I’m feeling quite ONIONY today. And lest you think I made that word up, here you go:
Onion:
adjective: oniony
6. containing or cooked with onions: onion soup.
7. of, relating to, or resembling an onion.
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For a long time now ONION has been my favorite metaphor for trying to figure out who I am. I’ve always fancied if I could strip away enough layers of learned behavior and roles I’d acquired over the years, eventually I’d come to the very middle of that onion where the naive, innocent part of me dwelt. The part that was there before the world went about changing me into someone — something — I’m not.
I’ve been spelunking in the cave of my soul for a good 12 or 13 years now, little by little uncovering artifacts that have helped peel away layer after layer of that ONION. Sometimes I’ve figured I’d never sort out how I was meant to be under all the debris. I’ve felt like I was running out of time.
But in my bones I feel as if I’m close to my core now. And suddenly a new fear has overtaken me. What if when I get there and peel away that last little bit there’s nothing there? Where would I go from there? Or more horribly, what if I get there and I’m the same person I was when I started? What of all the wasted years. The times of delightful discovery and disappointed tears?
Clearly it’s time for a new metaphor. So today I’m trading my ONION in to the Metaphor Dealership for a blank journal. When I get there to my core, when I’ve dug as far as I can in my cave, I don’t want to be a Job sitting mired in self-pity, I want a fresh new page full of possibilities to write on.
Will I be able to rewrite my story, begin anew? Heck, I don’t know. I just know I don’t want all these years of excavating to have been for naught.
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The Blogging A to Z Challenge — O
Picture Credits:
onion — thepeopleofthesign.com
heart cave — yellowairplane.com
blank journal — www.depthinsights.com
Impromptu Promptlings 
I don’t think anything we do in the realm of inner work is for naught. Sometimes we may find something other than we expected. And if we find something all too familiar, then perhaps it is opening the doors of re-invention.
I do like the idea of putting a name to your process. And love the idea of a metaphor dealership.
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People seemed to like the Metaphor Dealership idea. LOL
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It’s a great idea. There we are writing away, and suddenly we need a metaphor, but we’ve been using the same old one over and over. Bring up the browser, typing the http://www.metaphordealship.com and enter the world of… well, metaphors.
Easy peasy 🙂
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In my opinion, we don’t stop evolving and reinventing ourselves until we are 6 feet under or our ashes are blowing in the breeze. While the onion has a finite number of layers, our layers go on forever. I think we are at the center, and our discoveries make us richer and easier to find ourselves. I’d trade in the onion metaphor, too. A blank journal has many more possibilities. Great post. You always make me think!
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You know, you bring up a very good point about that onion. Most of the time it just made me cry anyway! Damn thing!
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Hi Cheryl – as your stuff no longer comes up in my browser for some reason I had to hunt you out!. It’s late. Got to go. I’ll be back!!
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Hi, Opher. Nice to see you. Have two days of your stuff to catch up on. See you on your blog. 🙂
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Keep peeling away. I promise you won’t find “nothing.”
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Guess we’ll find out… 😉
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I love your phrase “spelunking in the cave of my soul” and your trading at the Metaphor Dealership. Just delightful.
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Thanks, LuAnne. Yeah, we all have one of those caves. I don’t know WHERE Metaphor Dealership came from except that I have to keep looking the definition up on here. Allegories and simile always confuse me, too. I guess that makes Google my dealership. 🙂
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You’ve got me thinking – for years we’ve all been talking about peeling away the layers, and it was psychiatrists who started it. These layers are the sum of our experiences on earth – they are our wisdom as well as our weaknesses, and while I understand that the idea is to throw away the bad stuff and keep the good, I’m not sure that it always works that way.
When I wrote through my childhood, it’s true that i came to understand more about the influences which had shaped me, but it also made me angry. I found I wasn’t only angry with the perpetraters, but also with a few people who were completely innocent of any crime committed on me. So it added an unwanted layer of smelly old onion over my soul – now I’m having to work to strip that away…
I need to forget the past, and work on improving myself. “I can change myself, others I can only love.” (quote from Families Anonymous ‘Helping.’)
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I think I was looking at it more like I wanted to find the real creative me in that cave somewhere. The problem is, sometimes that good stuff is buried under a lot of debris. Like Drollery can’t remember anything good from his childhood. But it was there, I know it was because I’ve talked to his family and even catch HIM talking about things from time to time. But he’s not going to find it because it’s buried under a lot of bad stuff. He has to work through some of that before he can find the good memories.
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Look in the mirror. The the creative you will be staring you in the face.
Ha! Drollery and me are like opposite sides of a coin – I hid the bad stuff underneath all of the good memories.
But it didn’t take away the good memories… 🙂
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