Recently I’ve been feeling pretty blah — I don’t have a clinical term for it. I’m busy and tired a lot of the time and feeling displaced and suspended because of my apartment situation. Often when this kind of feeling comes over me, I fire off a text to a friend or two along the lines of, “I’m feeling lost/down, really don’t know what to do.” It’s an impulse to get someone else to share in and validate my feelings. That’s understandable, but last week I realized that I’m trying to bypass really sitting with and experiencing the feelings instead. I know this sounds like such thera-talk, but sitting with a feeling can be nurturing and also revealing. It can help you (me) understand yourself better, what you’re really feeling and needing and how to help yourself.
When I sat with the blah, after a few moments, I became aware of a deep sadness. It stole over me and I sat with it and just breathed with it.
I’ve been keeping myself really busy (per the usual arrangement) and my therapist once said that that is common behavior for people who are grieving. Those words resonated deeply within me. Grieving.
Beneath the busyness, fatigue, go-go-go that’s wearing me out, is a profound sadness about the unrealized dreams in my life.
I actually don’t need to do anything to fix this. It just is. It isn’t debilitating thank G-d, and it isn’t usually disruptive to the things I have to do. But it’s there, and I need and want to recognize it for what it is.
I’m happy in a generalized sense and constantly working at giving myself a hopeful, connected life. As you know, I’m a huge fan of positive psychology and it’s been lifechanging and something I want to share with everyone. And at the same time, none of this contradicts the fact that the things I want more than anything have not happened and with all the agency and optimism in the world, I cannot make them happen.
And I’m amazed and grateful that I can exist with this reality and be so pained and also be okay. And I think what I can do for myself is take the time to sit with my feelings more often.
