A Black Swan

about me, dark tunnels, and my nine lives

“What do you know about pain?” They say.
Strange isn’t it? To ask a stranger this.

When someone is deep in their own pain and they see another spreading joy and uplifting motivation, they want to see receipts. They want to know your qualifications on how you are allowed to be so beautiful and kind, and dare I say, happy. As if they can’t listen to someone’s light unless they know that person has breathed fire first.

But I don’t think they really want to know the pain another holds, that kind of bitterness is just a projection of their own unhealed bruises. I think what they really want to be able to say is, “how do I become full of joy like you when all I feel is darkness?” But the ego doesn’t like being vulnerable like that.

I understand them. I understand what it’s like to be a fire breathing human, overtook with shadow and weights that pull on you and keep your hands tied. Not able to give, only wishing to receive. I have walked barefoot on hot coals and made it to the other side now, but not without deep scars in the feet that walked me through that hell.

It’s hard for me to let others know me. Mainly because the dark part of me feels like why would they want to? I have a lot of great qualities, I’m soft like a swans’ down feathers, gentle like the way a swan glides on water as if it’s not even touching it. Poetic and romantic like the way a swan bends its neck effortlessly and becomes a symbol of love through its very existence. But to know me, means knowing my life, my experiences, not just my qualities. And I have often wondered why anyone would want to hear about my life, and hold any semblance of my pains. I think the honest answer is people don’t, they are just curious, but most won’t sit long in the depths of the dark, its just too uncomfortable.

I have a dark past that most can’t hold. And I’ve learned not to need to let everyone try to. Though, I have also learned that sharing is a reciprocal act, and when done without ego, can be therapeutic and can also help other people quietly to see life through new lenses. Desiring to storytell and to know each others experiences is a deeply human quality. One that makes my human self feel comforted. My favorite type of books to read are memoirs, for that exact reason. It’s a deeply human expression to share our real life experiences. It brings us together, as we should be, experiencing each other through our stories, as one.

So I think I will share a little here too, an introduction into deeper layers of me.

I am a black swan. Not only light, ethereal and the untouched color that is white like new cotton sheets. I am both. As is everyone , but each soul holds a different capacity of light vs dark, breath vs burden, no human is walking around here pure and untouched, but some humans’ color spectrum is wider than others.

Everyday is not just the beautiful work, that I so diligently try to fill my mind and space with now. Some days are still hard, still painful…But i have come a long way out of the depths of the underground. And my daily practice of beautifying my heart and soul, and my closeness to the Source is how I never return.

So to know me.. lets see,

I’ve served a 20 year sentence in prison.

Oh, mental prison that is. Self imposed solitary confinement, no sun for weeks at a time, no phone calls, stripped of comforts. I voluntarily put myself in a cage in my past.

I don’t forgive easily. For others sure, no problem..but myself? no way. Humans are funny that way aren’t we?

I also have had a problem with holding myself to impossible standards.. maybe as a form of self punishment (I’m really good at punishing myself)

When I was younger grief knew me early and I also became a mother before my prefrontal cortex was even developed. I had many back to back traumas that led me to experience long periods of dissociation, which then led me to walk many not so pleasant paths. When you go outside and even nature looks fake and you can’t breathe because the air feels foreign, something is very wrong.

Healing is not anything close to linear, and I have hit rock bottom more than once.

Those moments feel like another lifetime,
my days spent in recording studios, or locked in my cage,
and my nights spent in dark tunnels, face on the floor (semi-metaphorical)

fast forward into new landscapes, countries, people, and cultures and I felt I was really healing, finding rhythm..but life loves to keep giving. Hardships that is..because what is life without pain? there is not one human or being here in this physical world that doesn’t know pain. I was given a new challenge. To experience a stillbirth. To birth a fully developed baby girl, dead on arrival. It was a hard hitting body trauma. My mind could rationalize it, spiritualize it, but my body? that took longer. My body is a physical vessel, and that experience was deeply physical. But the hardest part was probably having to walk out of that hospital (in another country where I don’t speak the language) with her body, in a trash bag, because they had no where to keep her there in that run down building. So there I was, walking down a dark street under the moonlight as I cradled her body in that bag, as if I was just carrying a melon home from the market.

It took everything in me not to dissociate again, I fought my mind to it’s depths, trying not to go back to the shackles it wanted to grip me with. That pain broke me open more than any other pain. Like the way you crack open a ripe summer melon, my mind cracked open and let all the last of my shadows dissipate into the hot air. I think I tasted fresh air after that, like I could finally breathe after a life of one trauma after another.

I am softer now, sometimes like a bruise, sometimes like a baby swan just born, ready to glide and bask in the glittering sun that makes the water look like a sea of twinkling stars.

Through all my nine lives, a few things stayed with me. My voice and my unreasonably strong will.

I’m an artist, a writer, an absolute tech nerd/programmer, a mother…but above all, I’m a singer. Singing is how I survive. and I don’t mean for money or to eat. I mean to breathe. It is the only way I heal. It is a force within me that carried me through each life. (and I’m talking about the multitude of lives I’ve had only within this one incarnation.)

Singing is the only time I feel free. It’s a somatic release.. It gives me the feeling of when wings open and take flight. Or the way a newborn takes its first breath. The way a bird makes music on the vibration of the sun’s waves.

birdsong, black swan, sea of stars
- these are the elements of me.

- Noor