A few nights ago, I watched a movie on Netflix called I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. It didn’t have anything to do with current events, but the title has stuck with me. That’s not to say that I have any designs on leaving this world, that’s not what I mean in any capacity, so please don’t worry about that. It’s just that increasingly over the last couple of years, the place that I’ve always called home, has felt less and less like the home I’ve always loved.
Feeling out of place isn’t something that’s new to me, though. I’ve written in the past about struggles with not fitting in with my peers at some points in my life, but this is different. I feel…displaced. Like I fundamentally don’t belong anymore. My province, and my hometown seem to be so opposite to how my values and beliefs line up, and my frustration is at an all time high. And now, I have reasons to believe that I’m not even the person that I thought I was.
I’m finding myself saying and doing things I shouldn’t. I used to be able to control myself better, and keep my snark in check when I needed to. I have no excuses for the way I’ve conducted myself lately, and I’m not going to make any. Something came out of me recently that I’m not proud of. At all. We all have our people, our safe spaces, and I violated that space without thinking it through completely. And it bit me, and I deserved it. I haven’t thought about much else since. I don’t even have the words to express how sorry I am, and how bad I feel. I’m taking responsibility for my actions, because that’s what an adult should do.
I came to an epiphany of sorts recently, too. Until the pandemic hit, I was a worker bee. For a lot of years, I worked and worked and worked some more. Sometimes working 11 hours a day, sometimes two jobs. I filled my time with work, and not a whole lot else. At the time, I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I worked until I literally made myself sick at one time, I was severely anemic and exhausted. I wasn’t taking care of myself, and it showed. I was doing 8 or 9 nail clients a day, no lunch, no breaks. I’d start at 9am, and work until 7 or 8pm straight through, without stopping. It was like I was just this zombie on auto-pilot, a drone hunched over a desk, chained to a daily grind.
I’ve always been someone who would rather deal with what’s going on with everyone around me, rather than what’s happening with me. I’ve always known that could be to my own detriment, but I pushed things down, stuffed them away, because it was easier than facing them head on. Now that in the last year I’ve had a lot of extra time on my hands, it’s forced a lot of that to the surface where I haven’t had a choice but to look at it. It’s been staring me right in the face, a mental game of chicken.
How it’s felt for years, is like I’ve been a caged animal internally. But now? Now, due to this pandemic, I’m also literally feeling like a caged animal. Feral. Is that why my teeth are bared, and my claws are coming out more often? It’s my best guess. It still excuses nothing. All of these demons that I haven’t faced, they’ll eat me alive if I don’t find some way through them. I’ve spent so much time pretending to be fine, that for a long time I may have convinced myself that I was. I know that it hasn’t been fair to the people that love me. We’ve had our hands full for so long with another family member, that I never wanted to take the focus off of that. At the end of the day, I’ve always managed to power through, and keep going.
I once had a conversation with my cousin’s wife. We were discussing said family member, and some things going on. I mentioned that I had all the same issues, just not to the same degree, and that they manifest a little differently in me. She was shocked, and told me that of all the people she knew, she saw me as one of the most “together”. I told her that when it comes to me, I always like to use the duck analogy. She hadn’t heard this analogy before, so I explained. “Say you see a duck swimming out on a pond. What you see on the surface is just a calm duck, moving along. But under the water, it’s legs and feet are kicking like mad to swim.”
I can’t help but feel that the more time goes by, the harder I’m having to kick. I have no one to blame but myself for that, and for pushing things down as long as I have. How I’m going to navigate what I need to, I haven’t quite figured out yet. I’ve been in counseling at different points in my life, and I’m going to look at going back. One of the things I need to find my way through, though…I’m not sure there really is a way through it completely. The reason being that it’s not just about me, it also affects someone I love very much. And it’s not just my story to tell.
One day, I hope to be able to tell it. I can’t be sure that will happen, because it will mean some painful and difficult conversations. It also means that all that kicking may finally be on the surface of the water, and there’s others that could get splashed in the process. My instinct to this point was to always protect the people around me, keep some glass walls around me so that no one caught the aftermath. In this case, forget the duck. We’re talking full on Shamu out of the water, and my loved ones are in the splash zone. I’ve got some work to do on my own before any of it could possibly happen. I just hope I have the strength to do it.
No matter what happens now, I’ll continue to put one foot in front of the other. I always do. For my family, for the people that love me, I know I have to. And that’s always in the back of my mind. Everything I do, is for them. Brave face, game on.