It isn’t easy to live in my brain.
My mom used to call me a “malcontent.”
And it’s true, the feeling state of contentment often eludes me.
Yesterday as case in point.
It should have been a day of contentment. I achieved a big business milestone, going live with my new website on the first day of the new decade. Plus, the fam was home. We were having an epic staycation.
Unfortunately, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. The malcontented side. I didn’t want to make breakfast. I didn’t want to exercise. I didn’t want to meditate. I didn’t want to talk to anyone let alone do fun staycation things.
I don’t go into long lasting depressive episodes anymore. No… those days are over. Nowadays I have “mini” depressive episodes.
Yesterday I was overcome by exhaustion and melancholy. And, of course, I felt ashamed about it.
And I just wanted to feel better.
So I tried a few strategies…
- I obsessively checked my email, FB, IG for positive comments about the new website. I got a few but it didn’t make me feel better. Because when I’m in one of these funks, Brene’ Brown herself could post a comment on my blog and I’d still feel inadequate.
- So I took a nap. Which gave me the energy to make some Mac and Cheese for the kids but then I got irritated at my husband for buying two boxes of different pasta which meant I would have to boil the noodles separately because I’m too much of a perfectionist to allow different noodles to comingle in the same cheesy sauce.
- Then a friend texted me to see if I was home. He was moving and wanted to say goodbye. I considered coming up with an excuse not to have him over but I figured a visit from a friend might cheer me up. When he got to the house he asked to speak with me privately. Apparently, I did something to upset him and he needed to get it off his chest.
- After he left I took a shower and considered pounding the bottle of whiskey Ron bought at Costco that sat in the pantry but that would have broken my 6 year booze free streak. I washed off the negative ju ju in the shower and put on something cute but my jeans felt super tight because I’ve been gorging on sugar for the past two weeks starting with the carrot cake my sister in law brought a couple days before Christmas. So I changed into some looser fitting pants.
- Then I ate some milk Chocolate that was sitting on the counter left over from New Year’s Eve but the sugar made me feel tired again.
- So I read, which helped, but there is only so much Louisa May Alcott one can take in a single sitting.
- After that I tried complaining. I complained to my husband that I didn’t feel like cooking and I’m so tired today and I don’t know why my moods are so up and down but that just made him feel helpless and sad so I made some soup. I fed my family soup and we played a board game then Ron and I cleaned the kitchen.
- Then I put the kids in front of Just Dance 2020 and got into bed — my happy place — where Ron and I watched women’s tennis then finished the Kevin Hart documentary which made me exhausted because Kevin Hart’s life is like my month of December.
- Then I slept the entire night thanks to the new vitamins and the testosterone cream and woke up around 6, resisting the urge to keep sleeping.
- Still feeling low, I made myself a latte and started listening to a mind valley class on healing trauma I purchased a few weeks ago. Then I got up to make another coffee and started reading an email from Gabrielle Bernstein about manifesting. She suggested I write down my desires and how they bring me joy. This got me thinking about a limited time offer from Brooke Castillo and so I started writing a blog post called My Brain on Limited Time Offers. As I was writing about my Brain on Limited Time offers I revisited an email from Brooke that convinced me that joining her program would solve all my problems.
- So I enrolled in Brooke’s thing. Then I started to feel buyer’s remorse.
Then I went to see someone who does somatic therapy which is something I’ve been doing to address some old trauma. I’ve been seeing him for several weeks. There I rambled off all of the above plus more. It took about twenty minutes. He listened and did a good job of hiding his overwhelm then offered me non judgmental verbal validation.
And then he had me check in with my body. I tuned in. I closed my eyes. I placed my hand on the pain. My heart.
I stayed there and observed without needing to understand.
I felt emotions like sadness that morphed into anger that morphed back to sadness then oddly euphoria then humor then back to more sadness.
I felt a strange burning sensation in my chest that I couldn’t pin to an emotion and didn’t feel exactly physical but made me picture a crater between my throat and my chest, filled with molten lava that eventually turned into a waterfall. And then as I kept tuning in, the burning turned into tiny snakes of white light that escaped out my throat.
And then I paid the guy and I left. And on the way home I noticed something I hadn’t felt for about thirty-six hours.
Contentment.
