Vacancy

I feel it. Despite my life being full and rich and rewarding, I feel this vacancy inside that feels like it is growing.

I suppose I am depressed. The slogging through oatmeal feeling lifted for a bit and I thought that I was in the clear, but it has returned, feeling worse than before.

It is situational. My youth gone and with it went my ability to move forward as if nothing hurt, nothing left a mark. Now, what happens to me, actually happens to me. And it doesn’t just glance off me now and barely hurt at all. Now, today, I feel it. It persists.

There are so many good things in my life right now. And I am grateful for all of them. I have a very charming and satisfying life, but today, I am struggling to right my self in the sea of responsibility. Today I do not want to get out of bed. I just want to sleep and be unproductive.

I am sure I could use a day off, a day down. But for me, I can’t indulge that. Having had issues with depression in the past, stuck to my bed days are things that seem like a good idea in the moment, but then kind of like dancing with a gorilla, I am not in charge of when I am able to return to functional life. So I have to move forward and slog through my oatmeal life right now.

I am grateful for work, the pets and their demands, childcare and relationships that hold me accountable. If not for them, I would escape into the vacancy and hide out.

I know that I am still reeling from my son’s absence. If I am honest, I miss the chaos. I have lived with it for so long, I am not sure what to do without it. I feel lost and unsure of my footing in this new life without his daily presence.

It is hard to change patterns, even dysfunctional ones. One has to be willing to feel all the feelings and I am a great avoider of things that feel like sad, hurt, worried, scared, depressed. I do not like those feelings and I will do some pretty fantastic things to avoid them. But, as we all know, that which we avoid only has to work harder to get our attention, to hold us in our lives captive if only to ourselves, until we finally relent and feel that which is here to teach us things.

I need to feel the sad and depressed feeling that I have right now. They are here and it is ok. It isn’t going to kill me. It just leaves me with this hollow vacancy that begs to be filled by anything. But I also know that nothing but the passage of time can fill it. I can shop, eat, date, fuck with wild abandon but it will be right there waiting for me until I stop and just allow it to be, hear what it has to teach me and then, over time (never on my timetable) it will dissipate.

I am learning with heartbreak it is something you must make room for in your chest. You cannot really ever get rid of it. It is there ever present, taking turns occupying the vacancy that it created. Sometimes it is front and center and it is all you can see. And other times it slips into a deep crevasse and feels only like a distant drum that is easily crowded out by the cadence of every day life.

I miss my son. I miss all the things about him that drove me nuts. I pray that he is safe, warm, and knows how much I love him. I am sending him all the good vibrations I can, hoping that this time away changes us all for the better so that we can begin anew, with a better relationship than we had before.

Vacancy is like that, it begs to be filled. And my repeated issue is that I always think that it is my job to fill it. It isn’t. I am just to wait, not starting anything new and not ending anything ongoing, and trust that life will take care of all vacancies as nature abhors a vacuum. My job is to just keep living and feeling and being honest about all that is happening in the void of my heart and soul. Trust is sometimes the hardest ask of all, to believe that moving forward is the best thing when everything in you just wants to run or shout or do something, anything to feel better than you do right now.

Writing is like that for me, I am at the end of my piece and I feel less despondent than I did at the beginning. I have accomplished something even as I laid in bed. I have put forth my authentic, if not somewhat sad, self in the hopes that someone else can or might find comfort. And service is the best vacancy filler of all.