3 AM Stream of Consciousness

It's 3 am and I just put down the book I started tonight. It started with a chapter before dinner with Taylor. Dinner that was real. Dinner where I was me and he was he and authenticity was conversation. It continued while I talked to my dad in the living room after the Cubs game. Talked for hours. Talking about all of the hard. Life is hard sometimes. It is hard, and it is not fair. I told him if I could do my life over, I would marry L_____. L______ would never have done what S______ did to me. He would never have betrayed or hurt me. My dad listened. He said what he needed to say when he needed to say it. My dad is good like that. I told him that's what me now would do, but me then couldn't. Didn't want to. Maybe if I had known about anxiety, about medications, about therapy. But things happen the way they do and someday looking back we understand why. Not to mention that there is Toby. I regret nothing about having Toby in my life for the short time that I did. My soul is overwhelmed when I think of how much he changed me and taught me. (Hand on my heart. Help him please God to feel loved and secure). I told this all to my dad. There were lots of tears. Eventually my dad had to sleep, but I wasn't done. There's so much of me bursting to get out.

I picked up the book. I proceeded to read 200 pages. It was perfect and intense and connected to the part of my soul that was needing connection. I put the book down, crying like I do so often now (although less often than before I left my terrible marriage) as the author had described herself sitting in hot yoga literally sitting on the mat not moving and letting every terrible and scary and overwhelming thought hit her with full force. And she didn't die. And it is the same for me. Feeling my feelings, all of my feelings (and there are so many now) will not kill me. It will overwhelm me. It will hurt me. It will make me come up gasping for air, but feeling my feelings will eventually leave me face to face with myself, exposed and comfortable. 

I got up to get a drink of water and there was Gracie in her crate. Asleep like the dead. So asleep that she didn't move even as I turned the light on over her head, didn't even open her eyes. That dead peace is what I seek. The ability to sit still and face disturbance, to be disturbed sufficiently that I need not even open my eyes to see things as they really are. 

Part of it needs to happen for me as it happened for the author: on a yoga mat. The rest on a blank page, on a bike, at my new job - the one that feels almost like a calling. There will be many ways in which to face myself. To forgive myself. To let my hurt go. To keep reminding myself that I have already chosen to let my anger go because it no longer suits me. There is a new me inside, smaller but more substantial and settled. She needs to be heard, and facing her, discovering her, is now my story.