It's Been a While

I'm currently working on a short story that's taken me two months so far, and there's still more work to do. That's why I haven't posted here in a while. I can't say I've worked on it everyday, but I can say it's the hardest I've worked on any story in my life. 

This blog will be unedited word vomit about my life today. 

Uncertainty. 

This one word shakes me to my core. It haunts me. As a person with high anxiety and a tendency to obsess, this reality of our human existence affects me in acute ways. And I'm happy to know that other people feel this way too. 

I'm learning not to be fooled by those who say "I know what I want". They feel like they know what they want, and they make a decision to follow that feeling even when contradictory feelings arise from time to time. These folks are like "houses built on rocks" (some Jesus parable). And that's a good thing. With nothing to ground us, we become like leaves floating from one emotion to the next. 

Yoga teaches me this. As I suffer through poses that my classmates achieve with an ease I can only dream of, I confront a well of insecurity in my heart. It sometimes brings me to tears. This is what it means to be human: to not know, to be unsure. Muscling through and making life choices despite that feeling of uncertainty is sometimes a heroic act. 

Obsessive people cannot trust their feelings in the areas they obsess about. In most areas of my life, I can trust my feelings and intuition, but when I become obsessive or anxious, I have to re-align and come back to what I "know". I have to let the storm in my mind persist and watch it go by without assigning meaning to the storm or engaging with it. It's a weird feeling. 

Obsessive people like to think. It's why we obsess. So to choose not to obsess feels like leaving a problem unattended to. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're letting a thought be a thought without diving into it to uncover everything about it. Because at some level, we recognize that obsessions are only being fed by such efforts.

Meditation helps. Meds help. But training the mind to just "be" is a daily struggle. But it's worth it to live in the present moment. It's worth it to be a person who is not governed by ephemeral feelings but by values and choices. 

Anyway that's where I'm at these days. Hope everyone is doing well. Know you are not alone. We are all struggling with something.