I know it’s been since March since you and I spoke. In March, I basically had a breakdown. My experience at work led me to decompose into a bit of a mess. Since then, I focused on building myself back up. Perhaps I embrace a form of exposure therapy — embracing the thing that stresses me most and learning to love and cope with it. I’m finally, starting to feel more myself.
I’m more myself now because I’m presented with something very new, yet not very new to me — death. My father is in the process of passing away. Only time will tell when the actual moment arrives when his consciousness will leave his body. But until that time comes, I must embrace the inevitable with wide open arms and welcome it as a friend.
I’ve blogged about death many times. You can expect that I’ll begin sharing my thoughts on death and how I’m dealing with it more and more. So far, the experience is not sad… truly… if anything, it’s full of love.
The things in life that scare us, that stress us, that decompose us into a mess, that kill us…. these things are a kind of death. They are things we can choose to be scared of, or we can lean into and embrace. When I began embracing what gave me anxiety I work, I began enjoying myself at work. And now that I am confronted with the impending death of my father (however soon or distant that might be in the future), I lean into the experience and find that I feel more alive than ever through it.
Grit and resilience are buzzwords that get overused. I don’t see myself as gritty or resilient. Instead, I see myself as a someone trying to lean into the things that scares me the most with the hope of finding that reason to embrace life that much more.
