Moving through a bit of muck
and coming out a little calmer
I had a hard week. It’s fine, and now I’m better, and these feelings are so very cyclical, especially because I live in a female body and am ruled by hormones. When it’s over, I take it with a grain of salt. When I’m in it, it feels as if it will never end.
A lot of it has to do with social media, of course. The other night, two friends and I were engaged in deeply existential conversation and the topic of Instagram came up. It was validating to know that I’m not the only one who’s plagued by the constant comparison traps. I guess human psychology just is easily taken advantage of and so the more we’re in it, the harder it is to exercise any self-control. It’s hard to be seeing the highlights of a hundred people’s lives and to consciously tell yourself that this is but a fragment of reality. What I see is all there is, and I leave having taken in so much information but feeling like I’ve lost something very important.
The other thing is money; the urgency of it, the privilege of it, the sometimes lack of it, the devaluation of it, the unfortunate non-dollarness of it. A few days ago, I was sitting amongst a group of people expressing my desire to live in a classless, moneyless society where we all just do the things we like and exchange our services to meet our needs. I’m not sure if I should or should not be surprised that no one seemed to latch on. I also didn’t realize how beaten I was starting to feel by all things monetary until I had something close to a breakdown to wake me up a little.
New-age healing discourse has me feeling like I need to ‘heal my relationship’ with these things. Is it possible to have a healed relationship with something that is inherently a source of great toxicity? I wonder.
The cyclical nature of my moods and my feelings has taught me all I need to know about the human experience (so far): that I will be happy again, that I will be sad again, that I know nothing, and that glimpses of truth are all I have to keep me going. So I found myself thinking about abundance. What does it mean to have what you want? What does it mean to live the fulfilled life? If our feelings are ever changing, and some days are good and some days are bad, then what does it mean to be truly abundant, ever? Because suppose you have a big deep longing, and you think that once that longing is satisfied, you can rest your need to keep up. I think not. That can only mean that there is no elsewhere.
Again, this is one of those things I’ve ‘known’, or at least an idea I’ve been familiar with. I suppose I always thought of it in terms of milestones and achievements and the ways in which I’ve fallen short, always knowing on some level that more does not mean better, but still believing somewhere deep within that something is missing. And I’m starting to think that what’s missing is just an acknowledgement that nothing actually is. Life is always happening. There is nowhere else to be. Here I will share a quote by Ocean Vuong that I found on
’s newsletter:
This ties a little bit into what I wrote last time; there’s a slow dawning of the realization that there truly is no place to reach. Even when we do get there, somewhere, wherever it is, there will continue to be work that needs to be done, and all we can do is chug along, merrily or not, and do it. Maybe only then can we finally make room for play.
Here are a few nice moments from a mucky week:
