There is nothing like a week with fierce and knowing women to dredge the dark weighty corners of life, those spaces overlooked and forgotten, but oozing despair and confusion into an otherwise brilliant space. Here is something I learned this week.

I was a kid who loved to travel. My parents have the upholstery stains and stories to prove it. Because I was a kid who also puked at the slightest motion. From the time I could eat solid food, I regurgitated on every roadway in southern Nova Scotia. In the days when you could toss your kids in the car without restraints, my parents invested in a car seat so I could sit high and look out the front window. That brought some relief for both puker and the cleanup crew, until I grew some more.  I was outgrowing my nervous system as well as the carseat, making me even more sensitive to motion, more resistant to change. Why was I outgrowing my nervous system? My theory is it got shorted out in very early childhood, a rambuctious incessantly curious and loud kid born at a time when children were to be seen and not heard, into a family deeply reliant on quiet, calm, and what would the neighbors think of such a wild unruly child. As I shrunk to fit in, my system to acquire and act shrunk with me. Information became unwanted, capacity to process slowly shut down. By the time I was 7 or 8 I could barely leave the driveway without the tell-tale misery starting to surface: the pressure in my forehead, churning in my gut, and the overwhelming fear of being trapped in a moving car with nowhere to go if the eruption couldn’t be swallowed down. The joy of travel became lost in the despair of not being able to control the sensations, not being able to see the sights outside the window or play board games or enjoy the radio or even have a conversation, able to do nothing but think about not getting sick and making a mess.  I would close my eyes and pray, and even then, inevitably, the pressure would build to choking and with the precision of a race car driver my father would angle off to the side of the road and I would vault out of the door to heave into the ditch.

Over time I learned to control my carsickness, a combination of medication, herbal remedies, relaxation and eye tricks to calm my nervous system and stomach that has allowed me to drive, ride shotgun in cars, and take public transit without tossing my cookies. It also became apparent that while I could board a plane, train or automobile, I was still carsick in my life, just trying to get through the moment, then the next, then the next, without making a mess. For years it seemed to serve me, but when, as a writer, I found myself suddenly without words or the desire to find them, I finally allowed that something was not serving me in the life I was choosing to live.  Trying to get through meant I was missing moment after moment of beautiful experiences. Trying not to make a mess meant I would try nothing new, never take a risk, would never allow myself to write anything that didn’t come out finished the first time.  I could no longer live in a life small enough to include ‘getting through’ and exclude ‘messes’; I needed to let go and allow myself to live, feel and do in every minute, choosing all the way. I needed to allow myself to make messes, and if the results didn’t serve me, heave them away. Heave-ho, like a sailor off on a new adventure. Choose, always choose what serves in the moment.  Choice rewired.