Parallel and Perpendicular
Does a meaningful balance exist?
Be gentle and kind. Be strong and brave.
Proceed with caution. Throw caution to the wind.
Run wildly. Tread lightly.
Trust your intuition. Embrace the wisdom of others.
Wear your heart on your sleeve. Wear a helmet.
Be bold and brazen. Be humble and honest.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. This moment is the only one that exists.
Love deeply. Protect your heart.
Believe in magic. Ground yourself in reality.
Build your home. Explore strange worlds.
Play by the rules. Buck the system.
Indulge, breathe, rest. Repeat.
Pursue your passions. Expect the unexpected.
I’ve thought a lot about learning to be as good of a friend to myself as I am others. This thought process is one I’ve allowed to drift in and out of my mind over the past few months - but not one I’ve allowed myself to really think about it in the past few weeks. Recently, simply getting out of bed, taking a shower and leaving our house has presented challenges I didn’t see coming just a few months ago.
I’ve pushed myself, harder and farther than I ever thought was possible – and it’s still not enough. It’s not enough to ensure that I’m going to get healthy, that one day I won’t feel like I do now. It’s not enough to ensure that I’m going to be able to be the kind of mother, the kind of wife, the kind of entrepreneur, the kind of friend, the kind of person that I want to be in one month, or three, or twelve.
It’s not enough to ensure that I know how to be brave.Â
It’s not enough to ensure that I can find the faith or the courage I need to keep moving. To keep pushing. To keep believing in better days.
Recently I’ve had a series of intense conversations with a few different people. Part of it is that this is just where I’m at right now. I’m questioning everything, including who I will come out of this being and any way I can learn how to control any part of this situation. Part of it is that these are the people who have surrounded me, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for a long time now. They are the people who’ve watched this fight most closely over the past few months – and they can see the way my inner thoughts are circling and edging into a struggle.
We’ve had conversations about me. My body. My mind. The reasons I have to keep going, even though nobody can help. About being frustrated. About believing. Finding reasons to let go. Finding reasons to be still. Remembering to do good things for my mind. Trying to find gentle.
I have all these thoughts in my head. All these things I’m trying to understand, trying to grapple with, trying to reason through. And the thing is – I don’t have enough energy to talk through it. Or to write about it. Or to respond to the people who provoked these thoughts and pushed these emotions.
I’m trying to wrap my mind around the fact that I have no answers. That for all intents and purposes, everything is sort of on hold… waiting on time, on appointments, on tests and the reading of those test results, on insurance, authorization, approval.
I keep getting discharged from the hospital being told that I just need to wait. My life has now been on pause effectively for too long now. I can’t plan for anything – because I have no guarantee that I’m going to be healthy enough or awake enough to attend and participate. And this - it frustrates me endlessly. I’m angry. I’m scared. I’m trying to hold it all together.
But the bigger thing is, and frankly always has been, that I don’t know is how to be more gentle to myself. Or how to let go. How to believe in something bigger. How to trust. How to put this in someone else’s hands, or at the very least how to make peace with the parts of this I have no control over.
So tonight I turned to my keyboard. To this space. To you.
How do you let go? How do you learn to be gentle? How do you find the balance between parallel and perpendicular?