student

I feel like my last couple of posts have been a little... odd. All over the place. Then again, "all over the place" is pretty much my signature style. Today I do not feel as scattered. Or at least I feel calmer. The past week was a bit of a blur. It's not as though I was extremely busy, but the days leading up to Christmas tend to blend together to form one giant candy cane of anxiety. Why? A myriad of reasons, I'm sure. Nostalgia, mainly. Forgotten family and friends. Unmet expectations, mostly of oneself. Drowning in advertisements screaming at you to purchase their product so you can be happy and satisfied in life. And beautiful. Buy the beauty, consume the crap, kill your soul. MAYBE I'm being somewhat dramatic. Christmas was actually, overall, fairly decent this year. I don't have much to complain about except for how distant I was. I know my distance was due to restlessness which was due to anxiety which has been a serious issue of mine for I don't know how many years. A lot. I can give myself a break here and there -- some things are outside of my control. But the things that aren't outside of my control? It's time I start taking responsibility for the decisions I make. That's all.

It's getting old going to sleep each night trying my hardest to distract myself from my thoughts. I realize that's kind of a normal human thing to do -- that's why we read, take pills, watch television. But there comes a point when my distractions pile up and topple over, leaving everything so bare and brutal. That's the point when I can no longer ignore whatever it was I was ignoring for so long. And, as you can imagine (and have probably experienced, my sweetheart), it's entirely overwhelming. When you haven't practiced facing what is, the moment when you are forced to face it becomes a foreign and empty feeling, a feeling that is damn hard to get rid of.

So I won't even try to get rid of it. These feelings are going to appear over and over again, I fear, especially in the next couple of months when I begin to really take a closer look at my life, to examine my weak spots and touch what hasn't quite yet healed. The weak spots contain wisdom, however, because they are so raw. When the wounds don't heal, that means there is more left to be learned. It's up to us to become the star student or the dunce. I am tired of sitting in the corner.