During the pause

I am taking a second - to breathe, to asses how I feel, to asses my mental state, to check my connection to my higher power (which, oddly, is missing). When things get crazy at work and I lose myself in the midst of what feels like chaos, I really have to make a conscious effort to check in and see just exactly what is going on with me. It can be easy for me to go for weeks, or a month even with no real awareness of myself. I just go through the motions. I often find, in that moment when I pause - that things aren't what they seem - my reality and actual reality are not the same thing - and I also find that I am right in the middle of trying to ignore or avoid something. It doesn't take alcohol, or anything for that matter, for me to check out for a while. It's automatic and unconscious even. I don't realize until I come out of it, where I've been. I repeatedly have those moments where I think wow - I don't think I have felt anything in like a month.

My stress level is pretty high at the moment. I haven't had the greatest week - between the stress of my job, the fight I am in with Volkswagen, the aftermath of the situation with my mother (I'm still waiting for that to hit me, aren't I going to have an emotional reaction to this?), and last Friday when I almost drank...when I actually stop to think about how I feel, I don't feel great, which isn't surprising. I feel tremendously stressed and on edge. I guess if you look at the situation from a higher, broader level - everything is fine, great actually. But down here where I'm at, in the moment to moment, it feels sort of unbearable and like it's never going to end. My natural tendency is to look for immediate relief. My tendency is not to want to go through the feeling, it is to go around it or avoid it altogether if possible. I'll go through the experience - just so long as I don't have to associate any emotion with it. That is how I have always survived. There is a just a disconnect between what I experience and what I feel associated with my experiences. You might say the feeling part is lacking altogether.

People tell me that I tell the story of surviving breast cancer as if I am reporting the story of someone else going through it - as if I have no emotional connection. I would say that is quite accurate. I really don't feel much of a connection to that experience. I have only bits and pieces of emotion here and there that I associate with certain things that happened during those 7 months. I have anger over some things, I have sadness, I have mostly fear, but, for the most part, like all things, I have compartmentalized the pieces and removed myself almost completely from the situation. I was there right, I must have been. Or was I just working 50 hours a week and pretending to be somewhere else? If it weren't for the fact that my hair is still shorter than it used to be, and if I didn't have a physical reminder every time I take my shirt off - I think I could seriously convince myself that it never happened. Much like my childhood actually - my brother and I will tell stories and there always seem to be a lot of things I don't remember. It's like I wasn't there - and in fact, in a lot of ways - I don't think I was.

That's how I feel right now - not here. I do this sometimes, where I let my job consume me. I just let it swallow me. It wasn't planned, it just happens that I have a major deadline on a major project and the whole thing is riding on me. And while I am not enjoying the stress of it or knowing that I will be working all month with little break, even on the weekends, part of me thought - ahhhhhh - here's a little relief. This is what it's like to escape from myself, to escape from the emotion - it is to be somewhere else completely while physically present in front of you. It's like a drug sort of. I've learned though to both love that and hate that about my job. It's like dreading the up-swing of my mood which can change pretty rapidly, because I know there can only be a down swing to follow. There is no easy way to come off of the high of working like I'm working and the stress that goes with it. The only way is to crash. I love it and I hate all at the same time.

It's different this time though - I don't usually realize that I've been in a period of total avoidance of myself and my emotions until I crash, somehow surprised every time that it's happening. It hits like a tidal wave and knocks me over. I'm more aware of it this time. I know there is something there and I'm stuffing it. So aware that I paused yesterday for a second - it was like flipping a switch - just to see what, if anything, I am not processing. And there it was - in that pause, all I could think was - but I'm still not happy. I had written all those posts about why I can't just be happy - what is wrong with me that I can't just be happy? And when you strip it all away, my job, the stress, the money, my car, my friends, my family, there is a very definite hole, a very definite emptiness. You take those things away from me, all those things that I am trying almost frantically to lose myself in the midst of - you take them away and there isn't anything left. Something is missing.