Vulnerability - love the way it hurts

There’s something about an unreserved gesture of love that actually makes it both painful and elating to watch. And it doesn’t always matter if it’s real life or fiction, I don’t think. I’ve been watching Schitt’s Creek season 4, and the development of David and Patrick’s relationship, and twice now I’ve held my breath while they each, in their own respective ways, serenaded each other for all to see. 

Schitt's Creek S4: E9 "The Olive Branch"

I say held my breath, but really it was like there was no air in the room. I was breathlessly waiting and watching, vigilantly scanning for the moment when the writers might throw a curve and interrupt their declarations with some sort of comedic blunder or dramatic walk-on. It was almost like the moments were so beautiful that the entire universe might shatter if they were ruined, and it surprised me that I could feel that for a show, at the same time as the open awe and heart-bursting joy of seeing that they genuinely cared that much for each other after the relationship bumps they’d been through, and that reserved, tightly wound David in particular would be have enough trust and faith to let himself give up that much control. It’s the picture of what Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle’s ideas of vulnerability could look like – letting oneself be seen in spite of and because of the fact that it could actually destroy… everything. 

It was also very clear to me that my mind's normal protocol in these situations is to look for all the minuscule signs of something that might be going wrong, with my palm hovering over the "abort" button. It's hard to notice I love the moment when I am also actively running FUBAR simulations in my head. But I did notice, this time, and I'm grateful to the writers who put two such scenes in such close succession so that I could.

Unyielding grey

I’m… sad. Maybe? Lonely. And I worry that it’s because I’m inadequate. I’m doing something wrong. I also worry that it’s not that I’m doing something wrong, and that this is just how I’ll always feel and I’m… wrong? About the idea that it’s not supposed to feel this way, that feeling this way is awful.

It’s not very intense. I don’t feel it strongly, it’s just… there. Underneath everything, but also overlaying everything and colouring my view I guess. Everything is grey. Blah. Meh. Fine. Not great. Not even that good much of the time. Not really awful, but it feels awful, as if awful is always there lurking, waiting, seeping into everything by way of proximity alone.

Maybe I should get medicated for depression again. But I don’t want to go on a medication that’s going to make me think something’s happening and then let me down again. I’m too tired to hope again. It’s too painful, especially when I really don’t believe anything can help, and I’ve been told in basically as many words that I can’t be helped.

Although it’s worth noting that I’m resistant to a lot of things that are meant to alter and improve your psychiatric outlook. Not just medication but also cigarettes and weed. So maybe it’s not helping not because I’m looking at it wrong or doing things wrong or not understanding what “helping” is supposed to look like, but because it’s actually not doing what it’s supposed to do. And if that’s the case, then it’s great that it means I’m not just nuts for feeling like nothing’s happening, but… well what the hell do I do now?

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The best thing I did today was bake streusel-topped banana muffins with J. They turned out pretty good, and I decided to actually print out the recipe this time, so I was able to put it in my recipe binder, which means I'll be able to find it next time I want a recipe for banana bread or muffins. I make the stuff often enough that it was starting to feel silly not having a go-to recipe, and needing to search the entire internet for one every few months as if I'd never tried making it myself before. So now I have a go-to recipe reference, and it has a streusel topping which is even better! I mean, it might even be better than adding chocolate chips to them. I feel that chocolate chips in banana muffins is nice, but I'd rather just have chocolate chip muffins at that point, or just devour a plain banana muffin and then savour a little chocolate bar. The chocolate does improve the muffin quite a bit, but it no longer seems like a banana muffin, which calls healthiness to mind, and then banishes the thought when the chocolate enters the picture. So streusel it is. I even made sure it was oatmeal streusel. Because they are healthy. 

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That thing happened again during our couple meeting where I feel like there's something important, or maybe lots of smaller things that add up to important, that I wanted to bring up, so I keep casting about in my brain for what they were, occasionally bringing up a tiny thing that pops into my head on request and hoping that's the thing but realizing it has no substance with which to build a "discussion" and so that can't be it, so trying to figure out something else and trying to let myself be silent while doing it but either failing or being interrupted with his silence-filling, so that after half an hour we have discussed nothing of consequence and I feel like I have wasted the small window of attention I had and he has had his time wasted by stuff that doesn't mean anything but that he will now think is what I want him to pay attention to. I feel like I failed at making myself seen, again, and so I go away again, resigned to trying again next Sunday evening. 

Grey. 

To write or not to write?

Why do I feel so strongly, sometimes, that writing won't help me? My mind tells me it's just wallowing and won't really get me much of anywhere, that I don't really have much to say that would be worth writing down anyway. I wish I understood where that's coming from and whether it's true. Often when I'm in an ok place, I will ponder the fact that I can always journal to help myself untangle things. But when I'm feeling just on that outer cusp of being lost or down, I definitely lean towards writing being a kind of anti-help. It feels like useless navel gazing -- self-indulgent, digging the hole deeper instead of helping me out of it. Maybe because sometimes once I've written things down and gotten them out of my brain, they lose a lot of their urgency and I don't feel as strongly the need to act on them, even though I've now got the guidance I was looking for. 

I wish I knew which things were patterns and which were just chaos made sensible enough to observe and think on. What on earth is it that I need right now? What do I need to be doing? What do I have to also do in the meantime to support and sustain my ability to keep doing whatever I need? How much money do I need to be making, and how can I do that without compromising my health and recovery? For how long can I "just be" before I need to get down to doing? How much do I need to push myself and how much can I just let myself wander and explore? 

It's a little demoralizing just trying to ponder this stuff. No matter what I do or where I'm at, it seems, I'm not in the right place. Or I am in the right place but I don't know it so I'm fighting myself. But like, which part of me is right? Which part of me has my best interests at heart and which is the one I need to resist? And if all the parts are me and loveable and loving, but they're self-contradicting, then how do I chart my course? How do I decide? 

Integrity, integrate, integral. Return to my values. Connecting with community. Creating strength from plurality. Finding solutions that fit. Questing for truth and honouring truthfulness. Allowing and inviting wholeness. 

As for the writing part -- I know that I need to put things into words in order to begin ordering and understanding them. It may be true that I sometimes use writing as a way to avoid the actual work of doing the things that need to be done, or even as a way of saying only within myself things that need to be said to others. However, the truth is, if I don't put things into words, they will just circle forever inside me and I will almost certainly never do anything with them at all. So maybe this is the better first step for these struggles. Maybe if I can order my thoughts somewhat more consistently, I will be able, soon, to start expressing truth aloud, knowing that I at least am more aware of what I'm feeling and thinking and how my thoughts and feelings affect my actions. 

Nothing to say

I don't know what to tell you. 

When nobody's looking, but anybody could - how do you conduct yourself? When you want to be seen, but you're terrified that if they really saw you, their reactions might be just as you imagine in your most insecure moments, how do you determine just how much to expose? 

I have so much bitterness and rage living in my body. I'm ready, itching, to fight. Someone, almost anyone really, about nearly anything. It's closer to the surface than it used to be, but I think its depth is still hidden from most. It shows itself at inconvenient times, in fits and starts. Sometimes it makes me feel powerful. Other times I feel tired of my own self, depressed at all the whining and annoyed that telling myself to calm down has the opposite of the required effect. 

What could I do if I had the energy? If it wasn't whittled away each hour by the grind and the pain of trying to make it look like I'm merrily ticking along. Shouldn't I be there by now? In my life, doing my thing? What is my thing? How can it be I don't know yet? Will I come to the end before I even have something to call a story to tell? I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but I want it to be something. And not a series of unconnected micro-somethings, short stories with little in the way of an arc or a direction. I want a body of work. But I need to know what I'm working on. 

It feels like everything needs fixing, and I am pulled in all directions -- and yet, I recently determined that I need, for my own self, to desist in the notion that the world's problems are mine to fix and fixable by me. So what, then, can I do? What can I say? 

The hats I wear, the roles I fill, sometimes I long to be an advocate, a force for empathy and change for those who sit in those same spaces and feel, silently, the way I've felt. But "It's no fair!" is a child's war-cry. I want to go a step further, and find the way to "We can do better!" I don't know the answers though, or even the mechanisms the unfairness uses to thrive. How can I find "better" if I can't explain what better looks like, can't explain where to find the resources for better, can't see a way through the problems that trying for better will create? And then, who am I even, to be trying to reshape the status quo to fit me better? What makes me think I have ideas that are somehow better better for us than this? Surely, if I'm helping one, I must be hurting another. And if I keep on making it all about me (my this, I that, me the other thing), can I really be serving others with all my talk? And what am I really talking about anyway? Ugh. 

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I'm tired of thinking. Tired of trying to find something helpful, relevant, important, powerful to say. My brain is fried, and I'm so, so tired. I need to just let it sleep a while, but like a toddler who late for their nap, I've been short circuiting ever since I missed that magical window of easeful transition. Now I've forgotten how; I need someone to usher me into it: to thoughtfully suggest through my frenzy that I might do well to be still for a time, to sit by and nod in understanding as I thrash and resist, to wait without censure until I blunder toward rest, and to cover me for a while, whenever it may be that I finally succumb. 

The unedited self

I listened to Glennon Doyle's We Can Do Hard Things podcast yesterday afternoon. I'm not caught up on my listening, so it was an episode from a previous week. In it, they talked about Glennon's emergence as a writer. It all started when someone else shared a 'tell everyone 25 true things about yourself' letter, and she decided to go along with it, happily writing and then sending out her 25 things -- and then discovered she'd accidentally set off a torrent of raw and important truth telling because the things she shared were, unlike the mostly fluffy surface facts that others had shared, vulnerable and deep and life-shaping. After that, she began writing every day, and then sending it out into the world for others to see, eventually settling on the form of a blog, allowing herself to share her undivided and unedited self, and I felt like maybe, just maybe, I might have found some footsteps to follow in. Listening to them talk about it, I felt like this was what I've been trying to find. A way to be my true and real self through creating, without sacrificing the social boundaries that we all need in order to know where we end and others begin. 

This, together with another episode today with Tarana Burke and the idea of needing to get our truths out of our bodies in order to release them and not carry them as burdens and bonds... That episode made me feel like she described feeling, when she first encountered Dr. Angelou. She talked, too, about documenting her joy. Releasing secrets, documenting joy, sharing the self undivided. 

Maybe there's something to this. Maybe I can make a commitment, work some of it out. Maybe if I can make a commitment, then I can build a habit and then I can discover it's the habit for me.