I’ve been hiding from my blog lately but please do not take it personally, this is just my brand of crazy

Sometimes, okay, often times, life gets too LOUD for me.  When life feels too loud, I retreat and close ranks.  It is when I feel over-exposed, vulnerable, and really, just overwhelmed that life starts getting loud.  When the volume keeping going up, up, up, and the pressure builds eventually I hide to try to find some calm.  Some peace.  Some courage.

While in my self-imposed exile from society, I still perform all of my daily routines, duties, and chores.  I’m not curled up in the fetal position, sucking back Rye and Prozac cocktails while watching dog exorcisms on YouTube.  I still smile at people, make small talk, play with my kids, shower, laugh, cook, clean, drive, talk to strangers in stores, in not-so-short, I still function.  But I am painfully and acutely aware that contrary to what I have spent my life trying to achieve, my shit is most spectacularly not together.

I so badly want to be brave and strong and infallible.  I so deeply want to be wise, serene and generous.  I so honestly want to bring happiness, strength and calm to those precious, beautiful souls who have graced my life with their presence.  But I am not.  And I do not.  And knowing that chips away at my spirit until i can do nothing more than go into survival mode until I can convince myself that I am not nearly as crap as I believe and that I just need to keep trying, moving forward, work harder, get better.

During these mental and emotional shut downs (just like the US Government closing up shop, but on a slightly smaller scale), small things of no consequence feel like insurmountable tasks.  Just typing the URL into my browser (which is now Chrome, by the way, IE failed me six million times too many) to start this post took concentrated effort.  I had to will my fingers to move on the keyboard and type something other than “facebook” “swagbucks” or “dog exorcism”.  But I did it and landed here.  At my blog.  Which I found surprising because I was fully expecting for nothing to appear on the screen.  I was waiting for proof that the blog was gone.  And in that moment, in some strange way, that would be the best and the worst thing for me.  The erasure of my tiny corner of the interwebs would somehow validate and confirm all of my fears, bring reality back into focus.  But it would not really be my reality.  It would be a dark, ominous reality that I really want no part in but sometimes feel like there is no escaping.

Contrary to the tone of this post, I’m not crazier, not more psychotic, more irrational or hold bigger delusions than anyone else.  I spent far too many years being the type of crazy and agonizing about what people thought when they looked at me, talked to me, met me.  That brand of crazy wore me down and eroded my spirit, bit-by-bit, dimmed my inner-light from that of a blazing sun to that of a dollar store nightlight.  And I want my light back.  I am no longer a slave to a fictitious, high maintenance image of myself, my life and my family.  I am (maybe) finally learning to how to trust myself and trust that doing my best, really is good enough.

And if my best is not good enough for anyone?  Well to that I can only say, fuck the fuckers. There’s a new crazy in town.