a time of fullness

IT'S FINALLY COOL ENOUGH TO WEAR PANTS. (Not that I ever wear pants at work; I'm solidly a skirt person.  But at home I like my schluffy exercise pants and it's been too fucking hot to wear much of anything at all.  I hate you, human-caused global climate change.  I weep for you, planet dying of fever.  I welcome you, fall temperatures.)  Glory hallelujah.  Amen and amen.

Also holy shit this Sudafed is no joke.  (I generally keep myself well stocked with various medicines, Gatorades, ginger ales and chicken soups, because having lived half my entire life alone, I know how to prepare to care for myself during illness.  Side bar: I don't even feel sad right now that there's no one to take care of me while I'm sick, which has always been the hallmark of my I-hate-being-single mourning/whining.  Now I'm like "aw fuck yeah I can sleep in a quiet house without anyone bothering me."  I think I was so seriously miserable in my last burning circus of a relationship that I broke through the other side of even giving a shit.)  I bought the really good stuff -- the kind you have to show like four different forms of ID to even look at.  The kind you have to sign in blood for.  The kind you only have to take once a day.  Thanks to this marvel of modern medicine I have spent the last two days blazing through my work hours in a giddy spaciness that sort of vibrates at the edges.  I looked it up today to figure out why the fuck I've been so over-the-moon happy (I mean, I'm in a pretty good mood generally, especially now that I'm in a voluntary seclusion and better rested, but this soaring glee is a bit unusual), and it looks like pseudoephedrine has an impact on norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake, which is what my antidepressant does, so I guess I'm like double the happy.  Don't get me wrong, it's awesome; it's just gotta be weird for the people who have to work with a giggly, beaming goofball when they're used to professional and no-nonsense.  This is all-nonsense.

Oh well.  I am a many-faceted being.  They might as well see the sillier side of Sarah now as later.

So having got that amphetamine-addled preamble off my chest, here's the post I have intended to write since this morning.
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This is a time of fullness.

As with most metamorphoses, it took profound upheaval to reach it.  I don't subscribe to the philosophy that growth must come from pain; but growth certainly comes from change, and change, to the human brain, however ultimately good, is nonetheless tumultuous and stressful.  In the last four months, I:

1. Learned that my mother has ovarian cancer and went through a summer of travel across states to help where I could (Note: I will not be writing much about this topic for the foreseeable future.  At the moment Mom's treatment is going great, and I am unspeakably grateful, and that is all I can say about it);
2. Ended another terrible relationship;
3. Moved to a new apartment; and
4. Moved office locations and accepted a promotion.

The changes encompassed every facet of my life: family, personal life, home, work.  All in flux at once.  It was the most exhausted I've ever been.

But again, the changes themselves, with the exception of my mother's illness, weren't painful so much as stressful.  The breakup was both brilliantly done on my part, and deeply liberating (I really have broken through some ceiling that I've never been able to breach before; this level of satisfaction and happiness with my own life, on its own terms, is something I never dreamed I could achieve); the move was holy-shit-so-exhausting but I love my new habitat as dearly as I hated my old one, and the closer location to work cuts my daily commute from 2.5 hours to less than one; and the promotion has catapulted me along my chosen trajectory of enacting much-needed reforms in my office.  Undertaking all these changes at once definitely tapped out my reserves (I've been a pretty dry cistern for the last three years, so I didn't have much to draw on to begin with), but even in the middle of the irruption I knew I just had to get through a few months of insanity before everything evened out and coalesced into a beautiful sea change.

Which it has.  I can say without hesitation or qualification that this is the happiest I have ever been.  Which happened when I finished all the change-events, and allowed myself over the last couple of months to do nothing but rest.  And suddenly: joy.  So much joy.  My apartment is still a hectic jumble of boxes; there's still so much to do at work; but everything feels peaceful and unhurried.  And I love my quiet, solitary hours at home.

It is from this joy and fulfillment and happiness that I am starting to write again.  It's been a long, long time since I've considered myself a writer.  You can basically track my writing by my blog posting, which has been essentially defunct since 2009.  Eight years in the desert.

I thought I lost it.  I would sit and try to write something, but it was all stilted, forced, shriveled.  I thought that was it, for me.  It hurt me, but I couldn't fix it.  It just wasn't there.

Undoubtedly there are many reasons for all of it.  I lost my favorite blog reader and blogging after that felt weird; my first Great Change launched around that time as well and my internal perspective was shifting so fucking rapidly that I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone process it, let alone write about it; and then I didn't know how to write about it, because I found myself in a new emotional landscape that I wasn't equipped to describe; and then I embarked on a series of shitty relationships (my taste in romantic partners, with two exceptions, has trended toward the abysmal, although, I think, for no longer) and stretches of in-between recovery time that took over my life and left no room for writing.  Those were all factors.  But primarily, I think, now that the words keep welling up within my metaphorical soul and spilling out and I can't stop writing (yesterday I blogged, and worked on my new piece of fiction (!), and journalled): I had only known how to write from a place of pain, and not a place of wholeness, and it's taken this long, and this much rest and repletion and joy and fulfillment, to arrive in a space where I can be creative again.

It's a really good lesson to absorb.  I need to protect my peace and my wholeness, so that I can write.

This feeling -- this feeling of being myself -- this is amazing.  I am almost wholly Sarah.

And from this place of fullness, I can create.  I can turn my hands and my brain and my entire sense of being to my best-loved, and best-suited, craft.

It is so, so good.