Make It Matter

Vulnerable and true…

I’ve been keeping journals since I was seven. Somewhere along the way, I started naming my heart and my brain simply for ease of conversation. It was much faster to write, “Wanda thinks…” or “Care-is disagrees…” than to explain the ongoing negotiations happening inside my head.

There’s “Wanda”, my brain. She wanders. Wandaaas. Spectacularly. She’ll leave the house to buy coffee and somehow end up wondering whether octopuses dream and what schools might look like in 2045. She’s exhausting. She’s also responsible for most of my favourite ideas.

Then there’s “Care-is”, my heart. (I know the beautiful Welsh spelling is “Carys,” and with a little Welsh in my family tree, I probably should have gone with that. But “Care-is” seemed fitting because care IS rather her thing.) Her full-time job is reminding me that people matter more than plans, and that relationships are almost always worth the extra time.

But recently, someone new introduced herself. “Belinda” or perhaps “Belly-inda”. She lives somewhere in my gut, enthusiastically tending the emotional garden. She’s delightfully weird, wildly expressive, and seems to have been quietly doing important work for years without much recognition. The more I pay attention, the more convinced I become that we know things long before our brains catch up. (Sorry, Wanda)

The older I get, the less interested I am in pretending we’re tidy, logical creatures. I think we’re ecosystems. We have wandering minds, caring hearts, intuitive guts, and probably a few other delightful characters waiting to introduce themselves.

Wanda and I have been “chatting” the longest. The more I write here, the stranger I feel. So let’s leave it at that! Her thoughts might appear here. 🙂