Craving

These past few days have been rough. Much of my time has been spent abiding in alternating states of depression, anger, frustration, and craving. I have come face to face with intense identity issues. I feel dissatisfied with myself. Externally I am tired of this current manifestation of my appearance, I have been in this skin long enough to know when I get tired of these external factors it is indicative that something internal is happening.

I am uncomfortable. I just want to escape these feelings. I just want to know what it going on. Time and time again when these states occur it tends to be just before something powerful happens in my life. Things get really bad and then the flood gates of enlightenment open and relief springs forth. Its always darkest before dawn.

Last night I was reading Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott's journal of her son's first year. This book has been one of my best friends post-partum. Her honesty has helped me feel normal. A passage I read last night encapsulated so well a large aspect of what I have been feeling as of late:

The slow pace and all this rumination wear me down and bore me and make me desperately want a hit of something. Adrenaline, say, [...] or some big professional pressure, like a deadline I'm just barely going to be able to make. I want to check out. I do not want to be in the here and now with God and myself and all that shit. I know that this is where all the real blessings and payoffs are, that there is a good reason they call the now 'the present.' I want to learn to live in the now, I want to learn to breathe my way into it and hang out there more and more and experience life in all its richness and realness. But I want to do it later, like maybe sometime early next week. Right now I want a rush.

I have been terribly nostalgic. Thinking about different phases of my maidenhood. Those times when it was all about the rush. Of being so lost, searching so maniacally for the way. Now, I am more found than I have been my entire life and I miss that rush. I don't miss the lost-ness though, I remember it and I don't miss it. Today I felt a tinge of it, wandering around town looking for that right thing that would snap everything that is off kilter back into place. Its not to be found in this town though, or in any town really. Its inside, still, always. So I guess I'll keep chipping away at all of these rough parts, and be uncomfortable and the dawn will come at just the right time... Like Arlo's fleeting smiles, which are few and far between in this phase of his development. Just enough to bring tears to my eyes when he blesses me with one. They are like gold, they make it all worth it. 

Comments

[Cri]

You are so right. I am in the same place as well. I am trying to be more present and calm. Let these things work themselves out. Trying to not feel so frantic in my skin.

It's definitely a challenge. lol.
Your babe is so beautiful, and his smiles will start coming more and more before you know it!

[Goddess Leonie]

You are so utterly beautiful, darling

xoxoxoxo