Not Okay
The difficult business of living. Of being present. Of feeling. The examples and blueprints we’ve been given teach us how to circle around and go above emotions but not necessarily how to be in them, fully. How to stick with feelings or how to allow them to move through and leave us in healthy ways. How to allow them to show or reveal or teach us something instead of avoiding, dismissing or numbing them. We know how to drink. How to medicate. How to overindulge. How to be less here. But do we know how to heal or even live?
I am a shell of myself because of the wounded child in me who has been given permission to lead a life she is not qualified to captain. How do we move from simply wading through muddy waters and surviving to actually experiencing life without anything that constricts our breathing and being? We have to wrangle with what someone else said to us, did to us, opened up in us before we were ready for the weight of this type of knowing.
We manipulate our wants and our needs and desires because we’re afraid to be or become or to be known. Or because we don’t know what it means to want and need without guilt. Who told us this was the posture we should take for the rest of our lives? The staggered breathing, the panic attacks, the anxiety attacks, the depression, the bumpy journey of existing in a body and world that didn’t prepare us for all of…this.
What mountain must I climb to find a God or anyone who will attend to the depth of this pain and the crisis that is sometimes our own mortality? Who hears me when I say it isn’t fair? Who do I tell the unfairness can be fatal? Who sent us here to endure all of this with so much uncertainty? I know there’s more to this. I know there’s a way to overcome societal constructs/systems and the untrue personal narratives that never have meant us well. I know there’s a way to rearrange and reconfigure lives into something that doesn’t have to be endured. I also know I am tired. I know I am exhausted. I know am tired of looking at what’s off and not right and out of sync. I’m tired of the work required to get to a mode that feels less heavy. Less like this. I know I’ll find my way. I’ll be okay. But I’m accepting that’s not where I am right now.