To feel things so deeply ...

Someone once said that it is a burden to feel things so deeply.  I could Google it I guess.

I’m not in a good way for the start of the year. They say that each pillar of your house needs to be in order: loosely, family, friends, career, money, love.  Each of those feels out of kilter.  I just saw my doctor and she emphasised this.

I’m also using again. Today I took maybe three Stilnox and 20mg of Valium, plus red wine.  All to numb the pain.

It’s not that I don’t want to be in Australia.  That’s just geography.

My family – my biological family is far away – however close they are by phone.

My friends: I have friends here in Sydney, but I can feel myself cocooning and that’s not good.  I need to spend the effort to see them.  I know it’s good medicine. They bring me out of myself and make me feel better.

My career is plateauing, maybe even stalling, because I can’t concentrate because of all this stuff.  Maybe I’m at the right place for now, but I can’t help but to feel that if I were in-house again things would be simpler.  Maybe this should be a goal for 2018?

Money is always a problem.  I live barely (not barely) within my means.  I spend money when I want to, never really in a budget despite my best intentions.

Love: I love B., but I don’t think that he’s the one.  I think the fact that I loved him but was never head over heels is a sign. And then there’s the elephant in the room – we haven’t had sex for over 14 months.  Is he just my friend now?  I feel co-dependent. I’m so scared of losing him, but I feel that I could be a far, far better friend to him, than I can be a lover (which I am not, by virtue (virtue?) of the fact that we are not lovers.  But I love him so much.  But I know it’s not in the right way.

Last week I saw Call Me By Your Name and now I’m reading the book. If I ask myself today, have I met that one person who I achieved 100% intimacy with, for better or for worse, then I think the answer is no.  And time is ticking by.  Tick-tock, tick-tock.  I’m 45.  I may feel 25, but I’m not.

I feel close to closure, yet new beginnings.  I don’t know how to make that leap.  Is it as simple as just jumping from the edge (metaphorically speaking) and seeing what else is out there for me?

I found it:

“It is both a blessing
And a curse
To feel everything
So very deeply.” – David Jones

Restablishing the process ...

It took me a few days longer than intended to begin this process. And here is a poor attempt to brush over that fact with another fact:

Maybe it’s not a coincidence that today’s date also begins with the number 1, and is the first to have done so since the first time it happened this year, 10 days ago. So today is not an afterthought, but a start rich with intention. For now, anyway. Who knows with me? Least of all me.

But what to write about? I have written rarely to capture dreams (some will know my feelings about dreams – only ever inspiring to the dreamer), but last night I had a sort of fever dream, so while the memories are still free to come to me, I’ll attempt to unravel them …

We’re told that nature abhors a vacuum. If this is true than maybe it’s also true that the great feelings and emotions – love, hate, joy, sadness, elation, anger (to name a few) – don’t fill one vacuum or claim their own space in each of us as their cosy abodes while each of the others go unattended, unlived-in, cold.

All our lives are, are a collection of experiences that came to us via a manipulation of our five senses, to varying degrees, until the experience is manifest and is there to see, touch, taste, smell, hear. No experience is really comprised of just one sense. 

I write this with touch, my fingers touching the space between the keys. I see the words form on the screen with my eyes. There is the lingering taste of coffee in my mouth. The vague smell of deet is in my nose from the lotion I used last night on my skin. In my ears are the soft creaks of the woodwork in the house as it expands and contracts after last night’s fluxes in temperature.

And there – an experience. A small, probably inconsequential one – but one that is fully-rounded, examined and realised.

But soon enough it will be gone, and in its place something else possibly governed by love, hate, joy, sadness, elation, anger. Something else. Something else.

But whatever that something else is / was, never was it without another something else. Another experience. Never one without even the glimpse of another. Experiences, like the ingredients in our stew of emotions, lap over, meet, pull away from many others.

Perhaps the vacuum in our souls in which our experiences are created are like kitchens. Sometimes – sometimes too often - we cook alone. But sometimes we receive guests and for a while, and using each other’s stoves and pots and pans we join to create a rich and nourishing stew which we eat together, sometimes for company, sometimes for necessity, sometimes for joy, sometimes for love.

For some the stew will revive them, make them feel complete for a spell. For others, it may give them gripe and make them unsettled. 

And then for others they will feel touched by love, and remembrance, and heartbreak, and completion, and separation. 

For those it won’t feel initially like a nourishing meal (although they may already know it was). They will eventually be able to see it for what it was: needed, no, required. 

Requisite. To remind them that they are alive. To remind them that sometimes to love is to lose. And sometimes to love is to lose and hurt. And sometimes to love is to lose, and hurt, and then to love again through examining the experience again. Because if you remember and do so very, very carefully you will see it is still there, nourishing your soul still. 

Because you held it with you all that time. Nothing and no one ever really leaves us.

To use words that are not mine:

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.”

“Is it better to speak, or to die?”

My own:

Sometimes better to trust and to hold on, than to let go. Better to trust that the universe is nourishing us with the experiences that we really need, and never for the ones that we think we need.

Because how much will we ever know about what we really need. 

Who knows with us? 

Probably least of all, us.