How you can’t hide from yourself

Exhaustion is grounding. I rarely do bitterness and anger. It just isn’t in my makeup. I am the eternal optimistic and everyone knows that I will always find the positive reframe for any given situation. Except now. I can’t run from this or hide from this one. Waking everyday after only half the amount of sleep you are used to because of either a) the cold or b) an overactive mind changes all that. It slams demanding hands in your back and pushes you to edge of the canyon of wrath and asks if you fancy jumping. I lay listening to the roar of the taps in the adjacent rooms that crowd out all silence in mine and I pray for something to give. A counsellor I knew about 10 years ago who worked in a mental hospital once told me that the line between sanity and insanity is only about 4 days of insomnia. I marvelled at that. Monday you can be dandy, but by Thursday you could be rocking yourself with the loopy ones. She said that they had people who voluntarily checked themselves into the hospital after just 4 days of no sleep whatsoever. She said most things in life we trust and take for granted are just fragile transient illusions.

At this time in the morning I feel like a firework with wet touch paper. Dead, cold and inert. I know enough to know ‘I shouldn’t’ be using the word ‘should’ but I can’t help thinking ‘it shouldn’t be this way.’ Yes I do see the merits of this big adventure and lord knows have felt extraordinarily blessed by everyone’s generosity (extraordinarily so). And I know everything happens for a reason, what you resist persists and it’ll be right in the end etc etc, blah, blah, but actually feeling that right now, let alone feeling it consistently isn’t happening. Maybe it’s the Antarctic chill that started in the Man’s heart that is now pervading everything in my body. What can I say. I miss him. And I hate having to say that. Shit this hurts. If I am to be awake at this daft hour I at least want to be able to roll over in bed and have lazy sleepy sex with someone I love - who preferably loves me too - and then doze back off loved up, happy and content. Lying in the warmth of something true rather than in lying in the chill of false words and promises.

I said earlier I can reframe any situation ‘except now’. Maybe it’s more about ‘accept now.’

Mostly I am realising I just want things to be easy (as they can be), because if my heart has to struggle I don’t want the rest of me to struggle as well. Less is seriously more. So with this in mind a lot of things are going to change. The OU course is going to go. The tutor has been a burden since the start. I am also thinking of breaking out of NZ. If NZ is right for me it will still be so in a few months in the spring. I am going to stop trying to make it work and be somewhere where it actually just does work (in my mind or a geographical place). And I know that involves giving. I am happier when I am giving.

And I think that giving also involves taking the lead from these strangers that are helping me and give to myself too. It is both sensible and appealing to do healing somewhere warm and tranquil and I long for yoga, dancing, hugs, good food and eons and eons of sleep. Just to be.

So speaks the law of least effort – and a law of detachment comes to think of it.

Where in the world can I do that?