I don't feel truly motivated to leave my house. I can't even name exactly what I've been doing with my time. Wake up when I wake up. Do laundry from the top of the basket and rewear the same things over and over. Read my Bible out of something closer to survival than devotion. My only standing commitments are my dog, my therapist, and my psychiatrist — in that order. Getting through the day is The Project.
This week something in me snaps. I finally do the dishes. All of them. Now when I walk through the kitchen, the stainless steel bottom of the sink catches the light and I think, huh. The laundry basket has a bottom too. Haven't seen it in a while. I start pulling everything out from every corner of the house I've been in for over four years. Not carefully. Just out, onto every surface I have.
Predictably, the visceral need to sort through everything doesn't last. I'm back in molasses. Everything I own is pulled out, and now I don't want to do anything. But I have no choice. The house is a wreck, and my boyfriend doesn't have anywhere to sit.
Looking at the piles of KEEP, SELL, DONATE, reality is obvious. The projects I've put aside, the clothes that never see the light of day because I'm wearing sweats more often than not, the party decor still sitting in the wrapper. The mind is powerful. You can convince yourself you're fine for a long time. The party supplies aren't from this year.
I'm learning about my avoidant attachment in therapy. And there it is. Physically reinforced in every room.
I feel a lot like the wilted zucchini sitting on my counter.
Damn.
I've forgotten I own genuinely awesome stuff. Forgotten the events I've been wanting to put on and just can't muster the energy to follow through with. Celebration of any kind is an impossible destination. Not like a place I can visit, even temporarily.
I feel like I'm meeting a stranger, and that stranger is the current version of myself.
In this season of life, I never look for the things I love. Not for that event, that time, that version of myself. They just sit there, idle. It doesn't even occur to me that I should be looking for them.
I keep coming back to this: there's a difference between having a life and inhabiting it. Between having things and letting yourself receive them.
The clothes stop me. Things buried at the bottom of a hamper for six months, a year, maybe more. Not lost. Just unreached. Vibrant things mostly. Colors I love. I'm wearing a lot of black lately. Some of it is more form fitting than I'm willing to reach for. I'm hiding a little.
The fridge of hodgepodge ingredients and expired condiments tells its own story. A season where cooking feels like a chore and takeout feels like survival. I want out of that story.
I'm not overhauling everything overnight. Just reaching for the next thing to get me there.