I can feel myself becoming something else. There is a change within me that I have never experienced in my entire life. It’s kind of confusing. There is a quietness that I am almost confusing for depression. There is a stillness that I am experiencing that I feel like I could mistaken for laziness. I don’t know what to make of any of this.
I feel like I should be treating whatever this is with bandaids. With medication. With therapy. I don’t know what to call it and without a name how do I know how to even treat this?
Is this what learning is like? Maybe I’m just stressed because life and school is just so overwhelming right now. Maybe I am just normal and that is it. Why do I have to give everything that I am experiencing a name?
Because that’s all I have ever experienced in my past. Labels. I lived inside of this box where I had given myself thousands of labels and I stayed in that box. I became a girl in a box just covered in labels. And now I am something different, because I no longer live in a box. This is all still so terrifying to me.
Maybe this is just my midlife crisis. I turned 37 yesterday and everything was so perfect. So relaxed. I spent the day with my boyfriend doing stuff that I wouldn’t normally be able to do because I have been so busy lately. I feel like there is not enough time. But yesterday there was.
And I stumbled upon something that made my birthday feel so complete, because no matter how full my life is – the truth is that I have a hole in my heart from where my daughter is absent.
I found her music that she wrote and sang and I stumbled through her life for a few hours. It was like medicine. It felt like it was a gift to me and that was enough, because today when I went to stumble through her life again I wasn’t able to. I feel like the universe gave me a few hours window of access to her world and it was like medicine.
My cup often feels empty because I am drinking so fast from it and forgetting to fill it up. But yesterday my cup was overflowing and today I know that I need to be in charge of refilling my own cup – that is my duty, and nobody elses.
I am changing so rapidly. I don’t know who I am as a person anymore but I can feel a wholeness that I never even knew that I could experience in this life.
I thought I was born broken, but now I know that to not be true. There is nothing broken about me. I am just like everyone else out there.
Just trying to figure out how to stay out of that damn box, and keep my cup sufficiently filled.
Becoming Brave 