So it’s been a while.  Like a way longer while than my heart wants to admit.  I have neglected this passion project for other things the past 5 or so weeks; and it literally pains my chest a bit.  An old familiar, anxious gripping, tightening of the muscles around my heart centre for every day that fell between now and my last post.

However, not my last write.  To be clear, I have been doing other writings, along with other things like family photo sessions, editing, travel, a pathetic amount of yoga like the not enough sprinkles on your sundae to make it more than just a lump of ice cream, teaching on call, dog walking and training, parenting, friending, wifing, organizing, reading, netflixing…ya ya I get it, so many other things I have CHOSEN to do instead of writing a post.  And because my attention is so divided in a multitude of fractured bits – the way a sunbeam hits a geometric prism, except wayyyy less awe inspiring – I feel anxious.

My attuned inner being knows in its deepest place of knowing that when this type, this gnawing, this annoying drippy faucet of anxiety is left unattended, there is likely to be some water damage under the lino someplace.  So I am here to plumb my way out of this shitty way-overdue kitchen reno…that may be my worst metaphor to date. I own it.

So today’s image post is brought to you by a long night of restless-to-little sleep, brought to me by a 3 pm Americano and a late night of photo editing that made my eyes look like piss holes in the snow just before I climbed exhausted yet wired into bed at 10:45 pm.  The 7 hours that followed were me laying there, cold, despite wearing a hoodie, flannel pants and socks (and when I say hoodie, I mean I had the hood over top of my head to preserve what little survival heat I had left), curled on my side, splayed on my back, curled on my other side, interspersed with fitful really effing weird dreams of people I hadn’t seen in ages, all very disconcerting and something I would imagine to be very much like Hell.  And when my alarm signalled the beginning of another day in paradise, I was almost relieved that I didn’t have to put any more time into that business.

I got up and showered, anxiously watching for my phone to light up to tell me if I would be someone’s substitute teacher today.  Lucky for someone, I was not.  By 7 am I was ready to go at a moments notice, in case someone like old-me called in last minute on the account of a migraine, fortunately no one had one of those and for them I am thankful.  Truly. But ya, I looked at myself in the mirror after texting good mornings and fuck-I’m- tireds with my husband (already at work) and sent him this selfie on the premise “…well at least I’m having a great hair day.”  He kindly concurred.

I love how the more I look at the picture, the more I am like yes, nice hair, well done you! and in the same breath also like, jesus h. Sarah, you look like a hung over sleeping beauty wishing those little Disney birds and mice would just give you one more hour to sleep this one off and why are my fracking eyes stuck shut?!

But this is why I haven’t been writing posts, I am fracturing myself in all directions, thus triggering old anxieties and therefore feeling quite stuck and uneasy.  Uneasy because its just so darn easy to go back into those old neurological pathways, suddenly there I am again barreling down the centre of my 6 lane freeway of nervous apprehension.  But then again, at least my hair is dialed in.

So when I stop and pull over into a much needed rest area, and see what I just did, again…I see the directional turns that got me here.  I have been quite obsessively trying to reorganize areas of our home.  It started with my art studio, that still looked like Santa’s workshop December 2018, it had been left that way for so long in the far back recess of our basement that I thought, what’s the harm in just leaving it out a few more months as if Christmas was right around the corner again?!  But I did it, and it didn’t even take that long to reclaim that space.

Then I had ordered some of my prints from our UK travels and got them framed and ready to hang but then realized I wasn’t going to go to that trouble if my new art work had to complete with the clutter of the household space.  So again, I set to task.  Discarding, reorganizing, whatever it took to reclaim another space in our home.  And I love it, the space I have managed to reform and regenerate to bring a calm sense of peace to our family.

But here is my leaky tap issue, that I keep ignoring, and so it keeps on seeping and poisoning my beingness.  Where does that other crap go?  For expediency, it has gone into another room.  I feel like I am playing a giant sliding puzzle game, where all the components are fixed and so all I can do is move them from one room to another to get the configure mostly right, meanwhile all I really want to do is just throw away all the excess and see what I have left.  But it’s 2019, you can’t just throw shit away.  What would Greta think?! So here is where I am at…

But you know what?  It’s something.  It’s something that I am trying my ass off to make a difference.  It’s something that I am moving shit about, if only to make one room more comfortable at the cost of another becoming more shitty.  It’s something that I sat down at 1 pm to write a post and then got up and shut my laptop, instead letting my Time-machine backup for the first time in 30 days.  It’s something that I didn’t surrender to my long sleepless night and give up on today.  No I didn’t.  I got up and I did my fucking hair.  And that my friends is something.  And I feel a little bit better for all of it.  The little things can add up and feel heavy, but the little good things can also add up and make you feel like there’s hope.