Wheel Turns

I'm getting stronger at being myself.

I'm getting better at recognising my patterns, at predicting myself, at shaping the container of my life which I create to better fit my self which I suppose I also create but seem to have less control over. There's a core there I will not change. As time goes by I have less and less will to change it.

Change is inevitable. I'm moving into it with as much measured deliberation as I can muster this time. We'll see how those ripples make their way under my skin over time. School starts in a week and a half. My hobbies are turning under my hand: a little less brewing, a little more cooking, a little more travelling, maybe some sailing. I've changed my financial stuff significantly. I'm nosing back into the kink scene, or rather dipping my pinkie toe back into that pool. Change.

I'm comfort-reading again; burning through the Dresden Files a book or a book and a half a day. Reading is private for me. It takes me to the inside place that's totally walled off from the world, where nothing can get at me. I think I get the kind of rest from it that other folks get from vacations. I don't know if I'm hiding something from myself or just very tired of the world sometimes or maybe it's normal to need or want that escape.

I'm not as willing to eat or hold other people's pain as I have been in the past. I find myself acting straightforwardly more often and managing folks' feelings less now. It's colder towards other people, who have to deal with their discomfort, but gentler to myself. My life is feeling generally less intense than it has in the past, and also more solid. Picture the difference between jumping exhilarating stone-to-slippery-stone across a creek and walking across a solid wooden bridge.

So I think I'm in pretty good shape; not the greatest, but good. But tonight I am lonely.

I think the internet brings loneliness with it. I only had it reinstalled today after a summer away, and only reluctantly because I want to have it for school. But. It came today, and now tonight I feel cavernously empty, sad, like I'm all full of echoes of voices with no flesh to them. This is superstitious thinking, equating correlation with causation, and further ignoring complexities such as the way that writing allows me to recognise my emotions when, without this writing, I might just have been restless and gone for a walk before sleep.

Maybe I've been calm and stable because my emotions have needed to knock pretty loudly to get my attention without this focus?

I've missed rituals that give me time and attention and ability to look into myself. I think I can budget for a couple months of daily yoga again, like I did last winter, and use that repetitive ritual to check in with my body and my mind in a leisurely but frequent way (body and mind, two words as if separate, and yet 'self' seems so vague) to see how I am doing over an extended period of time. I'm not especially sure how I'm doing now, and here school is starting and my relationship is slowly turning towards more serious under my (yes, quite deliberate) touch. Change.

Whatever else I'm feeling, I am feeling so strong lately. So capable. So able to go through life in my own shape, on my own feet, creating my own connections and responding to opportunities as I decide to: not perfectly, but well enough to be mostly happy enough most of the time and sometimes very happy indeed. Strong enough to feel unhappy sometimes, or lonely as now, and almost shrug it off.

I'm afraid of this feeling strong. I'm afraid of having ability and responsibility gathered together in my own hands so completely. I'm afraid of being the one who can steer myself _best_, of not having someone else with the rules book because there are no rules to this game. I always come here to write when I've lost my compass and I'm feeling a little lost tonight.

There's a line from one of my favourite songs of the moment that always destroys me right now:

My first day walking on my own/ Well what if I'd been made that way?

I really am walking so much on my own this year. So much. And it's of my own making: so much effort put into slowly straightening my spine over the years. So much.

I'm rambling now, so I'm going to put the keyboard away. Goodnight.

Sweet dreams.