Exhaustion
I am exhausted.
I am drained and fulfilled and overwhelmed and thriving and fighting back tears and laughing, all at once, all the time. I am so busy keeping up with my schedule that I am dizzied by the thought of waking up tomorrow to do it all over again. I am, above all else, flooded by the responsibility of being a human being with people counting on me.
I am a sister and a daughter and a girlfriend and a writer and a student and a resident assistant and a writing consultant and a friend and a human. I am barely making time to eat during the day. I am missing my best friend and roommate, Natalie– I am adjusting to living alone.
It’s harder than I thought it would be.
I’m so far deep in my own responsibility that I am struggling to write this paragraph without panic flooding my chest. The work I’m doing in class is emotional and difficult; I’m reflecting on my own Truth as an intersectional young woman living & loving people from all different areas of my life. I’m still letting go of old habits and routines. I’m finding where I belong on my emotional, global, spiritual, and mental compass. I don’t know where that is, or what that even might begin to look like, and that terrifies me. I’m petrified of dropping the ball. What if I let someone down? What if I let myself down?
I’m still learning how to love people who have hurt me and how to love people that haven’t. I’m learning how to take care of residents who come to me for help when I’m in the middle of my own breakdowns - discovering how to do my job whilst simultaneously honoring my own feelings. Right now, my heart is heavy, and I don’t know how to lift this weight off of my chest without crying about it.
I’m finding the strength and the nerve it takes to paint each day with a positive attitude and a smile on my face – to create my new world in a way that feels beautiful. Right now, at 11:15PM on a Monday night before a long week with no sign of a break anytime soon, I am absolutely and completely mystified on how to manifest that positivity into existence.
This article is much less of me speaking from a space that I know and feel secure about like I usually do. This time around, I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to balancing all of this newness. This piece of writing is simply me, admitting I’m smothered in responsibility, confused and trying my best to find a space where I can breathe again. The Olly Project was made to document my journey, and right now, this is very much a part of it. As much as I want it to be sunflowers & sunshine all the time, this is where I’m at.
I’m okay with that.
I want the years I spend in this space as myself to be kind and gentle. I just spent a long weekend soaking in the light of my best friend & partner which grounded, stabilized, and refreshed me in the feeling of gentle thoughtfulness, the sacred nature of the passing of time, and the safety of experiencing this world together. This morning, his flight back to California brought about the end of such a tangible feeling of deep togetherness; with his departure, I felt a sense of grief and heaviness that I wasn’t expecting. I understand that I’m never doing life on my own but today, it feels like I am because the physicality of my aloneness.
It’s just me, on my own two feet, doing what needs to be finished every day so that the next day can be just like the one before it, again and again. I’ll adjust as time goes on, but this growth is painful. I miss the comfort of being responsible for myself and myself alone.