In early summer, I had for some time been carrying around a feeling of being slightly knocked out of line. I wasn’t quite straight, somehow, and there was something hazy in my inner landscape, something blurred and disturbing my field of vision, something I couldn’t quite grasp. It wasn’t there all the time, but it would stop by now and then, and sometimes cling on for days. It wasn’t exactly depression, but something else… a kind of horizonlessness brought on by constant strain?
How is it that prolonged strain can narrow one’s view so much? A strange, interesting phenomenon. Perhaps it is because when you have to keep pushing through, you have to save fuel from somewhere else, and then that keeps you from seeing all the way to your dreams, which would require more fuel, not less.
This is, admittedly, a rather poorly designed feature, because prolonged horizonlessness makes a person ill and does them harm; dreams do not. A notable design flaw in the casting of a human being!
I was weighed down by the shadow of rapid changes in working life and the search for a new job. By the tiredness painted over life changes, even happy ones. By the bitter draught of being mistreated. By the tormenting stretch of worry for someone close to me.
Little by little, and a little in secret, they had crept together into a moderately difficult lump, which had begun to whisper that I was a little, not very, but still a little, inadequate, and that my professional background was messy and wrong and somewhat odd.
I tried to tackle those feelings: I reasoned with them, changed perspectives, and distracted my mind with pleasant things. Sometimes it helped, and then at other times the lump would spill onto my fingers like hot coffee from under a poorly fitted cardboard cup lid.
> I observed something worth noting: I believe every good thing that is said to me.
I noticed that the most effective way to block that voice of inadequacy was to turn toward other people. And I observed something worth noting: I believe every good thing that is said to me.
It will be all right. Things will work out. It is windy now, but calm weather will come again. You are absolutely brilliant and you will find your place. You just need more time. You are really good at this.
How extraordinary! I truly believe those words, and they heal me. I don’t know what has changed. When I was younger, my strategy was definitely to turn away from others, because comments like that mostly reached my mind as yet another set of pressures about how to be and how to feel. Now they actually help, and I can manage again. That is why I turn toward the people I seem to trust.
I have a peculiar, rather brisk and solution-oriented way of gathering people close to me and then considering them my friends until proven otherwise. Sometimes a fleeting thought crosses my mind: does this person, who in practice is almost a stranger, find it a little odd that I am opening up about my emotional life like this? But then the thought slips away again, and I lean toward people. Wonder of wonders, they seem to lean back! They let me speak, and then perhaps they speak too. Good heavens, this is mutual! We like each other!
Sometimes crying cleanses, too. I cried through a whole pile of tissues at my child’s school spring celebration. I cried for my child and his funny dance with his friends, I cried for the first-graders in their sailor outfits singing sea-themed songs, I cried for the sixth-graders and their dreams, and for the fact that one member of the school staff was retiring.
It cleansed something in me very deeply, returned me somewhere close to the original source of goodness. Everything will work out this time, too.
The writer is a forty-something artist in the thick of the busy years, who is not afraid of feeling discouraged every now and then.