Just One Of Those Things

Thank you for all of your sweet and encouraging well wishes. I am slowly but surely recovering from the overwhelming whirlwind of illness. Today has been the first day I've woken up and felt like me, clear headed and enthusiastic about the arriving day. It is nice to feel somewhat human again.

I missed an entire week of work which I've only done once before to go on vacation. It feels strange to have been gone for so long. It feels strange to be so close and yet so far. It feels strange to be so far removed from my own life, but perhaps I needed such a pause. Perhaps my little meltdown last Thursday was my body's gentle reminder to slow down, and perhaps ignoring it forced it to take more drastic measures. Sometimes we need to refuel.

Having spent the week in bed, I naturally spent most of yesterday feeling both sad and guilty. Seven days of my life, gone, wasted. Seven days without writing, or reading (well, as much as I would like), or exercising, or hearing a child's laugh, or really human contact of any kind with the exception of a visit from my mother. Seven whole days of being and feeling very useless in the grand scheme of things. Seven whole days I will never get back.

A friend of mine sent me an email recently asking me if I thought that my emotional stress was a result of over-analyzing myself. I'm sure that he's right, a large part of it is. I'm sure that if I stopped thinking so much I'd be able to let go more easily and more often, but the truth is, I wouldn't be me. The truth is, I don't think I'd necessarily be happier letting the heavy moments pass me by. The truth is, I don't think that I'd behold the beauty of my life with such reverence if I didn't also embrace the darkness. It's just one of those things. It's just feeling purely and deeply. It's just allowing myself to be exactly who I am, darkness as well as light, simply and utterly human.

As I stopped in the street and opened my journal to record the way the slants of light against the buildings ignited my heart, she asked me if I wrote the same way I thought, or thought the same way I wrote, I can't remember which. I considered it for a moment and realized that I'm so very unaware of my thoughts unless I am writing them down. My mind moves too quickly. It's difficult to keep track of much of anything. But when I'm writing, I slow down. I pause. I hold onto those slants of light in my memory as though they were everything, because they are. When I am writing, I am conscious of my life. When I am writing, I am alive.

And so a big part of that is over-analyzing my every emotion. A big part of that is agonizing over who I am, why I feel the way I do in any given moment, where I fit into it all. The day I wrote 'Break,' my mom called and told me to go back and read what I'd written over the past three months. I've been through a lot. I'm going through a lot. I've been wrestling with some pretty big ideas. I've been "trying to fit years of therapy and healing into three months of blogging," as she put it. Which is exactly right. This is how I deal with things. This is how I work my way towards healing. This is how I grieve for those seven days, gone.

Maybe he was right. Maybe that's ridiculous and we all just have those bad days without any rhyme or reason to it, but I guess I take comfort in knowing that months from now, I can look back upon this entry and see the sadness of my loss reflected in these words. I guess I like and need to be reminded of these cycles, of the way highs become lows and then highs again, of the proof that happiness is never as far away as it seems. I guess I need to write it in order to feel it, and to feel it in order to know I'm alive. I guess it's just one of those things.