Braking

Picture a train barreling down the track at a conservative 100mph and think of the momentum it has and what it’s going to take to bring that bad boy to a halt. I am the train, just reaching full speed, as my body screams to me that we are going to need to slam on the brakes and come to a screeching stop. I have been waiting for this kind of momentum. I need to make progress. I am by no means ready to stop.

Okay, my hand is hovering over the lever now so I need you to work quickly. Stay with me and picture now that you are the train, barreling past at 100mph. Take a deep breath and then picture what you think the world would look like speeding by you. How much of it will you actually take in, remember? Now as I activate this brake what you will notice, long before you catch your lack of progress, is the way that everything finally comes into focus.

I’m starting to wonder if maybe, I’m not really a train. You see, every time I hit locomotive speeds I find myself disoriented and worried that my load is too unbalanced and I’m going to sway off the rails. I am positive that all it’s going to take is an unusually strong gust of wind. So I brake, slow down, let everything come into focus again, but I don’t think trains stop to question their load.

With an impressionable mind and a wild imagination, sometimes as a train, flying past at night, I’ll catch a glimpse of a tree branch blowing in the breeze near my caboose. I’m sure that’s what it is, only if I doubt myself for the briefest moment that branch becomes an arm, reaching forward to hitch a ride. Immediately I start questioning if we have an intruder and my confidence in the tree-like qualities of that blur was just a false sense of security.

The next thing I know, I’m not a train but I also don’t feel quite human. A week before Christmas and there was a list as long as Santa’s, full of all of the things I should have been doing. Instead, I was getting in my car and driving to Walmart to stock up on cleaning supplies because I was determined to scrub my bathroom so clean that no demon would feel welcome there.

I’ll make them think twice about hitching a ride, here, with me. So the next day, I empty, clean, and reorganize the linen closet. In fact, I’m impressed that I’m finding time to write this when my bedroom closet still needs to be purged of evil, clutter.

I wonder as I lay in bed at night screaming at the shadow in the corner, “I’m not scared of you so you have no power here! You might as well fucking leave!” if I’ll ever be able to be this truly myself around another person. My mind flickers to the way I’m at least 7 weeks into a relationship and I haven’t freaked out about it at all yet. Is it time? Should I start considering how it’s possible that I’m not even cut out to live with a person let alone build a life with them?

Ah, ha! Demon! I knew I’d draw you out! There is no way those thoughts, those doubts, belong to me. You must be near. “Didn’t you hear me tell you that I’m not scared, you have no power! I’m secure, happy, you can’t make me doubt myself!” It’s 11 o’clock at night. I wonder if my neighbors can hear me.

When life goes too fast, and I get so swept up trying to get everything done that I forget to maintain my self-care, I need a break. Don’t worry, I know I’m not a train. You can worry though, that I quite literally tried to scrub the demons from my bathroom. If it’s of any solace to you, I think it’s more so that I just have a flair for drama rather than that I’m losing my mind. I’m entirely too convinced that fighting my demons should feel literal.

My initial reaction was panic. Sometimes fighting my demons makes me wonder if the evil is winning. I asked myself if I was having a psychotic break as I ensured that there would be adequate lighting to keep away the darkness, bad energies. Days later I would find peace of mind that this was all symbolic but at the time I was hoping it wasn’t the beginning of a spiral.

If I had a nice, clean bathroom, I wouldn’t want it covered in vomit splatter. Whether this is the cause of a night of drinking too much or an episode of binging and purging surfacing as an urge, there’s no way I would welcome it in my new bathroom. Whatever demons were lurking beneath those behaviors were going to need to come out of hiding and be dealt with. This Christmas, I didn’t drink myself into numbness and I didn’t eat myself into an episode.

In the past, I would have reached out to someone, insisted I was losing my mind, and asked them to help reason me back into believing that my bathroom was just fine. Now, I’m starting to trust that if I explore the experience as it arises instead of running from it, I’ll really be leaning into my growth. After all, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that my way of learning can be equally as dramatic as my personality.

I’ve always wanted to have the answer “why” to everything before accepting it. Maybe, right now, I just need to accept that there’s always a reason and the why will come when it’s time. I don’t always need to know it immediately. So when my body screams for a break, I trust that it sees farther down the track than I do and I reach for that brake.

Much love, until next time.