I feel like I’m slowly coming out of a very very dark time. I have felt betrayed by my closest friends and family. I have felt betrayed at work and have found nothing but pain there. The girls are grown and moved on. I feel stuck in my career. I don’t quite know how to be disciplined and sort of run a productive life. Spiritually, all I have are questions and the faith I felt we moved to is changing yet again.
In the midst, there was still beauty here and there. A few new closer friendships have developed. The business is lurching along in a better direction. We are finally getting the help we need with various counselors, groups and therapists. Our marriage is slowly healing. We are pulling out of toxic relationships and focusing on others. We are in essence, still moving forward and finding our way, finding real truth and less emphasis on the church and more emphasis on the larger church of the world, greater teaching, great truth.
"Life is not a journey, with the end in mind: you were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played, not just wait for the end. We’ve looked at life completely all wrong." - Alan Watts.
I have one of his books from Rohr’s library.
So for Easter Sunday, the pastor talked about the part in Matthew where the women went to the tomb of Jesus at great cost to themselves, to keep identifying with this dead heretic, according to the Roman law, and he was gone. The angel was there, there was an earthquake and then some vision of Jesus himself. They ran away in terror and joy both.
She talked then about that, about having both terror and joy when things happen that we don’t understand. What is my response to things I don’t understand?
Grief and hope both tend to tangle within us. Is fear winning out? Do we keep it all controlled… inside? Do we act on it, like those women did? What do I act on, fear or joy or both? What am I doing to move my own life forward, to not be still. I believe I tend to want to control the terror part and ignore the joy part, thus shutting out the emotions of the moments.
I feel I am still coming out of this depression. When I shared at AlAnon last night, all I really talked about was being in my garden yesterday. I don’t remember much of last spring. I know I did some work in the yard but was exceedingly tired. I had almost no energy. So to be outside and feel and observe the aliveness of nature, it was pretty amazing. It's sort of life-changing, to feel that good and that hopeful and at peace. It felt like the rhythm of a good day. I am feeling more present with myself and it feels healthy. I still feel the energy of that coming my way.
Another big win last week was the discipline piece, realizing I need to have discipline each day and each week, to be on a schedule and not just fill up my days with random house projects. I need to be focused on maintaining our basic chores and our home and finances, then focus on my career and writing or learning next and then add in smaller chores that are decent to do and get done but can be done in the evenings.
I’m starting to feel like the foundational work I’m doing on all of these fronts is paying off and things feel more stable and predictably normal. So when I go to get some decent clothes on, the work I’ve been doing in putting together a wardrobe is paying off. The work on having laundry caught up is paying off. The work on sorting my clothes and not having a lot of stuff around that I don’t actually like is helping. So it feels less depressing when I open my closet and see what’s there. It feels like I’m getting healthier and also getting more in-touch with myself, with who I really am, who has been buried all these years.
I realize these changes happen very slowly, with occasional bursts of things that change fast. With my tendency to live in extremes, adjusting to this new way of being and feeling good about it is a slow but necessary process.
I won't beat myself up, but I won't let up either.
And in the midst of all this, dancing, laughing, refusing to go back to being hyperfocused. Living a life right now, not later.
*****
El is considering putting her cat back up for adoption. She doesn’t know if this is a good time or not for her to have a cat. It’s been a really rough two months for her, but it’s getting better. She has a low threshold for stress and chaos of any real sort. That makes me feel really anxious, to think of her giving her cat back to the shelter. I feel sort of sick thinking about it and don’t know why completely. I probably communicated that in not a great way.