The Weather is changing

It is supposed to be a warm weekend and I am both embracing it and dreading it. I love this time of the year but my body can’t always handle the heat. I had never really paid attention to my sensitivities and as I am watching my tiny human grow and how many sensitivities, she is currently struggling with I am realizing how much I have given to her and while I have worked really hard to not feel shame and guilt for passing this to her it doesn’t feel great sometimes.

I had a tough night last night, my brain was on fire with thoughts, so many thoughts. There are so many nights that sleep comes to me but then others where I am unable to rest my brain. I had therapy yesterday for the first time in a couple weeks and it was like breathing again. A complete sigh of relief. I really did need to talk to my therapist badly and not because things are bad but more because she is part of that self-care routine that is desperately needed to survive.

We spent a lot of time talking about next steps and how does one do that. I know that likely sounds silly but it is a huge area of concern for me. I don’t know what moving on would feel like and therefore I am unwilling to even contemplate it. I knew what I wanted there was absolutely no doubt in my heart and mind about it. What I didn’t know was how to execute all the things and more importantly I wasn’t ready to show up as a healthy partner. I was unwilling to acknowledge that I wasn’t ready and I was so unkind so often and no one ever deserved that. She didn’t deserve that. I often reflect on what was tolerated in an attempt to keep us pieced together even in the small ways we were. The amount of self-betrayal she tolerated, that I let be a normal thing, never had to be that way. I know that dwelling on the past isn’t necessarily productive but it has helped me recognize how I want to be in partnership and what I am no longer willing to allow a future partner to do on my behalf.

I don’t necessarily believe that anything was resolved yesterday by having a conversation about what moving on could look like and I really think that is because I am not truly ready to do that. I have spent many nights debating with myself what would it feel like to go out into the world and immerse myself into something I’ve never done or engage with people I don’t know and what I have come to realize about myself is that I don’t want that life. I want quiet. My ideal way to spend time has changed so dramatically that I am very selective in how I want to show up in the outside world.

What I want isn’t fancy, what I want is to be comfortable. I finally learned to take things slow. To feel the moments, I am in rather than chase the next thing that may bring me entertainment. I mean in a lot of day-to-day stuff; I still move quick. Getting things done, seeing clients, juggling responsibilities, all of that still moves quick but when the time to settle comes, I revel in those moments. I enjoy the comfort of a comfy bed, a good book, and just being with myself. There are often moments I get lonely and I would want to do these things intertwined with the person I’m with but since that isn’t my reality at this time, I enjoy the freedom of being with myself and exploring that even further. Eventually, time may change my circumstances. And if and when it does it will hopefully be with someone who shares in the same things. I don’t know if that is realistic or not but what I know now that I didn’t know is that I won’t settle for something that doesn’t fit. I learned way too much about the importance of being still that I am not sure that I can ever go back or quite frankly that I want too.

The amount of learning I do daily, the amount of self-reflection is astounding sometimes. There are days I am working through an interaction and I am left speechless with myself. Each time makes me more and more aware of my role, and what I need to do to show up healthier. My verbalization of my needs has grown tremendously. My communication skills have improved and mostly I am more and more regulated than ever before. And yet the work will continue until my final breath.

I feel sad sometimes about all that has happened. To have things go so wrong when I wanted the complete opposite of it and yet I can’t help but wonder if without all the bad some of this good would not have been possible. And even with that I can’t help but feel heavy because the loss is heavy and painful and at times debilitating. Paralyzing even. These times I feel this way I can’t help reflect on a happy memory. One in particular comes to mind with books, breakfast, and stillness. And those memories remind me of that reason I feel the way that I do today. It took my entire nervous system collapsing, rebooting, and settling for me to realize what I actually wanted my time to look like and how I wanted to spend it and that without removing all of the busy work that I was engaging in, I would never have gotten to this point. I would never have, had the time to focus on myself enough. Letting go of a job that was draining me was the catalyst to making my desire for time, presence, self-work, and healing possible. I hadn’t realized how impossible it would have been otherwise until I was no longer in it.

I could attribute all of my healing to the pain and grief I have felt but in reality it was a perfect storm of all the events together that brought upon the hardest, most complicated, yet extremely exquisite challenge/changes of my life.