Unsettled

I've felt a little unsettled all week. Whether its due to a lack of sleep, a recovery from illness, or just the general miserably rainy weather, I've had this constant tingling feeling of something being "wrong". Not terribly wrong like someone died or something, just like there's a discordant note in what has been, of late, an incredibly harmonic existence.

I've been through this before. It doesn't signal a need for a drastic life change or anything like that, but does signify an excess of mental energy, and is accompanied by an insane amount of insecurity and anxiety (which makes me hard to deal with.). It used to be that I would burn through this extra energy by writing, or painting, spilling out all of that mental bile on paper. Now that I'm older, I prefer to drink it away, and relish in the oppressive calm of a hungover morning the next day (what can I say, I got lazy.)

However, being cashless and thereby boozeless, and suffering through a six year bout of creative constipation, none of these options were available to me to rid myself of that oddly anxious, unsettled feeling. So I've grappled with it, and grappled with it, and grappled with it all week, and now I feel like I may finally be in the clear.

Its odd, how, when everything is going right in my world: amazing boyfriend, loving family, good friends, and enough money to get by on, my body has to fabricate a false sense of un-right-ness, just to keep things interesting. Darwin would have a field day.

But, thinking about it, its not just me. Look at celebrities, as a bad and probably unfair example, and their kaleidoscope of frequently self-induced problems. When things go right (money, fame, good looks, lots of work, and a creative outlet)  it seems to be a human trait to generate something wrong to balance it out (addiction, affairs, abuse).

We are a self-flagellating race. Whenever we have something good, we consciously or unconsciously seek something ill to balance it. It is some of the appeal of Christianity, I think. To have an outside force that can grant us forgiveness, thereby ending our own cycles of self-punishment. To have a God who can forgive us, where we ourselves can't.

But when you get down to it, self forgiveness is really what we are looking for. A capacity to accept what is good in our lives, without guilt. Frequently, we are reminded to accept that which we cannot change, usually in reference to what is bad in our lives. But it applies equally to the good. Fully embracing what is good in life, overriding that instinctive sense of unease or malaise that we get when everything is going right is possibly one of those elusive missing puzzle pieces on the (mixed metaphor!) road to happiness.

Or maybe it really is just me, and I should shut up and go take my meds. Either way, feeling better \o/.
Cheers!