I want blue sky

Riding to work the other morning I was crying from stress over having just talked with Mr. A about something painful I’ve been fretting over for the last couple of months or so. I’d picked a terrible time to spring it on him – five minutes before I had to leave – so of course nothing was resolved and I was left with a tsunami of emotion that had nowhere to go except right back into my own head. Or heart. Or somewhere. It felt like ten thousand tons of water surging around inside my chest. Heavy, dark and utterly overwhelming.

So I was riding along feeling doomed and depressed, thinking miserable thoughts about how now everything is going to be ruined, and how I’m too weird and demanding and loser-ish to ever be loved, etc. etc. etc. – and suddenly out of nowhere I was interrupted by the thought, “Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be a problem.”

Wow! It was like somebody had sat me down with a big coffee table book in my lap, opened it up and started turning through the pages. See, here are all the thoughts you’ve taken hold of so far this morning. Here’s the one where you think everything’s ruined. Here’s the one that says you’re too weird. Here’s where you think it’s all a huge problem.

I could see all the thoughts spread out on the page. And then we closed the book.

It’s not the same as denial, where you try to pretend you’re not really thinking what you’re thinking. It felt more like I was just recognizing a habit my mind has had – to grab onto thoughts about things I feel unhappy about (“problems”) and declare myself personally responsible for solving them – and realizing I don’t have to keep doing that. I’m not required to sit on the couch all day staring into the pages of that book.

Remarkably, perhaps a little pathetically, this is kind of a new idea for me. What a relief to finally start recognizing them for what they are. Just ideas. Not “the truth.” Not “the way it really is.”

Maybe that’s part of the reason I’m not feeling as compelled to write as I used to. For the longest time I’ve used writing as a way to deconstruct all the feelings I didn’t want to feel, until I got them broken down into manageable pieces I could find a way to feel good about or at least accept. Possibly with practice I’ve learned to be okay with more of the original messiness without needing to break it down or clean it up. Or maybe not okay, exactly – I still hate feeling the way I felt the other day. And actually I still feel kind of crappy and dissatisfied right now, which is why I’m writing, if you haven’t already figured that out. But I don’t feel as desperate to try to DO something about it.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to matter much if I do anything or not. My feelings don’t change on demand. Though of course they always do change eventually. So the whole imperative to take charge somehow just becomes less urgent.

All of which is not to say I’m planning to do nothing. It does feel good though to plan to do something different: try seeing things as not a problem.