life

429: The Pool of Oughts

| Aspergers Girls

I have been living through a familiar dread—one that I have carried with me my entire life.

A major part of my predicament is in the stringing of my thoughts—in the way my mind instinctually expands off one concept onto another. At times I seem to be thinking, or at minimum existing, at multiple levels. Not in a psychedelic way; yet, in a very definite effectual state in which I am neither here nor there, but everywhere. There aren’t any lights or awakenings, but there exists this extremeness of a structure or building, as if I were a skyscraper itself expanding out in exponential infeasible directions beyond the view of the naked eye. And here, I slip simultaneously beyond what I am able to see and into the place of invisibility.

I recognize I am absent, with my faraway stare. I recognize I have lost my leash to the rest of self. I see from beyond that I am standing outside of where I am, holding a string to the other place of where the rest of me exists; my body in most ways remaining a shell.

In life as in fiction, I can be watching a scene play out, and at the same instant be analyzing the characters’ personalities, the actors’ personalities, the screen writer’s purpose, the landscape, the environment and feasible psychological ramifications of the spoken words and actions of the people. My mind seems spider-like in its ways, capable of reaching out in a potentially infinite array of directions, with its spindly legs sprouting and spurning in fanatical rupture. The rhythmic zeal moves from abstract to concrete, and I am swept up in the weaving of a thousand stitching legs—the legs themselves as streams pouring out of a waterfall, each spawning another waterfall. Picture after picture. Image after image dripping down in a thousand ways. All of this birthed into a whirlpool of thought that is neither disorganize or organized, but collected in the same manner in which one would forge food for the winter or build a nest for safety. Here is where everything is.

In sitting to do or think of anything, I am sitting as the aching spider, as the legs, as the fountains, as the streams, as the nest. Some large living machine pulsating with connections. I can sense this happening, as I am thinking about thinking about thinking. I take an elevator in thought or jump through the illusion of self that is in actuality the mirrors set upon mirrors—each image further, smaller, deeper, but just as real and just as exact.

I don’t actually see a spider and legs, and the rest, but I feel this movement as such; where if I had to describe the pulsating chains of me, this is as close as I could come. But in truth there isn’t anything I can follow or find, just this sense of substantial never ending depth akin to the collective pool of unconsciousness or perhaps liken to a life-size mold where self enters to be reinvented again and again.

Here in this space of no space, I meander through the chambers that hold the record of all experience, shifting through the files and bringing up into the light that which has yet to be discovered: a scaffolding mechanism reviewing what has been, what will be, and where I ought be.

The trouble begins, need I say trouble, when I open the files of ‘ought.’ There is where the stinging nettle comes, with the burning so distracting that all else falls down. The ‘ought’ files take over. For some reason or another, my essence absorbs the rules, regulations, how-tos, structure, system of being, and so on. I don’t know why, and it hurts to try to figure out the why of why I need to know the whys. I just do.

And in so being immersed in the ‘ought’ files, I get lost. I become over-expanded, swelled, and pressurized. A sponge in a pool expansive and foreboding, each movement of thought yet another burden onto self. Here in the pool of ‘oughts’ I become confused, primarily because there exists contradiction beyond contradiction. One school of thought against the other. One way of being beyond the other. Each standing in line shouting to be heard. Here is a room that has too many choices and too many directions. Too much depth. For a child as I be, I become mesmerized and trapped in the gooey notions of ‘ought.’ I begin deciphering each segment, each crumb, reaching the same conclusion continually: That all is an illusion and all is not.

I stand there ashamed of my own being for not being who I ‘ought’ to be. As I stand there, too, erect in self proclaiming who I am. I stand there crying in the confusion. And I sink there too, the strokes of my arms useless, as I wade through the muck of nonsense.

I become useless onto myself with so many options that lead to either dead ends or the opposite or the contradictory voice of a mass of many; the ‘oughts’ tie up the whole of the machine into a ball of inability. Motionless enters. I remain trapped, focusing and refocusing on what is evidentially lies or mistruths. I hear the echoes of the all. The ways in which the ‘wrongness’ hurts the masses. The ways in which we are each silently tormented in our minds by the rules established by the ones who are equally predispositioned to torment. It becomes a jumble of confusion and mayhem; something far beyond the enchantment of mystery and far closer to the bowels of a bleak twisted jail yard.

I am myself here, still. Uncorrupted, unmoved, but nonetheless made into something I don’t want to be. I am crying on the inside while strong on the outside. And then I am strong more so in the depths of self and made weak on the outer layers. I am bathed in this place of non-discrepancy, baptized in a sense by the very alive confusion. Drowned too, unable to breathe, and then spat out, left as naked and brought back to this place I am now. Here. Present. Aware. Alive.

I go through this in a way so swift and abstract, yet so expansive in distance and very real, that I cannot help but to be altered, existing as this being reborn and reborn again, through the loud shattering chaos that the world whispers as truth.

428: Impermanence

| Aspergers Girls

Impermanence.

I understand the word. I feel the word. I live the word. I am hyper aware of impermanence. It is all around me. The constant changing elements of water, the river that is never the same once visited again. I understand all is in continuum. Nothing ever stops and nothing ever stays. I think I have understood this since I was a small child. I think that understanding such complex concepts at a young age added to my anxiety.

Perhaps this is when I began to cling to my imagination deeper and deeper, and began to learn how to survive. I was a fledgling set out to fly far too early. Someone unadjusted to the world at large made to be a part of something she did not understand and did not want to understand. I hid in my very own nightmares, determined to fight off demons in an arena I created, untouched by the outside.

I jumped fence after fence, leaping from robbers and ‘bad guys.’ I protected my mother from the giant waves coming at us as I clung to the ocean cliffs for life. I ward off monsters pulling me down the bed.

It was impossible to live in the present. Entirely impossible. To feel everything at once would have been liken to an internal combustion. I would have exploded, in one way or another. Instead I locked everything inside and I made promises. I promised to grow up to be a good person, to be a good mommy, and to make a difference in the world. I turned my terrible angst into hope. I set goals. I set conditions. And I made order out of the chaos.

Eventually my goals were reached. I’d done everything I’d ever wanted. My life was set. Every single one. And there I sat, not too long ago, lost. For what was I to do when everything I’d set to do had been reached?

I understood myself and the dynamics of my life. I understood the deepest of religious thoughts and philosophies. I understood my journey and all that had transpired. At least to the greatest degree possible for the person I was.

Had I been a different person years ago…oh so it seemed. Had I been made new week after week, waking up to a person I did not know or recognize? Indeed. I was transformed from the inside out. The dreams, prophetic and enriched with symbolism, came. The painting, the drawing, the poetry, the intense unbearable passion. I was wrapped up in this whirlwind I could not control. I was swept away by the beauty. I was floating. I was where I thought I would remain.

Only I was drowning. I was suffering in a rigidness and extremeness. I was stuck again. I lost myself in a way I didn’t know way possible. I flew up to the ceiling of my own life in a bubble of my own. Everything and everyone seemed a burden but my God. I was able to love, yes, unconditionally, but I wasn’t able to be. I wasn’t there. I was lost in yet another formed self.

I was reformed into something I was not. At least it seems that way through the eyes of retrospection. But what if that was who I am? What if at that moment that was me in completion: this lost heroine found to her own self. I do not know. I only know I was drifting. I was floating. I was no longer grounded. Nothing was that had been before, and all seemed lost and found at once.

It was my new escape. I know this in looking back. But I never would know it then. I’d transported into another place and into another state of being to survive. What was I surviving? This place.

I’d set new rules upon myself: to not fixate, to stay in the present, to be of service, to love unconditionally, to forgive everyone, to release anger. All beneficial rules. All effective measures. Except I wrapped myself in barbwire. I literally took the fencing that had always caged me in—the fence of rules, regulations, and must-do’s—and then made the fencing my very skin. I took my self and made myself the rigidness. I bleed for the world. Or so I thought.

But I was really bleeding for me. I was finally coming to the cuffing of self—to the last prison—the last restrictions of soul. I was making myself believe that through effort, sacrifice, and obeying I would at last be free. That through service, I would at last have found the answer.

I didn’t realize that I no longer need to suffer to be the light.
I didn’t realize that I no longer have to search to find who I already am.
I didn’t realize that the very impermanence that haunted me as a youth, was the same impermanence that would pull me through.

I went on my knees. I curled on the floor and I wept. For through everything, I believed I still hadn’t sacrificed enough. I believed I had to be tortured to heal the world. I believed if I wasn’t bled out I couldn’t survive. I thought, without reason, that to live was to die a thousand deaths.

I begged for reprieve, for change, for retreat. And it came.

The waves of trials. The turmoil of emotions. The constant moving of my foundation. Everything bubbled up and exploded as hot molten. Everything splattered and spilled and spat—hot liquid pain. And the landscape reformed burying me in the process. Momentarily, unable to breathe or float or be, I dug through the debris. I suffered then, but in a different way.

I suffered through finding where I’d last left myself. And I found me. Somewhat buried, too. But not as deep. Just set out as a shell beside the shadows where I moved; hidden beneath the very darkness I carried. An invisibleness that formed into shape with each of my worries and woes. I found me there then, or what remained of me, all withered and severed. And I remembered that I had this funny way of finding places to go while leaving the rest of me behind. I had to have been there, I supposed, in this place of no place, while the other slipped on my suit of being. I had to be there and rest, beyond the structure of the illusion of our world, so I could awaken to me again and behold the lands ruptured and renewed

423: I am enough

| Aspergers Girls

Life isn’t simple. It never will be.

As hard as I try to make it so, life will continue to be complex and awe-inspiring, heart-rendering and heart-breaking, and full of a mystery so full that to attempt to empty the bottle of unknown would leave me drowning within the first rendered droplet.

I am this and I am that.

And I see myself as constantly changing, as if I have lived a thousand life times in the span of a few days.

My mind is preoccupied and occupied by both my thoughts and my conclusions, and this gigantic network of interwoven threads of information.

I am constantly spinning. Unlike the spider’s quest, my web doesn’t begin anew; instead I build, scaffolding off of previously filtered information again and again. Some gigantic enterprise continually producing inside of this person I seem to be.

It is odd to look around at the world and take in the rules and regulations, the patterns and shapes, and the ways in which I am told to be and even see.. am told to understand and even how to use my mind to comprehend.

It is odd and extremely confusing to live in this world of extreme rigidness when such a remarkable being I be, full of potential and possibility.

Yet, indeed, I understand the need for structure. Of course without some sort of system all would fall apart and fail; at least that is what I have been told.

That teaching along with so many more that my mind hurts, and like the bottle of unknown spills out into more masses of reasoning upon reasoning.

I want to be simple, I suppose. If I think long and hard about the idea, which takes me a matter of seconds, I can see how simplicity breeds comfort—a false type of security that doesn’t exist in nature. I can see how simplicity eases the soul and leaves one freer to breathe and carry on. And I can imagine myself simple and free, drifting through life with the troubles past me because the challenges were never captured long enough to matter.

But what of my heart? So large it grows. I cannot help but want to complicate matters. Not because I long for disturbance or am the eager eater of drama. Nor nearer is the fact that I am in need of complexity. It is just how I am made: built into this someone who meanders to and fro inside a self that meanders to and fro; an insider watching through a window as the outsider moves. Each step we make either together or separate; each step leading deeper into a knowing that nothing is within control. Even as all about people reach, stabbing onward like phantoms attempting to grasp a steering wheel of hope.

I am not melancholic. At least not always, and essentially not at this instant; still I see enough and know enough to understand that no easement of woes exists. And I watch as bystander within bystander observing the masses create havoc of life in an attempt to alleviate a suffering they do not understand. And I watch, waiting for the games to end, waiting for people to come home to their own selves and to stop the games that seem so endless and limiting all at once. Restricted with manmade boundaries and manmade torture to be something and someone else through process and progress, when all along the someone was already divine and perfectly whole.

It is a type of treachery many succumb to through manipulation, repeated exposure and through the absorption of the spillage of the profiteering fools. How we are played as pawns and how I am made to watch helplessly the empire that calls itself wholesome.

I am not this gentle foolish child set innocent into the world. I am wisdom unfolding through and through. Cherishing the dance I play out in my head, as the dance outside in the place called reality is folded into layers of hatred and trickery. For I am escaping all that I see aching outside. And I am pulling in the answers to the folly and pain. I am reworking the outcomes and calculating the events’ offspring, hoping to counteract the wickedness that seeps through the avenues of discourse and greed.

I am enough into myself and need not partake in the ways that were made by the few to reinvent the perfect ones into blundering self-hating conformist.
And I am enough to know that when the season passes and the lies are exposed, I will remain the same. I will still be here with my honesty, integrity, and abyss of hope-filled love.

I refuse to be created into something I am not. To be made into something that is easier for others to comprehend and forget. To be ironed out and made flat and non-dimensional, so the waves I create no longer disturb those adrift in their own murky dark sea.

I am me. And in this I am everything. In this I can reach out my hand to another who is still breathing by her own accord and wish, through the pain of the world, and take hold of purity and hope.

I am me, and in embracing all I am, I have the capacity to embrace all that another be, before the blindfolds were attached and the ground moved asunder, so that floating ghosts appeared where banished souls once traveled.

I am enough and empowered with light, so that where I travel the warriors of angels come and guide me.

In my folly, in my surrender, in my imperfection painted as a coat of varnish on my silky silhouette, I am still enough.

I am everything and nothing. I am entirely filled and emptied.

And in each way I move and think and live, I am a testimony to truth and fairness.

I refuse to be what the world wants to make me into. Refuse to climb out of who I am to be someone I am not and leave but a shell of what I was created to be. For no one can fulfill their potential half-empty or entirely gone. And no one can withstand the weight of the world beneath the burden of their own disheartened soul.

Whole I stand. Undone and complete. Entirely me. And when the others shake because I am, I shall reach out again to find the hand that used to be, and offer my love. Over and over I shall reach, if not into my outer world then into my own self to pull out what has been formed and blended into the miracle of making, and to offer out what is no longer mine and undoubtedly the thread of love that keeps us sewn in strength.

To pull out of the game long enough to remember I was neither born a pawn or made into less than enough. And to remember I am here in serenity, fulfilling my dreams, the ones born onto me beyond the misery of fools’ making.

422: This Person I Be

| Aspergers Girls

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How I miss you, and how I don’t miss the need to blog.

It has been a gentle retreat to not feel pulled to do anything in regards to writing, painting, composing poetry, etc.

I often slip into creative endeavors, longing for reprieve of anguish and anxiety. Yet, my slipping undoubtedly turns into escape, a type of cloaked hiding from the world and my own state-of-being.

In exposing my thoughts through writing, I manage to simultaneously avoid everyday tasks, “duties,” responsibilities, and in a sense reality.

In creating or doing, I become overly-focused in almost all endeavors.

Finding the in between, the medium, the middle of the scale has been, and continues to be, a challenge akin to a phantom vapor that moves through me though never lingers. Inside there is a constant churning to find balance; whether I am actively consciously seeking or subconsciously hoping.

I have been afraid the last two months. Too much to comprehend, really. Stressors of life such as relationship turmoil, the prospect of moving (in which I packed most of the house, only to unpack), financial strife, and other common woes have been visiting my avenue of experience. And having been there, and still standing, I am actively catching my breath.

I have before me, to my side, the latest edition of the psychology journal. In it is my first column. My own column. And I’ve yet to open the packaging and look. I don’t know why. The white package has been sitting here, on my computer desk, for about a week.

Perhaps I am afraid of being pulled in again…to anything or anyone.

Oftentimes life is like quicksand. When I am not processing feelings of being misunderstood, judged, or misinterpreted, I am fighting this tremendous riptide. And the more I fight, the more I am made to struggle.

I don’t know how to strive without goals. I don’t know how to live without struggle. I set myself up through goals. They are this target I aim for only to find myself the very charging dart soaring through the air, becoming ungrounded in this quest to hit some distant bullseye.

I am not sure where my footing is at the moment. I am not settled; I am not certain; I am not sure. But I am okay.

And in this limbo of uncertainty the act of finding the strength to be in completion through all my emotions without clinging to a distant goal or some self-expectation is freeing.

I am letting anger surge through me. Allowing myself to explode and then re-center.

I am allowing myself to stop searching for improvement, perfection, and the ‘answers.’

I am allowing flaws to be flaws without the attachment of brilliance or giftedness, or the evaluation of the potentiality of the concept of ‘flaws.’

I just am.

I am so much like all the other people I meet: struggling and crying, cringing and contemplating, celebrating and laughing, mourning and searching.

I am this part. This singular part of a whole, no longer in need of excelling, propelling, or pushing forward.

I embrace this ebb and flow of me. All this silliness of thought.

I am accepting there is nothing I have to produce or become.

I am accepting this person I be.

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421: The Center

| Aspergers Girls

“I trust and accept where I am in this moment. I refuse to be my own judge and jury. I love me in all of my emotions. I respect my journey and trust in my own inner strength. I believe in a purpose, a power and a guiding light within and beyond me. I am enough. We are enough. And in both my joy and in my sadness, I shall choose to shine. Not hoping for a better future or to resurface my current existence; but surrendering to the process, while moving through the seasons, within and about these cyclic moments of rebirth; a willing presence to be that both ripens me into the fullness of now and forges a grand adoration of self and all.” ~ Sam

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I am a bit confused. I have been visualizing a diagram in my mind, similar to the cardinal directions of the compass: the compass points of north, south, east, and west. On the right I see obsession, on the left fixation, to the top the future, down the bottom the past. In the center is a circle, indicating the present.

Where in I spent much of my life in one direction or another, now I am practicing living in the center circle. Here is my refuge. Only I don’t know what to think about.

I find what seems to be relief in glimpsing the future of hope; but I know too well even glimpses of the future eventually cause me grief. A suffering of sorts. I find what seems to be release in sparring with the past; yet, I know too, the past is done now, and often is marred in my own disillusion of reality.

I used to naturally, almost instinctually, grasp onto a project or special interest, and here I would leap into a state of retreat. The world around me seemingly vanishing as I rose into a protective cloud of focus and revenue, reaping the sum of the parts I had envisioned in mind, and watching as the product of my creation came to life.

I used to unwillingly dance in the cyclic burden of obsessive thought, tiring myself up much within the first hours of the day with either wishful thinking or dreaded fear of illness and death. Now, this too has simmered in my mind. The tragic demise of self tango I forged through daily, hour upon hour, and wrapped myself in, with ribbons of torture, is missed. Not missed for the pain and agony I felt in doing this to self, but for the routine, the normalcy I created for escape.

The dreaming of the ways it could be and what could be, who could be—there I still slip into the easiest—a psychological and spiritual combination of desire, want, lust, love and yearning all tied into the knot of future that shall not be.

I am searching, without actively searching, for a way to be that requires nothing but the center moment.

A journey that is absent of requiring, in essence, and fills me with completion of self. However, I live in a world of constant wants and needs and unfulfilled dreams. Everywhere I look, everywhere I travel, is a someone reaching or inquiring, searching or instigating. People planning, constantly, for the next moment. People reliving, continually, the past hauntings of life they seem to think are real. And all around I am surrounded by this wild charge of inhabitants who are grasping my hand in an attempt to connect; whilst all about I feel entirely alone and isolated.

There is this burning longing in me, so tender, and at the same time so ravenous in its want, that destruction seems inevitable. I have this glow within that aches and burns and turns me to the direction of naught, repeatedly; this growing passionate flame I want someone to see, to hold, to recognize, to soothe. And still, there is no one.

This is an isolation new to me. A finding of self and of purpose, and a recognition of love of being singularly countered with the unyielding desire to be joined as no longer one.

I think of the moments. Of how to live in the moment, without wandering in any direction.

Though, I do wander.

In so doing, I recognize my humanness again and again. Something that is neither a frailty nor curse. Something that simply is. I recognize my confusion equally. Struggling in the freedom of travel. In the choices of now. In the ache of deep carved out awareness. And as I struggle with the need to connect, I also struggle with the need to protect, to hide in a delicate corner and retreat into self for rescue and reprieve. I hover in this in between space of wanting to reach out and find the connective bridge of recognition and longing to remain untouched and unmoved.

Each encounter in which I am present, I am equally vulnerable and exposed. In some ways, I feel as if a boulder is momentarily slid across to expose the cavernous depths of self. And in so being exposed, I am excavated and explored and evaluated. Then, without effort the boulder is placed back. And upon my return to being, I am neither beneath in the unseen dark nor above observing the gigantic barrier. I am equally not the boulder itself. I am nothing.

I am this searching that doesn’t search. I am this wandering that doesn’t wander. Like the circulating air I feel. Only with a voice that whispers: Find me. Hold me. Love me.

And I am left in the center. In the circle of creation, waiting for the bell to chime. To ring of both completion and beginning. To signal my unification with all and bring me to the someone with open arms who in my presence alone is home.

***
After reading this I was led back to this post: Day forty-two: On Leadership. The words helped greatly to ease my mind. ❤

The introduction to this youtube is wonderful as well.