Saturday, January 5, 2019

THIS AIN'T IT, CHIEF

I don't know what it is (reference to Rufus Wainwright song not intended), but I feel at ease. In years past, when things ended, I would be beating myself up and feeling like there were at least a dozen ways I could have changed my behaviors and actions to salvage whatever situation that happened to be currently crashing and burning and ending. Today, I feel massively different than those times. I think I'm slowly really reaching my center. I don't know what this center really means, and why they call it a center. Is it because you're right at the center of a metaphorical seesaw that is your mental health so it's hard to tip you off-balance, and you just remain level? Perhaps. Today, I am able to engage in a radical self-love that doesn't always occur naturally to me. I think I'm a mentally strong person, I've taken all the suckerpunches life threw at me, and I'm still intact. I'm inexplicably brave, I mean I moved away from my friends and family to this city of the great unknown and the ever-changing. Just the fact that I've taken both a life path that's foreign to the people I grew up with, and to an environment rather removed and foreign from the one I grew up in, makes me feel brave. I engage with all my feelings, and have pretty much felt everything with great intensity, including things that used to make me suicidal, and still I don't shy away from any of my feelings. I don't know what it is, whether it's my emancipation from a household that I felt restricted and depressed in for a couple of years, or whether it's really the fact that New York makes me feel at home, but I feel relieved, and I'm no longer trying to run away from nor toward anything. Today I read a quote by Lao Tzu: "If you're depressed, you're living in the past. If you're anxious, you're living in the future. If you're at peace, you're living in the present." And New York is a great place to live in the moment.