Time is flowing.
Life is confusing.
The US is exasperating.
New South Wales is burning.
In spite of the above, I am enjoying a small renaissance. Okay, maybe it's not technically a rebirth. Resuscitation might be more apt.
Excuse me for gloating. Now that my respite from social media over the past few weeks is finished, I am enjoying a small dose of self-approbation. You see, the break was unlike others I've taken in the past. During those, I usually squandered the break by floundering, mired in a muck of confusion and cheerlessness. Oh sure, I'd dig into the small pile of crisis-survival and here's-how-to-be-happy books that languish on my desk, but a general sense of disconnect prevailed. And I failed to achieve much of anything I felt was useful or worthy of such a radical step as deactivating my Facebook profile.
This time, I am very [ie, VERY] happy to report that I somehow managed to defeat that cycle. How? I am not quite sure. I believe it was a combination of factors that came together to allow for an evolution of spirit. To be honest, I possessed no truly solid plan. I did, however, know that this time something needed to be different. I had a few items on my to-do checklist, but noticeably absent from the list was the one thing that had always appeared: to stop feeling so bad that I still feel so bad about my experiences over the past couple of years. I did not intentionally (or consciously) remove that item. I simply had other, more tangible things I wanted to do, like finally get my bicycles in decent working order. To play my clarinet. To reconnect with a few ingredients of my former, more contented self.
A new friend helped me with my bikes, and I've ridden them quite a lot since. I've joined a community band and this weekend will enjoy my first public performance in a very long time on the instrument to which I nearly devoted my professional life.
As I said to my therapist recently, I feel like the crisis-intervention mode is finally behind me. I still have moments of intense despair. I still lament. I still rage. But I do it less often, in small and discreet eruptions and with a sense of awareness that I have never had to this point.
I cannot say that I am moving forward with any real confidence in anything other than the motion is just that. It perplexes me that a return to activities from my past are allowing me to move ahead, but I don't try to understand life. I want to go back to living it.