The leaves are starting to change colors. The ones the forest describes as the go-getters. The leaves who decide they are done with summer and wish to end their existence on a path or sidewalk somewhere. The cool breeze in the mornings is a surprise that I never asked for. It would be considered a weird ‘surprise’ considering I have experienced it in some way for 38 years but every year it brings the same panic and fear as the years prior. It is the only season change that fills me with a fear that is likened to falling from the edge of a mountain or taking the leap off a ten story building. I wake up in the morning trying to figure out how I am feeling and hoping this looming darkness isn’t going to set the tone for my day. I ask many questions of myself. Are we sad? Are we scared? Are we depressed? Am I supposed to let myself cry today, is that okay? Or will we get stuck there? Do I want to be stuck there? Kinda. I don’t believe right now there is a way out of feeling and believing in the ways I do. So why would I believe I wouldn’t get stuck there? Is it being stuck somewhere or is that just reality? It is my reality. My lens. I just happen to be better at noticing people’s pain and sadness than I am at noticing other things in the world. It is truth. And I am too cynical to believe that true healing ever really happens. We change sure, but we just change into this pretend person who has to struggle to be something they wish they were but won’t ever be. Sorry if you were looking for some hope here.
I have changed in many ways. Incredible ways even. My actions and life choices have changed. I don’t feel that I have changed inside. I am just doing and living the way other people want or need me to. I don’t want to be a burden or to be the person society glares at. Sure, I do enjoy some positives in my life now that I have made it through various addictions, traumas, divorces, and being re-traumatized by various therapists. Not that I am through all of it. Not sure what that means anyways. It’s all still in my bones and my body. It hurts everyday. It doesn’t just leave and then magically you are ‘through it.’ Guess you just accept it and move on, tell yourself it matters less, hurts less or whatever. Tell yourself some lie so you don’t have to feel the pain of it all.
I feel proud sometimes but there’s the voice that lets us know we are just waiting until later when it is the right time. Sometime in the far away future we will set out to be a traveler and disappear from this life. When I am not needed for much of anything. So we will wait. Watch the leaves fall to their death as we are frustrated with the fears inside that never leave. Waking up to emotions that were so powerful at times in our life we could do nothing but try to let go of the branches that gave us life only to realize those were the very branches that sent us to our death.
It gets exhausting to have to make an effort to change your emotions everyday. I do not have a choice in how I feel much of the time. CHOOSING JOY isn’t a real fucking thing. FYI. At least not for me or others who actually get it. I can find good things always. My bones are still sad and injured being held together by the dead leaves we walk over like they never existed.
And I don’t know how to want that to change.
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