There's something I know about myself. I repeat myself over and over.
There's been many times where I have come up with a "new" idea and find myself scribbling down my inspiration with a have-to-write-this-down-RIGHT-now-or-I-may-lose-it frenzy, only to find a notebook stashed away in a drawer where I wrote the same exact thing five years ago nearly verbatim. When I read journals I have written from my past, it's almost frightening to learn how little I have changed. I have a bad memory, so even though I often go through the same patterns and feelings, every time I experience them, it's like it's the first time. Learn from my mistakes? I wish.
This has been a really challenging year for me, and I keep waiting for something to happen to make it better. Nothing's happening. (I should know by now that's not how it works). The last month has really hit me hard. Literally, I feel like I've been punched in the gut, and I have been walking around with this knot in my stomach, an anxiety that flutters throughout my body, a cloud over my head. I feel like I am stuck in mud and there's no way out. This is why I haven't been writing in my blog. It's been totally consuming me.
The last time I felt this way is the fall of 2006. The circumstances were a little different but basically I was feeling: "I am very unhappy with how my life is going. I have to do something about it." I felt like I didn't have a way out until a few months later, I made the scary decision that what I really wanted to do with my life was quit my job and go to Europe for a few months. Making that decision and sticking with it was very empowering and liberating, and for a while, it made me feel so much better about everything. I realized that I have the choice to live my life the way I want. Apparently, three years later, I forgot that lesson. Now I am feeling the same way--that I am stuck. I am back where I started, trying to figure it out again.
Unfortunately, it's not an option for me to just take off and leave on a backpacking trip again....though, don't get my wrong, if I had the cash, I would be on a plane right this minute, Dan in tow. But I am broke and I have responsibilities and I can't just run away right now. That is not the answer of this. I have to deal with this head on. I have to make something happen.
I am terrified. I don't know if I can do it. But I have reached a point that this feeling of unrest and personal dissatisfaction and anxiety is so awful that I am almost more afraid of it than doing something.
Don't think this is the first time that I have had this kind of awakening. I am sure you can find something similar already jotted down in one of my old notebooks. I just hope that this time I actually listen to myself and do something about it.
To make me feel better, I am off to see Precious, a movie about an overweight, illiterate, abused teen who is pregnant with her second child by her father....it's bound to be really uplifting.
2 comments:
I was nauseous with anxiety through my whole engagement, with the future so uncertain, if things would work out in my favor. I think our generation has so much control over our lives and careers that the sheer number of possibilities is overwhelming. Don't worry, time will tell you what to do.
Without times like this you would not have any motivation to reinvent yourself, to resort to the scary, wild, risky, liberating and ultimately thrilling things that fulfill you.
Since you have a tendency to repeat yourself, you will without a doubt, just as before, find a way out of this lull.
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