I’ve had a couple of days of anxiety. Well, more like a couple of weeks. It’s the house stuff, largely, but periodically, too I get waves of images and thoughts in my head that I’d rather not have, and that can bring me down. Not obsessive, which is good. Not overwhleming, which is good. More just like my brain takes a while to go, ‘huh, that’s something to process….’ and then devotes considerable energy to it for a short while making me feel just drained emotionally and mentally.
So, when those moments lift, it is so fucking good to feel like myself again.
Funny. As I think of this, I realize how different my life is now than it was a couple of years ago. I actually spent a good portion of my adult life in constant anxiety, and that sense of weight and emotional exhaustion was so prevalent, so permanent, that I presumed that it was something inherent to my core being – that I was a melancholy type by nature, simply unprepared to live in a world so full of madness.
It’s only now, after over a year of positivity and hope, that I realize how situational that was, how much that was about the places I put myself, the stuff I lived with but never addressed, the questions I never asked myself, the hope I never allowed myself. How different a place this earth is when one simply turns one’s face to the light, and says, ‘I want more. And I can have it. And I deserve it.’ How different a place this earth is when one stops worrying about managing people and begins to accept relationships for what they are, with good and bad and ups and downs. How different a place this earth is when one begins to live intentionally.
I began this process some time ago, before meeting Meg and beginning this wonderful love affair that just keeps getting better. But certainly she has been a huge part of it. Not because love fixes all, as it clearly doesn’t, but rather because that intentional living, that emphasis on hope, is so much easier when it is shared.
Some months back, a friend of Meg’s came up to spend a weekend with us. He does emotional and psychological health work that I will never really understand, but from that he brings to a conversation ideas and reminders that are so core, so intuitive, and yet so absent in our day to day lives. We talked politics and love, and how all of our actions have effects – rarely the effects we intend, but the effects we need nonetheless. And we talked about relationships, and the central role positivity plays in determining relationship success. That is, it is less important the specific things we agree on, the specific personalities of the individuals, and more important how those individuals approach their interaction – is it from a place of hope and security that things are good, or is it from a place of work and struggle to make things good? Too often we live in the latter place – indeed, this is what the whole relationship therapy industry is based on. But what a difference to begin from somewhere else, somewhere that just takes for granted the goodwill and hope in the other. Seems pretty simple. Seems pretty common sense. And yet I have been aware, since that conversation, how often I have started from that other place, and how amazingly freeing it is to be in a relationships that simply drips with hope and positivity.
Yeah, I’m feeling good today. I’m realizing how I have grown, how I have become a better and stronger person these last couple of years. Oh, I’ve made my mistakes, I’ve make presumptions and assumptions and fallen into old habits far more than I’d like. But mostly I have been pretty successful in looking to the light, in moving towards it both on my own and with the girl I love. And the shift from melancholy and doubt to positivity and hope has, I think, really taken root, and really shifted my sense of who I am, what I and the world have to offer, and what magic is right there all the time. Nice.
