Tag: life

The Journey

My therapist shared this poem with me today, and it really resonated with me.  There are some things you have to do for yourself, because you are the only one who will understand.

The Journey

by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Good Things

I’m in a very dark place right now, the darkest I’ve been in a very long time.  But while I’m willing myself to keep existing for the next five minutes, I want to make a list of good things in my life right now:

  • Package of new clothes I just received in the mail.  They are very cute and seem to be good quality, I hope to enjoy wearing them a lot.
  • Bought supplies for some good vegetarian meals to have in the next few days.
  • Linda Linda
  • Warm, soft cashmere sweaters
  • Cute/funny hair clips
  • Rabbit Ears stories from around the world I used to listen to when I was a small child (a few years ago I bought all of the ones I could find on Audible and it was a very worthwhile purchase)
  • I just found this album of Disney songs covered by pop punk artists, and listening to it made me smile, laugh, and even cry

No one talks about 39

I’m older now than I ever thought I would be.  I know that’s the nature of aging, and it’s been true since I turned about 26.  I couldn’t envision a life as an adult when I was younger, it was just inconceivable.  In my depressive moments I felt like this was because I wasn’t supposed to be here, that I was taking the place of someone else who deserved to be alive in my place.  Now I don’t feel that way as much, because I spend every year building the kind of life that I couldn’t conceive of when I was a child.

Some people around my age are terrified of getting older.  I do worry about getting older in that I worry about losing my abilities and I’m scared of dying and not existing anymore, but the people I hear voicing their fears about aging seem to be afraid of the concept of aging itself.  They’re the ones who think the 90s were a decade ago, can’t believe this film is turning 20 years old this year, or feel like they’re too young to be having children.  I’m not judging these people, their feelings are their feelings.  But I don’t feel the same about the concept of time passing.

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future…

I always think of that bit of music when people complain about time moving too fast or too slowly.  It’s a perception game, but time is always passing us by.

When I was a child, at the start of some summer vacation, my father posed this question to me: what if, at the beginning of every day, you were given one hundred dollars.  You can spend it, invest it, do whatever you want.  But at the end of the day, any money left over will disappear.  You can’t save it for another day, you only have it for that day.  What would you do?

I was irrationally upset that I couldn’t save the money, not because I had a goal in mind but because I felt like there was a “right” way to use the money that I hadn’t thought of.  It took some explaining for me to understand that he was talking about time, trying to impress upon me that time is a use-it-or-lose-it thing.

I’m older now than I have ever been, and I will never have more time ahead in my life than right now.  There is only the present moment and a vague idea of the future.  I don’t want to take any time or ability for granted, I want to enjoy every minute I have.

Burnout

About a week ago I started feeling kind of numb, like the amplitude on my feelings and responses to life was being flattened. I chalked it up to getting through a few months of emotional ups and downs (mostly ups to be fair, but it was still a rollercoaster) and decided to listen to my body and take more time to rest between work and the social obligations I had already planned. I was adamant that it didn’t feel bad to be numb, it just felt quiet and maybe a little disorienting (since I’m used to feeling things so strongly).

Unfortunately, in the next few days I experienced a few hard things one right after another. A project I had been devoting a lot of time and energy on at work had to be redone from scratch (with other projects needing to take a backseat), and I had a very uncomfortable interaction with someone I’m very close to. The shock of those important things going awry knocked me off my axis so much that I spent most of last week nonverbal, crying quietly throughout the day then collapsing on the couch to watch movies or TV shows until bedtime every evening. I barely had the strength to feed or bathe myself, and even with spending time with loved ones and friends over the weekend I haven’t recuperated much since then.

I’ve been on a years-long research journey trying to figure out if I’m autistic or not.  I’ve had friends on the spectrum (whether they had been diagnosed professionally or not) my whole life, and while I found it easy to get along with them most of the time (we had a lot in common!) I still felt like I was more neurotypical than they were.  I could ask other people about their interests and look like I was interested much more plausibly, I understood tact and how to soften my words to keep other people from getting offended.  But the older I got and the more I learned about autism, the more I started to see some of those traits in myself.

There are still some things that don’t completely resonate with me though.  I don’t have a totally inflexible sense of right and wrong, I can tell white lies if I need to or I feel like it’s what needs to be done to get through an interaction.  I don’t have “safe” foods that I always eat without fail (though I have foods I prefer over others) and I don’t have insurmountable sensory issues when it comes to food.  The more I think about it, I have gentler presentations of a lot of symptoms.  I’ve been discounting them for years because they weren’t totally debilitating.

Well, things are debilitating now.  I can’t put my feelings into words, so I can’t ask for help.  I get overwhelmed at work, but I don’t have the support or security to tell them how much I’m struggling.  I’m afraid they’re going to accuse me of lying about my capabilities to get this job, when I feel like the conditions of my job have changed so much that it’s destroyed my previous ability to pivot and solve problems. 

I’m worried that I’ll never get back to my old processing capacity ever again, that my brain, body, and soul are just damaged beyond repair.  Like if an athlete goes too hard too fast, ruins their muscles and joints, and is unable to do basic living because they didn’t take care of their body.  I tried to take care of my mind, but I’ve also been told from a young age that I can just do more than most people so the standards for me are different.  I didn’t practice rest or relaxation after a certain age, and I certainly didn’t do the work to figure out what my neurodivergent brain needs to rest and recuperate.

Ultimately, I feel like I don’t have time to rest.  I have work to do, I have bills to pay, and I have people to take care of (emotionally, not always physically).  I’m so worried that if I fall apart, the people who are around me will get resentful of having to take care of me (because I did a bad job) and they’ll leave me, and then I’ll really be in trouble.