Detours and an ongoing disdain for pants

Monday mornings are an unpopular time to post your writing online, but I haven’t written in weeks, and words have been fighting to get out. So here we are.

I could say that I haven’t written because I had to return my laptop to my old employer,  or because I started a new job, or because I’m too tired after to write after work. I could blame it on a recent obsession with making tiny stop-motion robot movies. And that would be true. Those are all true things about the last month. I have started to explain this in my head, daily, wanting to pour it out. Somehow, after writing about positivity and self-awareness, coming out and saying “I haven’t felt like writing because I feel anxious and shitty” feels disappointing.

Do you know how you feel when you miss an exit on the highway, or even worse, don’t realize that you’re driving the wrong way, for miles? The worst. That is also how I feel on this journey to be my own biggest fan, or at least a serious cheerleader. I’m cruising along, anxiety-free, and then I miss a turn. Suddenly, all of my clothes feel too tight, I’m panicking because I’m two minutes from texting The Ex I Do Not Text and I’m reliving, with horror, all of the conversations I’ve had in the last 24 hours. Or 24 days. Or months.

For the last several months, I’ve felt myself moving forward. Anxiety about work and body-image and being solo and uncertain about the future didn’t feel like part of the present. Until it was again. And it seems like a failure of sorts.

The only thing that comforts me is that I’m still on the road. I didn’t park on the side of the highway and run pants-less into a cornfield. I want to. I want to say screw it. But I can’t because nobody but me can drive this anxious little robot-making, pants-fearing car. It’s mine. I get turned around, but I hold fast to my vague sense of direction. I have people who call and ask how the drive is going. When I tell them that it’s total shit, they don’t hang up. Maybe that’s my challenge: to keep going, to keep talking, even when the message isn’t too inspirational. I am allowed to be down even if, on the outside, everything seems to be going well. Being lost is a really nice car is still being lost, and it’s still frustrating.

So I’ll stay on this path, knowing I can only see so far ahead, and plan so little. This is a detour, if we stick with this metaphor, and not a break down. I’ll keep telling you all about it, because you’re here, and I said I would.