When I Disappear

I disappear from blog land (and real life) when there are no words. Or more accurately, when there are too many. Writing for me is the conduit for my best self, my true self. When I can't make sense of life, I get bogged down, run over, tired. And the words, I can't make sense of them. They are just this jumble of STUFF inside me and it hurts to let them out.

For the last six months, I have struggled to write. It is has been a big summer for me. Cosmic, even. Life feels very large and very unwieldy. I have been pushed to the brink emotionally. I have felt cracks and fissures down to my very core. In many ways, how I do life has become insupportable to me. More than any time in my life, I have felt like I might hop on the crazy train for a permanent ride into the void.

My job, my profession, my weight, my marital status, my goals, my dreams---all of it feels in jeopardy or close to crumbling. It has brought me to the edge. I've always thought I was comfortable with liminal spaces, the grays between the black and white truths, the emotional turbulences of living--until this summer. I don't want to be comfortable there any more. It is like I am crying out for ACTION, for LIGHT, for LIFE. I want boundaries, and sharp edges and clarity in my definition of myself. I want to depend on who and what I am. I don't want to be up for constant revision, constant change, constant remodeling. I want to be me and inhabit this world on my terms. 

One time period in my early twenties (for about a year), I felt comfortable in my skin. I was doing and living life deeply. For the first time ever, I was living this way: 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

So much of my life has been holding back, waiting, sitting on the sidelines, trying to figure out how to do this life. Many, many times I have felt out of sync, out of rhythm in my own life. Like I don't belong. And the real life--the one I am supposed to be living--is taking place on a parallel line in an alternate universe. And I am living the WRONG life. 

It has been crazy-making. To never feel comfortable, or at peace, or RIGHT in my own life. Or to feel that way so rarely that every time I get a glimpse of it, I feel like I am bathed in a cool, refreshing waterfall and I never want to leave. I want to live in that lush paradise forever. 

Ha! This is me making sense of the jumble. That's where I've been. And on the practical front, I have regained 45 of the 60 pounds I lost. And for that, there are just no words. 

Soon. But not yet.