My life has been very grey lately.
Now, before I start getting emails and phone calls from my friends and family inquiring about my mental state...let me assure you that this is a good thing.
It kind of snuck up on me, this whole grey thing, and it's been pretty eye-opening for me.
I don't know how my other self - the one I knew before all of this pesky anxiety happened - allowed her life to become so black and white, but she did. Every day was good or bad, never just okay. She either succeeded or she failed, never did she just complete a task in a way that left her content. Every movement and decision was right or wrong, black or white.
Never was it grey.
As you can imagine, living this way is like waking up in a pressure-cooker every morning. To greet each day with a "pass/fail" mentality is not a state anyone can live in forever - it's just not possible. Actually I guess it seems possible until your mental state makes it completely impossible.
And that's when you're forced to live in the grey.
It occurred to me this week that it's been a long time since I've gone to bed thinking, "Today was a great day" or "Today was completely awful." That's not to say that good and bad things don't happen...they just seem more fluid for some reason. Kind of like whatever happens, there's something about me now that knows that whatever it is will never be permanent. That what seemed like past failures actually weren't that at all and moments that I thought I had succeeded to a point where I thought my life would be golden from then on...that wasn't the case either.
It's really weird how sometimes you don't realize the rock-bottoms in your life until you're on the way up and how, for whatever reason, that thud might have been necessary for you to find the solid ground of "bad" so that you could stand up and start climbing towards the monument of "good." I'd like to think that I'm in touch with myself enough to know by now that even when rotten things happen...I know I'll eventually learn from them. But it usually takes space and perspective to figure that out.
And that takes patience and sometimes a little forgiveness.
For some reason right now, my life feels less angular, less sharp. The everyday pressure I didn't even know I was putting on myself has disappeared somehow. Truth be told, I didn't even realize it had been there until it was gone.
And now there is this sense of freedom I didn't even know was possible.
Some days aren't good or bad...they're just days.
Some successes turn out to not be what we imagined and some failures are sometimes just the catalyst we need to get us where we needed to go in the first place.
Some mental breaks are necessary while some intensely good or bad moments could be leading us to those mental breaks.
Life is not black. It's not white.
It's not a pass or fail situation.
It's just life.
This was a very funny post today. I was just telling a friend of mine I thought I was finally coming to some sort of peace with everything. Mike died 5 years, 2 months ago. I still think of him every day and have not dated and don't want to. I miss him more than I could say. But I think I am finally getting ready to move on...Things can be gray. That's ok too...thanks.
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