Adjustment

The process of adjustment is slow and evolving. I am in such a place right now. I suspect that we process change in multiple ways and often our intellectual races ahead of the emotional and physical. And then sometimes that goes backwards. I feel like I've spent the last year, at least, in a perpetual state of constant low trauma. No car accident, no flooding, no earthquake and habitat destruction in an instant but a persistent, consistent deterioration of "Life as we used to live it." What was, had definitively changed. What was going to be, was unknown. Things had changed and couldn't go back but I didn't know where they were headed. No comfort zone. Alarm, panic but control over the panic. Strategy about how to deal with all sorts of possible futures always in the front of my mind which left me with little energy to, well, let myself be. As if I had become "Me In Crisis" all the time. It became my persona.

Things have stabilized and there is some security and yet, because I've been living in a state of heightened awareness and readiness to act, I can't let go and feel secure. I am afraid to let myself not be "Me In Crisis." I bounce about. I try to keep some discipline as a structure so I can adjust but the moments in between the structure are wrought with depression, lethargy, disinterest, frustration, irritability, confusion and then, suddenly, clarity followed by emptiness. This is the process of change. These are the remnants of panic and alarm. Over time, they will dissipate. Sit and observe. Then do. The process can't be rushed. This, too, shall pass.