'Unstucking' Myself

For the past couple of weeks, even though I haven’t been 100% aware that I have been feeling differently, I have been vaguely aware of another change in the winds. The most accurate way for me to describe this latest forward movement is for me to say that things around me ‘look’ different. My perception has changed.

When Chris first died, I experienced something similar with regard to the way the world around me looked. Back then, things seemed to have a ‘toy’ essence for me. For example, I remember walking over the Mass Ave bridge in Cambridge thinking that the city and everything around me looked like a model, made of plastic, and like nothing was real. I suppose I was experiencing a form of detachment. I remember how I felt during those first few months, very transparent, like a ghost visible to none floating through the masses as if undetectable to others. And I remember describing that to my then therapist (whom I did not respect), the first in a small list of grief therapists I saw during those first weeks. She raised her voice, telling me I was getting too depressed, and ordered me to throw away all of my books about the spirit world. Those books are the ones that helped me the most. Sometimes it pays to listen to our own voices and tend to our own needs.

The same switch that altered my life view then has been recently re-flicked, and now things look different again, in a different way – like a rebirth, or like the cell door has been opened and I’m walking out of prison for the first time in 7 years. I feel like I am back in shock, but this time the shock is from the realization (even though I cannot admit it with 100% lack of guilt) that my life is finally a happy one once again. When I walked out the door this morning, the sun was shining and there was a beautiful breeze, and I really, really wanted to keep walking past my car, and down to Mass Ave. I wanted to sit in Arlington Center with a cup of coffee, and relax all day. I haven’t felt that way in a very long time. In fact, I have spent the better part of the past few years rushing around, filling up my time with anything I could stuff into it.

While all of this is quite positive and uplifting, my unconscious brain has been waging war on my subconscious brain on the ‘moving forward’ process, so I have been experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance – a push/pull effect, which is maintaining a certain level of anxiety within my body and mind at all times. Now that I am ‘out’ I’m feeling like running back in where it’s safe.

Because the two parts of my mind have been in conflict, I have been feeling paralyzed with respect to almost everything.

- I haven’t been practicing singing enough, so I feel unprepared
- I haven’t been thinking about or planning my own show, so I feel pressured
- I haven’t been spending enough time learning about my profession, web development, so I feel stuck

Unprepared, pressured and stuck does not make for a relaxed state of mind. My next order of business is to ‘unstuck’ myself.

Otherwise, I’m feeling very blessed and very lucky to be Jonathan’s wife, and I have just recently been allowing myself to feel and soak in his support. I could not have asked for a better husband and a better friend.

I'm certain that I'm not able to convey exactly what transpires in my brain and in my daily life with 100% accuracy – I’m not sure I even know how to -- but I do believe I have begun the process of popping the lid onto Chapter Grief of my life book.

The time has now come for me to accept my life as it is today, and to begin remapping my courses of action to try to put myself in line with my most recent healing stage.

There’s a lot of fun to be had. I haven’t felt this way in a very long time.