2020

"I feel like the city's going to swallow me up and I'll be left floundering around in my emotions and my thoughts and I'll slowly watch everything just melt away into the madness of the whir of the traffic and the voices and footsteps and my heart will race until I can't catch my breath and then?  What?  I'll die?  Find what I'm looking for finally?  I'll stop.  Maybe everything will stop." 

I wrote that in 2010 (my prose was stronger then), but it seems to encompass how I was feeling at the beginning of 2020. 

My life was full. I was booked with travel, fancy meetings, fight choreography gigs, working out, keeping up with too many people, and it seemed like I had tickets to everything.

I had also created 6 personal projects for myself to "change the world" (or at least the world around me) by completing one community based project every other month. Totally doable, right? 

I quickly discovered that I didn't understand the prep-work-overlap-insanity I had created for myself in order to accomplish my personal projects in the midst of everything else I was barely able to manage. You may remember the post I wrote at the beginning of the year about the anxiety I was feeling and how I thought I was going to die? 

"...and my heart will race until I can't catch my breath and then?  What?"

On March 16th, the shelter in place order hit California. I was sent home from work with the understanding that we would be working from home for the next few weeks which immediately turned into the next few months. My calendar was wiped clean of travel, social events, everything.  

"Maybe everything will stop." 

Well, almost everything. I had just started dating this guy who was already frustrated with my lack of time for him because of my crazy schedule. With shelter in place shutting everything down, and my friends committing to staying home, he soon became my schedule. He would show up in the evenings and we would go on walks and cook and watch movies. Sometimes we'd tell each other stories and play games, or stand on our heads at 2 o'clock in the morning. Everything started to feel really slow, and our time together felt simple and magical in the midst of the world going sideways. 

"I'll stop."

There was a moment during the summer when I was sitting on a porch in Stockton. The sunlight seemed to dance across the grass and an occasional bird or butterfly would flutter into view, playing in the heat, while the tress swayed so slightly. I sat there for a long time and just watched the yard. It seemed like something I hadn't done since I was a kid -- absorb my surroundings with nothing else to think about or do but notice the light and the heat and allow myself to be fully embraced in the moment. 

...

🌼