Thursday

The haze lingers all day.  At home now, I opened the blinds and windows for airflow, but there is none to be had.  Waited for a 5:19 bus, I don't know what time it arrived, but it was late.  Sat and read about 25 pages of a library book, only to look up and realize we hadn't even made it to the next stop.  Jumped off at 5:51 hoping to make a happy hour somewhere (for cheap eats), but ended up eating pizza and beer and continuing with the book, "the life-changing magic of tidying up," by marie kondo (uncapped on book cover.)  And I want to start now because I want things to change, but I also want to give myself the opportunity to be successful.  Other book I'm reading (bought it ages ago when I was visiting Portland) is "The Right Questions," by Debbie Ford.  Something's gotta give.  Muddling through, but could life be more?  I hope so; people in my life have had major changes in the past year and I've stayed pretty much the same.  Willing to take a chance, I think.  Trying to figure out why I haven't.  I'd forgotten about the library hold, but the timing works.

When I walked back to the stop, traffic was flowing.  People strewn along the wall, wide distances between them, as if to get too close would be to collect too much heat, impede the flow of air.  In the sky, hundreds of crows darted and cawed in play as they made their way to the evening roost, trying out this perch then that, with a touching down of feet and then immediately rising up in the air and flying off to the next.  All the while a the mass of them wheeling and diving in the sky: A slow and joyful progress.

It's funny that if you have an idea of changes you should make to improve you life first, and then find outside sources agreeing with that, it feels like validation, and gives you motivation to forge ahead.  However, if the outside calls for change happen and blindside you, you are more likely to dig in your heels, feeling bullied, and that you are not enough as you are.  A curious distinction.  Currently experiencing the former; the latter always seems to make me feel under attack, though I imagine delivery matters, and it was often not particularly pretty or kind in the past.  The idea that I'd be more acceptable if I fit someone else's criteria for acceptability, that I was deeply flawed and in need of saving.  Never pleasant to be on the receiving end of that.  The other side of enabling.

(People keep posting that thing about the violence of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, and how that is necessary and shouldn't be intervened upon; so the trick I guess, is finding the balance, figuring how to be supportive without interfering with a necessary growth experience of someone else, or letting them (or ourselves) deal with consequences, and knowing when it's necessary to intervene and that's helpful vs. when it's enabling.  Enabling is in my bones.  But I'm trying to reinvent myself, so that it's not the automatic response to quiet my own sense of panic or anxiety (and leaving me with little energy for my own life...and why am I choosing that outcome?  What am I not facing?)  In spite of what I've absorbed, perhaps it's not really my reason for being to save anyone. And I'm talking on the level of a parent interfering/intervening every time their kid is struggling, rather than letting them learn from the experience, and figure out how to solve the problem...which if they did, they would gain confidence and a sense of being able to take care of themself; I'm not referring to societal-level issues. I'm not turning my back, just not taking on everyone else's problems to my own detriment.  I want to know who I am, and what I want, outside of that.)

And I've been on both sides.  If it came to intervening to save someone's life, I'd do it again, but for everything else, I want to learn to support you without taking it on, and solving your problems.  As Marie says about tidying, it's not a skill we are taught, we're just expected to absorb it.

It's stifling in here.  I need to get some air.