Staring at the blank screen when my head is so filled with a tangle of thoughts and my gut is churning with so much emotion and my physical exhaustion is nearing its tipping point is a special kind of torture. Normally, I’d bust out the Moleskine and blast out a diatribe or so, but I forced myself to open the blog machine to impose some structure on the internal rough drafts. I have no idea how that’s going to go.
I have just returned from a quick weekend trip home both with and to see family, and mostly, it was a fine trip. Family is complex and mine looks like a Manhattan Project equation. What I can always count on, and especially when returning from home, are some intense emotions that usually well up right after I get out of the car at curbside. I keep my sunglasses on and my head down as I make my way through security, then pit stop at the bathroom for a muffled stall cry in an attempt to get it together before getting on the plane. It’s not without precedent that I cry once settled and the plane is suddenly speeding me off the ground and back to reality. I have always done this; my expectation is that I will always do this, and I am fine with it, but today’s episode reminded me how sensitive I am.
A wise person once told me, “Sensitivity is a superpower.” I know she is right and it is time for me harness it once and for all.
However, I am terrified. Not of Success – I am ready for some more of that to get here – but of rejection and humiliation and abandonment and all the painful things that I have already experienced showing up for a repeat performance. I am not looking for pep talks by sharing this, because my previous rejections and humiliations and abandonments were mostly the result of abuse, the extent of which I have only just recently begun to understand. At least now I feel confident I know how to spot that well ahead of time. (With the exception of some recent fumbles of my own making and then endless fixation on them.) What I don’t know how to do is actually open up enough to let the light in.
My most effective defense strategy and stalwart enabler is procrastination. I am the Four Star Generalissimo of Procrastination, a lot of it now achieved by too much “screen time” and while I do have an iPhone, I have a cumbersome, work-brick laptop and a TV that was state-of-the-art… in 1997. I dilly-dally and dawdle and putter and preen and run late and feel harried and then, like dysfunctional magic, I am failing just like Procrastination promised. (Yes, I am aware of the Mean Voice in my head that is telling me I am doing it wrong.)
Here is where the Return Travel comes in to play: I am in a vulnerable state, not here nor there, yet totally present in the limbo of airports and time zone jumps. And that’s when I realize I want so much more…
I want that light. And that love. And that success. And that serenity. And that fun. And that magic. And that energy. And that security. And that passion. And that confidence. And that warmth. I want that light to get in. To nurture me. I want that.
This was a start.
