So…..here is yet another collection of sort of random thoughts.
I’ve been avoiding my life or far too long. Sure, I’ve been running the PTO, and I’ve been leading my daisy troop, and I’ve been volunteering at school and meeting for play dates and even attending church. But I’ve not gotten on my yoga mat in months. Months. I’ve had to force myself to sit and journal. My house is a very scary disaster. I’ve been avoiding my feelings, my thoughts, my life. I’m not living.
In this day and age, it’s so easy to drown out the noise in our heads. Put on a movie. Binge watch a new tv show. Listen to an audiobook. Pick up your kindle and find an e-book. For that matter, pick up your phone and get sucked into the time waster of facebook, or reddit, or Instagram, or even just the news. And then of course, are the good old fallbacks. The big guns. Eating. Purging. Starving. Cutting. Whatever it is, whatever is available to drown out my feelings and thoughts and anxieties, I’ve been doing it. And I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t like who I am becoming. I don’t like the time I am wasting, and the connections I am avoiding.
How did this happen? I don’t know. I was okay. Good. Stable. Feeling like I was here, present, grounded. And then….well, I suppose the filter was removed and all hell broke loose, and I’m still trying to climb my way out of the black hole I was plunged into. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that a part of me has climbed out, but the rest of the parts are scrambling up the side of that huge black hole to no avail. They can’t get out until I look at the feelings, the thoughts, the beliefs. All of it.
And that brings us to my last few therapy sessions. Bea has slowly been poking and digging through the rubble that’s left from the filter disappearing. It’s not easy, because I’ve been really resistant. I think with the holiday break, and then the two week break because of the flu, a bit of that “crust of perfection” (as Bea once referred to it) returned. It had to, in order for me to function in my daily life. The difficulty comes in that Ms. Perfect will do whatever is necessary to keep Bea from breaking through that crust of perfection. Unlike times in the past, however, there is an adult self that is aware that crust needs to be cracked, and I am working so hard to break through all these layers and figure out what is really going on with me.
Confusion and aloneness have been the big things that keep seeping out past my barriers. We’ve explored what alone means, and that being alone is different than feeling alone, and that is different from hiding. Last week, I told Bea that alone doesn’t feel good, but it is safer to be alone. It was just this sentence that slipped out and Bea asked if that was a part or if that was me, the adult. I didn’t know, and so I when I got home, I decided to write about it. I wrote and wrote. I didn’t find any answers, not really, but I think I’m starting to come out of this fog. I feel more present than I have recently. It doesn’t really feel good, because there are so many yucky, messy feelings seeping to the surface. But it’s not a bad thing. I’m slowly coming back to my life. I just hope I can survive the mess I’m about to dig through.
Falling down the rabbit hole 
It’s hard to find the right balance especially when a lot of those things which you’re doing to avoid facing difficult and painful feelings are actually achieving useful ends and helping your daughter. I sometimes feel as if I’ve gone too far in the other direction and that I’m so wrapped up in dealing with all of the feelings I’ve allowed to surface that I’m not “doing” anything much in the world outside my head, just the bare minimum to keep the structure of my life ticking over, kind of treading water. I can get away with doing that because I don’t have many immediate responsibilities for other people – I’m not in a relationship, my daughter is grown and not living at home, I’ve gradually ditched the part of my work which involved having to “look after” people, but I can see that you’d be in a much more difficult position and maybe part of you is scared of letting other people down and not being there for them if you let your own stuff get too messy and out of control.
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Yes! It is a hard balance. Thank you for seeing how hard this is, and just getting how hard it is to find a balance right now. It’s scary to think of trying to find those painful things to be able to face them.
I wonder if there are ups and downs, times where we have to be in our heads and tread water so that we can work through things. I don’t know. It’s so hard to be in the place you are in right now. It’s painful and messy. I think as long as you have an awareness of where you are, and that you are more in your head and really just processing things, you are okay. It’s when we lose that awareness that things get to that really not okay place. Take care of yourself. 💕
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