Musing: Feelings

1) Sometimes I feel like I am drowning. Like there is not enough air, and that more and more weight is being put on my person. I'm a small person, but I carry around so much weight that nobody seems to see, or that people see and don't seem to check that is all my own, just like everyone else. Instead, I sometimes feel like I'm drowning, with no floaties, and more people, more weight, more things keep pulling me down. But I keep swimming. I keep fighting the undertow with a smile. I don't know why.

2) I fall apart. All the time. In my car before work, in my car after work, but for my full ten hour shift I keep it together. I take payments, I make arrangements, I excel. For ten hours straight I am competent and sure, I am precise and also nice...and then I fall apart. None too many people have seen me fall apart. Three. In 21 years three people have seen me fall apart. And those people have also seen me pull myself the f*ck together and get back to life, because it doesn't pause, there are no time outs and I have stuff to do. I fall apart and put myself together again. Every day.

3) I'm not all dark and twisty. The two previous, prevalent emotions may make you think so but I'm not. I laugh, all the time; I read some where that the people who laugh the hardest, who laugh so hard they cry, have known pain so that the joy is sweeter so maybe that's why. I still love listening to music, reading books (some I've already read), I still love driving with the sun roof open and the music blasting. I still love and enjoy so many things, things that distract me from the dry land drowning and the falling apart. I'm still a happy person, underneath everything else.

4) My boyfriend brings me joy. I sometimes get randomly mad at him for making me love him so much because before him? I didn't know I could feel like this, I didn't know I had such insane, beautiful, terrifying depths (also for him comandeering the left side of my bed, even when he's not here...just saying). He doesn't talk or say as much as I do, and he takes more time to think, but I adore him. I think he's wonderful, stubborn, sarcastic, funny and way too opinionated but I just adore him. Not like Jesus walking on water, but like a guy who has the key to a very tricky, very stubborn lock that leads to a room of new, exciting and super dope things. Yeah.

5) When the bad outweighs the good, when the hurt crowds around and beats up the joy, I become quiet and a bit more withdrawn. The ones closest to me sometimes take it personally; it's not as if I'm not there, but I'm not. I'll be on the phone with them, I'll be sitting in front of them, looking right through them, keeping me together. But even in doing that, I hear them, I hear what they need from me and do it without question. I don't know why, but I am always a safety net, even when I feel like my own net has holes so big I can fall through, even when I don't feel safe. So even when I'm falling apart, drowning on dry land, feeling the joy and the love and the abyss that threatens them, I am there for the people who I sometimes let be there for me. And then we start back at one, where the weight...and the lack of air...

I don't write as much as I used to. I don't know how to put into words every feeling, every thought and I don't want to as it makes them real. It makes them have weight and add more onto my little buoy of a soul that's already so weighed down. I am tired, and I fall apart but I put myself back together. I'm a strong person, a quiet, deeply feeling person. And how I feel about that is usually ambivalent but...usually? It sucks. But my eternal optimism, my belief that because I am good, and try to be better all the time, makes me believe, just like Nana says that trouble don't last always.

Don't forget to feel. It weighs you down, it hurts sometimes, and other times it's really amazing. Don't forget, in keeping yourself together by unloading on others, don't forget to check their baggage too, and if you love them (or even like them remotely) help them unload where you can. Above all, keep calm and keep moving; never ever stop moving. Take some steps backwards to assess, sprint a few yards forward and just... When you stop moving, you stop trying, and you never want to stop trying. Be the resilient kid who keeps building, even when they're running out of blocks, because that kid? Innovative. That kid? Will make something where there wasn't anything before. That kid, is going places. And so are you, kid.