Sunday, September 23, 2012

Back in the Saddle

After a bit of a dry spell, I have decided to get back into writing. Not that I really stopped, but it’s been a little more free-form than what I post. You could say I have been lacking the inspiration to put myself out there.

As usual, I have been doing a lot of reading, and as usual I often read to make sense of my life and experience, but in the last number of months there has been a more intensive quality to the soul searching I have been doing. I have felt that my life is not mine to live. I have often wondered who I am and been quite alarmed that I really can’t answer that question. I have felt that this transition period is still a transition not because I am actually still in transition, but because I have not yet recognized what I need to in order to know that I am moving forward. I have felt helpless and useless, that for some reason I am not allowed to do what I want to do, and I have felt that my brain is somehow being rewired.

What does that mean, you may wonder? Well, it was an exhausting process of trying to concentrate on something practical and 45 minutes later finding that I had been staring into space…or actually falling ‘asleep‘. I would begin meditation and find that I had ‘slept’ for a 10 or 20 minutes and afterward feel, relieved, recharged or sometimes as though I had been visited by people whose faces were still vivid in my mind’s eye and who crammed my brain with more information than I could handle. I refer to ‘sleep’ because it is a state of mind/consciousness that I experienced is not one that I am not familiar with. I can best equate it to that nap-like light sleep the brain slips into before you go into a deep sleep, but not. Perhaps I will have more to say on this at a later date, as I continue to search for an accurate description.

Anyway, I was learning a new level of patience when it just stopped. It was a Friday morning not long ago; I got up and began to struggle through my day as usual, and a little after lunch I felt lighter. By dinner, I thought ‘I feel different now’, and the next day I tentatively recognized that it was over. Say tentatively, because I waited to see if, perhaps it was a hormonal shift, then I looked at the weather to see if I had recovered from a mild form of seasonal affective disorder, and then I looked for some other mood altering shift in my life. After a few weeks I accepted that the months of rewiring were finished.

Now that things feel relatively stable, I am left to sort out who I am and what I want. The task feels daunting.