The Storm is Intensifying
This is not going to be the typical blog.
There’s nothing typical about the way I feel right now.
I’m sitting on a huge pile of anger and I’m not sure what do with or about it. After I swam this morning while getting dressed, I realized I spend so much of my time trying to avoid my real feelings. Completely intentionally I focus on things I love, am grateful for or are beautiful, all in an attempt to create good feelings so that good things will happen or come to me. I want so desperately to push away the bad stuff, the enormous fears I have. As much as I try to read and listen to countless books about manifesting joy and prosperity, saying affirmations, going to therapy and seeking good things to think about I still feel so much fear. Terror is what is inside of me and as much as I try to divert these feelings into something more positive they are still lurking there.
I want to say FUCK IT! Fuck the attempts to be good or sweet or nice. But I can’t say that because I’m a Mom and I write about love and I try so hard to be kind and gentle and compassionate and understanding. As hard as I try to do all that stuff and be a good person and a good Mom and set a good example for my kids, I realize I’m full of shit.
I’m living a lie.
I lie to myself and I lie to everyone else when, which is all the time, I try to be ‘nice’ because I’m not nice. I’m really not.
In an instant I can fly into an inner rage and be totally filled with intense spitting anger that if I said what I really wanted to say I would blow people away. The truth is I don’t want to be seen as mean or unkind or selfish or crazy. BUT I AM!!!! But I don’t want to be seen as that.
I’m a hypocrite.
Sometimes I feel so mean. Sometimes all I want is be totally selfish. I have a gazillion and one unkind thoughts about you and everyone else in this world. And so much of the time I don’t really give a shit about anyone or anything except me.
Can you believe it? Me? After all I’ve written in the last year and a half about Cindy Love and learning to love our selves and others?
I get we all have a shadow side. I know we all have darkness that most of us avoid. I understand all that. I teach about it a lot. And yet, to sit in the ladies locker room at the YMCA this morning and see myself in the mirror as a raging lunatic was nuts for me. And truthfully, it felt kind of good. I threw my gym bag over my shoulder and stormed out of the Y filled with this crazy dis-ease and unrest and came home to write to you.
I gotta get it out of me. That’s all there is. Like the song says, ‘I gotta be me.’
If you don’t like it don’t read it. But if you do, if you feel similar, then let me know. I want to know if I’m alone here. And if I’m not alone I want some soul sisters and soul brothers in my life who are willing to say what they mean and mean what they say. I want to find a tribe that is willing to get dirty and ugly and awful and still love like the world depends on it. I want to learn to love all of it, all of me and know the truth, and say it over and over again.
I can’t be nice right now. I won’t be nice right now. I just want to be real, the real me with all my anger and messy guts spewing out everywhere. I want to put it all out there and see what happens.
This storm inside of me is turning into a tornado and I can’t stop it from blowing where it’s going to blow.
If you don’t like out of control storms you better watch out.
And yeah, I’m still using this picture. I’m still the same person, just crazier.
“Completely intentionally I focus on things I love, am grateful for or are beautiful, all in an attempt to create good feelings so that good things will happen or come to me.”
Dear Melody,
That is an incredibly good life strategy. It is practical, functional and will succeed. We become the results of what we do.
There is a giant gotcha in the process. To grow we must revisit old emotional patterns that were impressed upon us by circumstance of our lives, families and histories – even human history of our ‘genetic fears’ that extend all the way back down the evolutionary path to ooze. Yes ooze was afraid.
Anyway, the price we pay for practical spiritual growth is dredging up the dreck of our ‘unconscious’ (stuff that lives hidden in the nooks and crannies of fearful emotional patterns of defenses and attachments). We have to examine them to grow. In doing so we actually do help others with their growth for the strength of those old emotional patterns that we all share is diminished by our efforts.
From my point of view that is the hardest work in changing the world. It is the most valuable, too. The price for joy is striving for the perfection of beauty, truth and goodness. The price of life is the growth to get there.
Congratulations on paying a big price today.
Welles
“The price for joy is striving for the perfection of beauty, truth and goodness. The price of life is the growth to get there.”
Beautiful. Thank you Welles.
The question is, when do we stop having to grow? And I bet I know your answer, either when we die or when we choose. And maybe when we make that choice we might as well be dead?
Thank you for your insights and brotherhood.
Melody
“The question is, when do we stop having to grow? And I bet I know your answer, either when we die or when we choose.”
Nope. Never. However the depths of discomfort are increasingly transmuted into simply a need for internal quiet. Every ending is a beginning. That is the essence of eternal.
♥ Welles
Nice. I was a modern dancer for many years and someone once described Baroque music as ‘every ending is a new beginning in the phrases’ and I thought ‘YES’ That’s how I want to dance and how I want to live my life. That was over 30 years ago in graduate school. To come closer around in the circle.and possibly begin again to discover the eternal.
Who are you Welles and how did you end up subscribing to this blog? You are such an interesting soul. I appreciate your insights so much. Thank you.
Melody, a wise friend said to me recently that when nice people are angry it has much more impact. This blog is powerful. If you were always angry it wouldn’t have the same impact. You are nice (lovely, in fact) AND angry 😉
Completely brilliant, real, and honest! Thank you! Yes, or no, you’re not alone, even if there’s only you and me. (Which I know there isn’t!) You are, like us all, Truth – Truth in human form, experiencing everything that means – love, joy, rage, the whole darned spice-rack! And I’m stopping before I seem to be writing an ‘I know stuff’ reply, because I don’t. I’m just a fellow much-irritated-full-of-love-often-confused being too. Much love, Melody. x
Oh yes! Real means all of this and I get it. I do wonder if this daily struggle to get beyond our more raw feelings of dis-ease is about us trying to be the civilized human beings that separates our species from other predatory mammals?
Probably so Katey. I resonate with your comment of our daily struggle. And now I feel even more raw having posted this and saying it out loud. It’s liberating and terrifying at the same time. I had more people unsubscribe in one day than have all year. That’s daunting. I struck a nerve. Wonder what the damage is…