Limits in all Dimensions

Chronic fatigue syndrome is all about limits. Exceeding them, testing them, being horrified by how small they are and then learning to live within them. Now I'm finally not pushing my body to go farther than it can, but I'm beginning to realize that I have spiritual as well as physical limitations. Apparently I can't just make over my life in an instant. 

It seems childishly obvious, I know. But I'm the person who moved across country to go to grad school full time when I was too sick to even work 15 hours a week. I have a history of unrealistic expectations of myself. And sadly, being aware of this fact does not now make me immune from it.

The other day I actually made a list of the strategies I am going to implement to turn my life completely around. No more will I be a bored, maudlin invalid! I will transform myself through art! I will go from somebody still mourning my losses and caught up in my own insecurities, somebody who is been afraid for at least 17 years of taking my creativity seriously, to a person maintaining the schedule of a professional writer. I will follow a strict timetable of writing and reading, I will discipline my imagination, I will drink vegetable juice every day and do more yoga, and I will start wearing button-down shirts. Life up until this point, it's sad and undisciplined wasting, will be completely obliterated. Goodbye, old life. Make way for Homo Superior.

I got really excited about this for about two days. I wrote a lot. I made myself. I wore the shirt and I drank the juice, but I couldn't do the yoga because after two days I was completely crashed. I was in way over my head. All my fears and doubts and expectations that I can't possibly meet right now just fell in around my head. It's too bad that my brain has to work suspiciously similarly to my body.

I hate being afraid. I hate being afraid so much that I have made it my personal mission of my adult life to seek out, hunt down, and destroy everything that holds me back. I hate fear and I hate being a coward. Every fear I find I have to run at full speed, sword in each hand, screaming and clad in bear hides like a berserker Viking tripping on mushrooms. It is a bloodsoaked mission of vengeance against all the ways I am weak.

I really have freed myself from a lot of my fears. I used to be terribly shy, really afraid to open my mouth in front of people I didn't know. That had to go. I was afraid of moving to new cities, so I moved to four of them. I was afraid of making art, and I made myself make it. And I loved making it, often. I’ve really won a lot of freedom for myself over the years. But now it's pretty clear my tactics have to change; I just don't have the energy to fight so hard anymore. I'm going to have to figure out how to do this the easy way.

I guess the things that I'm seeking, things that I think will make my life worth living again, are subtle qualities. They are positive things; they aren't just the absence of fear and hate and all the other fucked up things in my brain. They are things like creativity, gentleness, play, forgiveness. Actual and practiced love for myself. I can't intimidate them into working for me like I'm used to. And I can't just decide that I have them and act like I do. Otherwise I'll have anxiety attacks while trying to write short stories, because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm failing and I am NOT having fun, yet I cannot be a person who doesn't know what she's doing or fails or doesn't have fun, and thus I am living in two mutually exclusive realities simultaneously, which is hell on the nerves.

So I'm going to have to live within some psychic limits. I just don't have the spiritual resources right now to do what I want to do. No more running into the jungle to shake out my demons. I think I'm going to let some of those demons just hang out for a while. I'll take embarrassingly tiny steps and lay some groundwork. I'm pretty sure I know how to do this.