Having recently gone under for my first surgery, ever, I’ve been forced to do nothing. Like literally nothing. Like the wake up with no alarm, no agenda, and just binge watch, eat, sleep, words with friends, stare into the black hole of your busy brain, kind of nothing. Something I have had no ability to do before, ever. Not because I was incapable or too busy, but because I chose to barrel through life without coming up for air. BUT I enjoyed every minute of that barreling. (worth it) There is something so freeing to just diving in and never looking back, burying yourself in mounds of tasks, most never to be completed. The organized chaos I’ve thrived in for over a decade. But as I have gotten older, and yes I have gotten older, because I’m a human person that ages. I have developed a higher sense of anxiety. That lose of control aspect of my life, had really taken a grip on my emotional being. Perhaps it was because I was really discovering who I was. The last year has provided an interesting dynamic into working on yourself, and when you are forced to do nothing AND possess a busy brain, you get REAL introspective. There is an interesting thing, the more you work on yourself, individually, and even professionally as an actor, the more you discover, the more wounds you uncover, and the more you release the traumas that you’ve buried, or maybe didn’t even know existed. Even as I sit here writing this, I realize that I am procrastinating a billion things, probably because my energy levels are low, BUT mostly because I literally had my face cut open, removed, and put back together 6 days ago. I didn’t really know that kind of trauma before. Or that I would have panic attacks after. So here I am. Sharing. That I am not okay right now. I have so much to look forward to. So much positivity in my life. But right now. And all the last 6 days. I have had to sit. And think. Or force myself to not think. Because the idea that everything is going to be okay, is just too hard to let sink in. Let alone settle. I know this is just a minor set back, and I know that the above is true, I will be okay. But right now I am not, and I suppose thats okay too.
So many of us run away from our feelings, instead of just feeling them. Just living with them.
Trust me. I did it for years. I hid behind dark music, dark clothes, piercings, whatever, because I connected to those things. Those external things were my safety net. They were what made me feel normal. It took me 3 decades to accept that feeling normal is an endless chase and a fantasy. I don’t want to feel normal, I want to feel like me, and nobody else. I’d say I’ve settled into that. I’ve allowed myself to just be, exactly myself. I might not always know what I am doing each moment, but I know who I am, and what I want. I don’t ever want to run away from my feelings, because feelings are what make me human, and like no one else. I say this, because I’ve experienced recently, and for most of my life, people close to me, who are what seems to me, “incapable of feeling,” and that sucks. It sucks to be someone who feels everything all at once, and to love those who will never meet you half way, not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know how. It took me three decades to learn, its not my job to teach them, and that’s okay too.
I sit here, for the first time, since surgery, feeling slightly better than I did yesterday, and I know I will feel slightly better tomorrow. I am trying to be present in each moment, because I’ve found that the more I keep trying to plan for tomorrow, the more disconnected from myself I feel. So maybe for now, I will just feel the discomfort fully, and keep putting off laundry, because I’m supposed to rest. Good enough excuse, eh?
Oh i know it feels.