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A post shared by Elephant Journal (@elephantjournal) on Jan 27, 2019 at 1:00pm PST

I spent so much of my 20s searching for meaning, experience, and a greater truth than the one I knew.

Ironically, through that journey of trying to “find” myself, I lost myself and ended up feeling more disconnected than ever.

As millennials, we are often sold the idea of “experiences over things”—and that was my mentality.

All I wanted to do was travel and meet new people. And when I inevitably got bored, I’d escape to my next adventure where I could do it all over again, reinventing myself in the exotic smells of the unknown or in a new landscape.

But sooner or later, I found that while my experiences made me stronger, they didn’t necessarily make me wiser, or happier, or bring any new and profound meaning to my life.

I found that the “me” I knew and had been so secure in—that solid grasp I’d had on my identity, my “self”—was fading away amongst the chaos.

I began using the experiences, and the whirring pandemonium of life, to escape, and to distract me from me.

This poem speaks to the imprints of experiences, and how those experiences affect us. It speaks to the naivety of a young girl, trying to find her way, yet getting lost in the cruel and unusual chaos along the way.

Because sometimes, we don’t need experiences and travel to grow up, and to reach that blissful sense of happiness and enlightenment—often what we are searching so hard to find is already within us.

We just need to look a little deeper.

~

Hate holds hands with

the girl in the mirror 

she fingers the cracked reflection

looking

into the eyes of a soul lost

 a soft-spoken soul

the imprints in the carpet speak

volumes

forgotten footprints

of a life

barely lived

and a life

so broken

moths eat away at her torn edges

she fades like

the dying light

of a wavering candle

running out of wick

flame low

softly licking

burnt glass

she finds herself on these pages

somehow

etched out

in small shaky whispers

word by word 

but when she steps out

into the world

she is lost

tumbling into the wind

Alice down the rabbit hole

and the world

full

of grinning Cheshire cats.

~