[In an effort to use FB more for socializing and my blog more for my writings on my life, I am copying old content from there to here with the title prefix "Archive:". This was originally posted to FB on 17 January 2018.]
It's been about a month back in SF. Things have gone well.
It's hard to give myself slack for how long it takes, how slowly I've made concrete steps. I still feel the requirement to excuse myself for how much I depend on my friends, not least for housing right now. And I'm still extremely skeptical of my of progress.
Given all those disclaimers, the sense that things are going well seems real.
Upon my return to SF, I was determined to get off to a good start. I braced myself for an onslaught, of my body revolting to the place where it knew such pain. That surge did come, as per my last entry, but it plateaued, and I found that my coping skills were sufficient. Mindfulness kept me aware of primal fear as a bare sensation, and kept it at an arm's length with breathing room in between. I repeat that I was skeptical, but indeed the triggers have grown infrequent and with mindfulness I can arrest them before they take me over.
I distinctly wanted to hit the ground running, to set myself up for success. To take everything slowly, pay close attention to the trauma and the coping, and to take care of myself first and do everything else second. Even if I accomplished nothing future-oriented, I wanted to have my short-term affairs be healthy and sustainable. I started with two important practices. Number one was to go grocery shopping frequently, roughly twice per week, and cook for myself more often than not. A close second was near-daily physical activity: climbing weekly, and transit via foot or bike as much as possible.
As things unexpectedly started to feel under control, and as these habits started to gel, I added more. I kept the initial goal of each habit modest, and aimed for practice and patience over perfection. So, next came following up with some job/career leads. As a reward I allowed myself to socialize, reconnecting one-on-one with only a couple people per week. There's been some spare emotional endurance to offer support to friends who are hurting. After that came weekly meditation.
Looking forward, I feel an urgency to deepen my awareness of the signals from my body. My guts are still middling, and now that my triggers are reduced it's unclear what will be most helpful for them next. Several times I've noticed that I experience certain stresses or fears from my legs up through my gut, and stopping at my diaphragm. I am usually tense in my diaphragm and have weird issues about controlling my breathing. There is clearly some mental connection to unlock there. There's also a special fear I get when I'm put on the spot and feel in opposition to my body, say, when trying to dance or flirt. So I'm considering as my next project to take a dance class. And I have much more to do in terms of finding employment, both short-term and medium-term.
Speaking of flirting, though, all of these things have happened in parallel with a big transition in my relationship situation. Only vaguely due to others' privacy, I'll say here that it's a loving and supportive acknowledgement of diverging paths. I've tried to welcome it as a healthy learning experience in independence, seeing as I've hardly been single since mid-college. And yet I feel that itch to get my needs met somehow. Even though I feel confident and empowered to be intimate with people platonically, and in fact feel no shortage of emotional intimacy in my life, I'm terrible at breaking ice with people in beyond-platonic directions. I welcome suggestions here.
Anyhow, a couple references spring to mind these days. One is that scene in City Slickers where they say "Your life is a do-over." And there is of the notion of email bankruptcy. I've cleaned my slate of expectations, and am trying again with more intention and better awareness. Although I wasn't necessarily aiming to get the whole system up and running again, it feels like that's likely to happen anyway—there's an emerging feeling is that I am living a life again, that I'm a character in a story that I belong in. And I'm regaining access to old feelings of abundance that I want to share with the world around me. I am re-experiencing the components of happiness slowly and individually with great appreciation.
How to summarize? My life feels pregnant with challenge and possibility, and I feel resilience and momentum to do the slow, patient, unglamorous work to keep meeting that challenge and realizing that possibility.