My friend has recommended tea drinking, retail therapy, and bubble baths. I have opted for crying and crashing on the sofa instead. The excitement of the past month appears to have caught up with me. I feel like I have been running running running and then
WHAM
Like a cartoon character with the tweeting birds and my head twisted 90 degrees, I have fallen flat on my face.
Ouch.
I am waiting for the birds to stop tweeting and the dust to settle before moving to vertical.
I think this is the downside to my up. The highs are electric and energising, and the lows leave me gasping and stunned. I have not mastered the art of walking the middle ground yet, nor fully acknowledged that life is yang and yin: a little bit of good and a little bit of bad with the beauty lying in the contrast. Nope, the centre still needs a bit of bolstering and I keep ricocheting between the two.
This is, I think, probably inevitable. Up until this point, my strategy has been to neutralise, negate or control. To remove myself from opportunities of excitement, and pleasure, and enjoyment, because their loss is almost unbearable; and to plaster over the downs with eating – or not eating – or thinking thinking thinking it all out. For many years, I opted out of life all together; then, I created my own see-saw in a daily routine of bingeing and purging: high, followed by low, but with the knowledge that tomorrow it would be the same again.
Round and round we go but at least we know the end….
Life does not work like this.
There are glorious rainbow-coloured ups where everything seems wonderful and connected and full of potential, and then moments when it’s really rather black. The difficulty, for me, is keeping my feet on the ground when I’m exploring the magic and also when the grey clouds start moving in. It’s about accepting that sometimes it is neither stormy nor golden, but somewhere, cloud speckled or slightly overcast, in between.
It is harder than I anticipated.
You have to be exposed to the storm, maybe, in order to appreciate the rainbows; but then, you also need to remain standing, come rain or shine. At the moment, I am still at the mercy of the weather, and haven’t quite adjusted to life’s ups and downs.
Tags: life, self discovery
Beautiful and so resonant. Thanks for posting this Melissa and really capturing the difficulty of something I’m always experiencing (seemingly a lot at the moment) – managing the euphoric highs and the crippling lows as I search for a stable middle.
We always end up adjusting somehow. The lows may be crushing, but the highs are wonderful. It’s hard, but we know there’s a space in between. We’ll get there…
Hi Melissa. Thanks – you put this so well. I guess it may be about spotting where the ups and downs begin(?)
I would imagine that this is a lesson most people learn in their teenage years, when good news is AMAAAAAAZIIING and bad news is the End of the World.
When you’re caught up with “adult” feelings and worries, that then might get hidden in eating disorders, I guess it’s easy to miss this bit.
I think I experienced some of this, so am a little more comfortable with finding my middle ground, but since my eating issues distorted my view, I’m still searching to reorient myself.
Your ricochet-ing between the two will, I’m sure, help you to reorient as you bounce back to the middle, like a cartoon hero
Thanks for commenting guys. This one’s a hard one because part of me wants to just go with the experience and not try to control the emotions as I have in the past, but to reach a kind of “natural” balance, whilst the other part of me wants to alleviate the discomfort. I think this may be one of the few instances (!) where I just have to trust that the process (whatever that might be) is normal, and I’ll come out the other side.
Hopefully, like a hero!