Growing Pains

Letting go, letting in

Since my recent psychedelic trip, I’ve noticed that my emotions and thought patterns have returned to a familiar baseline. I feel just as moody and temperamental as before, though the swings are certainly less erratic. Still, they can hit hard and have destabilized me when my mind wanders too deep into thinking about the future, what I’m working on, who I am, and other similar questions. Put another way, the juicy existential stuff is coming up again.

Which has me wondering: why? What is triggering these thoughts and the anxiety behind them? What emotional needs of mine are being unmet? It’s possible that all of this is connected to the grief I’m going through regarding the end of my relationship, which I’m constantly missing and thinking about (the first love cuts the deepest, right?). But I’ve felt a vague sense of dissatisfaction and missingness for years now. Writing and talking about it helps, but it feels like I’m running through a mental maze I know too well, performing the same outdated emotional gymnastics in an attempt to hold together a life that is yearning for more.

A part of me is okay with all of this. I feel less anxious overall, and it’s easier to step back and make space for the moments of unease, for the duality of contradictory emotions that can emerge and coexist in a single body. Yet another part of me continues to reach. It doesn’t want distance and uncertainty anymore. It wants to close the gap between ideal and reality, something I have struggled to contend with as an adult and dreamy optimist. How do we know when it is our ideals or our realities that are in need of an update?

It’s true that the PhD rarely fulfills me (I need to dig into this) and has made me a bit cynical about science, but the concrete pieces of the work keep me grounded and engaged with others. Maybe it’s not supposed to entirely fulfill me. What I might need is to slow down and observe, to come home to my body, tune into the rhythms of my days, and pay off the lingering soul-debt. Maybe I simply need to read more, make more friends and deepen the friendships I already have, be outside in the sun, write occasionally, and pursue at my own pace whatever catches my curiosity.

I have no clues or answers to the questions that accompany me. I’m in the dark again. Though what I’ve witnessed over and over is that there is an inextinguishable essence or soul that readily shows itself in the process of grieving and healing. Even in the most painful of moments, it reassures you that you will make it to the other side. It reminds you that it was forged in the heat of heartbreak and loss, and can stand in the face of anything life throws at you. And when you’re ready to be taken by the flame of passion and desire again, it will be there with you waiting to heed the call.

David Whyte, from Consolations:

Pain is the doorway to the here and now. Physical or emotional pain is an ultimate form of ground, saying, to each of us, in effect, there is no other place than this place, no other body than this body, no other limb or joint or pang or sharpness or heartbreak but this searing presence. Pain asks us to heal by focusing not only on the place the pain is felt but also the actual way the pain is felt. Pain is a form of alertness and particularity; pain is a way in.

…

Lastly, pain is appreciation; for most of all the simple possibility and gift of a pain-free life – all the rest is a bonus. Others do not know the gift in simply being healthy, of being unconsciously free to move or walk or run. Pain is a lonely road, no one can know the measure of our particular agonies, but through pain we have the possibility, just the possibility, of coming to know others as we have, with so much difficulty, come to know ourselves.