Few things have been written here lately, but it doesn't mean there haven't been things I need to write about. Just fewer things I want read.
This blog has always been a place for me to process things. I write more when I travel because it's a way for me to process my experiences and relieve the commotion and excitement that swirls in my head when I'm experiencing so much so often with so few opportunities to decompress. I also write more when the world throws me curveballs, in love or in life or any of those matters of painful urgency. It's not the first time I've written about this.
So here I am. Twenty-seven and healthy, holding down a good job while I near the end of my Master's. Surrounded with a bounty of strong relationships and loving family. Even a loving girlfriend, to boot. So why the anxiousness? Why the feelings of restlessness? Why the sadistic, sweet nightmares?
When god was dealing out demons, I wonder if he didn't give me a double portion. Why else would I sit in a satisfying job only to longer for something more challenging, more illustrious, more lucrative? Why do I dream of girls I don't want while a charming, gorgeous woman sleeps next to me in bed? When will my demons let me be content? I can't believe it will always be this way.
My dad once told me that I was a young man in a hurry. It's an apt expression. This hurry, called ambition in my professional world and restlessness in my personal life, has helped me and hurt me. It drives me to do more things, and to do them in a better way, than many people my age. It's opened so many doors and helped me develop relationships, both professional and personal, that lift me up and share the weight. But at the same time, it makes it so hard to imagine staying in the same place year after year, slowly counting my pennies and following the well-worn track to domestication and 'success' that defines so many people I respect.
I came back to Canada with a plan. I was tired of the wandering. Tired of the slowly disappearing relationships back home, made harder with each year away and every memory missed. Tired of having thoughts of love lost be stronger than those of real love. I told myself that I would take 5 years to settle down, to build my professional life, to work on my education, to get my shit together.
I'm getting to the latter half of that goal. I'm a year away from finishing school, setting myself on a path that should hold many doors open for me. I'm overwhelmed with loving, strong friendships in my life and I find myself in my first healthy relationship in many years. After so much struggle, I've got my health back and have nothing holding me back.
So why the trepidation? Why the niggling restlessness that wants to pry me away from this life and hurl me into the wilderness? Why the inescapable nightmares, after all these years?
These are questions I'll return to one day and smile. I'll read this and remember the anxiety in the same way I now remember my chaotic teenage years and their attendant drama. But for now I live in them. And I promise myself that it's just a twenty-something sickness, nothing to worry about, can't be helped, better left unmentioned. Yet here it is.
6 comments:
I spoke of this exact feeling I had been experiencing for years to a friend about four months ago. She said I suffered from "the windshield wippers syndrome". I constantly chased things I couldn't quite catch while good things I should desire made me want to run. I asked her in a panick how to fix myself. She simply said "it needs to stop raining".
I like the analogy, but what is the rain?
Exactly. What is the rain?
The rain is what keeps you in motion. Without rain, there is no need for windshield wipers. So maybe by stopping the rain, you kill what makes you move.
The rain is every thought, every anxiety that keeps you in motion. It keeps you from seeing clearly through the window. It clouds your judgment. Forces you to go back and forth in your head.
The rain is uncontrollable. It stops whenever the sky decides it does. You just have to trust that it will. And trust that it will be back.
The rain is controllable. At least the amount of rain that falls on your window is. You are the boss. Find a shelter for your window. Stop the back and forth.
The rain is a fact. It's the human experience. It asks for nothing else but to be accepted. Maybe that regulates the speed of the wipers.
Then again, maybe I create the rain. Maybe I can stop it. And I do sometimes. I just stand outside alone, ankle deep in a puddle, arms wide open, trembling like a leaf, waiting for the next lighting bolt to hit me right in the heart.
Maybe we won't easily let the rain stop because the droplets offer us the only reflection of ourselves we can find.
I've been brewing this for four months. Never has a problem such as defining what the rain is given me such peace.
Love it. Thank you.
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