I don’t know about you, but being told to stay at home for the day in the hurricane did some weird stuff to my psyche. I was restless from the get go. I had moved in the pandemic from a small two bedroom place where I slept in a curtained off living room to a three bedroom house. We had space for Zoom school and I was a home owner. Then I rented that house and moved to be closer to the girls’ schools to a two bedroom condo. Now they were sharing a room but I had my own bedroom. Still, it was fairly small. Nowhere anyone would want to “stay in place” for any extended time. So there we were, me and two bored teens home still for summer break (counting down the days), monopolizing my couch, leaving dishes in the sink, and discarding sorts of unsightly stuff on the bathroom floor, and we couldn’t leave. The rain came down. I felt like every part of me was screaming to escape. I felt the old memories of being in lock down.
I drove in the pouring rain to Santa Monica to get a colonic. I know. Not your typical reaction, but I had been feeling clogged physically and spiritually and the walls were crawling. It was a lot of rain but not enough to keep me inside. I am an East Coaster. I have driven in blizzards without wipers and outrun tornados in Kansas. A little rain fall was actually nice because no one was on the LA highways. When I got back from my holistic hiatus, I rested in my bed with some books and just chilled. This isn’t a pandemic, I told myself, but the old feelings of powerlessness and surrender were there.
Then I realized how much all week I had been holding on to. Anxiety about the future, about how I am perceived, about my kid going to college, about why I am not writing enough, will I be loved enough… I had completely squashed out any and all noises that could come eeking out from my intuition and inner knowing self. I had drowned it in walks around the park sobbing and panic and some old dusty remnants of rage. I was grumpy and irritable, but not accepting yet. It trickled into Monday morning.
“Why did you pick the double dorm and not the triple? That just cost me $1000!!” I was standing over my sleeping older daughter’s bed, demanding answers. She opened her sleepy eyes and looked at me confused, thinking I must be a bad dream. Don’t I usually say “Good morning?” but instead I was having an out of body experience. What the hell am I doing? I am acting crazy (as I stomped back to my laptop still shivering with indignation.) I sat down at my computer and tried to readjust as I pounded gmail passwords that didn’t work into the rectangle space on my computer screen. My mind said stop. It doesn’t have to be this way.
We can become abusive, harsh, abrasive and unkind when we smother and mask our most gentle inner selves in fear and pity.
I don’t want to be afraid of perspective. So Monday night (after apologizing and praying for less will to control my life), I shifted my farm table (which I write about in my book) to face the damn fir trees that are majestically outside my balcony. I had been facing a wall. For 6 months. Why is this the end product of a whole run of angst and pain? We get to experience our shift in how it presents itself to us, and then trust the ripple effect. I find this very similar to facing the pages of your book and thinking, why am I so annoyed at this perspective. Something isn’t right. Then you go into self pity. Well, it’s a wall and there is nothing I can do about it. You are grumpy for a month or more. Well it’s the book I wrote and it sucks, so oh well. Until one day, like I had after the rain and the colonic, and being a total ass to my kid, I turned the table around to face the trees. I think I heard the songs of angels in the heavens. Or at least someone saying “Jesus, she finally got it.”
Shift your perspective and you can have a new experience but it will happen when you are ready and not before, and that can often take six months, or longer. Not to say you are not having micro or mini shifts in your life the whole way (which is why I keep a miracle journal to remember), but that one shift is usually after you have clung to, clawed, scraped and insisted on shit to the misery of others, and mainly yourself. Until you surrender, clean up your behavior, wipe the sweat, cookie crumbs and grimace from your upper lip, the writing, the book, your life, won’t shift.
After I emotionally melt down, I feel like a sloppy boob. I know it’s not true, and I am ultimately happy I did so but I think, I am NOT wasting time again in that way. Which is a bunch of rubbish because in order to grow you have to shed and burn off, and tread upon. We can’t just keep carrying the same stuff if we are growing and evolving. Sometimes it feels like a step backwards. This old trauma baggage AGAIN? But is it really the same? Look at it, be curious, there are shifts. The recovery is faster. The responses are quicker. The requests to others less demanding.
I am grateful the hurricane came and changed my perspective. I was due. Mother Nature is in all of us. We are beings in sync with the oceans, skies and the ground. If we lean in and listen as writers, we get to open up and evoke all the senses within. Some days that means messy tears, other days wide smiles. Invite in all of it.