Over the last two years I've had a particularly hard time of it with the depression and anxiety, often slipping into protective states of numbness. When I've not been numb, I've surfaced into pain, grief and fear and struggled to feel anything good. These are not ideal states from which to try and work out how to fix anything.
I've had a lot of pain to deal with, certainly. The last few years have brought some significantly wounding experiences, and I was hardly a cheery, untroubled person before all of that. Mostly I've been focused on the distress aspect of this in my efforts to find a way out. The numbness is about the only place I can go to escape, and that's not a solution that lifts me. It's just a coping mechanism.
It's only recently that it struck me that pain was never really the problem. I've endured plenty of emotional and physical pain along the way. I know how to weather that. I can make good assessments about what sort of price tag anything has on it. If you care about something, then sooner or later it will hurt you and there's no point expecting otherwise. I'd never been afraid of that in the past.
What I can't bear is paying a high price for something that gives me very little. I guess it's the difference between being a moth lured to a candle flame and a moth getting stuck on fly paper. I'm not afraid to burn. I used to push my body hard and pay with pain to dance at an event, or do something extraordinary like the Five Valleys Walk. There were no such opportunities in lockdown and I forgot how to even try.
I'm most myself when I'm prepared to do things that are glorious and outrageous, with no great anxiety about the trade-off. I used to be the sort of person who could love fiercely - people, places, creatures, ideas… and not care whether those things hurt me. It didn't matter whether I might break my heart over a lover, or an elderly cat, or a home I couldn't keep. What mattered to me was throwing myself in wholeheartedly in the first place. It means that I've mostly depended on my own ability to be enthusiastic and to make things happen.
I've come to the conclusion that burnout is my biggest issue, not the things that have grieved me. What I most need is to be more resourced, and to have opportunities to be enthused and uplifted by other people. Lockdown certainly didn't help with that as it cost me most of my access to live performance.
I've been looking after myself by reading more fiction. I've been moving towards people who cheer and uplift me and who bring me enthusiasm. We're looking at this as a household - how to be better resourced and how better to support each other. It's a work in progress. I eyed up something recently that is probably going to hurt me, but should also be wild and wonderful, and I remembered how I used to be someone who wasn't afraid of what it might cost me to truly feel alive.
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