Making my declaration

This week marks the beginning of my summer of endings. Yeah, yeah, I know it's also a "summer of beginnings" and all of that. Those who know me best know that I play the Pollyanna/silver lining card just about as often as I can get away with it. Yet in this instance I'm resisting the urge to make it "all okay," to blunt my pain with trite aphorisms about doors opening and opportunities abounding, blah blah blah. It's not that I'm being fatalistic-- I do believe that there is some pretty cool stuff on my horizon. It's just that I also need some time to bleed, to process all that's happening without a fake smile on my face. I need to grieve before I go blithely smiling into tomorrow.

I've been thinking of this era as an early mid-life crisis. I even threw myself an evening on the town with dear and trusted friends to commemorate this, and to epitomize this. At the time that I planned this gathering, I thought, "Okay, so I'll have this night, go a little crazy, and then the crisis will be over and I'll move on with my life! Problem solved!" Ah, my naiveté alarms even me sometimes. The truth is that the name (say it with me now...it's okay...CRISIS) fits, still. It's still happening. It come in waves. I don't lay around bemoaning my life and getting cookie crumbs in my bed and drinking myself into oblivion night after night. I haven't ran out and bought a hot car or signed myself up for plastic surgery.  I'm actually living my life pretty similarly to my pre-crisis life-- my family, my friends, my research job, my therapy job, my dissertation, my books, and--yes--Facebook. But I feel different. I introspect a great deal-- sometimes I'm so in my head that my body literally becomes a mobile receptacle which has the sole purpose of transporting my head from place to place. I think about the past. I think about the future. I think about the present. I think about my life and how it ties to other lives, and what it all means. I think about the choices I have made, am making, will make. Part of this is because I have the luxury of time for all of this introspection. And part of this is because I feel like I just have to do this right now.

I'm trying to find helpful ways to cope. Sometimes it feels more like grasping, but once in awhile, I grasp onto something good. Writing has been one of these incidental good discoveries of late. Writing and I, we go way back. I got my first diary when I was about 8 and became a semi-regular writer by the age of 10. In my tweenhood, I developed a habit of writing stories that depicted myself in lives that I wished I were living, rather than the one I was actually living. As a teen, I wrote letters to folks who I was mad at, or who I secretly loved, or felt some other strong emotion for-- with no intention of sending the letters. From my teenage years on out I've kept a sporadic journal. I used to chide myself on not being disciplined enough to write daily; now I see, however, that I write when I'm moved to write, and that's okay. My writing has to be inspired by some emotion per sé, or some event that I found to be meaningful (which of course evokes a powerful emotion), or some big idea (also imbued with emotion). Thus as I look back, I can see that I've always used writing as an outlet for emotion-- AKA, to cope. Yet in the mounds of required papers about theory and therapy and ethics and research methods, writing became a chore-- and it's now so easy to see why. Scholarly and technical writing--with the exception of special projects (such as reflection papers)-- are by their very nature devoid of emotion. Emotion isn't even really allowed. And while I can certainly write from a very intellectualized, "objective" position, I'm learning that it isn't my favorite. And anyway, that's work. This writing, the writing I've been spending hours and hours of my free time on lately, is for me. And that's love. It's coping in the best way that I know how. Sometimes I struggle in being true to my emotions in face-to-face situations. But I rarely if ever sugarcoat or minimize in the written word, the writing that's for me, nosiree. For me, it's a big deal to have a place to do that.

Something else that has been helpful-- reaching out. The times when I sought the solace, validation, and the loving arms of my family and friends have been among the most healing of my experiences.  I'm not gonna lie-- this whole reaching out thing actually isn't easy for me. I like to be able to do things myself; I've always been like that. Do you want to know why? When I ask for help, when I share my struggle, when I'm really, really honest with what's going on with me, then someone else gets to see how messed up and imperfect I really am. Though I like to (delusionally?) think I've come a long with in my battle with perfectionism, I am still really not down with people glimpsing what I perceive as the less desirable pieces of me. Sure, I'm now a little more okay with some of those external bits-- as in I am more okay with my personal appearance, house, office space, other outward expressions of myself being seen in their natural state (which is often in disarray!).  But the internal stuff? The confused, unsure, unhappy pieces on my inside that eat at me? The place I default to is: How dare I let that slip out. How dare I think about letting someone know that this crap exists in me. Everyone will know that I don't have it all together.

So, what I'm trying to achieve here is a marriage of the two coping skills that seem to have worked the best for me: writing, and reaching out. I need to use my writing to be honest with myself about all of this shit. And I need for you to see it, too, and do with it what you will. I guess I just need to let it all hang out, for better or for worse. 

As I sit here, I take a deep breath, just as someone who is about to make a big, loud announcement would. And now I'm channeling the spirit of Michael Scott as I say: "I....DECLARE....LIFE CRISIS!"