Many people who know me well make it a point to tell me they believe I'm a pretty self-aware person. I try like hell to be, so I take their words as a very high compliment. I feel a sense of pride when they say that because it means my internal efforts are externally noticed. Who doesn't like that?
So it frustrates me all the more when I'm confronted with a brazen example of the breadth of my own ignorance. This morning I was working along like I normally do, listening to music and doing my job, when I suddenly realized my shoulders were hunched over the keyboard. I deliberately relaxed them and went back to work, only to realize a half hour later that I was all hunched up again.
It got me to thinking.
My left eye's been twitching for two days now. My neck is sore and stiff, something I've been attributing to working out and sleeping wrong. I have to struggle on a daily basis to regulate my breathing by breathing in deep and breathing out again in a slow pattern -- even trying it now, it's an effort, and I feel pretty relaxed.
Seriously, am I under this much stress? STILL? And if so......WHY????
I've always thought of myself as a relaxed sort of person. I chuckle about that now because I admit to being a control freak and I get antsy when I don't feel safe and secure. Who knows. Maybe in all my so-called self-awareness, I somehow missed the memo about the amount of stress I have always had. Perhaps I was just used to the amount I had and piling more on like I've done in the past couple years has finally pushed me past my comfort zone. But in the past I could always manage to find some way to soothe myself.
I'm having trouble with that now. It's finally sunk in.
I don't have the subtle security of a home and a family. My friends (once representing the different life I imagined I wanted more than the one I had, but couldn't get since I was married and had already made my choice) aren't the place I can run to any more either; they all have lives of their own. And you know, that's as it should be. We aren't in our 20's any longer. Now that I have the opportunity to have that life I thought I wanted, I find I didn't really want it as much as I wanted the lust for it. That lust is gone. I don't have much left to want.
So I just don't think I know how to soothe myself anymore.
The result? The stress is piling up. Without someone else to share the burden it's sitting on my shoulders alone and they're beginning to hunch over from it. There's got to be a way for me to release it. I can't even pin down all the originating factors -- if I could, maybe I could excise them, though I doubt it. There's this....this urgency.......inside me. Time is running out. For me, I mean. Mortality. No one to lean on. Did I really realize what I gave up?
Being here alone this week really makes me realize it now.
((Song: "This Year" by The Mountain Goats. Lyrics here:
http://www.themountaingoats.net/lyrics/sunset_lyr.html ))
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