Adapting to Myself

One of the reasons I began this blog was to begin tracking my emotions and to be able to look back and see what life has taught me and what I still may need to learn. This is one of those posts.

It's been a while since I've written, and I need to remember to make time to write as it is one of a myriad of things that feels meditative and deeply personally gratifying to me. So I finally took a few minutes to open up and type a few words.

I quit my job 2 Friday's ago. What a whirlwind and clusterfuck life can be sometimes with the decisions we make. Long story short, it wasn't the right position for me. There were just certain things that didn't fit my core, and my gut was acting up, as it usually does when I'm doing something that I shouldn't be doing. I've come to value, respect, and listen to my gut feelings more as the years go by. I still feel like a novice in this regard, but at least I've made the first step of acknowledging that your gut is a wise survival and mental health gauger that won't exactly fail you if you treat it well and listen every so often.

Now I'm gearing up to make the move back to El Paso before I hopefully make the slightly more long term move to Las Cruces to start school again and learn great things. I got to see the bestie for the past few days, and hanging out with her was nice and refreshing and I forgot how we are the same person. I can always rely on her to provide me with perspective on myself.

I'm beginning to learn my craft, my trade, my skill. I can't exactly name it because it doesn't include only one or two things, but it is rather complex yet beautiful in its simple execution. It has everything to do with how I handle my emotions, and especially those emotions that make us feel extremely uncomfortable. I've come a long way for a person who used to hide behind Mom's skirt. I've never been shy, but I am a tremendously reserved person at times. Yet, I will always say what I feel needs to be said. I can't not do that, it'll eat me up inside and change my physiology, and that goes back to the whole listening to my gut thing. Stress is a very powerful, and not so silent, killer. Don't ever ignore it, the lesson I have learned.

One of the things I admire about myself (and my best friend by extension) is our ability to do the things that make us feel the most uncomfortable or most anxious. We are very anxious people whose sensory intake is always on overdrive. This makes us very good at observing detail and understanding complex processes and provides us a strong ability to apply those details and knowledge to make things run smoother and make things a hell of a lot easier for everyone involved. What most folks don't understand though, is that everything has a cost, and that this incredible attention to detail means that while yes we are good at really reorganizing entire systems, this isn't a part of us that we can turn off. It means that little things that most people won't notice, will stand out like pink elephants in the room and stare us right in the face, and we can't rest until that elephant has been addressed and the issues have been resolved. Being able to consciously ignore things is a skill I am still working on and actively developing.

For the past few years, and especially for the past 2 years or so, I have been seeing immense beauty and color and vivid imagery in everything and have been able to connect things and make sense of things that have been deemed to be entirely different by many modern societies. In other words, I've reworked this obsession with minuscule detail to help me understand how micro is simply an extension of macro and vice versa. In essence, there is no such thing as macro vs. micro, and we as humans have defined the scale to accomplish whatever it is we need to accomplish. This is why microscopes and macrophotography and cell biology and leave patterns and flowers blooming have been such influential parts of my life recently. I've gone from angry and irate about why most folks don't see the intense intricacy in simple things, to recognizing that by studying the patterns all around me, my mind stays happy, fulfilled, and productive. I live in my own world in my thoughts, and I've learned how to carve out my own space within them to let my thoughts teach and guide me, and the journey has been more than amazing. I'm here, while I'm there, and I'm part of everything and vice versa, and all the things around and within and of me, are like a huge kaleidoscope where no patterns are ever the same, and where all the patterns that will ever exist are played out in infinitely random order forever.

And so I don't beat myself up about leaving a job where I would not have been able to allow my thoughts to breathe freely, or rather would have been given the fully intense creative outlet I so need. I've learned through my travels and experiences that you really can do whatever you want in this life, you make decisions and you deal with the consequences, and there really is no for better or worse. Instead, you are participating in the age old tradition of evolving and learning how to adapt to your environment and ultimately how to adapt to yourself. That is pretty powerful stuff to recognize the day before your 30th birthday. And that is why I love to write.