This Girl That Place

Have you ever had so much time on your hands that you felt like you were going to explode? Yeah, I hadn’t either until recently. I want to capture how I’m feeling in this moment because I might be tempted to punch myself in the face if I ever say “I just need a few minutes to myself” again….in this life time. I see friends on social media with kids they’re homeschooling and attempting to entertain and then I’m on work calls that are interrupted by family members and pets and I can hear the frustration in their voices as they try and carry on like it’s not happening- send all the annoying things and people to my house and let them tap dance on my nerves for a few hours, please.

This loner, this independent yet continually humbled woman has met her match in the silence of the world outside that echos loudly with in the confines of my address and that match is me; I am the problem and I am the answer. The more restless I become, the fewer places I find to put what I’m feeling or even worse I put it in the wrong bucket. I don’t know how to sort through the resurfacing feeling of loss and living in an uncertain now- what goes in with the colors or with the whites? I have a high level of self awareness and I do a pretty good job at keeping my emotional baggage in the overhead bin but I’ve hit the fucking mother load of pandemic turbulence that’s slinging my shit all over the cabin. Could you grab that insecurity hanging off the seat in front of you so I can pack it back up? Thanks.

Pandemic or not life is unpredictable and all it can really guarantee is that it will change whether you are ready or not. Life can be painful and it doesn’t always go the way we planned- but that’s where serendipity comes in and kisses our boo boo’s and gives us a renewed belief that the next sunrise will bring hope with it. If I’m going to stop kicking my own ass and repeating patterns that catapult me from one dead end to another, I need to remember that people can only meet me as deeply as they’ve met themselves. Everyone has things that they are continually working through and all that any of us can ask of one another is kindness, forgiveness when a shoe from our emotional baggage hits them in the face, and to accept that the real and raw version of ourselves is better than the expectedly perfect version someone has created of us in their mind. We’re all together in this experiment called life- some days we’ll be a cure for someone and other days we’ll be the placebo.

I’m not sure I enjoy the headspace that feeling isolated has put me in. Its made my light hearted transparency feel like a wool coat in a room with 100% humidity. I’d love nothing more than to slip into an invisible jet, like Wonder Woman, and fly around taking in the world from a different view. I feel like I need to post ” Have you or someone you love been affected by my overthinking quarantine brain? if so, sorry.” I know that all of this messy emotional overload is temporary and I’m hoping to wake up tomorrow and feel more like my care free optimistic self.

Life is such a twisting mesh of push and pull, of want and need, of hands slipping out of ours as kids grow, as we outgrow people and as life takes them from us. The moment we thought we’d never live through become notches on our armor and intensity of feelings become something we try to avoid. We seek a mirror images of ourselves in other people with the hopes that their company will feel a little like home and we push away from things that smell like drama and a headache. With all the uncertainty the one thing we can be certain of is that nothing in this world lasts forever, not even our troubles, and with any luck at all we’ll emerge from this uncomfortable normal we’ve taken on as a kinder, more gentler creature despite ourselves.

Xo,

Rach