#87 - All Thrown Out Of Whack

My momentum stopped when I got sick two weeks ago.

Dead halt.

Total standstill.

There’s a certain crushing need I have to continue on as if nothing is wrong. As if revealing the fragility of my immune system will be taken advantage of by some unknown forces.

But that’s not what happened. I admitted it. And then spent a straight week unable to do much besides lay (mostly in my bed but shoutout to my couch for providing a slightly different location) and listen to/watch episodes of the D&D live play podcast Dimension 20.

(Thankfully I now have a job where sickness isn’t seen as a punishable failure that needs to be made up for, and it was wild how much relief I had waking up in the mornings knowing that I didn’t have to have any guilt around how long I was taking to recover from what I had initially (with such hope) declared a 24-hour bug.)

It’s hard to allow ourselves peace. Nearly impossible to eradicate outside pressure. But once my day-to-day was no longer the norm, it was incredible how apparent it became that I’ve actually managed to make a life for myself that isn’t full of anxiety and self-judgment.

(Have I stopped altogether? Of course not! But the frequency and the intensity have both been turned down to a degree that I would have thought impossible just two years ago.)

I recovered from this flu slowly. It’s taken two full weeks to get back to what I would tentatively describe as feeling about 85% better. (And lemme tell ya, a B has never been so impressive to me.)

Ramping back up into my daily activities has given me the chance to understand what I take from each action. (My penchant for feeling guilt over missed journals and skipped walks are actually doing me & the action itself a disservice.) If the intentions that I began doing them have evolved, or if I have simply become a creature of habit.

Reimagining what my life can look like used to fill me with dread and recently it’s been tipping over the other side of the spectrum into wonder. Not escapism or wanderlust, but more of a careful fantasy about the limitlessness of my potential in life.

Recovering from the damage of my childhood consumed most of my twenties without me even knowing it, and getting through a breakup ate most of 2022. So, now I’m 30 and single and I like my apartment a lot and I love where I live and I’m a regular at the places I want to be known by and things are kind of maybe working out for ‘lil ‘ol moi! But actually enjoying it has also been a journey. And admitting that has felt so ludicrous to me that I’ve failed to examine where that alarm was stemming from.

Of course I know how to be happy. Right?

Me, the self-proclaimed personal essayist must have a deep and unshakeable sense of self that hasn’t been just a mishmash of well-worded projections of what I assumed other people have wanted from me the whole time because if the latter is true, I am a fraud and a phony at best and a pathological liar at worst.

Ugh, you’re telling me that the process is just as important to consider as the outcomes? Fine.

My anxiety used to jump from one host to another, like a parasite that I could not defeat. It would just take new forms as soon as the old ones had been conquered. Making up stories in my head about why a friend hadn’t texted back yet could consume my entire morning, I would convince myself over the course of a few hours that they hated me and had always hated me and this was the day they finally got too sick of me to respond. A text back would instantly slay the dragon. To the point I could laugh at how easy the defeat had been. But after my response (or even post-hangout if I was lucky enough), the anxiety would reincarnate and the cycle would start once more and the dragon seemed meaner this time somehow.

(And it’s exhausting to be exhausted by your own personality and brain. Articles cropping up about how the actions of the socially anxious are offputting—as if we’re not all keenly aware of just how strange we’re being in our attempts to appear at ease. Being sick of yourself is uniquely cruel because it feels like the best option is to further self-isolate in order to keep the monster from consuming even more. I can always sacrifice myself rather than risk asking for help and getting a friend burned in the process.)

But I don’t want to rehash my history anymore. I want new input. Experiences that haven’t happened before, emotions I have rarely felt (or barely felt in my rush to just get through life for so long).

Fear is the natural response to doing something new, but I think I’ve been gradually building to this new horizon for a while and like may have allowed myself to gain strength and resolve slowly enough that it became a real part of me.

Instant results are cool and all but when it comes to picking between  “just don’t let things bother you” vs. “allowing the necessary grief to take place even though it’s often uncomfortable to acknowledge how bad things got” I’ll choose the latter every time.

Cleaning was the thing that caused the most disruptions when I was young. My room was never clean enough. Sunday mornings were full of dread because no matter how many tasks were accomplished we were still people who would inevitably make more messes. No amount of dusting could disguise that.

It felt childish to me that I was actually resistant to keeping spaces around me tidy. And once I could berate myself, the spirals began. I didn’t have an accurate barometer for “good enough” so everything was an intensive deep clean that I would delay and delay in hopes that my future self would take care of it instead.

It turns out that instead of cleaning my whole apartment on Sundays, Thursday evenings suit me way better. Also doing a little bit when I want to rather than a marathon of unfortunate tasks. And now Friday mornings are often my favorite part of the whole week. I get out of bed at 5:30 am, put my laundry in, write in my journal, head back to the laundromat to flip my laundry, stop by the corner bakery for two (2 ✌️) iced coffees and a croissant, and then I sit and finish my substack draft.

I grab my hot laundry, pick out a photo for the cover image, and hit send. Feed the cats, wash my face & brush my teeth, and start work.

When my routines are thrown off by forces other than myself I get so resentful. I love my habits. Through them, it turns out that I have been able to satiate my lifelong craving for stability over the past two years.

It just took me a little while to realize it.

Coming to an understanding of my life’s continued turbulence also came with a confession that I had still been flying the plane over mountain paths because I didn’t know what to DO with a smooth flight. No bumps? But how will I know I’m a good pilot without the demands of perilous navigation?

Life didn’t feel like it was being lived if I didn’t have a Big Stress thrown in there as a massive benchmark.

Coping was my superpower for so long.

I can make anything “work”. A fun side effect of having virtually no self-esteem was that I was a macgyver of any and all relationships and expectations I or others placed on me. (Oh baby hand me some duct tape and watch me work.)

(Forgiveness is often praised rather than questioned. It’s seen as the Good and Right thing to do rather than an extension of the demolition of my self-worth.)

Learning how to actually feel anger and be angry at people rather than moving to the immediate phase of self-flagellation and playing the tape back to determine what actions I could have taken to prevent it from happening at all has taken a lot of time and effort.

Holding any sort of standard for how I wanted to be treated was frightening because it came with the acknowledgment that my rubric had been so lacking before. But it’s actually not sad or scary to lose people that ultimately do not care about me. It’s uh, freeing!

I have been carrying so much around with me for so long and I slowly was able to unload and put it all down. But then I just kind of wanted to keep talking about how sore my arms were.

Please acknowledge how heavy it was, how strong I had to be.

Without demonstrating my suffering how will you know you’re supposed to care for me?

If I untangle the ball of trauma will I still be an interesting puzzle to solve—and if I am not being examined can I still be fascinating at all?

& what is my appeal outside of pain?

Being sick sucked. It wasn’t restful, I couldn’t breathe through my nose, I had a bunch of ED flares because I simply could not be motivated to intake food or undergo the process of acquiring it, and I certainly didn’t have the energy to wash dishes so my kitchen became a source of distress. But it forced a pause. And that disruption turned out to be incredibly educational.

I was tempted to write off February as a dud. Just a shitty plop in the bucket. But I’m trying not to be so black-and-white with my worldview these days.

The point of life isn’t to be just happy all the time. I think my goal is to be fine most days. Be able to recognize and revel in the high moments when they come and not lose sight of the fact that the low days do actually have an end to them as well.

It’s all grey.

So I have to pay closer attention to the shades.

There’s a scene in my favorite deeply flawed dance movie Center Stage where the instructor is walking the Difficult But Talented ballerina through releasing her center and allowing her momentum to carry her through the rest of the pirouette. Dancing is all about taking something difficult and making it look effortless. Good choreography should look like it’s the only thing that would have come to the dancer’s mind when they heard the music. Instinctual. A good dancer can dance anything and make you believe it’s just an expression bursting from within.

Releasing the center, letting go of my tight grip and control via routine, learning to trust myself and my instincts to take care of the big stuff and not sweat the doing so much.

Life will happen one way or another. The turn can complete itself.

I can’t stop the dark days any more than I can manufacture sunshine.

I’m not interested in practiced discontent. I do believe there is a chance at a communal better future with less suffering and exploitation of humanity. I think the collective grace of other people is astounding when we allow ourselves to feel the results over and over and over again.

There are always helpers.

We are always pushing forward and the momentum of progressive social change is rarely thwarted by the backlash. Incremental progress is still progress. Small victories deserve to be celebrated.

Routines are not the end-all-be-all. A great life doesn’t have a neat narrative arc or a script that demands foreshadowing. Self-discipline doesn’t always look like a checked-off to-do list.

It is worth it to keep trying.

It feels good to care. And it feels good to feel rather than always analyzing the feeling and in turn explaining the feeling and getting everyone to agree that That Feeling is the Right Feeling and you are a Good Person for having it.

I’m determined to no longer cast my assumptions as definitive stories that others just haven’t been able to tell me quite yet. I don’t want to diagnose other people in my attempts to keep my heart safe. A fortress does nothing but create the need to be rescued from within the walls that I myself constructed with false hope and skewed understandings of the results.

I have to trust that I have it in me to live life as it happens and give up the controls that I developed in the hopes they would keep me safe. It was a valiant effort, but it’s an outdated system and we’re all about progress here babes!!

I’m on the path even if I was unaware of it. I’ve forged ahead on instinct and am finally becoming aware of my new surroundings.

And it feels incredible.