Calling the kettle black.

I have been feeling scattered lately.  Unproductive.  Unmotivated.   Tired.  Frustrated.  How long is this grieving going to last?  How many times will it pummel me to the ground?  Suddenly I am down again.  My body and mind want to retreat.  I do not want to socialize or be in public.  I want to be left alone.  Last month, I was back out there in the world, embracing the people around me and enjoying new experiences.  Now, I am back in hiding.  And so it goes.  

And then I have an epiphany.  I have been blaming grief for all of these ups and downs, all this drama in my head.  But yesterday I was forced to look at something greater than grief as the cause for all this mental and emotional turmoil:  I was forced to look at Me.  This is what happens when you keep a journal for years on end.  You cannot deny your past, or who you were, or what you struggled with.  It is all there, in writing.  Your writing.  And it hits you right over the head.

Yesterday, in the midst of my restless desperation to find direction, to find answers, I picked up an old journal, one of many stacked on the shelf, not knowing the time period it reflected.  I opened it.

September 2011 - May 2012.  I had returned from my travel adventures that June, ready and excited to start a new life with George.  In October I began my studies in Chinese Medicine, finally going back to school to make the career change I had been dreaming about for years.  I had a whole new life, a new home, a new partner, a love I never imagined I would find.  I had everything I could have asked for, and more.  I was finally living the life I wanted, a life I had created.  And I knew this.  I wrote this.  Over, and over, and over.  I wanted so badly to feel the gratitude that I knew I should feel.

Yet the feelings of discontent, inner conflict, and restlessness jump from the page.  I was still searching for something.  I began exploring new possibilities in consciousness, and stillness, and states of awareness.  I experimented with food, and fasting, and alternate forms of nourishment.  I was striving to grow, to change, to elevate my spirit, to reach my human potential.  And I was struggling immensely.  Against myself, my environment, my lifestyle and my habits.  What I wanted on the inside and what influenced me on the outside were at such odds with each other that any attempt to enact conscious change eventually landed me back to square one.  I did not know how to reconcile it.  I wanted to go back to the temples of Southeast Asia, and back to the treetop bungalows, where life was simple and my mind was clear.  Instead I spent my free time socializing, in restaurants and bars and at parties, because this is what we did.  My relationship with alcohol reared its ugly head, again.  

Then slowly... the fierce need to get back to myself, to find my truth, dampened... and I stopped searching.  I settled in.  

I think I forget sometimes, or rather choose to ignore, the fact that I have a psychological attachment to alcohol that has been destructive since the day I started putting it into my body.  I have tried many times to stop, eventually coming to the conclusion that I am too attached to let it go entirely, that I can find a way to live in balance with it.  I no longer think this is true.  It's not that the quantity I drink is so destructive to my body, because I generally drink in moderation; but the mental attachment, the grasping, the association of alcohol to pleasure and escape, the crutch it provides when I am feeling overwhelmed, when life gets intense, and its ability to soften the edges yet keep me in a state of complacency when I am too afraid to move forward, to really change -- is killing me.  

After George died, I used alcohol to soothe the pain.  It helped, of course.  But it is a downward spiral, and I feel myself slipping away.  

Grief is hard.  I miss George immensely.  And I do not know how to reconcile his death.  But I realize now that there is more than grief at play, and this is not all about George.  If he were here, I might still be struggling, just as I did before.  This is a difficult fact to acknowledge, but an important one.  I cannot hide behind grief, and I cannot blame it for everything that I don't want to feel.  I have work to do on myself that has nothing to do with George, nothing to do with grief.  It is a journey that began when he was still alive, and one that somewhere along the way, I abandoned.

It is up to me now to want more, to resume my soul journey, reignite that spark, and find inspiration within myself to become the woman I was brought here to be, so that I can be of service to others.  It is time to dig deep.  To elevate.  To know that a life of happiness and fulfillment are only bound by the limitations I place on myself.    

​I have been waiting for this opportunity.  For the strength and the space to follow my path.  I am scared.  But I know I can get there.  My life, and my daughter's life, depend on it.