What I Know On Days When The Living Feels Hard.
Notes on healing, fatigue, and grief: for anyone else trying to find grace here.
Hello friends. Open Heart Surgery is a newsletter devoted to exploring metamorphosis, unravelling, questioning and healing. I write essays and poems in service to personal and collective liberation - the personal, political, social, cultural and spiritual realms are all present here. This is a space for divergent thinking and open hearts.
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- 35mm film photograph by moi, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room (Polka Dots), NGV, Melbourne, 2025.
I was born ambitious,
But you cannot be ambitious about healing.
What I Know On Days When The Living Feels Hard.
- Notes on healing, fatigue, and grief: for anyone else trying to find grace here.
I watch eighties rom-coms for company, And unsurprisingly, I wake up missing you, and romance, and partnership, At this stage, It could be a stranger’s arms holding me. I think I miss romance, But perhaps I’m just missing my best friends, and stability, and a home that is not portable. I miss sharing the mundane with the people I love the most - Isn’t that all any of us really want? I write my dreams down: These weird, twisted, lonely dreams where I am trying to find something - (or someone) - just out of reach, and go through the morning rituals at midday. I tire of living with chronic fatigue - These days, I am sleeping away every precious day off. I know the things I need on the days when grief is heavy And living feels hard: To shower, to rub oil on my belly and her scars. To write, to cry, to eat, And to write and cry some more until the words and my eyes run dry. To tell someone, my therapist, or a best friend, to allow myself to feel tender and vulnerable and wounded, without pathologising the shadow parts. To aim for some gentle movement later - yin yoga, a nature walk, a small dance, Or just a child’s pose. The biggest thing, The hardest thing, I am still learning is this: When I am down and out, Hurt and exhausted, Under the ocean where there is no sunlight, Lost in the sea of grief - to not try to fix the feeling with productivity, to not make the day about accomplishment. My dreams and my to-do lists, long as ever, all wait and beckon me endlessly. There is always more to write. There are photos to edit. There are projects to share, There is a future to plan - As if my sheer will could determine it. What a silly illusion, But I am still nascent in my learning of surrender. I was born ambitious, But you cannot be ambitious about healing. So I allow myself the luxury of lamentation - I am tired of chronic illness, I am tired of being a sensitive woman, And I am tired of this calloused, man-made world that spins around fictitious paper and warfare. I read Alice Walker, And I vow not to be at war with my own shadow. The world doesn’t need more violence. And nobody benefits from my war With my own vulnerability. There is no “mindset” to fix, only parts to see accept, and one day, perhaps, to love. Rumi tells me to let it all in - to be a guesthouse for the grief, the despair, The heartache, the rage, The joy and the hope. Perhaps I was always too much, or too sensitive for my family, and for many. But I will not be too much for myself. I look my shame directly in the eye - That has shrouded my emotional world for long enough. I will not be too much for myself, I will learn to love this Self If it is the only thing I do here.
When the days are hard and my tears are many and even my spirit feels worn down, I turn to the great poets and mystics - Rumi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde - to name but a few. (I also allow myself lamentation and tears, and I message a best friend.) Aside from a best friend holding space for me (today I cried and confessed a lot over the phone to a soul whom I trust with my life), reading poetry is always a balm for my weary heart.
It is a gentle reminder that I am living my life in full colour. The courage to face the depth of my pain and grief seems to deepen my capacity for joy, love, and communion with the world. The great poets whom I admire understand and share my exhaustion. But they also remind me that all adversity, when met with presence and compassion, can be alchemised into love, truth and wisdom.
My therapist (who reads this Substack) is another shining light of wisdom and inspiration, and it is through years of work with her that I could begin to write a poem like the one above and truly mean it. I am eternally inspired by the humility, grace and compassion with which she imbues her work and her life.
“Go to the Limits of Your Longing”
- By Rainer Maria Rilke.
God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.