On Letting Your Soul Breathe

"This is going to be hard. Life is going to be hard. You have to remember to always leave room for your soul to breathe"

It's been a long time since I was a serious blogger. I felt the urge to start a new blog the other day. Started new blog. Deleted it. I've probably started and deleted like five different blogs since my last blog post on here. And yet, I can't do it. Nothing I create seems to be home like this blog is. And so, I'm here to start fresh on an old blog.

I'm back to blogging here because it feels like my only thing that I have thats all mine, that allows me to be me and no one else. Right now I just feel so lost in all of the different areas of my life. I keep looking around and not recognizing anything from from where I'm standing right now.

Since the last time I blogged (on a weekly basis) I feel like I've become a different person. When I think of myself I no longer see the happy, carefree, running hippie that I used to. I feel…old. Older. Bogged down. Between my homework and my responsibilities I feel like I'm carrying around an extra 100 pounds. When I'm talking to people, regardless of their age, I feel older than they are, like I've lived an extra 10 years.

I work a lot, but everybody works a lot. My days are somewhere between 8.5 and 13 hours long. Whenever I complain about this I feel like a giant tool because I'm the one who signed up for graduate school, I realized it would mean days like this, stress like this, sleep loss like this. I realize I should shut the hell up and stop complaining because some people work way more than I do. Some people have way more stress than I do. But still, the feeling of falling down a giant slippery hole remains. I feel like I'm always behind, always late, always…not good enough.

Not that I have more to do than most people, because I don't. But for me right here, right now, it's too much. I don't have enough time for my soul to breathe. I feel like I'm suffocating.

Every day I see very sad people who dump all of their sadness on me. There's the woman who can't stop using cocaine, there's the kid who wants to see what it would feel like to kill someone, the little girl who wants to stab her mother, the teenager who spends every time she sees me in tears. I love these people, each of them. And I love my job. But what's missing is between the therapy-class-homework-nannying-cleaning-planning is that there's just no room left in my life for…..well me.

What I need, who I've lost, was that fun-loving crazy happy girl. There's just not room for her anywhere. I have to get up every day and wear black dress pants and a conservative top. I had to say goodbye to that free spirit that I loved so much. What I need is to run wild in the woods for hours, to spend time on the beach, to read for pleasure, to wear clothes that I actually feel like represent me.

I think it's important in the midst of chaos, whatever yours happens to be, to make that room to let your soul be able to breathe. I'll be working on finding that myself.