- hannnahmichelle
Unmoored, and okay with it
Unmoored.
Synonyms being:
adrift
afloat
drifting
loose
unanchored…
Definition being:
[uhn-moo r] verb (used with object)
to loose (a vessel) from moorings or anchorage. verb (used without object)
(of a vessel) to become unmoored.
As it’s played out in my life recently, to be unmoored has manifested as the overwhelming sense of having been cast off from your sense of stability. It’s massive change and a general swerve away from the horizon you saw your Mazda 3’s front bumper pointed towards.
Unmooring is an end. It’s an end of formerly known comforts, securities and your certainty in where things stood. It’s accompanied by too many cups of expensive coffee, a predictability of tears and a suffocating sense that your decently managed life is turning to liquid and draining between your fingers to cascade at your feet.
In all this, the break in the clouds and the flight of the birds comes in the recognition that unmooring is also a beginning.
It’s a beginning of epic proportions, where the water pooled at your feet evaporates into an atmosphere full of stars where maybe for the first time in your life, as it is for me, your hands are the unhindered and very capable sculptors of your future.
Unmooring is a bright supernova of choices and potential that, by the hour, lurches in a bipolar rollercoaster track from extremes of incredible exhilaration to complete devastation.
It consumes time, and stretches through it for days and months and probably years. It has a sinister side that lurks almost as a threat behind the scenes as you piece your life back together and experience moments of clarity followed by a sweeping sense of self doubt or judgment.
In my experience, being unmoored came about in a long swell of time that crested like a frothing wave over my life—and I created this blog as a place to officialise my process of figuring things out the best way I know how: talking things through.
I’m going to use Unmoored.art as a springboard off into a few paths, mainly featuring my art and my life. I plan to have it all circle back to the larger story and question of what being unmoored is, what it’s like living through it, how I’ll harness it and, I’m sure, how it’ll kick my ass from time to time. My hope is that as I write and share, things can be made clearer for me, and hopefully for others who find, or have found themselves, cast adrift.
Being unmoored is life. Sometimes delivered as a soft, gradual slide into uncharted waters, or as a violent backhand that careens you out into thick fog.
As I come to question and challenge it more, I accept that being unmoored delivers its hurts and blessings indiscriminately. And at the same time, I latch onto the certainty that my artist’s hands will knead and carve my unmooredness into exactly what I want it to be.
Even if I have no idea what that is yet.
And might never.