Day 84: Cry baby

I found myself sobbing uncontrollably this afternoon.  I have no idea why.  This is not a common occurrence for me.

This was supposed to be a blissful weekend of relaxation, nurturing company, and creative output in the form of 20-30 new pages on my play (because I always set my expectation so very low).  This was not supposed to be a weekend where I would feel frustrated and sad.  My friend/mentor/former-teacher/surrogate mother even asked me if I was ok; she said I seem sad this weekend.  But there is nothing wrong.  I have nothing in my life right now to feel sad about.  So many things are going so wonderfully well! And yet, sad I am.  I don't understand this.

I always assume there must be a reason for every emotion -- a thought pattern I have been working to deprogram.  This was a big problem for me with my anxiety disorder -- I would sometimes get what my therapist called "free-floating anxiety", where I would feel the physical symptoms of anxiety (accelerated pulse, numbness/tingling, upset stomach, obsessive thoughts -- imagine a really bad overdose of caffeine) without knowing why.  I would assume there must be a good reason for it, so then my brain would search around for a something worthy of being anxious about and BAM: within moments I would have discovered the disease of the month to be convinced I was dying of.   I cannot express how glad I am that I no longer experience this.

I felt myself start down a similar path today with my sadness.  Why am I sad?  What's wrong in my life that is making me sad?  Is it something connected to my divorce?  What would be stirring that up?  Or is it my frustration over not getting as much writing done as I wanted?  Does that mean I really don't want to do this?  Should I quit the blog, stop trying to write the play?  Is this project making me sad?  How do I fix this?

But perhaps there is nothing to fix.  Perhaps the moon is in the seventh house of the purple dragon and I'm just sad.  Or maybe I just needed to let go of some of the stress that had built up over my crazy month of March with hardly a day off.   Or maybe, maybe I was just tired.

I took a walk outside and at one point just collapsed onto the grass and sobbed.  After about five minutes of this, I suddenly felt lighter and more open.  I spent another half hour or so walking, and then took my laptop and coat outside to start writing again.  Things started flowing.  Not Amazon-river flowing, but a nice gentle stream.

Perhaps I need more downtime without pressuring myself to write.  Perhaps I need to tame my beast a little better.  Perhaps I need to stop expecting myself to be superwoman. 

On that note, I'm going to go take a bath.