This could be said to me daily...hell, hourly. My friend Jayme says it to me...a lot.
I am not a lightly kind of person. I tend to be loud. A being in constant forward motion. I am the kind of person that I should be worried about right now. I have a good life. But that life, at its core, was centered around being busy. All the time. Active. Busy. Always doing something.
I have spent the last two months in a flurry of activity. My job was incredibly busy for me while others not so much. I took on some major back yard renovations that kept me busy in my non-working hours.
Now work has become more routine and the yard is done and I am out of money. I should feel great. I should be happy but I, instead feel depressed. Let down. Without purpose.
I have always been the kind of person who needs a choke chain. Something to reel me back in when I get too far out there. Guess what? I have gotten too far out there.
So I am at a place where I have never been before...willing to look at my constant motion and actually deal with it. I am no longer proud of all the shit I do in a day, but instead struggling to find meaning in even one thing I do or have done. I am struggling...just like everyone else. I am struggling to find meaning in my life now that everything is different. As usual, I am not fitting in to the two camps - I am calling them the flat earther camp and the round earther camp. They exist at polar extremes. And, as usual, I am inclined toward the round earther camp but can’t decidedly land there because I am not a true believer of all they say.
I don’t know how the fuck I feel about the virus. It is a rabbit hole that I keep falling down and cannot avoid. I do not believe it is a hoax. I do believe that our solutions were not forward thinking and came a little late. I do not think that our plan forward makes any real sense. I think that no one knows what they are doing and them pretending they do is making it worse.
I do not know who I am now in this world of home and idle time. I do not know how to be still. I do not want to really see what I am finding. A woman on the edge. The edge of what is debatable.
So I feel down. I kind of want to take to my bed and stay there for a few days. Sleeping and not having to talk to anyone. But that is just depression's solution for anything. That doesn’t get me anywhere...believe me I know. I want so much for someone, to give me a solution that I like and am willing to do. But all I keep getting is that I just need to be quiet and still...I hate this.
I suck at relaxing and am better suited for life lived loud and hard. I am not easy, breezy. I am driving, relentless and rarely still. So I am finding the current paradigm hard.
I am also seeing that I need to look at what is coming up for me. I need to see that I have real work to do here. Different work on myself that requires I develop a new set of coping skills and strategies for living. And I really don’t want to. Like a toddler with a prized toy, I am pissed off and throwing an internal temper tantrum about the fact that my old life, and the way that I lived it is gone. Instead of accepting what is and moving on, I am bitching and moaning about how I want the old life (toy) back.
But unlike a child, I can see that life is a constantly changing and moving process, what was a week ago is no more and this is how it has always been and will always be. I am not able to lodge myself into a pattern or routine and find solace there. The world has shifted and now I am forced to deal with its instability in real time. I apparently have more work to do to get comfortable with uncertainty...again.
I have spent the last few days beating on myself which has done nothing but make me feel worse when I am already down. It has enabled me to cry which is good for a person like me. Tears are healing and something that I couldn’t do a few years ago. But after I wipe my face, there I am again, stuck in myself and unable to really see the point.
So today, I start off with a desire to connect. To my child, to my pets, to my loved ones. I am going to take my inner loving parent with me. I am going to attempt to reparent myself so that I can be a little more loving and a little less hard on me. I am going to try to do life, lighter. Of course we all know I am going to fail...likely in five minutes. But that is where I am going to deploy, "lightly my child, lightly" going forward. I am going to try to slow down and remember that life can also happen without the kung fu grip. Life can be like a loose garment, not a straightjacket.
I will remember that I am doing the best I can and it is ok to feel down, sad, depressed. That is a natural, real reaction to everything you once knew being different and changed and altered forever. Everyone keeps talking about when we will get back to our old lives...I do not see it that way. Everything we knew before has changed. And for me, my pile driving, take no prisoners manner of handling life, doesn’t work anymore. I need to find a way to embrace slower, quieter, aloner. So I am going to try to shhhh, and go lightly into this new life.
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