Today I find myself desperately trying to hold on. Hold on to what, I’m not sure. I just have this feeling of holding tightly to something in my core habits or ways of being. It’s like I’ll lose myself if I let something out. I feel like a balloon, and if I let out even a little of what’s inside, I will lose everything.
I’m not sure what it is I’m afraid of, though I think I’m trying to keep from changing. So much of my life has changed that, perhaps, I’m seriously trying to keep something of my old life intact. I can almost see my hands clenched and tired, but still grasping tightly to this, something. I don’t want to let it out. It feels like, if I’m not careful, what little there is left of me will escape and there will be nothing left. An empty shell. Everything that I value will be gone and I will be just some kind of ghost, without substance, meaning or purpose.
Up until recently, I had structure and rhythm to my life. Things I had to do, was expected to do. Duties and obligations that filled the time and used up my days. They left me empty and frustrated, but I had a niche and my life had rhythm. Now that is all gone. No one depends on me. No one requires me. I seem to have ultimate freedom, but I am still trapped within my expectations and self-imposed requirements, all still based on what was. My work schedule changes every week, and there is no one around be that keeps a regular, daily or weekly schedule. I never realized how much of my life was structured around that weekly rhythm. I feel totally lost without it. I am having a really hard time keeping track of the days. It is so disorienting to not have a rhythm to life. It never really come home to be before how the internet and digital recording has done away with TV schedules. So that rhythm is gone as well. There was a certain amount of comfort in knowing that certain things would be happening on certain days and times.
I expect that this is a period of transition. At some point I will let go of what I was, as frighting and difficult as that will be, and become something else. I know, I know that most of what I miss really didn’t exist, it’s made valuable only by it’s loss. I didn’t like it when I had it, but now that it’s gone it seem infinitely more appealing than the unknown staring me in the face. On the other hand, I now find myself going back to my roots, writing and reading again, but not as I had done before. I find that I want to out in the world much more than I ever did before. I want to be with people, being alone is just plain lonely. In that sense, my current job is a godsend. I get to spend my time interacting with people all day long, and there are no important decisions to be made, everything is straight forward, right now, and I can completely forget about it when I go home. Nice.
Everybody knows that change is stressful. But it’s one of those things that is hard to grasp until it happens to you. I think this is probably the most drastic period of change I have ever gone through. This time, there is truly no one in it with me. Or, perhaps, there are, I just need to recognize them.
This change didn’t happen all at once, of course, things have been shifting for years. This was like the earthquake that happens after years of two forces moving in different directions. They finally reach the breaking point when something’s got to give. Then, when it does, the disruption’s considerable, as it shatters the pretense of sameness and normalcy. The break scattered my life into pieces and now I am trying to reassemble them, but I don’t know which pieces to keep and what the picture is supposed to look like.
I have be re-architecting myself for a while now, a process that had been hung up on the immovable forces in my life. Things I thought couldn’t be changed, or that I didn’t have the strength to change, or survive it I did. Yet change they did, and now, like pulling a thread from a scarf, I really don’t know when to stop. Everything is intertwined, and the fear, deep down, is that I will completely lose something vitally important, if I’m not careful. So I’ve dug my emotional fingernails onto some intangible core that I want to preserve. Ironically, I also have the fear that I’ll, by being afraid of change, I’ll make some commitment that locks me back into those old patterns that I’m trying to be rid of. Maybe my fingernails will hold, maybe they won’t and maybe they shouldn’t. My path forward is as clear a mud at night. I just hope that, in my stumbling and bumbling, I don’t make any mistakes that can’t be corrected.
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