Malaise

I've come to dread those free floating anxiety episodes. I'm in one right now and I don't think I've ever written(apart from private journaling)openly during one.

I've no idea how long it will last.

It was a brilliant day. My fourth writing workshop this afternoon went really well, a big class, excellent assignments turned in, word is out there so visitors pop in for some sessions and also comment privately on the quality of the participants' writing. And I love conducting it.

Daughter (who attends) gave me lots of baking and cooking out of her trunk to take home with me and we then laugh as we find we've each been invited to the same house for dinner. Which was lovely. Another friend there gives me her special frozen soup to take home. I won't have to cook for days it looks like.

Chimney Man PMs me to tell me my parts are finally in, it took well over two months for 7" stove pipes to be found anywhere, there were certainly none on the island. The reason I know this is that others have been whining also. Our power bills were through the roof (no pun intended) waiting for them. Wood stoves save a whole wad of cash.

So all is going well, right?

So I bury myself in the Kimmy Schmidt series and I still feel that pit of the stomach thing which won't go away.

And I slap myself upside of the head, metaphorically, and it won't go away.

And I look at my dog and I worry. I look at all the legal papers that I had to sign yesterday at my lawyers. And I worry.

I listen to the rain outside. And I worry.

See?

There's nothing at all to worry about but I'm caught by the throat and I hope it won't be one of those endless nights.

I just hate those.

And then we die.

I think: why are we all so afraid of letting people in? Telling the truth? Risking our feelings, our fears? Sticking it all out there? Helping each other understand. And care. For that is true intimacy.

Most people are shut down, terrified of someone getting in there. Afraid to express joy or sadness. Fear of what exactly?

I had a long conversation with someone tonight. We are not afraid to express our troubles, our thoughts, our fears to each other. And we did. We talked about the fear of making decisions. The terror we feel when loved ones suffer in self-imposed isolation. The fear of letting go. Looking into the void. Contemplating the unknown. We had each let go of businesses recently and find other issues surrounding those decisions grabbing us by the throat. How to stand firm. In his case, how to say no to the new owners leaning on him and being disrespectful. In my case a few issues around the financial impact of my particular revenue stream vanishing. Fear of the unknown again. Because there's no impact yet. So what use is my worrying and anticipating?

It's good to air the inner laundry, to hang it all out and begin to laugh even. An old adage I heard once was if you walk into a room of trusted friends and everyone agrees to share and exchange their troubles, at the end of the evening you gladly pick up your own again and walk out of the room feeling grateful.

What triggered this odd wee post? I have a strong desire to heal relationships that have gone sideways. No idea why they've gone that way. All I know is that most people don't reveal their inners: their hurts and disappointments or feelings of rejection, their love.

I had the oddest dream last night. Where I was sitting in my childhood home around the dining room table in the gloaming with the family and I lit many candles to 'light the darkness' as I explained to my father. Very calmly, he told me to leave the room, that I was banished from the table. I sat down at the piano in the front room and played some Mozart and felt overwhelmingly happy. And then I woke up.

And I found the dream rather profound on many, many levels.

A sense of urgency is good. A sense of our time here being so finite. And unfinished business is baggage I don't need.

Make some heavy decisions, I sez to myself. Risk, I sez. Action plan, I sez. Now, I sez.

And myself listened.

Irrational Fear

Every time I read about an aircrash lately, I've been nodding to myself. I don't know what's wrong with me.

I've planned to go to Ireland in September/October and something is holding me back from actually booking the trip. My intuition has always been of a pretty high quality. It's an instinct that's non-comparitive I suppose and completely subjective. I'll give you a few examples:

When I saw this house I'm living in now I knew it was mine even though the vendors reneged on the original deal. I went around for months talking about the house and was totally unsurprised when of their own volition, the vendors contacted me again five months later. Same with Cara in the last few days. I saw her picture and knew she was mine. I could go on, you get the drift.

On the last flight I was on less than a month ago I was in total discomfort at every bounce of turbulence, every landing and takeoff (six in total on a kind of milk run across Canada). I had the thought that I would never fly again if I got out of this one alive.

I've been in that territory before and attended some bio-feedback classes to get a handle on it way back in the eighties.

My logical self knows it's more dangerous to drive my car but also kicks in to tell me that in this age of economic freefall cutbacks are possibly happening in the area of airplane maintenance and shaved back pilot wages. And I'm not even thinking about the alcoholic drug addicts in the control towers.

I kick myself for being so irrational but this isn't helping. I'm stuck in Silly Fartdom.

PS Another update on another airline today: passengers trapped and screaming. Great!