ISO life answers

I’m here because I refuse to write on social media.

Instagram captions used to be my outlet. A place to be honest, to externalize my thoughts when I couldn’t anywhere else.  There’s something cathartic about expressing your feelings and experiences and releasing it out into the world. I think my hope is that I no longer have to carry them once I put it out there. I don’t have to remember or keep them with me because an archive of it exists somewhere. I can go back to it whenever I need to but it is no longer only mine.

The other day my mom put on Gypsy Kings to listen to. I remembered how much I used to listen to them as a kid because of that. There’s this one song that I remember used to make me immensely sad. I never understood the lyrics. But there’s something about the melody that would bring out such a deep sorrow. Listening to it again, and feeling that feeling again made me feel in awe of the power of music. How much it can make you feel, change how you feel and how you are.

Music is magic.

I’m not really going anywhere with this honestly. Just thoughts. In conversation. With myself and an imaginary reader out there in the internet void. A necessary step before getting into deeper reflection.

You see, just a couple of weeks ago I had a little body breakdown. Maybe not so little. I pushed myself too far, too fast. Working non stop, put together with very little sleeping, almost no water, eating whatever was out there, impacted my body in ways that felt incredibly scary.

That wasn’t it.

Once my body stopped in its tracks, the mental freakouts came. The anxiety, the panic, the fear of not preforming at my best took over. My body had chosen to break down on the first day of tech for a show that just opened.

Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.

I’m trying really hard to remind myself that this is a sign to stop. That getting better doesn’t mean I just go back to business as usual. My art aunty told me if I didn’t reassess what I was doing, I’d end up with severe chronic illnesses by her age that I could be avoiding if I took care of myself.

I’ve known for a while that I needed to change. But that knowledge alone isn’t really enough. How am I supposed to keep paying bills, how are my parents going to pay their bills if I don’t help pay their bills. How am I supposed to climb up the ladder in my career without killing it even single time. How is the store going to grow if I’m not fueling it 100% of the time. How.

It requires an impossible answer. Impossible because of the conditions on which this world runs. Money is everything. Without it, we can’t lead good lives. But what is a good life anyway?  Is it this? Where I end up at a clinic passing out on the doctors examination table/bed thing?

But also… how much of it is me?

How much of it is pressure I put on myself.

How much of it is practices I haven’t developed to ease off some level of work? Delegation?

I know what you might be thinking. A symptom of living in an intensely violent capitalist world is that we start to blame ourselves. As if we could micromanage away how much this machine damages us. As if we could choose ways for our bodies, minds, and spirits to not deteriorate in survival.

Choice.

What is that?

Whoever feels like they figured it out, I’d love to talk cause man… this sucks. For real tho.

For now… I’ll just leave it at that. My Virgo brain is desperately looking for solutions but I know none will come until I rest. For now I can only trust in the universe and the answers it may bring. Only if I’m grounded enough to listen. So off I go to quiet my mind. To trust that creator/universe (whatever you want to call it) will show up for me as it always has.

Only if I’m quiet enough to listen.