Wistful thinking

It's the end of my last weekend in Chicago for a while, and since I don't know if I'll live here again and I've been saying some goodbyes, I am feeling wistful.  This place has been my home for 7 years, and maybe it will be again, but I know that even if I come back, this is a new phase of life for me.  I think life is set up to be full of beginnings and endings, it's perpetual motion, with so many things coinciding and overlapping.  It's really exciting, but it's hard to adapt and evolve at the pace that decisions are made and circumstances change.  Even when I'm the one making the decisions and changing the circumstances, which is what I'm in the process of doing now.  It's amazing, these feelings both that I'm the least certain of the outcome of what comes next, and simultaneously the most sure of myself that I have ever been.  I feel empowered even while I feel as though I'm not really in control.

I've been thinking a little about my orientation toward life, how I have this persistent sense that there's more to learn and do, and it motivates me to keep going.  Back when I had first started making some of the big decisions I'm now carrying through, someone asked me, "Is there a chance that this won't work out?"  And it's always felt like a very silly question to me, because the answer is, "Of course!"  I think it's really the only honest answer to that question, in any context.  To only pursue "sure bets" means we miss both that nothing is truly a sure bet and that so many of the most important and rewarding things to pursue involve risk and investment of ourselves.  What I'm doing now feels like going "all in", a strategy I was never taught and have in fact been discouraged from.  But my "sure bets", my very rational and responsible-seeming choices up to now, have gone bust when it comes to bringing me happiness.  And I'm actually excited to be going a different route now, one in which my heart and intuition have more influence.  It feels very romantic and much more genuine.

And speaking of being genuine, to start a new tangent, I have also been feeling like I have put myself through too much emotional hell just for wanting to really be and express myself.  It turned out that what I wanted was not to be in my marriage, which I began realizing more than a year and a half ago.  And that really jolting realization was then scrutinized, first by myself, but also by others, including my now ex-husband.  It became a debate of what was true, but the truth that was my emotional reality and not somebody else's, so I find myself getting this surprising new feeling of indignation about how I treated myself and how I was treated by others in the course of trying to navigate how I was feeling (though some very graceful people in my life were much more generous with me).  It was a terrible process for me, but the burden of blame was readily given to me (largely by me) and I accepted it, so it was difficult even to acknowledge my own needs at the time.  It's hard not to break my principle of "no regrets" when it comes to the way things went last year, because I really would do some things differently if I knew then what I know now.  But I know life is what it is and there will always be imperfection, some gap between the way things are and the way we would have liked, because we can't understand and anticipate everything we will encounter.

But we can learn, and that is what I find exhilarating and rewarding about life.  I feel anxious about what comes next, but I feel better about it because I am facing it with someone who doesn't balk at uncertainty.  I don't want to gush, but I'm feeling grateful for all of the really unmatched strengths of this guy right now.

And I guess that's as good a place as any to call it a night.

Zen week is over

So last week I was feeling a sense of possibility, excitement, and everything coming together for my impending move.  Very calm, very zen.  This week, I have felt really anxious.  I feel like I have a lot left to do, and at the same time that I'm trying to focus on the practical things like work and packing and making sure my pre-departure to-do list gets done.  The practical things have never been that hard, they are sort of a welcome break from the emotions of leaving Chicago, being farther away from most people I know, and not really knowing how this whole adventure will go or what will come next.  I don't really spend time consciously worrying, but I've been feeling overwhelmed, and people around me can attest that my emotional fuse has been shorter.  I'm fortunate to have some very supportive people in my life, and even just reminding me that what I'm doing is exciting and that I am capable of doing it is a help.  I think at this point, the encouragement makes the most difference, because soon I will be getting onto a plane alone.  I have some help on the other side, too, but so much of it will be up to me to figure out and to make the most of it.

That doesn't seem like a complete train of thought, but that's all I've got tonight.

Sunday evening and what's next

I'm sitting at home on a Sunday evening at 7:30ish, and I'm loving that the daylight is just now fading.  I feel calm and content after a great weekend road trip with my friend Gloria to my sister's place four hours' drive away.  I will be in Mumbai in three weeks, and I'm trying to savor the time with people here, the relative quiet, and the familiar surroundings.  After 7 years living in Chicago, leaving for Mumbai and whatever comes next after that is going to be bittersweet.  I'll be turning myself upside down in plenty of ways, but the one that's been on my mind is how I'll be missing the people I can currently see and seeing the people I currently miss.  All of my relationships will change, and it's hard to imagine how it will feel.

Gloria asked me during the drive back home whether there was any year in my life that I see as my best.  And I said, I think it's now.  Maybe that's because it's now, but when 2011 arrived I thought it would be my best year yet, and so far, so good.  I think I'd be hard pressed to pick out any year in the past that I felt was so full of opportunities and lessons and growth and new kinds of happiness, as this year has been so far and promises to continue to be.  I am anxious about the vast unknowns, but they are also what give me a sense of the possibilities ahead.  Things could all blow up, but then I'd adapt and try something else -- I think that's really the only way for me to live.

Just a quick one

I feel sort of lame and cowardly for posting this here, but I just didn't have the interest or energy for a facebook based soundbyte debate.  Today I posted a link to a story about income disparity in India (50 billionaires account for 20% of the country's GDP), and I got a mix of responses -- a few outraged by the fact itself, a few taking issue with my posting it.  So I'm not sure how I feel about it...I mean, I got some strong responses, so people are engaged and that's generally a good thing in my book, but I feel like they were responding to what they thought was my position on it, not my actual position (which I didn't actually share, other than to simply say "Wow").  It's got me thinking about how divisive the things that we care about can be.  I don't really expect facebook to be a good forum for dialogue, and maybe it's not really fair to post something without any personal context or opinion, but it was surprising to see how quickly the outrage on both sides of an issue can come out in a way that feels derisive of the "other side".  To me, the problem is one we are all more likely to agree on -- poverty and human suffering -- but who to blame and how to go about changing it are not things we have consensus on.  I do think there are some individuals to blame (and more than just 50 billionaires in India), but I think that more than blame, compassion is needed.  It seems so many problems are exacerbated by lack of communication, which is exacerbated by lack of knowledge of how to communicate and really connect and understand each other.  One facebook post is a small example, and probably not entirely illustrative of the thing I'm feeling at the moment, but because real attempts at understanding each other have been on my mind lately, it sent my brain in this direction.

And now, I will sleep.

You know what's funny?

The past few days I've been all calm and zen, and today I am sick and exhausted and totally annoyed by everything.  I took the afternoon off and slept for three hours, and woke up not so sure I feel better.  I think it's going to be a bit of a crazy month!

Expansion and expression

It's been a good weekend, but I'm feeling exhausted both physically and emotionally.  Some of it's a shortage of sleep and the fatigue after a long evening of revelry yesterday after my friend Kris's wedding.  And some of it's the emotional work of reflection and connection-making that's been occupying me so much lately.  I'm not really eager to start a work week with such thin resources and a persistent need for rest, but my spirit is feeling hopeful.  Because I feel like I'm evolving, like I've become more expansive and less limited inside, and I'm excited by the new possibilities I'm sensing as I experience a new range of emotion and expression.  I was describing to my friend Kelly today at breakfast that I have been finding myself talking to people lately, and while I'm talking, I'm feeling sort of amazed that what I'm saying is articulating so well what I'm feeling.  It's like I'm hearing myself and thinking, "yeah, that's it!"  For a long time I feel I've been drawn to other people who articulate emotion and experience really well, especially to Ani DiFranco, whose music is really emotionally eloquent, both lyrically and in what's conveyed through her guitar playing.  There's been a longing inside me to be able to express things so well, and I'm in the process of learning to listen and hear myself, as well as listen and understand others better.  It's something that excites me, makes me feel somehow stronger and more capable of facing whatever unknown challenges lie ahead.  And it makes me feel more confident in my relationships, because there's more fluidity of what's flowing in and out of me.

Vague emotional reflections

So, so much has been going on with me emotionally over the past week or two, and it's hard to know how to begin blogging about it.  Especially since it's a lot of deep and long-standing personal stuff that has roots in a family dynamic I haven't lived inside of in more than a decade.  So it's complicated and hard for me to articulate, but here I'll give a shot at beginning to...

The way I'm feeling right now is something like freer, lighter, less encumbered.  Some of it's likely that I am about to embark on a new adventure in India, and I feel like I'm finally stepping forward after a pretty introspective year post-ended-marriage.  Partly I have been eating a healthier diet as well.  But another big part of it is discovering some parts of me that have been like locked up, forbidden wings of an old mansion (and for some reason the palace in Beauty and the Beast pops into my head as the image for this...)

I always thought my family had problems of the kind that every family has, nothing out of the ordinary.  But the more I reflect, the more I realize how not normal it actually was.  I am hesitant to go into detail because it's the proverbial dirty laundry, so I am going to at least try to stay general instead of citing specific examples.  There was a dynamic in my family of my sister being the black sheep, the rebellious one, and the dominant emotion I remember feeling about the way my parents responded to her is fear.  I steered clear of frequently explosive situations between them, and I developed some obsessive, perfectionist habits and became the model student.  I behaved well to get my parents' approval instead of their wrath, and in doing so I limited which parts of me were allowed to be shown to the world, as well as to myself.  And I also absorbed a sense that my gain was linked to my sister's loss, which has created a long-standing sense of guilt, and I think some of the decisions I've made as an adult have been attempts at atonement for the injustice that has chafed at me for so long.

I feel like I should limit how much more I say about the past, but at this point the reason I'm feeling good, given all of the deep emotional stuff, is that I feel more like me.  I am seeing some good things that I didn't think were part of me, as well as realizing some not so great things I've thought about myself were actually imposed ideas that I don't have to buy into.  I see a less distorted version of myself and I like it (and I hope the process continues, I doubt it can be over yet).  I've decided not to keep trying to get complete acceptance and affirmation where it's never been offered, and I feel more able to take care of myself emotionally (taking care of the material things has never been difficult).  It's weird, I find myself thinking, "So this is what it's like to feel self confident and not depressed.  This is nice.  I hope it stays."