I can no longer remember what was happening when I last wrote. My new job is okay. I don't love it, and I don't hate it. Currently I am viewing it as a means to an end. I need a full time job with benefits, and this is a path toward that. Yesterday I met with my insurance agent who reminded me that I could moonlight with him. I want to do this. I wrote out some checks yesterday, I wondered if it was too much money at the time, but I wrote them anyways. Sometimes I do things because I don't want to let others down, because it makes me feel good to do nice things for others, because I've learned to put others ahead of myself, and haven't unlearned that on some fundamental level. My new audiobook is titled The Emotionally Absent Mother. I finished How We Decide, started a book on changing your age by changing your brain, that might even be the title, and pulled it out in favor of the one on motherhood.
It wasn't long before I was in tears. As a mother who has a mother, and had grandmothers, it is a message that has an impact on me. The opening was especially tough as the author questions where her mother was during some milestones, getting picked on at school, things that most of us can relate to and identify as a current, or past experience. I talked to a friend of mine as I drove beneath trees that are still clinging to summer green, wondering how my life had become so vacant, so empty, so unfulfilled. The brain book came back to haunt me as that author spoke about the people with vibrant lives whose brains were internally robust and youthful. I learned about how being overweight shrinks your brain, and after the book on decision making, I think my prefrontal cortex is at war with my amydala, and I need to sort out what part is in charge, and when.
Perhaps I am chronically tired. Maybe I am depressed. Both could be true. I left a job that was incredibly stressful, I don't think I even know how to explain what I went through and how I suffered. It seems so distant and small now. But at the time I was caught in a powerful vise, feeling trapped, like a live insect pinned to a board that people were poking and probing in an effort to determine how I would react to various painful stimuli. Today I am listening to music, the same chord progression over and over, I took a bath, had a hot drink, laid down on the floor, and thought about some of the money I had spent recently. What would I tell a friend? Was I being self indulgent, or taking care of myself? I had heard the phrase - you have to be your own best friend, but not that you could become your own mother in the sense that you could really nurture yourself. It brought up a lot of things from the past.
The book started by saying a lot of people wouldn't go there because they were afraid of what introspection on this topic would reveal. Today, I choose to be brave.
Xoxo,
J