Bed-bound Ramblings III.
They say time heals all wounds. They say it gets easier and you disagree. You can’t see beyond it, not then anyway. But it does. You remember. And it gets so much better.
I’m on the bottom bunk in a tiny hotel room in Philadelphia for vacation. My best friend is asleep on the top bunk, nursing a sinus infection and struggling to sleep comfortably. The hotel room is nice but small, and I am confined to where I am so much so it itches slightly at my claustrophobia. I was never really comfortable in my own home, but I am comfortable in my own home.
I think about when I wasn’t. I think about not so long ago trying to sleep in the place I thought would be a home for me sometime in the near future. A place I thought I felt at ease in, but kept waking up every night in the middle of the night, unaware as to why. I ignored the unsettled feeling and reminded myself of the body heat next to mine and went back to bed. I shook it off as my anxiety, my obvious talent for just being unsettled. But often times, I fail to listen to my body just as I had done then. My body told me that being there didn’t feel as good as I had wanted. It told me something was wrong and I needed to feel right. I ignored it then, when I should have listened. I’m trying not to ignore it so much now.
I have more intuition than I give myself credit for. I have more confidence than I allow myself credit for. I do a lot of ignoring when I should be listening because perhaps if I really pay attention and listen, my feelings will guide me away from all the things that just aren’t good for me. For the past few months, I had ignore my body crying out for sleep. I was waking up to check texts, to prioritize a relationship, to offer myself down time in front of the television, and spending any and all free time I had traveling and experiencing what I took as an investment in my life and future. I dehydrated myself by drinking more coffee than my two cup a day max rule because it’s just what we did and it was there. I explored food because I love it and I was exploring love, forgetting all about how I need to eat for my thyroid condition. Ignoring how I shouldn’t be having dairy and should be ingesting more fish. I forgot the importance of gluten, grain, sugar-free and paleo. And I had forgotten the fact that I loved the gym and lifting. I forgot how to make time for it between everything else.
My body shut down. It shut down last week, and I took it as a warning. Granted, landing in the emergency room severely dehydrated and mildly deluded from ultra-violent food poisoning wasn’t exactly something I had done to cause it to shut down, but it sent an alarm off inside of me and I listened. I intended to listen.
I slept like the dead for three days. Since then, I go to sleep around 10 or 11 instead of 1 or 2 and I feel so much better. I’m not skipping my vitamins or medication because I’m too busy galavanting about and didn’t have the time or water to take them. I have returned to investing in my health and myself and I have been happier. I am almost fully vegetarian now (I allow myself fish and since my hospitalization, I am deterred from eating meat. The idea makes me sick). Although I am better, my stomach is still in recovery and I intend to treat it with care. I have been doing so.
Prior to this, I had been doing yoga which helped my anxiety, posture, and health. I felt a whole body and spiritual difference within starting that practice. The results began to pay off. I even invested in buying my first spin bike, to prioritize my health when I am too busy to get anywhere else.
I’ve allowed myself to be deaf for much too long. I’m learning to listen to my body and to my mind and frankly, I am loving the results. I am still recovering, but I feel incredibly empowered.
Sometimes when you lose yourself in other people or things you forget who you are. I know who I am and I will never let myself forget it again. I know what I am capable of and how I am an amazing warrior woman. I don’t care what they think, or anyone else. Only what I think.
The only investing I ever need to do with my love is within my own body and soul, not that of another person. It is not selfish to put yourself first. When you do, it makes you beautiful and powerful. It brings out your best person. I’m back. I’m grateful.
I won’t forget again.
Stay True
I stopped writing for a while. I was scared of becoming dependent on it I suppose.
I'm trying to figure out how to communicate visually and I guess that I was scared that anything I got out through writing would then be lacking on my paintbrush.
I also found greater needs to communicate verbally. How could I learn to talk to someone if I relied on writing?
Maybe I was right to be scared and maybe I'm foolish to be reverting now. I don't know.
What I do know is the feelings I was scared of expressing in the wrong ways have become the feelings I'm scared of expressing at all and now I'm scared I've lost them.
I'm scared I've lost me. When I look at my old writings I see a person that is no longer me and when I look at what I have made recently I don't see a person at all.
And now I am not faced with a question, but rather a hundred questions face me:
Is this moving forward or backward? Am I helping or hindering myself? Do I even exist anymore? Can the person I'm trying to become and the person I was both exist? Can I fit either of them inside what is left of me now? Is this faith or is this fear? Does it matter?
I know meaning is something that grows as you give it the time to, but I still won't be satisfied until I know where to find it. Each step either takes me closer or adds distance, and I can't know which until I'm there or gone forever.
Is this what gone forever feels like? Or is this part of the fog that gets me closer in the end.
How I long to act without fear of some elusive eternal fate decided not by any moral act but mere personal preference, and yet it is only the hope of a happy such ending that keeps me moving forward.
If I am not true to myself, I'll lose myself. I hope only that I am in the process of finding myself rather than losing it, for I am not quite sure who to be true to quite yet.
Too many times
She cried alone
She always had to hide
Falling deep
Into the unknown
She barely stayed alive
She lost herself
A long time ago
But kept it all inside
Now it’s too late
It’s starting to show
Her broken soul that died
Written by Michele S Del Russi
5/10/19-7/12/19
Journal entry and poem
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MysticMichele
Mental Health Poet
Eternal Flame of Love
An image laid before
Created by the light
Void of substance; hollow
Dark as ebon; night
The shadow of my being
A silhouette; my form
Body and its tracings
Absent; spirit, soul
The all within my vessel;
Ephemeral, my frame
Perished, poured, immortal
Eternal, burns love’s flame
Credit:
ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit
We
Can you find “The One”? It’s possible isn’t it? I mean you can’t find what isn’t yours yet. So do you actively search? Do you patiently wait? Do you even know what “The One” looks like? Smells like? Feels like? How do you know you haven’t already found “The One” but let them go because you mistakenly believed they were not “The One”. How will I find “The One”? I will start with loving myself. Taking care of me. Doing the things I like, things I love. I will go to that movie, see that play. Take that romantic trip. You see I won’t find “The One” if I haven’t found me first. Only then will “The One” find me, and then become “We”.
