It's been a few weeks since I've written. It's been hectic, and it's been emotional, and I've written several drafts but haven't gone through any of them in order to edit and publish, and for that, I am sorry.
However, I am not falling off the planet here again, so here I am, writing.
A lot has happened in the last two weeks, but mostly, my emotions have kind of spun around and finally settled in a place I'm still trying to find my footing in. It's been a hectic several years, and while people always seem to tell me that I seem great, and I, for the most part, have felt great, I've been coming to terms over the last few weeks with the fact that I have a lot of things that I have left unmanaged.
Last summer I experienced a day where I was faced with an issue I hadn't dealt with since my marriage. It was a silly conversation between myself and a friend of mine and something in me switched. When he asked what was wrong, I said I didn't know, and I was being honest. But something inside me had triggered and I went from sitting at my dining table crcking jokes to uncomfortable around the person I was most comfortable with. I promised I'd call and let him know when I figured out what was wrong, and I'm pretty sure I confused the hell out of him because who is upset without knowing why?
Well, the quick answer to that is girls. But in all seriousness, I'd never felt the way I did out of the blue before and I truly didn't know.
An hour and a half later I sent a text, apologized, and gave my explanation. The topic of our conversation had triggered an uncomfortable memory from my marriage and I went from entirely happy to extremely uncomfortable, hurt, and upset, in a split second.
The crazy part about it was that what upset me was something I hadn't been faced with since I had left my marriage and didn't apply in that moment. The crazier part is that I had entirely blocked everything about it out of my brain until that very moment.
What I came to learn was this: Our brains and our body's are amazing things, and in cases of trauma, we automatically shut out traumatic situations. Our brains block those things and they don't come back until we are able to handle them. In other words, we are only given as much as we can handle at any given point, regardless of what the world has actually served us.
What an incredible (and considerate) gift.
I'll be honest though, it didn't feel like a gift in that very moment. It felt more like a sabotage.
Thats a little bit how the last few weeks have felt. So many things have happened all at once and it has felt like an outpouring of events followed by an outpouring of emotion and man, can I just say, I am exhausted?!
My last post I wrote about how I was tired of being hyper vigalent all the time. I said I was tired of staying one step ahead and making sure I'm doing and saying the right thing for everyone else. And in case you don't know me, when I hit a point and make a decision, I move forward.
What does that mean? That means that since finally coming to those realizations a few weeks ago, that it has felt like my entire world round me has been crumbling. The crazy part to this is that it hasn't been the kind of crumbling where you are stammering trying to catch the pieces. It feels more like the demoing of a home in order to rebuild - and I'm holding the sledgehammer.
For three weeks I have stopped trying to carry the world. Instead, I have focused on stopping the conversations in my brain that are taking place in order to prepare for the conversation that is potentially about to happen. I have worked hard to stop the spiral and focus on the present moment. I have put my phone down and made myself consciously stop my brain instead of using my phone as a distraction from my world - a habit I got into in order to escape the beratings that came with my marriage.
It sounds pretty good, right? Like, wow, she's been just turning it off and moving forward - so strong. Ha. Well, let me tell you.... It has been hard. And what is all of a sudden happening is instead of being able to focus on controlling the outcome to everything, I am forcing myself to trust in The Plan. You know.... The real one, that I know nothing about. And that is hard. I have always been great at planning my days and my weeks and my years, but now I have to let go of it because let's be serious - My Plan Didn't Work Out. That doesn't mean it wasn't a good plan, it just means it wasn't the right plan. And I'm learning to allow myself to not make the life plan, because that's just a whole lot of let down waiting to happen and I am, at this point, certain that my plans aren't as good as His plans anyway.
Back to the sledgehammer though. Have you seen Sing? I have (because I have a kid) which also means I've seen it about 15 times. Anyway, there's a scene where the glass on the stage starts to crack, and all the water comes rushing through the theater, essentially wiping it down to its bare bones. That's how life has felt in the past few weeks. But, the thing that happens when everything is wiped away to a clean slate is, you are then ready to rebuild and while that sounds great, in all honesty it feels messy and I don't like when my life feels messy.
To me, there are two things you can do about mess: You can clean it up, or you can ignore it.
Honestly, I think that's how I've always treated mess in my life. I've either fixed it, gotten rid of it, or entirely ignored it until I've had time to deal with it. That, however, hasn't been working for me lately. I made a decision two years ago to get out of my mess, but in order to make sure I don't ever end back in it again, I have to actually deal with it - an every day conscious decision to learn and grow. And while that has felt like a mess the last few weeks, today, I got a little bit of a reminder in a text from a friend. It read:
PROGRESS IS MESSY.
And while the text was simply referring to a comment I made about the mess my daughters room was because I'm rebuilding her bed, it hit me like a ton of bricks and filled my heart with this unexplainable hope and joy because, progress IS messy, and while life has felt like a mess lately, I am finally stripping away at all the crap, and I was reminded this morning that I am making progress, and that right there feels good.
So, to everyone out there who is going through a mess, embrace it. Here's to the mess. But more than that, here's to life after the mess, because it's GOOD.