In this new, great big adventure, I sometimes get confused.
There are times when I feel lonely, sad, fat and emotionally spent and I don’t know how to react.
Do I pull out my sword and cry “bring it on bitch — do your worst but you won’t beat me down”?
Or do I say “hello loneliness my old friend, you are welcome here, come into my heart where it is warm and safe”?
Perhaps both responses are appropriate. How I deal with what I am feeling isn’t as important as just dealing with it.
So some days I remember how tough I am. I know that I have survived all manner of pain and tragedy and I am still alive and fully functioning. I revel in the challenge of finding a way to diffuse the intensity of the emotion and forge a path to a happier place. I reframe my thoughts, I skip lithely away from the darkness, and I keep going no matter what. I keep fighting.
On other days, I just give up. I surrender to fully experiencing the intensity of the pain. I wear my sorrow like a cumbersome overcoat that all can see. I talk, I cry, and I fall into the hole. I surrender to the exquisite torture of living.
What I no longer want do is stuff my feelings down with food, with alcohol, with abusive exercise or with chronic deprivation. I am not flawed or imperfect because I experience down days — I am simply experiencing the contrasts of this physical reality.
There are things beyond my control that frustrate me, and things that I can control that I fuck up and this will never change. I will never be permanently blissful, and for that I am thankful.
I am doing the best that I can. I am choosing to be alive and authentic. I would rather be wide awake and feel than be asleep and numb.
The darkness reminds me that I have the strength and courage to walk into the light AND the strength and courage to explore the hidden secrets and encounter the complex monsters that inhabit a world without light.
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change.
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better….
→ photo : jtravism