Some nights, I feel that I am just beyond functional – I cannot possibly do anything here on my own to improve the current state of my brain and emotions, so it is best just to go to bed already…, even if it is barely 9pm and I didn’t exactly get up until after noon today…
Yeah, today has been stressful, simple, lazy, informative, comedic, helpful; it has left me feeling a sense of helplessness, embarrassment, disappointment in myself, upsetting surprise, loneliness, physically stressed – like really physically stressed and in desperate need of human physical contact… – hopeful, useless, inefficient, unwanted, frustrated, wanted, lost for words, unhelpful, like I have wasted something, somehow…, and ready to cry…
Quite a day and night so far…
So, I think I am ready to go to sleep now, with a conscious hope and belief that tomorrow, taken on actively, can and will be significantly improved in just about every way from today.
With that, I bid you goodnight: May we all rest well tonight.
What is this life I’m living (right now, anyway)???
The world is going crazy having to stay home, and I am here being extremely productive, and somehow still napping as needed, or just lying on the floor for a bit, multiple times throughout the day…, and eating a lot and often… and still getting my job done…
This has been rather good for me, I think, having to stay home and all.
It was rough at first, especially since I really want to get to know this guy I kind of just met, but I think I approached the whole ‘stay-at-home’ situation with a genuine and thorough consideration for my health and well-being, and I have acted accordingly with my self-given guidelines and encouragements, thereby helping me to be extremely sane and comfortable and confident, and also, somewhat surprisingly, very productive (more so than usual, even).
And it was really good for me to have to sit with so much discomfort around that guy for the first while – I needed to be able to get through any panic and just chill out, approach the situation as myself, and not as the crazy person that sometimes won’t shut up in my head… she’s funny, but can get way out of hand, if I indulge her.
So, yeah…, this has been very good for me.
And, as mentioned, I have written now a third song… that’s three songs in a week’s time… crazy… and in a good way… a very good way.
Which, I guess, means that there’s no time like one in the morning! 😛
I had just completed a few hours of meditative work both for myself and for a friend – making a mala, and being very intentional about the whole thing and its entire process, thus taking hours to do it all, to meditate first on what to do, and then meditating by doing it – and, as I was packing up things, I acknowledged that the pull I had felt the past hour or so to play my second song (with the hopes of getting it recorded to share) was worth it… bed could wait a little longer – it wasn’t like I had to be anywhere early tomorrow, nor that I couldn’t nap as needed throughout the day (though I do have to start work at 9am, it is from home, and I don’t exactly have to talk to anyone first thing, possibly at all, so I’m okay to be a bit short on sleep…, even though I struggled with sleep last night…, but I’ll get back to that in a sec…).
Plus, this pull was more than just one to record a video or audio recording… there was something emotional pulling at me through it…
All these emotions that had gone into the song, they were ready to release, to be expressed, and to start to move onward… I had sat in them consciously for long enough – it was time.
Just to be sure, I played once just for myself, just to see how it went.
It was practically flawless.
So, then, yes, it was time.
I pulled up my computer, tested the sound and video and all, and then recorded…
And it was perfect.
And it was 1:12 in the morning, and that was perfect, somehow, too.
And now, without sharing the video, I will go get ready for bed and go to sleep, with hopes that, with these emotions out of me like this, I will find rest tonight, and can wake up refreshed tomorrow… unlike today.
And yet, even with these thoughts and feelings waking me while it was still dark outside, and not allowing but another short bit of respite – although, can we call it respite when we just end up inside stressy dreams with all the same thoughts and feelings that kept us up in the first place? – I still seem to be functioning at, now, almost two in the morning… I trust that I will be okay tomorrow, especially after resting for real… yes… I will sleep well tonight.
Thank you, God, for the music and the words… they are invaluable to me right now, and I am immensely grateful.
Neither of us is looking to date (or anything of the sort with) the other – we genuinely just want friendship through language sharing, as we each improve our own abilities in the other’s native tongue.
In a way, we hardly know one another.
Yet, we chat (via messages that are mostly text and sometimes voice) and send one another photos and videos and updates basically every day… yeah, every day, I think…, so it feels like we are closer than we are.
We are honest and open with one another… in a way, it is an extremely low-risk situation for us both, you could say… I wouldn’t say yet that we are friends, but I no longer describe him as ‘my conversation exchange partner’, but as ‘my buddy’…, because he really is a buddy to me, and I hope I am to him.
We know about highs and lows in love and heartbreak for one another; we talk about finances and healthcare systems and death – so much death right now in his part of the world, but we never seem to dwell longer than is respectful; we get nerdy about grammar and explanations of turns of phrase; we share about work (we have very different jobs yet similar setups); I sent him my song before I shared it with almost anyone else (Since he isn’t great with English, he said, he could be a good testing ground for sharing it…, which he said after encouraging me through my nerves of wanting to make the instrument side of things go well, but being worried at my skill level…)…, and he knew what and whom it was about, without a doubt (It was not about him, of course, but someone in my life here.).
(“Comunque si. Sei cotta!😂,” he said after reading the lyrics. Anyway, yes. You are cooked. (A phrase which here means, “Out of your wits in a crush on this guy”) 😛
And, what’s extra fun is that our time difference and lifestyles actually line up perfectly that when I’m getting up and going to bed happen to be perfect times for him to be messing around, messaging me… so we have two good chunks of time every day to be in communication with one another.
And it really is fun… honest and fun.
I think meeting this buddy of mine has been one of the most valuable parts of this year so far.
It appears by, well, all accounts, that I have just written a song.
I started at about 7 PM, and finished the initial complete draft around 8:30 PM tonight.
I then cleaned up all of my materials from my task of the day, brought them upstairs where they belong, showered and started preparing myself for bed, and then pulled out my notebook and laptop so that I could type up the lyrics and put them together, organized and in an easily rearranged format.
I then did some slight rearranging, and phrase editing, and am now ready to go to sleep with a deep sense of satisfaction both in my accomplishment and in the awesomeness of the song itself.
I can hardly wait to record it and get some instrumentation figured out for it(!).
(I’m a dork, I know – always have been and always will be, and gladly so!)
I want to get to sleep as fast as possible now, so that I can wake up sooner to work on it in the morning.
Woohoo. Haha
This has really been a fun miniature adventure today and tonight… I kept wanting to write a song this week or next, and I couldn’t seem to get the right style or topic – I kept straying from the focus every time I started to write, and then didn’t like it… until a friend (? We’ll call him that, anyway.) shared a song that he had written…
When I heard the first line, I felt struggle and pain being released… by the second line, I was almost certain I knew the origins of the song, the cause for the emotions expressed within it through its music and words… and it was, somehow, so relatable, although I had never been in the same situation… it was also so vulnerable…, which made it all the more powerful.
Thinking about the song today, I thought, Man, those are Real, meaning the emotions in there…
And it struck me: What would happen if I did that, went ahead and wrote about the heavy, loud emotions going on inside of me right now?
It might be embarrassing…, but it would be honest and to the heart…, which, I think, is a huge part of what makes my friend’s song so amazing – you can feel it, deep inside.
So, let’s get deep and put it onto paper, I guess…
I pondered on it as I walked for a while, listening to musical songs, and then, upon returning home and preparing to start work on a new mala (meditation and prayer beads), I was suddenly feeling a need to write down this idea calling out to me from inside my head – I am real emotions, hear me roar and write me down poetry style(!), it was saying to me.
Okay, so this time all on my own and with my lonesome thoughts has been tough and uncomfortable on me…
🙂
In a way, I’ve been totally fine, yet I’ve been kind of a total mess – I’ve had to sit in some really uncomfortable space emotionally, and, not having any distractions from life has really given me the conscious opportunity to be okay with the discomfort.
So, though it has sucked, it has been good for me as a person, I believe… and it will continue to be better and better for me, so long as I persist is allowing the emotions to happen and then to disappear after being heard.
Also, I desperately miss hugs and physical contact right now… another really stressful point for me that has been bringing up a lot of history for me…, yet a good opportunity for me to learn to be my best self, even in the face of no agreement from the world.
I am finally doing a bit of genuine work for work, as of yesterday, and not just waiting around for e-mails most of the day, however, my time has passed greatly in the pursuit of playing music (learned to play the harmonium!), listening to music, making malas, making an art journal, painting, walking, cycling, checking on my friend’s cat for her, cooking and eating food, exercising, sitting on the porch swing, working on photos, watching(?) a few movies, reading books, daydreaming like no other, reminiscing, eating loquats off the tree out front…, and I started a puzzle today… to name a few of my activities 😂
That vein said, this has really been a wonderful time lately of me exploring my self-expression in my wardrobe… one area where I do feel comfortable and at ease.
I just put on what I genuinely want to wear each morning, and I don’t even have a thought of concern when I have to go outside or to the store – I am comfortable and confident in my clothes, and excited by each outfit, every day… and delighted at how varied it all is, and at how I find myself chuckling at times, when I see how much skin is (potentially) visible – I never would have Dared wear such an outfit as some of these before, even at home… let alone Out in the world!
Yet, today’s outfit was just the same: I dressed how I truly wanted to dress this morning, having true fun in picking out the pieces, and then I had to go to two grocery stores…, and I never even considered a need to change clothes or anything, because I was already so okay with what I was wearing – of course it was fine to wear in public.
And so, I publicked in it, I laughed when I realized how I couldn’t possibly have worn or even considered this outfit in the past, and I was overjoyed at my clear progress in this realm of my life.
The outfit:
I know it isn’t exactly scandalous, but that’s exactly the point: It isn’t scandalous – just great, and it happens to show skin (especially when the wind blows).
And I love and loved it.
So, yeah…, there’s that for joy from today and these past couple weeks. 🙂
Have you ever been so supremely satisfied from a dream, that, even when you wake up and discover that it was all just a dream and is not, in fact, your real life, you find yourself still feeling satisfied?
Despite the harsh reality that those amazing hours on end of your every wish right now in some aspect of your life coming true were merely a dream, and not how your brain felt and believed them to be, your deep-seeded experience of utter bliss is unshaken – you are nevertheless content…
This morning, I was heartbroken when I realized that I would have to accept that my dreams-come-true had only come true in my dreams…, yet, to my core, I was nearly overflowing with love and satisfaction, so fantastic were those lifelike dreams…
I wanted to cry, yet I didn’t even need to do so, for I was so calm and centered in my cellular and brain-function satisfaction from the night’s adventures… my mind had been so pleased, and my body had responded in kind – I was at ease, and I chose to dwell in such a blissful space for a while, merely lying awake in bed, taking note of how wonderful I felt…, and wondering how I might feel one day of those dreams really did come true, but in no way regretting their having been in my dreams last night – a spectacular dream is always welcome, when it is uplifting, inspiring, loving, and empowering… and this one, these ones, was and were.
And then, blessedly, my day today was supremely satisfying, as well – kind of a beautiful combination from the universe for today… how I would love to have another tomorrow(!).
Perhaps I can start the day right with beautiful dreams again tonight…
Here goes…
P.S. That’s a song from a French movie I saw back in high school… it had a lot to do with a roller rink with a slide, and that’s about all I remember, aside from the song. 😛
Because I let myself suddenly believe that something I had carefully placed at the back of my mind and dreams as ‘extremely unlikely, so don’t even bother, honey‘, might actually be not only possible but likely…, and then it seems to be following a path toward not being the case at all, and being disappointingly unlikely, all the more disappointing for the recent hope, and still more so due to the original evaluation of its being unlikely, and yet I changed my evaluation…
So, I not only feel like I am losing a sort of dream, but I feel stupid over changing my mind, and embarrassed at ever thinking it was possible.
And then – as though that weren’t already enough – I have the part of me that believes anything is possible…. and that other tiny part that still, despite the stress, believes that this dream is possible and could really happen, sometime soon, too…
So, it is all so very hard, because I have basically the whole spectrum of positive to negative feelings around it all, each side seeming to be at odds with the other, going back and forth between which one will won out for this particular ten-minute span of time…
Yeah…
Also, I’m tired of having this weight at all – because it does weigh – yet I acknowledge that my dismissing and letting it all go would include letting go of the parts of me that believe it can work out beautifully… and, though I seem to be leaning more and more to the ‘unlikely to happen’ side of things, the fight between the two sides is what makes it feel real, possible, even… without the struggle between them, it wouldn’t be real at all right now… and O want it to be real, so that the possibility of its happening can still exist.
I have not and shall not give up hope… I just feel I need a different approach.
Let’s talk for a minute about how we live into the future…
You know, on any given weekend, Sunday is kind of the sucky day of the weekend, because we are acutely aware of having to go back to business Monday morning… and then, if we have a vacation coming up, we’re overjoyed and excited all the time, all throughout the day, even if it is Monday morning, and we have work to do…, because our vacation is soon(!)… The boring meeting right now has no power over our cruise that starts Saturday morning…
In that sense, we live into our future, right?
Right.
So, for me, I need to be around people – I need to have my solo time, but I also need to be with people, really be with them… a friend(?) recently mentioned the term “ambivert” to me, and I like it… it very well describes my situation with all of this being extroverted and introverted…, which people almost never seem to understand, by the way…
Anyway, I need people in my life.
For the past two weeks, I have been living with very few people in my daily life… it was enough to get me by last week and the start of this week, but then the working from home this week has crushed all interactions with people in my daily life now…
However, I had work to get me through the week, e-mails to exchange, interactions (though cyber) guaranteed to be had throughout the day…
But tomorrow is Saturday… I have no work, no e-mails, no semblance of human interaction…
And I am miserable… I almost – scratch the almost, I feel like weeping, I am filled with such an experience of stress and of being unloved…
There is that beautiful quote of, “I have called you by name; you are mine,” and, though it is used initially as defining a part of the relationship between God and humanity, I feel it applies to how we interact with all things and beings in our life… when I have called you by name, given you a name of my own, I have given you a place in my heart, and you are dear to me – in some way or other, you are mine.
When people interact with me, call me by name, I often am filled with the love that is present in our relationship, whatever that relationship may be… essentially, when people interact so directly with me, I feel and experience their love for me.
In contrast, when people do not interact with me directly…, I sometimes lose sight of that love…, I sometimes begin to convince myself that the love has faded, and that I am left to myself, to be loved by no one else…
And the experience of that always sucks.
Just saying, it does.
And I know that my love is enough, and I know that the pieces of God that reside within me are enough to sustain me and fill me in every way…
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck to feel unloved by the rest of the world.
I know I will be okay… I will be far more than okay…
I’m just letting myself experience this overwhelming feeling of sick right now, so that, in acknowledging it, in allowing the intense, hiding yet ebbing emotions to express, I am able to let it all go, to release it all in a cathartic convulsing of body and searing tears…
It is already late tonight, but I know that I will go to bed in an intentionally much improved state…, and I will get out of bed in the morning and take care of myself – I will play music and make art and work my body as hard as it needs to release anything else that might remain in the morning… if I cannot focus my love on others, perhaps there is something missing in my love for myself, something on which I would do well to improve… I am worth loving, and I know that and experience that with my whole being… even when I stray to wonder at its being true…
Nonetheless, I will take care of myself… I will do what I wish others would do to show their love for me, because I love me, and I am worth being loved (and even lavished), and being all alone for so long and for so much foreseeable future is scary right now…
But perhaps it is this problem exactly that has me in this situation… perhaps I need to grow more comfortable with providing all the love on my own, so that I become fully clear and comfortable in the fact that I do not need the others’ love – I merely want it.
As I was thinking in a dreamed conversation just today, do you really want to be with someone who needs you?… Would you really choose that over being with someone who wants to be with you?
I have said it before, and it still holds true entirely, I want to be with someone – in all my relationships, really – who doesn’t need me, but who wants to be with me nonetheless… who wants not to be without me, and so chooses to be with me.
It is in times of these feelings of isolation that I wonder where the people in my life stand on this spectrum, to what degrees they want me in their lives…
I have yet to find the far edge of the spectrum of wanting me…, but perhaps it will come some day… soon…
Anyway, I’m off to clean up and get ready for bed, now that I’ve finished this whole cry fest… who would have thought that Friday night and an entirely open weekend ahead could be so upsetting??
Haha
Anyway, this was how I spent my evening: eating fancy stew straight from the pot, while watching the first half of one of my favorite films, which was just recently gifted to me for my birthday, all while detachedly wondering about something that won’t seem to leave me alone lately… (I mean, what are you gonna do, right?… it’s like when a song gets stuck in my head… just let it ride, and it eventually will be replaced by something [hopefully] better, you know?)
I believe that, perhaps, one of my favorite things in life in whenever I have the opportunity to experience, even to witness, someone who is in the presence of his or her true and dear friends… when we are with our closest of people, we do not have to ‘try’ to be anything – there is no effort to be made – because we are able simply to be ourselves… that is the glory of friends…
When I am granted such an opportunity as to be able to witness someone I know with his or her true friends, it is truly a blessing and a gift… one for which I am dearly grateful.
In fact, it is one of my favorite ways to get to know someone new… I do not want to bother with either one of us putting our best foot forward, or putting on any kind of show, wondering what the other thinks, whether she might approve, accept me like this, and then, maybe, one day in the very distant future, accept me as myself…
I want to dive right into the truth of a person, who he truly is… who is she, really?
One of my favorite quotes about friendship was sent to me by the friend of a friend, back when I was struggling to find friends of my own, living in France all those years ago… I have kept it in my files ever since he sent it to me, because it so beautifully expressed my own sentiments, I wanted always to have it on hand…
It is:
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First Series
Now, imagine meeting a person who is in that state, in the space of being with a friend, all guards and falsehoods down and dispensed… would that not be utterly spectacular?
To see a person for who he truly is, and not for any of the fears or concerns, hurts or airs… just for who she is…, it would be so beautiful, how could we ever want anything else?
In conclusion, I love who people truly are, and I am filled with love at the opportunity and blessing of being able to see people among their closest of friends, where they simply are their best selves, their truest selves… those are the people I want to get to know… and that is how I want people to know me.
hannah ananas 