I had a hard day yesterday. Variety of reasons. None of them critical to why it felt so hard. Everything seems harder these days. The world is fucking weird and everything feels upside down and like the things that have always applied just don’t anymore. Which, I don’t know about anyone else, makes me feel just a little off kilter, a little sad, a little unsure of things that I used to feel so sure about.
So the day started off hard and then my headspace just made it harder. Like all day my head just chewed on me, I felt uneasy, not really scared but unsettled, and I felt sad. And I felt stuck. And I felt like I wanted to scream and yell and cry and kick something. But I just didn’t have the energy to do any of that.
At lunch time I went for a walk. I needed to get out of the house. I needed to get away from my computer. I needed to do something for myself and to widened my world view which was very fucking narrow at that moment. So I hiked. Took the dog and off we went to see what the larger world was up to.
It was pretty much doing what it always is doing: being beautiful and dramatic in a very understated way. It was just there for me to walk with, behold and take in. And it changed me. It gave me a feeling that things were changing all around me even though they appeared the same. I could see rocks moved, branches broken, earth disturbed, water trickling. I could see that the world I hiked yesterday was not the same exact world that I hiked the day before. I could see it and I could feel it. Yet, it was all the same. Nothing so critically different that made a fundamental difference.
Except for me. I was different. I was not the same. I was broken, moved, disturbed, trickling out of myself. I was just like the landscape but because I am much smaller the changes were more significant feeling to me. So I walked and turned off music and just listened to the earth and the sky and water and the birds. And I heard what I needed to hear.
I came back to sit at my desk and work for the remainder of the afternoon. And I was not the same person. In some ways, I felt more despondent than I did before. Because when I put myself in the way of nature, I am always humbled. I am always made to feel more right sized. It so large and pervasive and me, I am just this one person in this much, much larger world. And I needed the shrinkage. Anger and resentment make me feel really big. Like GIANT. But that is just a misinterpretation of emotion. I am not bigger because I am pissed, I have just allowed my feelings to outgrow me exponentially. And I need to be readjusted downward. To a more manageable Erin size.
And so it was.
I spent the evening on the phone, pretty much. Two unexpected calls with people that I needed to hear what they had to say even though they honestly would have been the last people I would have thought I needed to hear from. Not because they aren’t great people, I just didn’t really see the importance of me in their lives. But first one then the other, I was reminded that I am not the only one who feels things deeply. I am not the only one who struggles to get out of my own way. I was given camaraderie on the insecurity super highway, an intimacy into the interior world of another...twice. And it felt good. I felt heard and seen and cared for. And hopefully they did too.
And I am weirdly aware that whatever it is that is happening to me right now is not hard or painful or punishment. It is alchemical. It is altering me from the inside out. All my ways to exit are being sealed off one after the other and this needs to happen. It is painful yes, but it is necessary. It is vital to my changing just like the landscape was changed, so subtle but perhaps critically in ways that were below or above my ability to perceive.
I can feel the changes happening. Right now, all I feel is the bad. I feel the loss of the way I used to be and it is scary and hard and unsettling. But I have been here enough to know that it is always, forever for my greater good.
Pain
Growth
Joy
I am really only interested in the later two. I do not like pain, or more to the point, I do not like being uncomfortable. I want to feel good all the damn time. I want to be high and then get higher. Always. But like all addicts, there comes a tipping point where you can only get so high and then all the things you did to get there fail. You do all the dope seeking behaviors and the high just isn’t as good, you can’t get as high. You did all the things that used to make you feel so fucking good but somehow it just didn’t work this time...so you try again and again and again. But you never get there. You just keep doing more fucked up shit...thinking, believing, knowing that this time it will be different and it never fucking is. Some people never see the loop. Some people die in that particular loop. I am one of those people who could have easily. I could have fucking lived that living death until I was dead but some benevolence, some loving force pulled me from my tight earth bound spiral and set me down firmly on the ground, eyes pointed to heaven and had me begin.
Pain
Growth
Joy
That is just the process now. I am in the pain cycle now which is actually great fucking news. Because that means the growth is next and then the joy. So much harder really to be in the joy knowing that the pain is coming.
And so I ended my day with immense gratitude for the God that I do not understand showing me how and why and when. I turned off the lights and drifted off to sleep. I let the day go and was thankful for the unexpected gifts that came in odd wrapping paper and when opened, did not really appear to be gifts. But fuck how they were!
And as I drifted off to sleep, I could feel myself being moved ever so slightly towards growth. The pain lessened if only a little. There was a space in my heart and mind that had previously only been consumed with want and need. And somehow the unexpected gifts of the day altered that density and made it lighter, flowing and less consuming.
Life is like that you know? Always delivering a miracle, sometimes so tiny that it escapes my notice. But not last night, last night I was so aware of the unexpected gifts of the day...and I think, just maybe I might know what to do with them. But that is for another day, today I shall just be thankful for my being blessed by them and allow that to be enough for once.
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