Numb

I often struggle with the thought of what to post, what not to post, how much to reveal about the inner workings of my personal life to the intimate group of friends I call the internet.  I often get really uncomfortable and annoyed by those people who feel the need to reveal every intimate detail of their life on the interwebs and I certainly wouldn't want to be one of those people.  At the same time, there is a certain catharsis that comes from putting my thoughts into words.  Of course, thank goodness I do have some discretion, or I'd probably have FAR fewer friends.  Sometimes I think that the thoughts and ideas that I have are not unique, but shared by many (especially other SAHMs) but we just lack the courage to open our mouth and be honest. 

Recently, I've been engaged in an inner battle.  Things in our lives have been tumultuous, to say the least.  I won't bore you with the details, but it's been a REALLY hard few months, with more fog on the horizon.  After spending weeks strung out on nerves and way too much caffeine, I think I just sorta turned it all off.  I'm not sure when it happened exactly, or why, but a certain numbness has set in. 

Numbness is such a strange and fascinating phenomenon.  I'm highly familiar with it.  Three years ago, I lost feeling on my left side, and it's not returned.  Over the last 3 years I have experienced numbness that has come and go in various parts of my body.  When this first occurred, it was frustrating and troublesome, and confusing.  I felt like I was losing my mind all of the time.  We would laugh at my clumsiness as I would try to put my hand in my pocket, only to be halted by my wayward pinky sticking out because I couldn't feel that it hadn't made it into the pocket as well.  We had scary experiences, where I burned myself on the stove or the iron, because I didn't detect the heat on my left arm, or ran bathwater too hot for the girls, because I tested it with the wrong hand.  I say all of this to explain the feeling--or lack of feeling.  We've all had that moment when our foot has fallen asleep from sitting cross legged for too long, but this is different.  When an appendage falls asleep, it's numb, but almost with a heightened sense of feeling.  This is a complete lack of feeling.  Imagine, looking at your arm as if you're watching someone else perform the task that you know you're completing--present but completely absent in the situation in which you are a player. 

In recent weeks, this numbness has transcended the physical into the emotional.  Where the goal of thriving is far too removed and function is all you can muster.  It isn't like things have gotten exponentially more difficult in this time, or that any specific new developments have unfolded, it just sorta happened.  Yesterday, as I sat on the couch, feeling completely apathetic about life, and allowing Emily to watch way more television than typical, it dawned on me that I had merely become a player in my own life, but had begun to lack the initiative to be the director.  This is a terrifying realization.  I began to think over the last few weeks and some of the decisions that I've made, and I realized that so many of them were strictly an attempt to feel--anything.

Two weeks ago, we threw a birthday party for a friend.  She was turning 20 and at the party she asked, "What's the best advice you can offer me for my 20s?"  Little did she know how much I was wrestling with this thought for the last several weeks.  I immediately piped up and said, "Don't rush it!"  I never realized how much I had rushed my life until I was talking to a friend about a week prior.  My friend mentioned the challenges of working while going to school, and I thought about my senior year of college.  I was taking 18 hours at school, working 2 jobs, getting married, and pregnant, all at 21!  I did so much, perhaps I set a precedent for myself--an expectation of sorts.  Here, 6 years later, when marriage is comfortable, the decision has been made that we're done having children, I'm a stay at home mom, and life is on coast mode--I feel like I'm lacking something.  The urge is to be reckless, impulsive, make bad decisions--make ANY decisions, just to feel something, to have something to be excited about again.  While I know there's no hope for my arm, I can only desperately cling to the hope that something will ignite me mentally again.