Life Upside Down

I woke up this morning and didn’t feel tired. This hasn’t happened in months. My body felt open to the day, open to facing the cold (it’s still winter here, folks), open to new challenges. Moreover, I felt clear. Clear, light and strong.

This rediscovered strength has been a long time coming and is due to a variety of things: I’m finally exercising again, doing yoga and taking short evening runs. I’m eating cleaner, reading, getting enough sleep and being kinder to myself. More than anything though, I’ve rolled out of the yucky quagmire funk of the last few months.

Life is kinder, the future seems clearer. It started with a few small things like being around the right people, then mushroomed into a happy trail of joyful events such as Donna’s visit, the trip to Thailand and a new job. There are other factors, too, that I won’t share here because this is a blog on the internet and I’m not an idiot.

I can’t say what turned the tide of the first discouraging six months of 2014 to a more promising latter half, because I honestly don’t know. I don’t have any feel-good quick tips on getting out of a shitty headspace and improving your life when nothing seems to be going the way you are trying to get it to go. I wish I knew, but maybe that’s part of the story. You don’t know when things are going to turn around so you just keep plugging, and that’s the idea. You just keep going and suddenly there’s a light at the end of the tunnel but it’s not like you’ve been consciously moving towards the light, you’ve been moving somewhere- anywhere-through the muddled grayness and a light has just been turned on.

This post is starting to sound rather dark, so I would just like to clarify that I’m not emerging from any sort of deep, dark depression. I’m fine. That said, the last six months have been particularly challenging in many ways for me, and I’d just like to express a few observations from this trying period. I’d also like to add that just because someone is not morbidly depressed doesn’t mean that they’re not going through their own version of real shit and what’s hard for you is hard for you.

Mainly, I’d just like to express that I’ve realised that life comes in seasons and some are just going to be harder than others, but tides turn and seasons change and when that happens, the ball starts rolling again and this beautiful thing called inertia makes it progressively easier to keep it that way.

Inertia: a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.