Imagine my life as a giant pair of scales, with little me standing on the fulcrum with one foot on each crossbar.
My job is to balance these scales, shifting my weight from one bar to the other to keep everything beneath me in balance. sometimes, it's easy. sometimes it's very, very hard. And sometimes i lose my balance and I fall one way or the other, tumbling into whatever's unbalanced me, with either terror or delight.
and sometimes, i jump off.
you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here
I can't decide if i've really jumped off this time, or if the art of balancing myself has suddenly become a hell of a lot easier. But suddenly, it seems like all of the energy I generally use on keeping everything stable has been freed up.
If I've jumped off, then i'm wallowing in delight. If i'm still balanced, I'm standing on the pivot point on one toe, a beatific smile on my face like in a painting of a saint.
But either way, i'm happy. i think i'm not going to worry about it for the time being.
Someone told me once, "you can feel happiness in the same measure that you can feel pain." I don't think i believed her at the time, wallowing as i was in the swamp that was my past and present. I couldn't spare even half an eye to glance at the sky, and when i flew it was always away from something.
you will solve this problem with flight. perhaps not in flight, but by flying.
I still can't stop being amazed at the way my life feels right now. Okay, it's not perfect, I still get tired and sore and tense, i miss Loba and Chris and Misha and bunches of other people, I occasionally dwell too long on the mistakes of the past.
But i also feel amazingly all right. It's like...
i know what it's like.
I've stopped waiting for the other shoe to fall. I've stopped waiting to be punished for every good thought and feeling i have. i've stopped feeling self-concious about the way the shape of my face changes when i smile.
I can still feel the potential for depression lurking in me. I know that it'll probably never go away completely; i've spent too much of my life with my brain wrapped in it for it to ever go away entirely. I still have my moments of terror and self-hatred, especially when i overextend myself. If I relax, i can still see patterns in the air.
and i know I've written about this a lot over the pst few months, but I still can't get over it. Nothing in my whole life has prepared me for the prospect of being healthy, either emotionally or physically; i don't have a lot to go on in my own experience to give me a how-to guide. I feel like this should frighten me, but somehow it doesn't.
Then again, i'm getting used to the "This should make me feel X but actually i feel Y" thing. I
Take, for example, jealousy.
I have known from the beginning that i am a very jealous and posessive person. I didn't have a lot that i considered mine when i was a kid, but what I had i guarded zealously. when i started dating, I was very posessive of my boyfriends, constantly tormented by the thought that they were going to leave me, and I dumped several of them as a preemptive move. (Okay, there were other reasons, but that was a big one.)
Unfortunately, there's a small problem with this little piece of self-knowledge.
It doesn't seem to be true any more.
i mean, I can concieve of jealousy. I remember jealousy. It just doesn't seem very relevant for some reason. I mean, for me to feel jealous i would need to feel threatened, and there are very few things that make me feel threatened these days. And when i do feel threatened, i always have a good reason even if it's not immediately obvious to me.
And jealousy springs out of threat; without threat I don't really feel jealousy. And even though Loba is so very far away, my missing of her is less a thing of hard heavy longing and more a thing of warm fuzzy feather blamkets; not so much clutching as the knowledge that whatever happens, it'll be okay.
The bizarre thing is, I kind of feel like i should be jealous or totally posessive or something. I can't decide if it's societal conditioning or just what I sort of expect or what. It just doesn't feel how i expected it to feel.
Which is more than okay by me. I like how this feels, it feels wonderful!
Best reason to read Metajournals:
Dig Deeper brings to light all sorts of obscure journals. I love obscure journals.
how goes the war?
At about 11 AM our side decided that we were all done with Monday and went home.
