The signs were there the whole time, you just didn’t notice them.
When we expand our awareness, our world opens up.
2006: Remedial English Class with Hippie Professor
Writing wasn’t about filling up a page. It was sharing what you see and experience in the world in the most vivid color, in text. I learned it was my job to create imagery with my words. It’s not enough to have words on a page. They aren’t just symbols put together to make words, to make sentences. They are pieces in an evolving language that can have as much movement as a dancer. Just like words, the pieces of life on earth are moving and showing meaning. There is so much around us, showing us the incredible miracle that is our life on this planet, and sometimes we don’t see the signs.
Cut to: 7 years later, anxiety/mental breakdown.
I spent so much time in my head, thinking about the next time I would be frightened, or when I would be in danger, I couldn’t see the beauty of the world that I was living in. I needed help escaping the trenches of my thoughts. Those pathways scraped deep in worry, like stones worn smooth in worry- I had to get out, I had to rebuild.
The path to recovery wasn’t anything like escape, however. I had to face my real fears head on. I had to change so many obsessive behaviors that I thought were habits. It was time to grow out of that shell I had been accustomed to, to blossom and fly free of everything. There was no lion chasing me, there was no zombie apocalypse, and there was no infection sweeping the globe that would make me miserably sick and die.
It turns out that the world keeps on moving, even when you’re in your own depressive stasis. So when someone reaches into you hobbit hole, exposing some of the sunlight, it makes you remember what is so glorious in the world outside your head. The obsessive behaviors were so absorbent. The more I broke the pattern, the worse I felt in the moment, but the better I felt the next day, and the day after that.
Cut to: 2 years, after break down.
I deeply breath in the crisp air, I hear the birds chirping, singing their ancient songs to one another, I feel the rumble and rotation of the earth.
I notice street signs on the side of the street that are facing me–they were there the whole time, but I wasn’t looking for them there. Such a metaphor for life.
Sometimes we aren’t ready to see. Sometimes we don’t see until it is shown to us. Either way, we have to keep our eyes and hearts open, looking for the goodness around us.
Just like when you are searching for all the bad in the world and you find it, when you look for the good, it’s always right where you left it.
(It’s the secret!)
cut to: Present
I spend way too much time with my face in my phone. My head stuck in a facebook fishbowl. I needed a better reason to stop waking up and looking at other people’s lives. I would lay around and look at my phone for hours, my hands falling asleep and in pain, but I would re-position and keep scrolling. So then, my hands start falling asleep every night, I know I have to cut back on the phone business.
I JUST declared my plan of action for 2015, and now my hands fail me. I was going to make SO MUCH jewelry for an event I have in just one month–but I have to rest my hands so I don’t create permanent damage. I’ve been sleeping on my hands, my money makers, I’ve been scrolling away my perfectly talented and nimble fingers, because I just have to look at other peoples lives on our collective-but-separate consciousness online.
Enough is enough.
We look to what we feel to indicate what is happening, but often our body cautions us, but doesn’t halt us.
Eventually, our body completely stops us in our tracks so that we can sit down and really look at what we are doing in life to make it say, “HAY! Sit down for a second, you’re moving too fast, not treating me right, and I won’t stand for it!”
When will we listen to the early warning signs? When we recognize them.
So then, we re-learn how to treat ourselves kindly, and use these meaty body computers well and efficiently for this short jaunt on planet earth.
So now I say it, 2015 is the year of breaking habits that hurt, and starting habits that help.
Do you have any habits you want to break? Have you successfully broken any habits in the past? I want to know!
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