Today someone suggested I do some writing. The words for what was suggested just wouldn’t come, so this is what came out instead.
I have so much work to do on myself that I’m starting to think when I have a really good day, it’s just a day I’ve been completely successful at hiding from myself. The good news is, I’m starting to embrace the emotional chaos. I think we’re taught early and often about the negative aspects of being even remotely complicated in an emotional way. We start young hiding our individual complications and emotions. The very things that make us each our own person, we’re taught to flatten, level and fit in a standard size box so they look like everyone else’s. Some of my shit isn’t box shaped though, so it’s just been crammed in there, all lumpy like and stuffy for years. I’m kind of in a love/hate relationship with watching it spread as I pull it out…like one of those expanding kids toys that you never can quite believe all fit in that little tiny pill before it went in the water. I’m fascinated by dumping buckets of water on my piles of “stuff” and seeing it swell to take up all the space that I thought was “well adjusted” but now realize was mainly just empty. What the hell is well adjusted? Is that like “normal”?
I think I’m at least moderately well aware of how far I have to go. Fairly realistic of the reasons I’m playfully called a Beautiful Train Wreck. I know I over think things, I know I worry too much about others and details I have no power over. I know I lack patience in many areas of my life and that I strive for control over…pretty much everything. I know I’m my own worst critic. I hope I actually am sane and not just one of the people who thinks they are sane. I’ll temper this paragraph with the statement that I also know I have many positive points. It wouldn’t be like me to list them here, but I AM aware of them. This isn’t an essay on self depreciation.
It seems I know plenty about myself, and could have a field day working on just that, rather than pulling up more, but somehow it seems like I’m looking for something I lost. Like something I packed away for a move at some point and want to find again. So at first I sort of started to half heartedly peek in the tops of some boxes and see what was there, but then I realized all the stuff I forgot about.
Not everything I’m finding is good. Searching through, looking for that point when I went from the young kiddo my parents describe who ran around naked constantly to the body conscious adult I’ve become. Did that happen over time? Was there an event? Can I blame that one on “society”? When did I become insecure? Did I always compensate for insecurity by appearing Type A? Nope, not in this box, let’s check another.
Sometimes I want to grab a box and stuff crap back in there to be dealt with at some later and unspecified time, but it seems like right now I’m more likely to make piles. You know when you organize a big mess by trying to make it a neater mess? Sort of like that. I’m not actually solving things yet, but I’m sort of moving about, making things look more presentable so I’ll be less intimated about going back and looking through the pile at some point. (Yeah, THAT needs to be looked at…later) But some of it doesn’t stack up neatly. It’s like that expanding kids toy…you never can be too sure what to do with it when you are done. It’s here, all big and sort of squishy, but what exactly do you do with a huge gelatinous dinosaur stuffed inside a bucket of water? What do I do with this…feeling? Keep it? Appreciate it, and then toss it? How much do emotions from years ago that I ignored matter now? Can you genuinely process and move on, or do you accept them as part of your life and somehow store them away in a healthier manner?
There is a certain part of this journey that makes me feel three years old again. It’s no longer enough for me to be so “strong” I can say, this is what I am, deal with it. Now I want to say why. Why am I like this…not just the challenging parts, but the parts I’m proud of too. Understand why. I love understanding. I should have been a scientist who could base everything on fact, thought honestly in some ways that would bore me. More fun is the answer to Why which can be picked over, studied. The answer to Why that can be debated and discussed, even if only within my own head.
I’m asking a lot of why’s lately. I’m talking in a lot circles but finding sometimes, a different way to say the same thing, seems to trigger another box in my mind to open. Some answers are more clear to me than they were even two weeks ago, but the questions are more complicated now than they were last week. Sometimes I find the answer to one Why at the bottom of a box full of questions, all the while I seem sure that answer to everything is in the box I can’t see or reach yet, that’s at the bottom of the pile. I know if I pull it out, just to get to the answer, that won’t work at all…but patience…patience isn’t my strong point, remember. So I try. I try to sit on the floor and sort things into piles, one box at a time. Some of the time I’m laughing, some of it I’m crying, sometimes I sit in complete disbelief that I forgot about THAT. Some of the boxes are full of more questions and some of them seen to have answers to things I can even express yet. What I want, who I am and how I want to get there. The questions and answers are here somewhere, if I can stop talking in circles long enough to get there…
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