Or is it crashed and sunk? I think that probably has a more...Titanic feel. My state since I woke up this morning. From the first bit of awareness, cranky, irritated, achy, feeling physically sort of poisoned. Up and out of bed, carrying that cranky energy with me through a variety of tedious tasks that somehow seemed to need to be done. Mostly household related, but some teaching. And after a sort of early lunch I completely ran out of steam, and went to bed. And scrolled through social media a bit, but mostly either slept or half slept, and finally rolled back onto my feet at about 4, feeling a depth of sadness, sorrow, loss, at-sea-ness, and bewilderment. Some of it definitely around L. Melody Beattie's Dec 5 entry in The Language of Letting Go, in part:
"It is time to let it go. It is time to let him or her go. That doesn't mean we can't love that person anymore. It means that we will feel immense relief that comes when we stop denying reality and begin accepting. We release that person to be who he or she actually is. We stop trying to make that person be someone he or she is not. We deal with our feelings and walk away from the destructive system."
This sounds great, and I know I am in the middle of it, and have been in it for months. It's definitely not linear. I had scheduled a phone conversation with a new friend of mine for this evening, and had to face the plain fact that I was just not in a place to talk. Canceled the call. I think these extreme ups and downs are part of why I rarely schedule any interaction with people, other than for my teaching of course. The Saturday tidal wave of emotion in particular, after a week of showing up and performing the role of teacher, mentor, colleague, is a definite part of the highly elliptical emotional orbit of my life. I was sorely disappointed to be swallowed by the pain I was in, as I was also looking forward to the conversation, a rare thing for me, hating the phone as much as I do. But it's just not possible for me to even articulate what I am under, when I am under the way I was this afternoon. Of courswe, I do not practice talking about how I feel, even with very close intimates. My usual strategy is to isolate, try to sort it all out myself, and avoid contact in the meantime.
So I went deeper in there, and worked out for more than two hours. Working out, which, at my age, includes a ton of stretching, always gets me right into the core of my heart's sadness. All the sadness and loss that I carry, I carry in my body. When I start making contact with that, it is deep and vast, dark and aching. But I know that the only way out is through, as cliched as that is. I figured, also, that a huge part of the sparking anger of the week was just my way of functioning while in the midst of grief. I find also flashes of grief around the death of my father, the death of my brother in law, the fact that I didn't get a research or college job but I'm back in secondary teaching, the grief over the loneliness of LA, the loneliness of the pandemic, and the frustration at not being more available for new opportunities, new people, and my new life. I do indeed tend to push sorrow down and make a field of anger or irritability around it instead, and end up functioning better thereby.
Now, at the end of the workout, there's a little more peace mixed in with the sorrow. It has taken me a lot of my life to learn that my feelings are embodied, that my body is the ground of my emotional life, and that I somatize everything. A huge part of my addictive behaviors, whether substances, or sex, or love and romance, is rooted in the desire to get out of my body, because by doing so, I get away from my sadness and anger. Usually the sadness is the thing I most want to escape. It's interesting sometimes to recall how sad alcohol used to make me, however, especially in the last 5 years or so of my drinking. But there's an ersatz kind of sadness in the wallowing self pity that comes with being drunk. It was never healing, and nothing ever moved through my blood or muscles or breath.
So I'll chalk up this Saturday crash to the tidal losses that were at bay all week, repressed because of work. I am still getting used to the energies of work week versus weekend. Graduate school was so much more amorphous. I am still in a lot of pain and sadness around L. The weird news that A had a shitty several months of fucked up relationship life with her new person and that they broke up also stirred up a ton of weird emotions for me, the entire gamut, from gloating and schadenfreude to pity, compassion, sadness, anger, and a ton of memories of how she had treated me at the end, almost four years ago now. Which was, basically, like shit.
The above a pic from 13 years ago in Baja, standing next to a giant cardón, Pachycereus pringlei. I bet that gorgeous giant has hardly changed at all. Next time I go down, I'm going to try to find it again. It was just outside of the tiny central desert town of Cataviña. How strange to be human and to think of 13 years as a long time. Or four years. Or 100 years.
❤️