passing along genes that people envy because at some point in history, some asshole formed an opinion loud enough to be heard and people stuck with this ridiculous idea of what beauty is. And because of my nieces, I am a toddler version of myself, running around rainbow islands in our backyard on a Saturday afternoon who just happened to adjust to these growing bones and new responsibilities somewhere along the way. . I am so many ages wrapped into one. I find that amazing. I find myself drenched in wholesomeness because of it.

[marilynwargo]

More listening. More tea & coffee. More reading. More nature.

[marilynwargo]

you are hurt and you are love.

[marilynwargo]

1. Meditation in the morning is the strongest cup of coffee you’ll ever taste.

2. If you say you don’t have regrets in life, you’re probably lying. It’s ok to have regrets, we all do. Did you learn from it? Yes. Will you ever do it again? Probably not. Move on.

3. Forgiving someone will free yourself more than the other person. Forgive them. Forgive yourself. Go live your life.

4. If you can’t afford a flight, calculate the cost to drive somewhere. Make a playlist. Road trips make up some of your best stories anyway.

5. Do not speak out of anger. Give yourself ten minutes or ten days to ground yourself. Your blood and thoughts are boiling in that moment; nothing good can come from things that hot unless you’re making tea or homemade caramel.

6. Eat the cake and drink the wine. But also make a salad, chug water, and grill some damn vegetables once in a while.

7. Every day, ask yourself, “Do they make me better?”

8. There are liver’s-of-life/writers of honesty and there are liver’s-of-life/writers of popularity. Never become or compare yourself to the latter.

9. Be grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful.

10. Make your own list. Come back to it in a month’s time. Change the list. You will change, do not be surprised. | Marilyn Wargo