Notes Along The Journey: August

I keep wanting to be someone that I'm not yet. I want to be through this stage of healing where everything is about how hard it is to get through the day. Where all of my energy goes towards the things that help me to maintain my sanity. I want to have the emotional energy to invest in my world, to educate myself, to step beyond this story of trauma and recovery. To get to that place where who I am is healthy.

It infuriates me that I'm not there yet. It sickens me how self-absorbed my world is much of the time. And this isn't me going on a rant against myself. This isn't some passive aggressive victim plea for you to build me up. This is the truth. The truth of where I am right now. I'm in the middle. The in-between. And I've written about it before and I'm going to have to keep writing about it.

Writing about the struggle to not give in to the old ways that allowed me to survive. Yet also not using energy I don't have to uselessly fight things that take time to change. It's living in this place of accepting the now without losing hope for the not yet that I'm moving towards.

This week has been a week of being reminded of how bad it was last August. I don't want to confess how many seasons of Stargate Atlantis I've watched (three and a half) or how little I've accomplished from my to-do list for the week (none of it). But this is my reality. For today. I can beat myself up for it. Which I have been doing, at least a little bit. Even to type this I had to wrap my wrists up so that the pain from the weather changes doesn't keep me from being able to use my hands. I'd love to know why my joints ache like this. I struggle to not feel betrayed by my body and wonder if this is my body punishing me for all the ways I didn't care for it until this past year. I don't have answers. And if you've been reading here for any length of time, you know how much I hate not having answers.

But. I made it almost two weeks into this month before I ended up in bed unable to function. That's two week I didn't get last year. I'm still able to write, although really I'm not entirely sure what value my words have to anyone else right now. I'm still writing. Still pushing publish. I haven't shut the world out or turned into a zombie. It's not as much progress as I want. This inching forward one exhausting step at a time feels ridiculous. Yet it's going forward. For the first time since I can remember I'm not stalled out just because of the calendar. That's never happened. All the work I'm putting in, being self-absorbed and micro-focused on my own healing, on my own becoming, is paying off.

So I'm going to keep showing up to whisper into the vast void of the internet. I choose to show up in my own life, as best as I can because I know that on my worst days, I need to read, to hear that others choose to show up and stare their dragons in the face. Your dragons probably don't look like mine. I'm going to tell you this anyway - you are not alone. I see you showing up, fighting to hold the scraps of yourself in the face of overwhelming odds. I hear you. You are not alone. (and neither am I)