On the Otherside of Loving Yourself
With reference to 9/11/2023 post “To Love Oneself (Writing)”
I am trying to force it. I am trying to understand things before they are ready. To force the feelings into the pressure cooker and tear into the raw, red meat.
I am still so bad at sitting in this discomfort. I am frustrated when my words do not come to me clearly. Angry, as I am unable to fit the square peg into the round hole. Shoving harder with each attempt. I feel unable to stitch the sentence together correctly. Everything feels wrong. I just want the answer!!!!! And this is the part I have been practicing for. The one I told everyone I loved and cherished just a week ago,
Fuck this part.
I love and cherish it in retrospect, or when I’m feeling the alignment of good feeling emotions, a culmination of yellow. I love and cherish it when it all makes sense, when the anticipatory period feels like a sea breeze filling your lungs. A child’s warm cheek resting against your chest as she sleeps.
Not when it’s like this. Not when the feelings cause necessary turmoil. Not when their manifestations entail a tightness in my throat and a constant desire to work myself into submission until the answer falls out.
But it’s not anger, really, this weight boiling inside me. This heaviness as I walk, as a breathe, as I teeter on the edge,
It’s fear. Fear yielded as hatred turned inwardly, its presence confirmed by my usual choices of poison, all sending the same message: you are not good enough as is.
Perceived fear in an effort to distract and protect, just misaligned in its goal. Uncomfortable feeling emotions have been shunned from my being for so long their presence still triggers what is left of outdated protective mechanisms. Denying them a chance to declare their identity and state their message.
Fear that says, “Oh, this abyss, I would like to politely decline, please. No diving for me.”
Because I’m tired or I don’t have time or I simply just don’t want to feel this way. And sometimes the dive entails to just be without action, to just let the darkness run through your veins in order to deliver the message and if that’s the case I would really, really rather not.
So, I stand behind my former words, of loving and cherishing this period of feeling without understanding, but I would like to add an addendum.
That for every light there is a shadow, for every up there is a down, for every moment you think you have experienced there is another version and the only way to guarantee you will live a life without peace is to cling to the expectation of the previous experience. I am not having fun right now as I realize I am once again in segment of feeling without understanding. I miss the version where I feel as if I’m floating in knowing and I have it all figured out and “look how far I’ve come.” Instead, as one rock slides a landslide falls in its wake.
I can tell there is something coming to a realization, something on the side of life that will require effort to work through, something meant to reassess that which serves me, something necessary, but still I begin to panic. A seed planted in uncertainty will deprive nourishment of every plant in the garden if not tended to. All of a sudden I find myself checking the calendar six months ahead of time, questioning every past and future decision made, grasping onto the kitchen counter as my heart threatens to jump. Unable to separate life lived in the present from life as a totality. A small shift that turns the details into the mountain. Something I cannot explain past what I imagine was the origin of the word overwhelming. An avalanche of doubt collecting every sound thought that once inhibited my kingdom.
I have learned and learned and learned and studied day in and day out, and I joke that I’m in grad school for healing, for living, for trying to understand myself and others. And while I barely recognize the person I was a few months ago, I still have so much to learn. And that is an exhausting and terrifying thought. It is so humbling and it is so groundbreaking and there will always be the voice that trickles up my spine and reminds me how nice it sounds to just fall apart into the familiar hands of my past. To give up, for just a second, and not feel the effort it takes to feel all the time. I don’t know how to live in the in between. And while the highs are so high, the lows are equal in their depth and their deception. While a high is recognizable and welcome and celebrated and loved, the lows are still shunned, they are still treated as second-class, still forced to act as an enemy instead of an ally. The lows without acceptance are able to slither through the tall grasses undetected until I’m almost lost enough to listen to the warped message. A war against myself raging without an awareness. Distraction employed by both sides to find comfort in the numbness it brings.
I have asked to be here, but I am tired.
I acknowledge the dualities of life and feeling, but I struggle within them.
I am learning to listen more clearly, to turn inwardly with more confidence, to believe, truly, that all parts are welcome, but I also understand that human nature entails I sit in this space criss cross apple sauce and try to learn the edges of this version without attachment. For, I will inevitably be here in some way again at least four hundred to forty thousand times in this year alone.
