If you’d like to eavesdrop on my inner monologue, consider letting me read to you—just press play on the voiceover above. Includes select footnotes, excludes headings.
This entry was originally drafted on 4/21/23.
The waters recede.
Today I woke up feeling…better.1 Not like I had superpowers or anything, but I felt dry. Like I’d been wearing cold wet socks all week, but today when I woke up they were fresh out of the dryer.
The metaphorical wet/dry dichotomy has been with me all week as well. I wrote a haiku about it the other day:2
a wet exterior
a dry center
i am a river rock
Today I have the sensation of settling into a comfortable babble, after having raged with the flood waters of a 100-year storm. I am in a different place than I was a week ago, moved by the river’s turbulent intensity, but nestled once again on gentle banks.
Now is time to take stock of my new surroundings. Where do I find myself?
The waters meet the Dunes.
I think of the Litany Against Fear from the Dune universe:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
The swollen tides of emotional chaos unleashed by this month’s Moon3 have passed over me and through me…and here I remain, not much worse for wear. Maybe even a little better than before—with a smoother surface and softer edges, like a river rock. But what does that mean? My eternal questions are still omnipresent:
Who am I now? What am I doing here?
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the Dune series of books has been kind of an important spiritual anchor for me over the past year of my life. The books have presented themselves to me at the right time, in the right way, and with the right incentives to help me re-frame a lot of my personal outlook.4 To me, the Dune books feel dry in the same way as my metaphorical socks…
Mixing metaphors.
Anyway…I can’t seem to catch the train of this thought.
I’m trying to talk about this sense of relief that I feel. It’s expansive. Like a particle of sand now free-floating in the atmosphere, when once it was pressed under the weight of mountains. It’s a disorientingly neutral feeling that gives no guidance whatsoever, creating an unpleasant sensation of paradox. There was only one way to behave when you had a mountain’s inertia, but as a grain of sand the possibilities are infinite—you could be turned into concrete, or blown into someone’s eye, or simply re-buried under innumerable others like you.
To re-anchor the metaphor a little bit: Existing on the razor’s edge of a meltdown for any moderately extended period5 of time, like I sometimes do because of biology, really clarifies my immediate priorities. I have spent recent days hanging on to my emotional control valves for dear life, flipping levers and pushing buttons and letting off steam and trying to keep control of the roiling engine inside my PMSing mind without causing too much collateral damage.
I always learn so much about myself during these times; about my reactions, my needs, my visceral truths. But it’s exhausting and I’m not in control of the process—so when it’s finally possible for me to re-take command at the end of the week, I don’t know what to do with it. I just want to shut everything down and take a nap.
It’s disoriented relief, with no idea what happens next.
Listening to my guts.
Now that the roaring flood / runaway train / whatever metaphor I’m currently using is calm and I have settled back into myself, I am faced with a life full of choices to be made arbitrarily. Well, perhaps not arbitrarily, but…the emotional cues are so much subtler than before and take so much attention to notice! Here, in the place I find myself, there are no thunder-claps or torrents of water to spur emergent action.
Here, everything is dry and still.
Here, the only sounds are a warm breeze rising and falling to the gentle rhythm of nature’s beat…and my own softly ticking clock.
What do I do? What if I don't do the right thing? How do I prioritize? Is NOT doing something an option? To be safe, I’ll wait for someone else to render an opinion on what I should do. That way I’ll know at least one person approves.
But that way madness lies. I can’t keep living my life swinging between extremes, trying to make people understand me, so they will approve of me, so I will feel able to do what I need to do. Can’t I cut out the middle-man and approve of myself from the get-go? Why is that so hard? Am I not “at least one person” capable of generating the necessary approval for my own actions?
Maybe I can learn to exist and function with a certain level of intensity of experience humming in the background at all times, like I have the volume turned up on life. That way, I might be able to hear my guts talking to me…but hopefully not shouting at me, like they do at that-time-of-the-month.
There’s gotta be a middle ground.
Maybe if I can more clearly hear my internal communication systems—my instincts and intuition—it will finally become easier to listen to myself than it is to listen to someone else.
Better than what, you ask? Idk. Better than before.
Lately I’ve been very into writing haikus. Distilling a sensation into as few syllables as possible is apparently quite a satisfying activity for me…I’m sure I’ll share more of them in the future.
Yes, I mean my period.
Admittedly, when the movie came out they started hawking the books pretty hard. But that event, which obviously had nothing to do with me personally, still happened at a point in my life where I really needed it and (since we are all centers of our own universes) that makes me feel important and seen by the cosmos.
Pun intended.