SassyBlonde

I am broken. Scooped out, hollow, spent, a dried-up husk. I have expended the energy allotted to my season and my soul is no longer fertile with the possibilities of energy, activity, and change. Its fuel has long since been spent, the flames sunk to embers-- one small wisp of smoke trails from the remains. I have poured my effort and time and thoughts into a chasm of work and seen it still yawning before me. I have reached the end of my ability and it is not enough.

I have a problem: I like to DO, and sometimes that sets me on the path to trouble. Not the doing part, per se, but the agreeing to do. Every so often I tempt fate and ask for more work than I can handle, and usually I've managed to power through until I have it done, usually nearly at the cost of my sanity, and the price is paid in weeks of lethargy and heavy, drunken sleep. This time, however, I think I have had my bluff called.

I don't have enough time, this time. I don't have enough energy. Somewhere in the past year I've gotten lost. I remember a self who was able to take joy unashamed and unadulterated. I remember a self who could get lost in her passions. I remember a self who could manage the burdens she had shouldered and then lay them down.

Somewhere along the line that self fell away, prey to ambition and work and demands. I've forgotten how to let those things go and put them down and they've become intertwined with my soul like a dark clinging vine. Burnout has come and gone, and there's really not much left behind. I feel like I'm sitting alone in a darkened room, quiet and fearful. This self knows that this too shall pass, but for the moment it shivers and quakes and cannot move, paralyzed by the thoughts it carries and the shades that hem it in. It sees the darkness and can feel it looking back, silent, airless, vast and empty and meaningless.

All it longs for is escape. Escape in body to comforting hands and hearts, escape in mind to a place where the fearful wings of doubt and stress and demands don't enfold my heart from my first waking moments into the next night's dreams. Silence. Peace.

Fear not, gentle reader. I do know that this state of mind, while strange, is passing so. I can see the pathway out of the valley and know its steps well and truly. I've been here before. Except that this time something seems to be staying behind here-- a younger self, a lost dream, a change of mind: a shift in the fabric of my reality. I leave this place a little lighter and a little more shadowed than when I came this time. I leave, nonetheless, to sunnier climes of the mind, but with the memory of the shadow left behind and the knowledge that it waits for me on the road ahead, ears cocked and black tail wagging.