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.

Dare to Be Extraordinary

I have come to realize that how I feel about things influences my thoughts in ways that are very important to be conscious of. I think I am becoming aware of ways I hold myself back by how I feel or what I believe, but I don‘t quite see them clearly.

I am currently looking for work and have been for a while. I have been shifting my career focus and things had been working out well, giving me the impression that I am doing what’s right for myself, but things seem to have changed. Though I still enjoy the work and continue to look in my desired area, things are not flowing as they have in the past and I am beginning to feel quite stuck. If I look closely I can feel that I have shifted. Somewhere along the way I stopped taking for granted that this was the right thing for me, and I stopped moving forward blindly and blissfully.

A few of months ago I started to ask myself bigger questions again. I started wondering what the point was. I started asking myself why I am on the planet. I started waking up to the fact that, although my work is enjoyable, it does not satisfy me to a significant degree. The words “dare to be extraordinary” entered my consciousness and would not leave. I tried to convince myself that I could be extraordinary in my work but, although that is certainly true, the dare does not nullify the quest to find the point.

During this seemingly huge transition I am looking for activities that resonate with something inside me, so that I can feel some relief from the intense dissatisfaction that permeates my being. I keep trying to move forward, to identify the things that are out of sync and to right them so that I can continue to move forward. I seek to understand myself, how I think and why I do things the way I do, and I try to understand my experience and my energy in a way that builds cohesion. I sometimes have a perspective on my life from which I am whole. When I don’t see it, I can still feel that it exists, but from my current vantage point I still see fragments.

Reinvention

I am in transition these days. It’s a familiar state, but I find that this time I don’t know what to do. I have known for a while that I have some unfinished business, but I have not really been able to identify much of it, and what I have been able to identify I have been unable to process. As a result, the baggage is getting heavy. Emotions used to come and go; their ebb and flow imbuing me with life, but it seems that in the last little while some things have come and not gone making me heavier and less alive. I decided to look for a therapist. I have known that I should for quite a while but, in the past it has not been an easy process to find someone who knows how to get past talking ‘about’ things to get to the heart of the issue. I don’t know why after 10 years I can no longer do this on my own, but whatever. Maybe there’s something I am just not supposed to do on my own.

So, here I am, lacking a sense of my future self and wondering if that’s why I am stalled. I am also not really sure that I know who I am right now - another good reason to stall out. Have I not been paying attention? Has enough changed to totally disorient me? Is it just my way of telling myself to sort things out before moving ahead in the wrong direction?


Although the state of transition is familiar, I don’t really feel familiar. As much as there are things that I know about myself and I have confidence in my ability to figure things out, I feel as though I don’t really know who I am. My tendency used to be to look for familiar, but that is not only extremely difficult, it means stagnating. In my quest to feel more alive it didn’t really work. In the absence of the familiar, it is easier to reinvent myself. However, in order to do that, things need to change; which things are still to be determined, but there will be change, and with that comes pain. I don’t like it but it doesn’t scare me anymore. I used to think pain was destructive, but once I started paying more attention to the bigger picture, I realized that it was actually transformative. What worries me now is doing it wrong, making bad decisions. Whatever I change about myself will affect all of my relationships. It is not my desire to affect them badly.