her able hands

I’m sick of this little piece of insecurity that festers in my mind. I think I could find a better use for the space. This bit makes it so I think I need to preface anything I say with some kind of a disclaimer to let everybody know that I’m probably mostly full of shit. Way to invite confidence, huh? Way to let people know that I think what I have to say might be valuable or even helpful. My big goal for the spring? Get over myself.

This winter has kicked me hard, and crawling along towards my 39th birthday on my aching knees has caused me to look at my lifestyle and my health. Particularly my mental health, which I think is mostly okay, except for the bat-shit crazies I’ve had for the past three months of continuous PMS and irregular cycles.

I’m getting to that age. I’m going to have to start paying attention to things like my body, and my health, and my mental stability. It’s really hard to do that when you feel like you’ve been pumped full of mud, or like you’ve spent the whole winter smoking pot around the clock like you did that one year in NY when you thought nobody noticed that you hadn’t moved from the couch to do anything but pee, sleep, and stuff Mallowmars and Funyuns into your slack maw. Or like you’ve been living in the desert without any water and only the company of a spitting camel and sand fleas. Or like all of the needy children in the world are depending on your useless ass to survive.

Oh. Hi! Where the hell was I?

Right. Yes. Mental health. So I haven’t thought of myself as depressive for a long time. Not since I was married the first time. I don’t really have anything to be depressed about, and feel like such an asshole for even using the word in a sentence about myself. But something’s up. Or really it’s more like something’s down. Something chemical in nature, I believe. Like I’ve got a bad mix of hormones and brain chemicals turning me into a peri-menopausal fruit loop cocktail. My energy level has hit an all-time low, and this week I couldn’t sleep at night without the help of Valerian. I have a million plans and only enough energy to do like, one of them.

I get it that I’d feel a lot better mentally if I felt a whole lot better physically. If I could button my pants, or wear something other than flannels and fleece jammies around the house. If the idea of taking a long walk for exercise didn’t make me want to curl up in a corner by myself and pull a Rumplestiltskin. Eating less carbs would help, but I’m so cold all the time, and carbs seem to fix that. Letting go of my caffeine addiction would help, but I’m afraid I’d never get out of bed. I have every reason for not taking care of myself, but none of them hold water. I need to do this, and I need to do it now.

The mental byproduct of all of this feeling like shit is the fear that rises up in front of me like a hurdle every time I want to do something uncharted. It tells me I’m not good enough to do any of it well, and that I need to quit fooling myself because I’m not fooling anybody else. I had to jump it when I went to my first day at the farmers’ market. I had to jump even higher when I stuffed that essay into an envelope and dropped it in the mailbox. I often have to find new ways to climb over or around it when I sit down to write another post for this website.

Maybe you wonder why I have a personal website if I’m such a big chicken shit. I could tell you that I have pie-in-the-sky visions of building up a big enough readership that it pays for itself, and maybe helps us slowly pay off the mortgage early, and that would be one part of it, probably the unrealistic part of it. It’s mostly because I have a compulsive need to tell stories to anybody who will listen, and frankly the people closest to me wish I would just shut the hell up already. You’ll end up plugging your ears and singing la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you, too. Everybody does.

I look at this road of plans ahead of me, and I can’t see a clear path with logical steps to take, I just see fear of failure jutting up out of the landscape like rock formations I have to navigate while I search for the next thing to do. The fear has always been there, and I wonder where it all came from. I plod along, and find a faint trail in the rubble, but I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I spend so much time stuck in this holding pattern. Only recently I’ve noticed a different thought process, and it intrigues me. I think a whole lot of potential hides inside the truth of this idea.

I wonder: what if I don’t have to navigate the fear? What if I’m not supposed to give it any attention at all?

I can’t tell you what it means. I haven’t a clue. But it keeps popping into my head when I think about my fear and insecurity. Maybe I have so much because it’s what I spend so much time thinking about. Maybe it doesn’t really matter how it got there in the first place. Maybe it pops up in the road whenever I start to move forward because I expect it to. Maybe it won’t go away because I haven’t realized that I can let it go.

Hypothetically.