I am not a stranger

I’m a stranger in the city I grew up in.

No, that’s not entirely true. I obviously know this place. But the memories that surface as I walk through Copenhagen in the soft, milky white, morning light are foggy, softened, slightly distorted. As if they have been passed through water and laid out randomly to dry.

Here’s the restaurant where I had dinner with a high school friend at age 17, all dressed up, feeling adult and sophisticated. Here’s the street a college-crush lived on, where I cried my heart out because I wanted something I couldn’t articulate and he didn’t and it hurt. Here’s part of my regular running route when I trained for my first marathon at age 20, and I must have run through there so many times, and I don’t remember a single one of them clearly.

I do see a pattern to my early adulthood, and the best word for it is alienation. I was young, yes, and that is some explanation. But even setting that side, I had not learned to identify any of my feelings. Whatever discomfort I had I would say that I was tired. Even now, unconsciously, when I am overwhelmed or frustrated or experience despair or anger, the words that come to my mind first are: I am so tired. Even when I really am not.

I learned over time. First to feel, then to sort the feelings out from each other, then to express them, and then to accept them without shame. This is the work of a lifetime, work in progress. This is, in fact, yoga.

It is also the only reason I am no longer a stranger to myself.