Shifting Sands
Well this has been a hell of a week, with the Brexit and all. It feels like departures are all the rage this week.
In the midst of the June 22 Earthquake Drill, a minor, if welcome, tremor shook my life. I received news (from the unlikeliest source) that I got accepted into graduate school. Grad school has always been a "maybe yes, maybe no" thing for me and applying to it was something I did for myself; partly out of spite, partly out of boredom. The moment I saw my name on that website, I felt the proverbial sands shift under my feet. It's like starting UP all over again. Excitement, anxiety, and a whole heck of nervous jitters washed over me like some emotional version of the Ice Bucket Challenge. As I read that acceptance email, I felt like an astral projection, watching over my own body go through a raging torrent and wildly trying to catch up with it. I guess that sums up this week pretty well: Me, watching the world and myself change while desperately trying to catch up and cope with it.
It's not that I want to hold on to the way things were. I just keep stumbling and falling over myself, trying to process the speed of how things change. Going back to the title of this post, it's like the sands shifted and opened up like quicksand and I'm being sucked in at breakneck speed. I am flailing and floundering but I accept that I will continue sinking. It boggles my mind that I somehow feel that I am not the same girl who was sitting on the beach just last week. I am no longer the girl who waxed emotional to her friends over the speakerphone last last Friday night. There's a part in me that is both impressed and alarmed at how my psyche ruthlessly transitioned to a completely foreign state of mind in a matter of days.
Getting into grad school was a trigger for an internal restructure within me that I was barely conscious of. You know when you meet up with a friend and you become aware that something's changed in that friend since the last time you met? Wasn't it a bit disconcerting? Well, that's what I felt last night except that the friend was my own goddamn self. I've always struggled to care less about everything. I just ALWAYS give a shit. But that night, I slipped into indifference like it was a second skin. It bothers me that I did it so effortlessly with ice-queen poise. When did I stop caring, especially for something I've cared for too much before? Could it be that I am now too preoccupied to give a fuck? Is it a win or a loss? Have I finally stopped caring and consequently, saved my sanity in the process? Or have I stopped caring because things are going to shit and I just sorta saw a way out and bailed like the scared little girl that I am?
This is a very schismatic existential moment. For weeks, I wanted a cure for my loneliness and hopelessness. Now that the medicine is before me, I have no doubt that I want it but this was not the way I wanted to go. You can choose closure but you can't always get it the way you want it. Emotions, feeling, and caring keep me feeling alive. It keeps me human. Losing these emotional lines that have been so saving and defining to these years is scaring me. Maybe I was wrong to think I could have it all. That's not far off as it has been a year of wrong assumptions. I just want myself back. I just want to be kind and loving again. But it seems like I can't anymore. In these changing times, I feel that it is time again to harden up and tough it out. I can't seem to find that balance between kindness and honesty; or emotionally available and unflappable. It just doesn't work that way for me. I keep steeling myself against people leaving and relationships changing but the only thing I accomplish is making sure they do. But what was I supposed to do? Hang on until they're clearly not there anymore and ask them to come back for me? I keep telling myself that people always leave until they decide to stay. Even in the arms of these people; even while looking into their eyes and laughing with them; I am so painfully aware that they will someday leave. And somehow, I manage to respond to this awareness with the emotional maturity of a passive-aggressive temper tantrum: I'm leaving you before you leave me. It feels right in a self-righteous, self-saving kind of way but the people I care about always call my bluff and I am left with nothing but my achievements and my intact pride.
Lin-Manuel Miranda posted this poem on his Facebook page:
The world changes.
The earth spins.
We grieve our losses.
We eke out wins.
And so the world does. It goes on. It does not stop. I once wrote that Life does not and will not stop for anyone. It does not always go in a pace that I am comfortable with. We win some, we lose some and sometimes it's just all too much. This has been a breakdown that has been so long coming but so gracefully executed. The sun has set on the longest summer day. The smell of summer lingers, the fire trees have yet to flame out, but the rain has come. The past year has been nothing short of amazing and the emotional connections and feelings were nothing short of honest, real and eye-opening. But things have begun changing around here. Life goes on for them, even without me. Life goes on for me, even without them. I know no one can stay in those green plexi courts forever, even if this feels like quickly ripping the band-aid off a very raw wound - it's most painful after the fact but at least that shit's over and done with. To end this long and very rambling emotional breakdown, I again borrow words from my man of the moment, Lin-Manuel Miranda:
Sigue andando el camino por toda su vida
Respira
Y si pierdes mis huellas que dios te bendiga
Respira
Keep walking along the path of life
Just breathe
If you lose your way, God will keep you
Just breathe
