Early morning in Seattle:
Nobody gets up before 7 here, it seems. I haul myself out of bed at 5, disturbing Juniper, who's stretched out against me. Some food, a brush through the hair, and a set of clothing later, I'm ready to go.
Of course, I went to bed at 11 last night, so I'm a bit....tired....zzzz. I manage to make it to work without killing anyone, mostly because there's nobody on the road. It's still full dark out, headlights shining in my eyes when I pass the few cars heading towards downtown.
I'm yawning, still, Wriggling behind the wheel, attempting to stretch. I go past work and towards the street I always park on. There is free parking as far as the eye can see, and I pull into the first space. This is a major perk of getting up so early in the morning--the parking is easy and close. Beautiful. Nothing like it in the world, the intoxication of just pulling into a space without having to hunt around.
So, car parked, I walk the block to work. Torrefazzione Cafe beckons me, bright warm lights standing out against he chilly velvet black of the morning. Caffeine. Yes. I silently apologize to my body and go inside for a tall americano in the hope that it'll help me wake up.
And then I walk into the office, the silent, dim office, went into my office, pull on my headphones, and start working.
That's the best part about early mornings. no interruptions. The blessed quiet interrupted only by my clicking keyboard and the sound coming from my headphones.
I need to learn how to stop leaning so much. You need to learn to lean on occasion. And once more, somewhere between us on the spectrum lies a truth.I don't know.
I'm not sure what it would mean to lean, even a little bit.
I'm cussedly independent. always have been. I was born that way--my reaction to being one of those highly sensitive kids was to control my environment by refusing to engage with the people around me. I was (am) stubborn, bright, and had a lot of time and energy invested in being self-sufficient.
And, of course, there's the whole trust thing--the decision to jump over that damn cliff again and again with the certain knowledge that odds are one of these days you're gonna fall on the rocks below.
I think the problem is that I'm a critter of extremes, and I know it. And I'd rather be on the extreme of standing on my own two feet than the extreme of being dependent on anyone. And I know there are shades of grey there, but damn if I'm not afraid of the slippery slope. There's trust, and there's dependence, and I refuse to mistake the one for the other.
Still, I don't know. I'm not even sure what leaning on someone would be like. I have distant memories of depending on other people during the depression days, but as I move farther from them, the memories become more and more inaccessible as the girl I was then goes farther underground. I hated it then but didn't understand why I hated it.
I don't want to be treated as if I'm ill or in some way defective. I learn best when I'm left alone with my mistakes, when I have a chance to think about what I've done wrong and then try again. When I have a chance to look at things from a remove instead of hurting in the moment with them. That was the hardest lesson to learn, for me--that feeling my way through a problem never, ever works, because there are so many contradictory emotions running so strongly in me that I could feel one thing and three minutes later feel something entirely different.
Unlike people I know who happily get down and dirty with their emotions, I choose to try and keep an unbroken thread in my life, choose to feel one way and not another about things. It really confuses people when I change my mind and my emotions so many times, and it's simply a lot easier to be consistent.
Those are dark currents, those emotions. I'm not sure how far I really want to go down into them.
Listen to me--talking about my depression days as if they were a really long time ago, in a universe far, far away.It was about nine months ago when I came out into the light.
And, somewhere, there is the terror that I'm going to fall back into the old patterns, the old habits of mind. I spent so much time in all that useless fretting, so much time feeling sorry for myself.
The problem with happiness is that I get used to it. I like being happy. I fell violently in love with life nine months ago and though the first infatuation has worn off, the love's still going strong. And the thought of giving that up for the complications, the walking-on-eggshells, the fretting and worrying and always, always, the thinking is disturbing.
On occasion, I still have the urge to walk away from my life. Not so much right now, and I know that I'd hurt a lot of people I care about if I did so, so I won't.
But I crave simplicity.
I crave simplicity in my emotional life, I want to be able to take the words of others at face value. I have nothing invested any more in being complex and inscrutable or cryptic, I want to lay myself open in front of people and say, "this is what I have to offer you". I want there to be room for unspoken uncertainty in my life without fret. I want to be able to say, "Yes, I know the sun might not rise tomorrow, but I'm not going to worry about it now."
Somehow, it all takes care of itself. I want to live in the moment and explore the feast of everything spread before me.
so then Love walked up to Like
and said, "I know that you don't like me much,
Let's go for a ride."
This ocean is wrapped around that pineapple treeand is your place in heaven worth giving up these kisses?
if I have a bag of rocks to carry as I go
I just want to hold my head up high
I don't care what I have to step over
I'm prepared to look you in the eye
look me in the eye
and if you see familiarity
then celebrate the contradiction
help me when I fall to
walk unafraid
I'll be clumsy instead
hold my love me or leave me
high.
walk unafraid
I'll be clumsy instead
hold my love me or leave me
high.
(Walk Unafraid, REM)
