What Makes Us Feel Okay

Photo taken by L.M.

So with my laptop still being "under the weather" I have resorted to my tablet until further notice. Which in retrospect sounds a bit privileged so I will refrain my complaints about this.

This week I wanted to explore the idea of what makes us feel "okay" in the context of when someone is particularly unhappy. What relieves the ache. What diffuses. What allows us to breathe again. What in the middle of everything can make us feel like we can easily take a breathe again.

I know the answers are different and ever changing for everybody so please know that what diffuses for me may/can/will be different to what diffuses for you.

I find myself always at a constant of searching for more in myself than the numb and sadness. What else is in that huge hoarding pile of feelings. There has to be joy or peace or something like that somewhere in here. I always seem to be blind to it as if my sight is selective. I think from feeling numb for so long I've felt at a loss when it comes to much else. I mean I let out a laugh or two day to day and find amusement in random things. I feel kindness to my friends so I get stumped when I think back to those things and try to convince myself that is one of the many ways joy can look like. I seem to feel this emotion that can't be described in any other way than the lazily shrugging of shoulders. Its like I remain unmoved by the evidence that joy is not the stranger I claim it to be.

Hey, um didnt you hear???? You aren't just a walking talking robot built from fuckery buuut nope all that I get is just the metaphorical shrugging of my souls shoulders

I think I can come to discover that I can feel much more than what my current range of emotion allows me to. I think I have to become more trusting and believe that the times of laughter and kindness and peace are not or will not ever be forgotten by my soul. Perhaps my soul has found the loop hole to misery. MAYBE just maybe this entire time I thought I was failing at feeling okay I had been completely ignoring the fact that I was even able to participate.

This week has been pretty straighforward. Go to work, get out, pick up Celest, go get some wifi then head to our designated lot for the night. Of course days like yesterday when we went from picking up Celest to the storage right up until they closed is a nice change of pace. My work week hasn't been stressful, I actually really enjoy my co-workers company so when I get to work with her 3-4 days out of the six days I'm at work I'm grateful. I made a co-worker laugh once or twice and that always make me feel okay for a couple seconds. It reminds me that I can be funny. My dogs are always happy to see me and taking them to an empty park where they just ran around made me so happy. You should have seen their faces. Watching new episodes of our favorite shows on netflix and hulu with my mom and Celest make me feel okay. Hearing from Lori, my best friend, makes me feel okay. Organizing things putting them where they belong or making a space for something is comforting to me.

We often go to our favorite thrift store and so often I see small dining sets and wooden bookshelves that if I had a home I would refurbish and that does not make me feel okay. In fact it tears me a part inside because I'd like to have a home that I can make homey but instead I stand back and watch everyone else do it for theirs.

My sadness is ever present but hopefully I will never stop looking for the things that make me feel okay. We need those things after all so recognizing what those things actually ARE is really important. Maybe one day I can look back to the things that make me feel okay and not have a shrugging of shoulders reaction. Maybe I can have the reaction that my dogs have after running around at the park. Pure contentment.

One can only hope.

I hope to have a more interesting in depth much more revised post next week but for now this is all I got. Sorry, kinda.

Until next Friday,

-Analaura

Songs of the week:

Stay- Sara Bareilles

My Love Is Like A Star - Demi Lovato

Surviving Wont Be The Hardest Part

I have never been shy about sharing the uncanny, witty interpretation of hope I have. The stumbling, ruffled, unprecedented hope I believe in. In fact, a while back I stood in front of a church full of people with a microphone and declared how I believe, "Hope is a relentless bastard". I also often write how my hope seems to be walking around without its head and continuously bumping into walls. Imagery people, its everything. Yes, hope is blind but do not be mistaken it is very aware of whats it stands in front of. Hope is pretty much a bad ass. 

Hope is important and most of the time anything important and/or significant is at one point or at other times entirely painful. Sad AND happy is the paradoxical normal of the universe. Pain and healing go together. Hope being painful is not always the truth in every situation but in a deprived, suffocated, and overwhelming period of ones journey it can be. 

Hope being painful is for the people who have learned how to make a home inside the storm. Not out of choice but by severe necessity. Hope at first is motivating but eventually hope just gets annoying and annoying I mean too painful to bring around. Hope is the dream of it getting better. Hope is looking forward to the brighter tomorrow. But what happens when tomorrow doesn't get better? After a while its too difficult to keep believing because its much too tiring. Life can make you feel like a fool too. When you are in a upheaval to get your life to a safe place dreaming ahead can be helpful. Hoping to ones highest ability for a change of course can be/is a helpful tool. I do not discredit this but also in a long journey there is a point where it becomes easier to just continue moving instead of enthusiastically hoping. 

That was something I wrote up a month or two ago. I must have had an extra rough week. But I must have fell asleep before i could finish. I did say something though that struck a cord in me after reading this today. 

Enthusiastically hoping.

Is that how hope works? Is hope only enthusiastic? I think that is how its advertised to us. Hope is the shiny and bright during the bleak. So does that mean that hope can't be be dreary, weak, maybe a bit dirty or confused? Am I doing this hope thing all wrong then??  

Hope and Grace are the most powerful forces in the universe. Do you think they would conform to one specific definition? Nah, thats way too boring and exclusive. Hope fights to stay with us. Hope fights to stay alive in us. Hope grows and shrinks in the same way our lives fluctuate but it will not wither and die. No matter how determined you are to believe it has. 

Continuously through the extreme, rough and bumpy through the impossible we think now how the fuck am I going to get through THIS? but we do. No matter what way we went about it. Wearily, quietly, kicking and screaming, crawling, angrily, gracefully, quickly,slowly dammit we got through it and then its just right along into the next adventure. Whatever the hell that may be. 

Hope doesn't sit anything out. Hopes attached itself to us forever. It becomes whatever it needs to be in order to stay within us. So no, enthusiastically isn't the only way hope comes. Hope is the badass in the leather jacket and its also the weary kind friend. 

I think I maxed out the number of times one can use the word hope in an essay but zero fucks given. 

This week was something. At work I was blamed for all the things being wrong by another receptionist which caused anger and frustration and even insecurity. Then out of work I am overwhelmed with bills and exasperated by how even homelessness can't escape the wrath of bills. The lottery would solve this. Hah, wishful thinking. But we also got offered a blanket yesterday morning by a woman in a military uniform while preparing to head to our destinations for the day and the fast food restaurant we frequent gave us 2 free things the past two days. We were able to cook with our camping stove today and eat a "home" cooked meal. Percy got really tummy sick this week and cars broke down. My best friend lost her best friend-her doggy and I wept while leaving work to grieve with her. I got a house sitting opportunity in May and I was ecstatic upon hearing the news but also grief stricken because I'd love to be in a home by then. January is almost gone and I'm terrified. Take care of us 2018.

Until next Friday.

-Analaura

Song of the week: "26" - Paramore

Hey, 2018s Here

Hey there 2018.

Cute puppy-AKA-Penny

Although I am not one for resolutions I did promise myself that this year I would begin to write again. I seemed to be a gray blur in 2017 and maybe that was just my healing process for that moment in time but these past few days my soul has been tugging at me like a 4 year old on a mission to write again. My conscious blowing up at me because it knows that I'd feel better if I just wrote something. Ah! I wanted to come up with a title or an idea that I could center my thoughts around but then I remembered that was the very reason I felt I couldn't write in 2017. 2017 was the year that all the crap and turmoil thats always been hidden under the rug got uncovered and so of course this caused the world to believe the world has turned to shit when in reality all of these things were already there and happening. It was a year of eye opening. It was a year where people discovered how far their compassion for "the issues" would really take them. It was the year people rose up to activism and others turned their backs and stayed silent. It was the year when people finally made those who are silent realize they are on the side of the oppressor. That there is no limbo when it comes to justice for black and brown lives, for women and so on. It was the uncovering that the world needed to begin a better revolutionized healing process.

I have a job now. I work part time in a medical office. I like it although it hasn't came without work place drama I'm actually quite impressed with how I've done and how I have been handling being homeless and working at the same time. Some days it takes everything in me to breathe and not to start crying but others are a breeze and I am able to clock in, do my job, clock out and leave it all behind. Some days my mental health is on the brink of giving out so I'm grateful that I am able to bring one of my dogs to work to hug when I feel like being alive is just way too damn much to handle. Some days I work at the office and then later as a nanny. I'm tired and empty and overwhelmed all at the same time but I keep going because what the fuck else am I going to do. Food for us and food for the dogs and gas for the car and laundry to wash and storage and insurance and cell phone won't happen by itself. My transmission died during thanksgiving and that caused a whole bunch of expense. I brought my grandma and had her stay with us. We were able to supply a hotel room for 2 weeks or so before money was gone and the car was broken so she stayed with us through new year. I was actually relieved to have her with us where we could make sure she was fed and interacted with and showered and taken care of. Shes losing her memory now and at home unfortunately she can't provide herself with the self care she needs. Its a very complicated situation so even though she drove us all insane and we were almost always arguing at the end of the day my shoulders felt a little lighter knowing that my abuela was being taken care of properly.

I stopped going to church in 2017. I think I finally came to realize pushing myself to go when it drains me isn't taking care of myself. Plus, my spirituality was dragging just like my situation. I was visiting with a friend from San Francisco during Christmas who had asked me why i no longer attended and I eventually figured out that I felt crippling loneliness when I visited church. That is not the reaction you are supposed to feel when going to a place like that although to be fair I feel quite alone in the world too but you never wanna willingly place yourself in a place that creates that feeling. Not to get too real or dark on you here. You still there? I dont come into contact with a lot of homeless young brown women like myself. Not to say that they aren't out there but the lifeline I wield hasn't given me that gift...yet.

This is more of an update post than a reflective one and I am quite okay with that now. I think I would put so much pressure on myself to make a great reflective post every single time that I didn't even wanna try anymore. I realize now that I'm not going to get more than a couple views and that feedback just isn't happening but regardless I need to write. Besides having it out in the open is so subversive.and freeing that I'm going to learn how to make it feel enough.

I am making it a plan to have a new post every Friday and I hope those of who you reading now will check in, read and reflect with me.

I suppose life would really suck if I didn't take advantage to grow and learn from all the pain. The day I decided to use my pain as fuel instead of an anchor is the day I created a million and one opportunities.

Healing is everyday and chosen and uncomfortable and difficult and hard work but so is the alternative.  At least healing gives you freedom.

-Analaura

Sacred Joys

A friend asked me the other day what my plans were moving forward to be happy and I struggled with that question. I became irritated by it. I didn't express myself then mostly due to not having my thoughts together but I feel like here in my own space today I do and thought to share.

I no longer make goals to gain happiness. I do not wish to accomplish certain things and then feel like happiness can then happen to me. I have learned that continuing to wish for happiness is hurtful for those of us whose lives have been eaten up by unfortunate events and circumstances. My whole life has completely taken over the ability for me to try new things, to take risks and fuck up, to actually act like whatever a 22 year old woman acts like. But I don't mention this to 'cause sympathy or concern I've mentioned this to try to explain why my goals don't include "and then happiness" at the end. I used to do that a lot. I would make a goal and know that once we passed the finished line to that goal then I could finally take happiness for my own. The problem with this is that there was always another goal and always another finish line to cross. Those of us whose timeline of their life includes stories of how we went from surviving one storm to floating right into another know that the dream of one day no longer having to bear the crippling storms is a finish line we aim to one day get the luck of crossing. Unfortunately, this dream finish line keeps us in a state of paralysis towards real joy. We are always courageously rowing ourselves through tremulous storms and feeling let down by the world when that lovely dream finish line is still not in our reaching. There will always be prisons but that does not mean that we cannot be free, that we cannot have our freedom. Likewise there will always be goals to complete, to grow into or out of but this does not mean that we have to wait to make happiness our own. Granted there will be times when joy is something you've forgotten how to want or feel or deserve but we cant continue to see joy as a finish line. Perhaps instead we can believe in the powerful, fleeting moments of sacred joy. Yes, I may always have a trap door leading into sadness but I know that the joy and peace I am able to feel in the tiny moments in between storms or during the storms are sacred. My sacred joy shakes its head in disbelief when I reduce it to a finish line. Some of you may understand and some will not but for those of us where joy seems hard to come by whether due to mental illness or life circumstances or both please know that your joy is sacred. I know that the word "happiness" feels big but know that your sacred joy is your humble healing companion. Sacred joy is those 5 second moments. Those moments that so often pass us by a little too quickly to brag about themselves. We don't have to pass any finish line for this. We just courageously row our tired selves through the all the storms and continue remembering to remember our sacred joys. This I can do. What about you?

Some of my current sacred joys:

When my dog Penny wiggles her butt 

When my dog Percy hops from joy

When Celest says something hilarious

I may not currently know how to want joy or how to stop cringing at the word happiness but that doesn't even matter. I'm just gonna keep rowing my fierce crooked self through shitty times and remember my humble healing companion sacred joy.