Comfortably Numb

I’m mostly apologizing to my future self.

I apologize for not writing during the past month while I was house sitting in Kentucky. It turns out I have trouble maintaining myself when I am responsible for other people and their things. At the very beginning of my extended house-sit, I got rather annoyed because I felt like I was not able to do what I wanted to do. I planned to write out an entire course for plant taxonomy, I wanted to record many videos, create mind-maps, and explore my own psyche. I didn’t get to do that. There was no time or energy to do that. My stay went by fast, but everyday dragged on, each filled with cigarette smoke washed down with black coffee. I realized that just because I got away from home, didn’t mean I got away from my demons. My desire to overindulge in sweets and to smoke was still there (in fact, back with a vengeance.)

Fighting my urge to accomplish goals was a deep understanding that life just happens. Sometimes its nice to sit on the outskirts and stop trying so hard to have an impact. Sometimes its important to look at what is going on internally when we are feeling constricted or unfulfilled. I found that I was disappointed in myself for not being a hyper-positive person. I do not try to make people feel better, I just try to listen and be there when they need to vent. But empty space needs to be infused with some comic relief and often times I embody someone else’s pain to the point where I become one with it. This is a sign that I’ve given too much of myself, and I know that now but it was a lesson I learned in stillness.

When I was thinking that I was too cold and melancholy, I was more in-tuned with someone else’s emotions, than my own. Because if I was considering what I was actually feeling, absent of anyone else being there, I was pensive. I was deeply in the thought realm, so I seemed to have access to thoughts that I wasn’t even actually having. I was experiencing someone else’s emotions. Whether or not I had correctly labeled those emotions, I can never know, but I was picking up on body language, cadence, and other non-verbal clues. This is the unpredictability that we are presented with always when in the presence of someone else. That is the uncomfortable with which we have to become comfortable.

Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa