The reality is I haven’t been thinking rationally. I was even told, I want you to think more rational. I worried and wondered if he chose the right word. Am I being irrational? Or anxious? Shouldn’t he just say be less anxious? I don’t think any thing has been irrational? But it has. I have been groundless for sure. I have had no mental clarity. I have had no sound judgement. I have been irrational. I spent weeks with a former drug user. In recovery but so new in recovery he unrecovered. He went backwards when I was moving forwards. I have to. I’m worried he won’t be able to. I’m worried and have worried I will go through a form of grief from him. Maybe I did already? I had to let him go. I knew I would have to. I knew he couldn’t move forward. I knew the sweater I tried wasn’t needed anymore. Then I felt I used him. Like a sweater.

He was situational? That’s what my therapist said. Is everyone? We just waltz around in this world with our situations and people become part of them? He was a tumble weed? Blew in like a tumble weed then got a little snagged on a limb then I untangled the tumble weed and now it has to tumble weed away. It’s sad. I’m sad. I was already sad and I added sad to get over my sad. I won’t ever get off my sad. I’ll cry for my losses forever and will keep losing. New loss washes up old loss. Then we think about the old loss and remember we got through it.

I am typically a rational person? I had been irrational and now need to get back to it? I feel I have always been kind of impulsive and do things in a whim. What I need back is my balance of rational. I need to know when. I need my rational to be situational. To think with clarity when I need to and think with mental Unclarity when I don’t or can’t. I haven’t been able to. I couldn’t see through what I was going through so I looked for someone else to do it for me. Someone who couldn’t even do it for himself. Of course I chose wrong. Not wrong but the way I did. I wasn’t thinking with clarity. I lost my dad and my way. I was the equivalent of a lost child in a mall not knowing who to turn to for help. To stay still until I was found again. Because I wasn’t taught how to stay still just to stay not still.

So now what? Now I need my rational balanced. It feel like a math problem now. I can balance things. I just have to find balance. That’s how balancing works. You walk on the seesaw board until you get to the spot you find it balancing. A little bit this way and a little bit that way.

I want others to know it’s ok to think what we think. To think all of what we think. Do we all have the questions I do? Are we all full of them and some just don’t want to say? Are we all anxious minds and some just can keep quiet. Is that rational thinking is? Control of our anxious thoughts that drive us to make mentally unclear and impulsive decisions. They can put their anxious aside like a side dish unwanted and focus on the problem at hand. That their dad dies and they shove it aside and focus on how to find a way to live without the one person who kept you rational?

Except I don’t share well. I want to but have little time really. I could open every social media app and lose myself all over again specifically for the purpose of trying to share who I am. How can you share who are if who are is someone who doesn’t share who they are? Someone who requires the focus to focus on themselves and not others. Just to keep from spending time with people who they shouldn’t be.

So I opened a twitter account. It seems harmless. We will see how harmless. Was this rational? Probably not. I don’t need to watch tweets of anything or anyone. I don’t need to see Chrissy teagan so sad over the loss of her baby. It’s a private thing? Right? I’ve also lost a baby. Two. It was private. It felt private because it felt like something I did wrong. It felt private because it was a little tiny possibility of new life. A spark of hope, burnt out. It felt private. But don’t we all want to feel that it was nothing we did. That we aren’t alone. Can’t we just feel it? Can’t we feel not alone without validation that we aren’t. I’m here. Always. Whether I say it or show it I’m here. Can we say it once and have it believed forever? Can we feel it when someone is gone? He is with you even though he is gone. Yes he is. So are lots. I’m not alone ever. In my thoughts. We all have them. We all want validation from others when self validation is so clouded by loss. By the turmoil that is grief. It’s ok to cry we get told. It’s ok to be sad we are told. It’s also ok not to. It’s ok to be angry. To feel guilt for not. Then to tumble all around between them all like a person with multiple personalities. One day is this one then the next is that one. Which will it be today?

I have some math to do. Or some playground equipment to play on. Some seesaw balancing and not tweeting. I could likely find people to follow and a world of chaos I don’t belong in in about five seconds but the rational part of me on the seesaw is weighing this out and to keep that balance I will not tweet. I will have a twitter account and share my thoughts and not wander what is happening with everyone else’s. It’s called balance. I’m sure I will tip it too far on a restless night or in a moment of unclarity. In a moment when I’m too much for myself I can lean a little away and into others. For validation.

I just thought he would learn something from me. That I could show him how lost I was. That I could show him that seesaw can be tipped by heavy grief, feeling like we are being taken down. But it’s up to us to tip it back up. Something heavy sat on me end and we lost balance. That we can wonder the woods and find a way out. Get off trail and back on. Stay alive. Feel alive again. Tip that seesaw right back to center again. The weight is still there. But we found the center again to keep it steady. Why can’t he do this? It’s my biggest problem. I want everyone to just take care of themselves. So I don’t have to do it for them so I can take care of me and you don’t have to. Unless you can’t. Which he may not be able to. I thought about the possibility of helping others this way. Could I lead people astray in the woods for adventure to show them basic survival basic self care? Would I look at a group and know who will find that balance and who will always feel the weight? Could I help others with balance? When I don’t have my own? I did but then it was heavy again and now I’m feeling it lighten. Finding my own balance again.

Now I want someone with me. All this did was make me want to have someone with me again. The same way I once did. Only better? I want to turn and show someone what I see. I want to find things and places with someone. I want to travel with someone. I want to walk out and say open this. I can’t. I want to sit and watch tv. Or at least try to sit. I want to wander off alone and know that someone is back waiting for me to come back. Someone who knows he can’t tip my seesaw for me and find the balance that I have to myself.

I get seesaw updates from my kids teacher so seesawing is weighing heavy on my mind. All school is. It’s weird they used the word seesaw for this app. I feel zero balance with the use of it. I feel like it should just be called school again and seesawing should be a playground activity. Back to seesawing.

My dad died early this year, April. Right when the earth was just thawing of winter and waking for spring. At the beginning of my busiest time growing plants.
During this time we could not do a ceremony for him. No one could do ceremonies. Being who my dad was he wouldn’t likely have wanted a big show anyway. He wished to be anatomically donated. So people could learn from him even after he is gone.
That’s the kind of man he was.
Not having a ceremony has felt a little like I have dragged out a funeral for months. That I am finding my own ways to learn from him without him here.

Where will I put my grave pillow? My flowers for him? Where will I go to talk to him?

I have traveled woods, rivers and even our skies looking for ways to find peace. Jumped from a plane,tried to grow a garden, made up stories of being in jungles to move forward. I am exhausted. Looking back, as I often do, when stuck in looking forward, this is what I learned.

He is everywhere. Which is part of what is so difficult. He was once just somewhere, one single place I knew, now he is everywhere I look. I just can’t hear him the same way.

When I wondered off to the Chattooga River this summer I knew I would find him. I knew if I quieted myself enough for a moment I could hear him again. Right here in the rapids of the water, in the sun that peaked through the dark woods, in the little raindrops, in my every step forward.

I don’t need a place to take flowers. He wouldn’t know to look for them in one single spot from me. They have to be picked and tied with a little piece of grass and floated down every river I see forever. Float down casually, tumble from rock to rock, pass by a boater or fisherman who will know, he will see these flowers and say “I wonder who you were?”

We want a place to remember our loved ones. A place to put their pillows. Their favorite flowers. To sit on a bench and chat about so much. I take myself back to right here when I need to listen to him. I was wandering a plant jungle yesterday and went back to the river today.
This is what grief does? Back and forth? It’s exhausting.
Looking forward soon.
The holidays are going to be difficult this year. Look further than you’ve ever had to for comfort during this time.
Peace be with you.

🍃 Heather

Do you see it?

If you look closely and squint through the sun you can see what I am trying to hear, what I need to hear, so I can listen.

Isn’t that how our senses work? Like a team. I couldn’t chose one to lose if asked. Why do we even ask that? I need them all to work.

Try to eat sushi with your eyes closed. It makes for an interesting change in the way it feels and tastes. I don’t know why I picked sushi. But if I said peanut butter and jelly it sounds kind of boring, unless it’s crunchy peanut butter…

Listen to music with your eyes closed. It blocks the vision of the moment to allow for the feeling of what the music brings to mind. Take away the traffic and you can hear what you need to listen, to feel the music. Don’t drive with your eyes closed🤦‍♀️.

If I plug my ears, all that happens is, I can’t hear anything as well or eat my sushi without my hands. But I can still see. So I can probably still listen, if I had to. And want to.

Many of us are visual learners. We need to see it not to believe it, but to hear it, then understand it. If we aren’t presented with something to see, it’s hard to hear. Not just hear, but listen. We often say “show me”. We tend to like to read over trying to hear something. We like maps, graphics, charts and images. We tend to remember a face and not a name. I close my eyes when it gets too loud, not my ears.

I looked way out into the tree tops. To the horizon, to the sun that was trying blind me, to see if I could hear what I was trying to listen to.

What was it?

Myself.

We get so lost in our moments, lost in others moments, we get noisy. Too loud to hear the most important person to listen to.

I’ve been lost in my grief. It’s been like a wave, a calm, a fear, a gain, a void…a squiggle, to use a word my second grader uses when she has to write a story from a “squiggle” drawing. “Everything is squiggle-y” she says. Grief has been squiggle-y.

I can’t hear my dad anymore. Not the way I used to. So I went after a place to listen. To see if I could still hear him in any way. I can. He is right there. See?

Grief is a heavy weight. When we surround ourselves with any piece of our natural world it can lighten the weight. Even while carrying it on our backs😊.It could be a garden, a long hike, potted plants above your kitchen sink, herbs in your bathroom, a single orchid, or a snake plant in your corner. Take away the noise of the busy world, the rules, the traffic and you are left with this. Just you, and what you see, to listen.

🍃 Heather

I have not written in a month. Not here anyway. I have written in my head and written in places I don’t know and written in places others know but not in the one place I know. right here. With me. I address my anxiety specifically here. It’s not always a welcome visitor. Not even with me. Especially with me. Lately it has taken over. Lately I have been….to say the least, anxious.

To start, when my dad died I felt a loss. Of him of course. I miss and missed him but the feeling of someone who “got me” is gone. My connection to someone other than me is no longer there. Now I have to plunge real far into my imagination to pretend my dad is here. Dead, but here. To feel him as I take every breath or step. To know he is guiding me. To know he is listening. Is he? It’s the core of my anxiety. The big questions. The Who and what is in control. Oh right, that’s me. Of me.

I crave control of me. It’s the one single thing I can do in a world so chaotic that I feel I’m spinning right into another universe. Which I hope there are. And I’m wearing something fancy, listening to the New World symphony, mask free in a little cocktail dress with my head rested on his shoulders. You know who I mean. Yes, him. Except he isn’t there. No one is. I’m rested on air. My head lays slightly left to rest on the sounds. I’m turning my ear to hear. So I can see. I’m listening with my eyes. So I can hear. That it’s me there. On my shoulder.

I once found comfort from someone who was broken. It was no wonder we connected. I was lost. He was lost. We were two losts in a woods of founds. We wandered woods all over the country looking for ways out. I found mine. He hasn’t yet. His path went further into the woods and mine took me right back to that shoulder to lean on. Mine.

In a world full of chaos it is hard to manage our own chaos. The one that is quiet. The one that spins us all quietly. The one that maybe makes the whole pot stirred chaotic. We are all fighting chaos within and without. In this universe anyway. Not the one with symphony music to see.

So I write again openly here to my anxious mind which is the Aspen in me. The roots that run rampant across the land and form some of our largest living organisms. All connected. Roots ready to grow again when destroyed by anything. Little baby forests ready to emerge.

I’ve been writing about my loss which isn’t a loss but has been a gain. I have gained from losing. How? By losing my father? No one wants to talk about the hard things like death. Yet next to life it’s the one thing we all will accomplish. We have a common bond. We will all die. No one will beat it no one will win no one will defy the odds. At best we drag out the painful process of living. Life is hard. Death comes so easy and so peacefully.

I held my breath for my dad as he took his last. I will never forget this moment. Except he stopped and I had to breath, or I would die. Can we hold our breath until we die? I wasn’t planning to except it felt like I shouldn’t breath until he couldn’t anymore. Maybe he made me? Maybe he breathed life back into me as he took his last? Maybe that’s right where I am now? Alive? I have been holding my breath still since he died. I forgot how to breath?

Greenhouse scents?

“It smells so wonderful!”

Does it? It did and now it doesn’t?

It still does. We love to hear this. As we work in the bottled up Frazier fir our sense of smell gets fatigued, olfactory fatigue, it’s called. Nose-blind. We get used to the smell. Not tired of it. We like to be reminded how wonderful the smell of fresh Frazier is. How wonderful it makes you feel. Reminded to breath.

Breath in, slowly, with your belly, not your whole body, relax your shoulders, breath out, repeat. And keep repeating. It’s science that big deep slow belly breaths can relax you. Maybe not science,but it’s known.

Breathing techniques-It’s how we calm down, it’s what we are taught to have babies, it’s how we regulate when we run, hike, work out, it’s how we live. By breathing.

If we have learned anything about this time in our lives, it’s how to never have a routine again. We wake daily to new ways to adjust to life. Then wake the next day and it’s different. The unknown is making you anxious. We want to see family. We want to eat turkey. We want normal. Not new normal.

Slowly we forget to breath. Should we forget to breath? We do. How many times a day do you think about how you inhale? When you do do you think, what if it’s the last one? Is a really great inhale as calming if you think it could be the last? Maybe those are the really good ones?

How many times can we breath in the greenhouse scents before fatigue sets in? Once we walk away and come back the nose blindness is gone. The nose remembers. We remember to breath in deep and enjoy the scent before we get used to it again. We just need reminded.

Unless I am under water holding my breath I am unlikely to die holding my breath. Unless I’m being strangled, I suppose but that’s against my will and out of the norm. Yet so would being under water unless I drove off a bridge on an icy road and my car is filling and full of pressure and I’m kicking myself for not getting that tool that breaks windows? Where are my pruners? Why would my car fill up with water? It will just run out of air right? Or both eventually? Why did I drive on an icy bridge? I don’t like to go over bridges on a good day? What kind of car was it?I feel I have been holding my breath. Waiting for what? To see what would happen? I haven’t actually been holding my breath. It just feels like it. I have been breathing wrong. Too much, not enough. Too fast. Too slow. Too painful.

I haven’t been able to put into words the way I handled my dad dying. My grief took me all over the place and still is. I cried today with a customer who’s child died 6 weeks ago and needs a little child sized grave blanket but can’t find one. She cried. Hard. The hardest I’ve heard someone cry. She was doing it right? I was not? she went on to tell me all about her grief and loss. I listened through my own tears. Maybe I can hear better of my eyes are flooding? I was aware at some point I was no longer crying for her but for me. I felt bad and told her. She cried less and I cried more. She stopped and sniffled. Wiped snot likely on her mask like we all do right now. And we both did that nervous giggle of how silly we were but we aren’t silly. She lost a child. I lost my father. We are far from silly. And not far from each other. Connected over the phone in my office over my tacos. She was in a closet. Her child’s. The universe without the cocktail dress in the symphony but the one with me and all my grief brought her to me, me to her. To get us through today. She apologized and I said it was due. I hand yet cried today and hadn’t cried like that at all.

So I wondered around with someone I care deeply for but can’t care deeply for. He needs to first care deeply for himself. I can’t be his reason to be alive. It’s too much pressure for a person. I like the simple control of me. The bed being made. The dishes done. The bills all paid and debt free ready for the next day.

I am an anxious girl. Not just because it’s an anxious time, it could be a calm clear controlled beautiful moment in time and I am still anxious. The more calm it is the more I wander, why so calm? One thing I struggle with is staying in the moment. Being anxious I tend to time travel during the day. I kind of wander off back and forth. Looking for today. The right now.

Today I have gone from thoughts on eyelashes, to King tut, to remote learning, to the birth of my babies in the time it takes most people to blink a few times. And that’s just a few blinks of time….just not the time in front of me. I also still have an eyelash stuck in my eye and blink more than usual…still today.

When we take a picture we are capturing life. We want to remember it. We want to be able to pull it back out someday and revisit it. We also want to share it. If we take a picture with the intent to share, do we lose the moment for ourselves?

In that minute, did you think? I have to share this? With who? Or did you think? Look at this? I want to remember this forever? Can you? Do we miss sunset if we capture it or do we capture it so we don’t miss it?

Then I think, it’s just a flower.

It’s just an anemone, blooming right now, November 28th not the 14th when I last wrote how to breath again, 2020 in the greenhouse.

It’s one of my sisters favorite flowers.

I can see the light shining through and the shadows of its anemone self through the velvet pink petals.

I can feel the sun through the south window more, winter is coming.

I can hear the roof closing, the fan squeaking.

I can smell the greenhouse, it’s smells like life.

I can taste, nothing. But wish I was tasting the cherry dipped ice cream cones from DQ. Ice cream is easier to eat when I don’t have to eat it fast from the scorching summer sun.

For a moment, I am grounded. Right there with the flower. I snapped it’s picture. I want to remember this moment forever. I want to share it later when I wrap my anxious thoughts around it.

Except I am the anxious flower.

I slept two nights in a row. Not from avoiding things either. I wanted to actually sleep. To feel that pull of tired I hear about and have felt so rarely. To lay down and feel sleepy not worn out, my body doesn’t hurt from trying to run my batteries down when I don’t have batteries to run down. I didn’t want to feel like I was falling into an abyss. Into an unknown. Often times medications and alcohol can make you feel like you are falling into something when you lay down. They trick you into sleep. They alter your mind and my mind can’t be altered it can’t fall for it. My mind knows better than to fall for a trick such as this. It protects me. I protect it.

That being said I wanted to sleep. I am tired but not my mind. It says it has things to figure out first. Shoot, I forgot I was cooking sausage and it has been whistling and I couldn’t figure the whistling out. I’m cooking. That’s right. Sleep made me too rested. My guard is down now.

My house has been egged several times in a row. I didn’t even know people still did that. Aren’t we in the midst of a global pandemic? People are wasting eggs on things right now? I can’t even buy bacon because of this. I’m more upset with the waste than the act itself. My wipers won’t work from being so gummed up. I have had to wash my towels twice from the egg hitting laundry I had drying on the balcony. Kids need more to do. They need to be in school.

I have not even really thought about coronavirus in weeks. I just can’t seem to care anymore. Not not care but just not care. What good will it do me to think of it? I am doing what I can and always have done these things so I have nothing to adjust to except living life without my dad and everyone else around me seems afraid of me or themselves. It’s a weird world now.

I almost tried to think about the theory of relativity before bed. No good would have come of this. It seems so neat and tidy to sum up in a single paragraph yet the equations involved are so complex. It seems it can’t be thought out but just believed. What made Albert Einstein need to figure this out. Did he feel it? Feel something or just question it? I wonder what it would be like to try to talk to him? I mean he is dead so it would be just talking to yourself but if you could go back in time and talk to him. What would he say? Anything? Was he a man of few words since he was a man of too many?

Could you imagine trying to ask someone what they want for dinner and they are just busy trying to prove or disprove theories of relativity? You say do you want chicken and he says, do you think time bends gravity? Can gravity bend light? In fact, what is gravity? What is time? Space? That pillow talk with Einstein would include his thoughts that time and space are intertwined like a blanket? I am not so concerned with the theory itself but what made him need to know? Who was he? How did he keep his drawers? Did he sort his socks? Fold towels a specific way? Did he even eat dinner? Or just graze? Did he like bacon? What kind of man needs to prove the theory of relativity? The more questions I have the more questions I have. Why did he try to figure this out? Why do we try to prove him wrong?

What kind of woman needs to know what kind of man Albert Einstein was? What kind of woman am I?

I should be more politically concerned with politics. That’s not right I should be a more educated voter. How do you become an educated educated voter? I don’t vote unless I can do it with some education behind the choice. I don’t want to chose randomly. I don’t want to write in a vote. I want to select a candidate based on a knowledgeable background from reliable sources. How do I find reliable sources? Who do you trust? And how?

How do I trust again? I have to guess? Just do it? Let it go when it’s broken? I was told someone trusts me. I am in his small list of people he trusts. Why? And how? I know I am trust worthy and belong on this list but how does he know? I could learn to trust again by learning from people who trust people? It felt kind of nice to have someone say they wanted to beat the people up that are egging my things. It shouldn’t feel nice because I want no one beat up but sort of do if it keeps the eggs away, but it’s not the way to solve things. We teach our kids that. Not to hurt others. Be kind. Even when kind isn’t being given. But it still felt nice. Doesn’t every damsel in distressed woman want a knight in shining armor? I doubt it. The world isn’t like that anymore. We have to look out for our own selves. I also wasn’t in distress. I am not a damsel either. Eggs are being thrown and I am trying to find a way to just fall asleep. I don’t care what occurs in the night out of my control anymore. I want to sleep. Like a sound little baby. But I do want a knight in shining armor. I am that woman. Just to be told they would be. Nor actually do it. If someone showed up on a horse with swords drawn in armor I would panic about the horse, the sword, the armored man and the entire scenario. But eliminate that whole image and someone just says hey I will be there for you then actually is, it feels like a knight in shining armor minus the armor and shining and horse and sword. Someone to trust because they showed up for once. That’s how I can trust again. When it’s shown I can. Just once.

I found that a small amount of valerian root does it. It just puts me right to sleep. At least twice it has. Twice is good. It’s way more than never. I don’t want to try to profile the personality of Albert Einstein before bed or try to become and educated voter. I want to sleep so I can wake up and not feel like I almost died or that I was dead. That I was just asleep. No confusion as to what occurred in the night for a few minutes that feels like hours or hours that feels like a few minutes.

I had no idea what would happen as I took that little drink of this potion to help sleep. Will it work? Will it be poison to me? What if I am unknowingly taking my last drink? Of anything ever again. Is sleep this important to me? You never know how something will effect your mind and body once consumed. Until you do. It won’t work forever if it is what is working at all. It is just what is working right now? Or maybe it’s not what is working and I just drink valerian root and am sleeping on my own. I will never know. If I stop drinking it and still sleep was that what did it or was it me? If I stop drinking it and don’t sleep is that what did it or didn’t?

I do have things to figure out, but they aren’t theories of relativity. They are simpler but maybe not but simply not when I want to sleep. The holidays are coming and my dad is still dead. I’m in no hurry to jump to next year since then I will have to say in my head and to others my dad died last year. But it wasn’t. It was just 7 months ago so it was last year but still not. I don’t want a holiday without him yet. I don’t want a single day without him yet. It’s still too new and I’m still in April of this year. Everyone else can want to move forward too fast to get past what is too hard but for me the too hard is necessary to move forward to the not as hard so the too hard has to be single moments. Right here and right now is all I can do. Unless I need to go back 100 years and try to determine the kind of man Albert Einstein was.

I thought I wanted to write. When I woke I woke from sleep so hard I was certain I died. I did not feel suffocated just certain I was dead. My legs were numb and I couldn’t feel them. Either from sleep so hard my spine crushed a nerve that left no feeling or I walked so much in a day I wore them out and they had to sleep more than me.

I woke with the desire to be at the river. I love the woods and in a mood I need it but I’m worn out from thinking even thinking of needing it in a way I need it. Which means I do. But the river….

I am naturally drawn to water. I am also unnaturally drawn to it. I seek water out when I’ve lost my way. When in doubt look for water, or low spots where land snakes lower, it drains to something my dad said. It goes to somewhere. I’ve gotten out of more land adventures by finding and following water or drainage ditches than I have not. It may be the longest way out but it has proven a way either out or back to. Often trails intentionally lead to river side walking and I have ran back into the trail or a trail while walking just along the river myself while accidentally being drawn to it. Or intentionally needing it. I can hear it. If I hear it I steer myself or myself gets steered to find it. I am not distracted by shiny objects. I am distracted by sounds. In a less than anxious time I will listen to it and stay put. Not just water but any noises. If I am too loud myself I wonder off to find the source of the noises. Especially if it is a babbling brook or trickling of water falling from rocks that I can’t see but can hear and I don’t want to hear me. Then I go. Off the trail to find the noise. I go off the task to find what’s clicking. Off task to see what I hear so I can see it. Everything must operate smoothly or I might disassemble it to find the source of its pain. Of mine. That door knob is just too loud. Why? The fan is too loud. The clicking of the key pad. Chewing gum. I’m sure there is a word for people who don’t like noises. It is not that I don’t like them it is that they are too noisy. I get it. I shouldn’t be so loud and leaky with all my noise too. I should take myself apart and find out why. Why? Why I am so loud today that I have to yell at others. Not yell but use an outside voice when an inside voice is what is needed but an inside voice is too soft for me to hear myself. While I also have all this chaos and then add a squeaky fan from not being balanced. I am not balanced?

I have to check in with myself today. That’s what I’m going to call it. My therapist says it a lot. I don’t always hear what she says. The last appointment was interrupted by my phone lighting up next to me with too many messages from someone who won’t get that I can’t think of him I am busy thinking of me. I also don’t want to explain it. He took the first time too hard. Too personal. My need for space made him need to know what about him made me need space. I need space from myself not from you I said in my loud head to myself but not to him. Who would get that? It doesn’t matter. I get it. That’s what matters. I matter. I don’t think he doesn’t but he can’t matter to me if I don’t to him or that he doesn’t get that I do to me first. That’s the red flag I saw waiving it’s red at me from the very first message. It said think of me not you. Then I will make you think that if you think of me I will you. But that’s not that works. I fell for it once. Fell for too long. No one makes me think of them. I think of others more than I should the way it is all on my own. I have to work harder than some to make myself listen to myself because I am often too loud to hear even me. So I have to check in. At the river. So I can see what is so loud by seeing what is so loud. I also know what it is but I can’t get it to resolve on my own.

I need the river one last time before it’s too cold to put my feet in it to splash water on my tears. To let it wrap me up in its little wiggle around the hills. That sounded so silly. Can’t we get wrapped up in rivers. I can. Not physically. Unless of course I fall from my boat and am actually wrapped up in tangled branches. But this is a rhetorical? Metaphorical? Wrap. But it’s literally a wrap. In my head I can make it feel like it’s wrapping me up and taking me to where? No where or to out and back to. Even if I just sit on the edge and watch the water. Listen to it if I can. I will have to shut myself off by closing my eyes and trying so hard to hear just the river. So I can feel it so I can feel me again.

The loss of my father put me in a place I have to resolve again. This place I felt someone was required to be with me or I won’t get through it. It may have been true at the time too. I may have needed that for the time and I may need it again. I suspect I will struggle with his loss for some time. And I will keep making up ways to cope without making it be that someone else should do it for me. Because they can’t. No one is going to resolve my grief. But me. And the river. River resolve is what I use the river for. Not the same way as the woods. My father was a river man. He lived to be on the water. He drove us across states to be on rivers. It would be no wander I wonder to the river for resolve.

I thought I was done. I am not. I’m never done. I wondered the house to gather my things to go river resolving and keep thinking of the river itself. All of them. I have literally distracted myself from my task at hand by distracting myself from the task at hand. I feel I can’t leave Until the entire house is picked up and my pillows look firm and not squished on my new sofa. Everything needs to be in place before I come back from putting everything back in place.

I could take someone. Can you really show someone self care by inviting them on your own time for self care? Can you really show people self care if in the moment your thought is on sharing your self care? Can you be in the moment and share it at the same time?

I didn’t grow up around big beautiful rapid moving rivers snaking through roaring mountains. In fact it’s the opposite. I grew up with every river in the Midwest surrounded by roaring corn and soybean fields my dad could get us to. The closest thing to what he really desires and several times even took us to what he really loved. The fast moving beautiful rapids of rivers roaring through mountains. So I grew up watching the desire for these rivers. Surrounded by soybeans and corn but not mountains.

Someday my kids will do this. Not all of them I suspect but two out of the four I feel are paying attention to me. The other two are but not in the same way. They don’t share the passion I share with my dad. The desire to explore. I can’t take them with me since they leave on weekends and one I can’t take with me right now until I get what I need first. I’m teaching him that he should be first for himself by teaching him I am for me right now. And he gets it. Then one day we will go and he will get to see why. In time. Same as my dad did with me. In time. I will take you down that river some day. Or someday you will take yourself down that river. In time.

No more distracted river resolving I have real river resolving to do.

Grief has taken on many forms for me. I’ve felt like I’ve shape shifted for months. That I am one thing then another then another not knowing each day what shape I would be. Fighting some days to shift back to the day before shape while also wanting to be the next day shape. I have not been exhausted from grief itself but from the shape shifting it presented and I shifted through daily. The constant switch of emotions as if I was multiple people.

From grief I felt the strong desire for human touch. For interactions. To be felt not alone. I met a few people. I had to also un meet a few people. The grief made me feel desperate and that just any people will do. Like trying on sweaters. I felt I needed a sweater and I tried a few but then found that they pulled at my neck wrong or the sleeves weren’t long enough, the threading kind of itchy. Nothing is more bothersome than a poorly fit sweater, especially when it’s hot and no sweater was actually needed.

I am taken. I have been telling people this for years. As a way to make them go away. It’s am easy boundary. Just say I’m not available because my thoughts belong to someone else. Which was true except the someone else is not actually mine. No one is mine. I belong to me and they belong to them. I have used it as an easy out from avoiding the hard words of I belong to me. I am taken by me. No one wants to sound this ridiculous. Yet it’s the most not ridiculous thing to say. But my thoughts are still are for someone. He still doesn’t know. I won’t tell him from fear of him not wanting my thoughts to him and I won’t tell him from fear of him wanting them. A bothersome predicament for me since I do want a companion someday which means telling people things I’m afraid of telling them so I can hear back what I do and don’t want to hear so I can tell others the same and hear it back and then keep moving forward till someone says that’s what I wanted to hear. Then I will feel fear from this and have to face this fear next by hearing that’s what I want to hear and keep hearing it by actually listening and not really hearing so I can feel it. Just not during a signifiant time of loss.

That should be a grief rule. No big decisions while grieving. Such as falling in love. Or selling houses or buying cars, maybe no new puppy’s. Is it even a decision? Falling in love? Not the feeling but the process is. I feel love for someone yet I am not actively in love. I just feel love for him but I am not pursuing love for him. It is stuck love really. Which he also doesn’t know but maybe he does but I won’t ask or tell anyway. Love is as weird as grief. They may be the same sometimes or feed each other. I am grieving so much from no where to put all the love I have for my dad. Displaced love. But I am loving so much because I have displaced grief? I am grief loving? Not loving grief? And want to be loved because I am grieving and now I am confused by both. Like just now.

I do wander. He said I suffer from wander lust. Which I do? Or I can feel like I’m suffering if I don’t wander. If I am Unwandered I tend to feel restless. Like I am geographically displaced. Geographically, love and grief displaced? See how I could feel restless? Like the globe is spinning waiting for me to be dropped somewhere on it. That I am spinning independently from the planet. Just waiting. Which doesn’t sound like restless except I’m watching a spinning planet while also spinning in my mind of places I should be or rather be than sitting still spinning above a spinning planet while grieving and loving. Then I fall and land and find somewhere to be and make that the place I have to go and be so I’m not just spinning while standing still watching the world go by. Is that wander lust? I don’t have a strong desire to travel, I don’t like to drive and really even fly so actual travel presents a challenge unless I walk. I have to be driven and of course be flown since I don’t fly but I sort of want to learn to fly so I can be the one to fly me. I may love flying more if I am doing it? Otherwise I need to keep flying to see if I like it. I’ve not flown enough to sort this out yet. I have a strong desire to not be rooted in. A strong desire to not be stationary. Not tied down. Same thing?

I am not a very stationary person. I don’t really like the idea of planting seeds and roots in a spot and calling it my own spot. I had this once and then it all got uprooted and fell apart. I let it. Because I really didn’t belong there. I was spinning out of control in a place I couldn’t get away from from roots hindering me down. Then I got all tangled up on roots that I planted but never wanted to grow there. I have a large root system, that like an aspen tree. I am wide spread and vast. Across entire countries and land not owned by anyone. I can be burned to the ground destroyed from wind and storms and my network of roots are just below ground waiting to grow tall again across the planet. Very little can destroy me including myself. I’ve tried and others have tried. I just grew farther and stronger not deeper and more rooted but shallow rooted and flexible to move freely around. Less tangled. Free to spin when I’m restless waiting to be somewhere I can be not.

I am restless now. I felt my anxiety moving back in place after months of feeling a weird calm from the loss of my father. I break from myself to rest and grieve and not feel anxious for just a little while. My secret gift from my dad. I am him. He knows how restless and anxious I am because he was. He passed peacefully and I am certain finally felt relief not pain which for once in my life I felt peaceful and relief for him which gave me peaceful and relief from me and for me. Of course I am not saying I am relieved my father passed I am saying I felt his relief. All my life I have worried my dad was dead. Not home from work yet, dead. Not back from the store, also dead. I have no good reason to ever think this except I am wired to believe it. From the beginning of life I felt the safest I’ve ever felt likely in my moms tummy. Then out into a world of chaos while being full of chaos I was just born with. I was born anxious. Life makes me anxious and I get more anxious sometimes than others but I am always anxious even when I felt a little peace during grief as my mind doesn’t know what peaceful really is making me anxious even while at peace.

My dad suffered from wander lust. He woke us often and said let’s go and then we would go not knowing where we were going but we had to go. Just to go for a little bit. Then be right back after he found what he was looking for in himself and untangled so he could reroot his big vast root system that we share. He took us all over the country to see the country. He would have taken us all over the world but the world ran out for him. He called it stir crazy. He was stir crazy. I called it fun. Adventure. I couldn’t wait for a weekend just to see where we might go having my own stir crazy I needed to go to be gone to do so I could come back and be able to stay. And breath. Roots have to breath. Especially ones as big, shallow and vast as mine.

Man that was all over the place. I definitely have to write more often again so I can undo what I did these past few months. I have played with boundaries and rules and my comfort zone too much and now am uncomfortable and have new boundaries and some that won’t be followed still by others no matter what I say or do making me want to lose my mind. He is in my space and trying to make me think of him. If he only knew how big of a space I needed he would understand but I don’t even want him to know how big my space and roots are and to just get off of them so I can breath and keep growing bigger and stronger but he keeps trying to dig around in them and take them from me. I don’t have to explain myself to anyone. I’ve laid out where he can’t be and he keeps being in it making me feel stir crazy like my dad. Like I need to make my space so big he can’t find the edge. Land somewhere else. I have a desire to flee to avoid from a feeling so familiar I have to go. I am looking for someone to follow my new rules for me not bend them and break them. They are there from years of not being there and are new to me so new to everyone but to be followed until I bend and break them myself to allow room to grow big. Someone once tried to destroy me and I’ve spent years growing back to me and won’t be destroyed by someone again.

What I was feeling was feelings? Other than anxious for once. During a time of significant loss I was more calm than I ever have been. My anxiety took a backseat to grief. Or maybe my grief is part of it and it is part of grief. I will always be grieving these losses? I will always be anxious. I won’t let go of the love I felt for my father. I won’t forget him. Someone said, actually lots of people say it hurts less in time. It gets easier. Why does it have to? Why can’t it hurt? It should. It was a great big feeling. Now it’s gone. Or the person is not the feeling?

For a little while I was given a little relief from my anxious mind to settle through a process that I didn’t think I could settle through. It’s not over but for now I have all my questions back. For now all the words are back. Grief has to still be there it is just not in the form it presented at first. I was sleeping more, eating when and if I wanted but mostly not, I avoided nature and places that made me recall childhood memories because they are too painful when those are the places to go to feel all painful memories of a childhood raised to go to the woods to deal. Everywhere I looked he was there. But not. In spirit isn’t working yet. In spirit can’t cook, laugh, ask questions in wonder, pray, play the piano. In spirit can’t help me through yet. I don’t even know if it ever will. I haven’t even found it yet. It’s not real. I can’t touch it and feel it and see it. I am supposed to just imagine and believe it to feel it. Except I can’t feel what I can’t touch and see.

I am going to try to manifest more properly. I maybe haven’t been asking the right ways. It sounds like a plan. I found a few simple steps to manifest that then at the end said in two weeks report back to here with your results. Report back to where? Pinterest? So basically I will write down what I want from the universe then put it in my pocket then look at it daily, then repeat it in my head, then look for signs everywhere of sprouting up, then open myself up to receive it. Then report back. How hard can that be? So in two weeks I should see signs of the universe sprouting me up a companion? Just a man growing right up out of the ground for me? How does it know it’s in my pocket? What if it’s washed? I lose it? What if I forget? What if I’m asking wrong? Is a companion to be manifested? What kinds of things can I ask for? Who am I asking? How do they hear? When will I know? What if I miss the signs? Too distracted from distractions? What if he does?

I forced myself back up this morning. I have some manifesting to work through and need to be back up at the time I am supposed to be up. I had a nightmare my dad and sister were stranded on a rock protruding from the ocean. My sister was unconscious and my dad was too far away to help. I had his backpack on and was on shore and couldn’t save anybody. I woke upset. I feel it in my throat that I cried through my sleep most the night. I forced myself back out of bed so I didn’t lay and over think anything that was stuck in my night head that hadn’t been digested yet. Like the lack of a companion. Someone there to hold me when o cry to sleep. Someone who will wake from my waking, someone who may even get up first and bring me water. Is that a more simple manifest? Someone to bring me a drink of water? Have I been making it too hard? Not clear enough? I wasn’t looking for a companion I would have to take care of. Someone to replace what I’ve worked hard to not attract. I wasn’t looking for someone just as sad as me to sit or not sit sad with me. Was the problem that I was looking? I wasn’t asking for what I want I was looking for it? Trying to force a process too complicated for an average human or myself to understand. I am not an average human to be clear. Trust. I thought grief was hard. My keypad is making words it wants. It wants grief to be fried. It can’t even guess what my fast thoughts are trying to say.

Trust yourself and then the universe will what? Trust back? Offer the opportunity for trust. I’m asking wrong? I am looking for a companion. So o should focus on myself and then a companion should appear? Sprout up? If I look for one then I quit being me. I quit taking care of me. Because I am too busy with other people’s lives. I don’t want to actually know he has someone. I could probably find out but I don’t want to know. I’m so used to being the other person that I assume I am. But I’m not supposed to assume and I quit not assuming for awhile when I lost track of my chaotic thoughts. I assumed the worst, I assumed the same. I assumed the outcome, I assumed I was right or I was wrong. I was consumed with assumed again. It doesn’t matter if he is with someone else. That has nothing to do with me.

I’ll have to start exercising again if I eat like I’m two people. I am over compensating for not eating for months. I lost too much weight. Now I’m eating again and I can feel my skin filling in. I feel fuller again. Not fat by any means but not loose. Like my skin was loose. I don’t like to exercise at all. Or run. I can walk but I don’t seem to think I need to get anywhere any faster than a walk. I miss too much I am supposed to be looking at. But I can run. Really far. And for a really long time. I do it when I have somewhere farther to get to than I have time for. Or sometimes I do it for no reason. But I don’t regularly run and don’t plan to. I don’t plan to actually exercise or change anything. But I should do something. Maybe moderate the appetite a little. I could start swimming again but they have made the process so difficult to set a time that I can’t even open the app and get the password. I could call and make my spot. Be the one single person who can’t use an app to make an appointment to swim?

All I know is I am back to me. Back to my anxious mind feels comfortable to me. The calm, sleepy, avoiding me is more anxious, awake and eager to not avoid again. To go back to the woods and find myself again. It’s right where my dad left me. In the woods is where I will be found and lost. It didn’t work a few weeks ago. I just wasn’t there anywhere. I looked. I was nowhere and he was everywhere. My dad was too everywhere for me to find me. Which is like he is still everywhere in a way. If I make up something in my head and pretend that he is always part of me because genetically this is true then maybe in spirit I can feel him guiding me or I can feel him within me but I can’t feel my genes. They are part of me. And not him. It is a far stretch of my imagination to believe my father is with me and not just gone. It can’t offer me peace until I wrap my entire anxious thoughts around a made up spiritual story to find a little comfort. Like the butterfly. I use the butterfly as a way to tell myself my dad is visiting me. It really doesn’t work. But I’d i do it enough and say it enough then it almost feels true. True enough to get me through a day. But still sad since I know my dad is gone and is not a butterfly in spirit or even in not. I am not 5. I am a grown women who misses her dad. My imagination can be stretched pretty far for a grown woman but only as far as it will go. Which is far. But not far enough.

I can hear my turtle tank. I really can frustrate myself if I let myself. I need help with something hard and don’t know how to ask. No one shows up for me. I spent years asking and being let down. I got used to just doing everything on my own and never asking. Now I want to ask but don’t know how and who to ask. Then I don’t even want help because I want to actually do this really hard thing myself. Except I don’t. I’ve tried asking the universe to present me a companion to do things for me but again I was looking for someone not asking for someone. So do I just not do my hard things until someone comes along and does them for me because I’ve quit doing hard things? Or do i do them and ask for someone to at the same time? Why would I do that? Why would the universe even think someone should come along and answer my questions? Fix something? Hold my hand? Walk with me? Talk to me. After all these years of not? Do I deserve them? After all the years of not? Why now? It’s part of my process? Part of life. Everything got me to here. What’s next?

I’m trying to get back into a routine. I can’t have my old one and need a new one but want my old one.

Since the whole world shut down and my dad died then my brother in law died I have to find a life that doesn’t include them and doesn’t include most of the things I once did. But some are starting to slowly get back to a new normal. I am just not adjusting to it. I like my old normal not new normal. What is new normal? It is not normal at all. It is abnormal. New normal is abnormal. unusual. Uncomfortable.

I am trying to get back to writing again daily. The thought that I don’t need to write was replaced with the thought that I was doing well enough that I didn’t need to write daily, then replaced with the thought that I am avoiding writing to avoid writing daily. I stopped to avoid not because I am so grounded and resolved that o have nothing to write out. Nothing to see. I am too afraid to see it.

I bother myself. I was told I bothered someone for years. So in my mind I bother everyone. But really I bother me. I’m a lot for myself. I exhaust myself. I don’t wear myself out. I have tried. I have tried to exhaust myself to the point of exhaustion that I hope will resolve the bothersome thoughts. The feeling I bother others. I haven’t heard it for years. In fact I’ve heard the opposite. That I don’t bother him. That he liked my energy. How could he? Even I don’t. I see it and feel it but can’t accept it. I’ve been trying to find calm. Hoping I will attract calm when I can’t attract what I am not.

If you love someone set them free? This thought comes and goes with me right now. I’m trying to set love free? Why? I want to hang onto love. Not set it free. Why would we. Can’t we keep it forever. I loved him once and it isn’t gone? Is it? Was it not love? I only really know what love is not so love is is difficult to feel from others. I can give it? Can’t I? Am I giving or wrong? Too much! Not enough?

I don’t want to think about love. I have someone I love. I am certain and have been for years. It is just am unusual love. One I don’t recognize. It was self love. I let it go. I stopped loving me out of confusion of needing love from others. To fill the void of less love from my dad dying. The last few months have been like a dream. A nightmare if I really think of it. But a hazy one. I woke in the night from a nightmare feeling like I finally have time to sit with myself again. Or that I want to. It’s the hardest thing I know to avoid to not do. It’s almost too hard to sit with my thoughts. Torture for me would be to have to sit. Alone. For a few hours. Torture yet also not. When I don’t want to do it is when I know that I should the most. Just sit. Not be so not sitting all the time. I don’t mean physically sit. Although that’s when it is the hardest but just to be completely alone with my thoughts. No distractions. Think of whatever comes to mind and allow it to be thought. I have to work harder than most people to focus. I’m easily distracted specifically because of the fear I have of the thoughts I am avoiding. Feeling things. Remembering and thinking of things I’ve spent years keeping from surfacing. The brain is fascinating. For years it protected me by allowing some things to just not be remembered. Then slowly they started coming at me little and sometimes they came like a train. Fast and furious. But the brain knew what it knew that I didn’t know. My brain seems to work independently of myself.

I think a lot of my anxiety is in my feet. They do a lot of my walking and work. Almost all of my work. And one is bigger than the other. An entire size. It is difficult to find peace in my foot from foot store rules not letting you mix and match sizes. I have bought two sizes and just done it myself. I buy shoes like some buy what? Not toilet paper but someone who buys things a lot. If my left toe is cramped it’s style is cramped and it makes my entire body anxious. Making my mind anxious. I wore shoes with individual toes. It was so weird I can barely describe it. All my toes seemed to have a mind of their own. They seemed to work independently of each other. Not all cramped up together. They were less of a team. But more like a relay race. Most important the big toe was free. It was comfortable with himself for once. Less pressure and pain. More miles he said. My toes don’t actually talk but they speak real loud when they hurt. I walk miles. Hundreds. Not just a few but sitting with myself is too hard so I walk with myself to sit with myself. Miles. Hundreds of them. So toe anxiety is a real thing. Less anxious feet less anxious brain less anxious me. More comfortable sitting. But walking.

I had no idea what I would think this morning no way did I think it would be about toes. I dreamt I was witnessing a man being buried alive by a backhoe. I woke in fear of being buried alive. I never found sleep again. I have been sleeping so much that a few days of not sleeping has made me a little more awake. Back to my normal. My abnormal. Back to square one. Self love. The more I do on my own the more I see I don’t need someone. I want someone. I have been manifesting to thé universe and getting frustrated that it’s not giving me what I want. Because it knows better. It knows I am not ready or not knows I don’t need it or it knows what it knows that I don’t get to know until it is known. Why?

I was manifesting the desire to be held, comforted, loved and not forgotten. To have someone’s shirt to ware to smell and feel wrapped up in a tight hug when I don’t even like to be wrapped up in tight hugs. I panic at the thought of being held. Why would they hold me? What if I can’t breath? What will I think of when being held? I would hold my breath? I would worry I’m not doing it right? I would worry I am being held and not holding back. I wanted to just be with someone else so I didn’t have to be with myself. Because that was too hard. My dad died and no way was I going to be able to do this alone.

Alone? I spent years undoing the thought that on my own means alone. Alone is a feeling of being lonely. On my own. I can move this piano on my own. I didn’t want to move it. There has always been a piano. I avoided it for weeks. My mom is ready for there to not always being a piano. Ready to move forward with no piano. I am just not. The piano is moved and I moved it with my son on our own. We didn’t need someone to move it for us. I wasn’t alone. I didn’t feel alone. I felt I did it on my own. Even though someone else was there. It is just a more empowering thought to have. To be on my own. Even with someone there I am still on my own. I’ve been the loneliest I’ve ever been while being in company of others. And felt the most not lonely completely alone and on my own. I keep company with myself quit well and my grief made me think I was not who I really am. My losses made me feel like I was someone I am not. Made me feel like I was a certain way. And I was. I am who I am and not what I’ve been through.

Grief has been a weird process for me to get through. It has felt like a loop. Like I started and went through the woods and came right back to the beginning and not an end. It can feel like waves but being so afraid of the ocean I can’t really relate anything to waves. I haven’t been in them. I want to be. But I don’t know what it’s like to be in a wave or feel waves. I know loops. My mind works in loops. Her and back to here. I don’t see the same thing twice this way. That’s how I like to hike. To come out in a big circle through. I don’t like just ending somewhere and turning around to come back. It’s such familier territory.

My kids and I are not adjusting to remote learning. My youngest is slowly but I can’t help her with much since I am not adjusting. We do math. First grade math and algebra. It’s funny how it came back to me like I’ve been doing math all my life which I have. But algebra? How did I blurt out how to do distributive properties like I’ve been doing them daily? Where did that come from? I didn’t get it when I did it and was told my alphabet was coming along for the ride with my numbers. I don’t use algebra for anything except now to do it with my son who won’t use it for anything except the same thing unless he teaches algebra. Or moves forward to more difficult math to become like an engineer. But yet it still isn’t really used? Is it? Are all of our buildings designed, engineered, and built with algebra? Everything makes sense because we solved and found X? Everything works because of letters and numbers? Algebra is what? A building block to something bigger? My son asks me, what about the a? What do I do with it? I say, it’s just along for the ride, move it down with his number. It isn’t adding or subtracting or multiplying at all just kind of there. Because I don’t know and will never know why. But math, math we can just do. It adds up. It makes sense and it doesn’t make sense. But it can be done and turned in. My kids will be great at math and self care. They may be engineers or maybe they will just be growers like me. Growing through grief.

I can’t recognize calm yet. I live an anxious life in my head. Full of chaos. The quieter I am the more chaotic I am. I have to talk loud to talk over my own self. So the louder I am the more chaos I have. It’s both. My leaky thoughts spill over and I have to yell to make sure I’m heard. Then be quiet to try to hear myself. Then occasionally. I can hear. But it is like hearing for the first time might feel after not. Because it is like that. For one day the birds were singing and not annoying, for a day the hum of the vents were soothing. I could hear them. For a day I heard my stomach growling. Then ate. For a day I was able to give clear directions, solve simple difficult problems. Yes both simple and difficult. The simple task of finding the problem and the difficult task of solving it. For a day I think I was un-anxious. Not loud. Not leaky.

Then I became angry I wasn’t sure. Then angry I couldn’t get anxious. Then angry I was angry at not being anxious and not understanding not anxious. Anxiety has a vicious cycle that is more difficult to manage than the difficult task of managing the actual anxiety. It’s when I’m not. My anxious mind gets anxious not being anxious. So not anxious is unrecognizable since it can only last a few. Maybe even minutes. Sometimes it’s just a simple good breath that I think. Good one. It didn’t feel like the last. Just the simple one needed to get to the next not the last one before the end. I told my sister I thought my dads last breath looked peaceful. That I imagine he felt comfort that he knew it was coming and that they weren’t struggled breaths at the end. That they were a balloon slowly losing air. Not painful. Not like he was trying to keep breathing but he wasn’t trying at all anymore. The relief he probably felt was probably, just that. Relief. I held my breath while he took his last ones. I didn’t want to breath and accidentally give him more a feel he needed a reason to keep breathing. I wanted it to be quiet so he didn’t hear anything but himself. I wanted it to be quiet so I could hear him let go. Hear his relief.

Living is very hard. It is hard to keep breathing when we are so uncertain of the next one. By we I mean we not just me. I know we all struggle with a form of anxiety. How can we not. The calmest most centered people I know are calm and centered from being not calm and not centered once. They got it down? They can get not anxious. They have self control. Not control of anything but themselves. They have mastered learning to trust themselves and thé universe to take care of them. They manifested the kind of life they want and they got it. But they make me anxious. Because I feel them trying to stay not anxious. They likely feel me trying but not there yet. I don’t know what others feel when around me. My tandem skydiver said he didn’t know for sure what I was feeling. That he didn’t know if screaming was excited or scared. If tears were happy or sad. That I felt very deeply. I said it’s all of them. Then fell out of his plane.

I gave myself a day to be ok with being ok. To be ok with just listening to myself for a day. No matter what I said. Grant me some grace to be me. Anxious or not. That for a day I was less anxious by being ok with being anxious about not being anxious.

See the vicious cycle. Early in the day the birds chirping sounded like a song for me. I could listen to music. By the end of the day I was annoyed when a bird wouldn’t chirp when I heard it then it didn’t do it again. Annoyed with my music playing. I was starting to get noisy again. I am struggling with meeting people and trying to not so I don’t have to. But want to but can’t and don’t know how. I want companionship. Not again but for the first time. I don’t recognize what I crave and crave it at the same time. How can I crave something I’ve never known? How can I manifest? Who is listening when I’m not?

I recognize unhealthy. I attracted people then was able to say, hey this feels weird. Not right and really something I’ve already dealt with and grown through. It feels comfy. It feels so comfy I know it’s wrong. Out of my comfort zone is what I am looking for. Not even looking for but I am trying to manifest this thought into the universe so it presents itself back to me in a form I don’t recognize. So I can say to myself when I’m having a day to listen to myself. This, this feeling. It’s so new it has to be the right one.

Manifest is the word of the day. It is not clear to me but I found it attached to a saying about manifesting my desires into the universe then they will what? Be manifested? Who is listening?