Limbo

So I started this blog to keep me distracted while my boyfriend was away for 3 months. Really, it turned out to be a piece of cake! I got my life together, in terms of family life, connecting with people that matter, spending time alone, studying and giving up smoking and being a stoner.

I thought it would all go uphill from here. However, sometimes I can be a bit too optimistic. I'm trying to analyse why this is happening in terms of all that I've learnt in my degree. I thought I knew myself well - better than most people know themselves - but sometimes, like now, I am left stumped. What can I attribute this feeling to? It feels like... loss. Like stagnation. I'm unsure where to go. Maybe I had a moment of insecurity and I latched onto it, holding it close. That's a mistake I almost made a couple of weeks ago. I'm fighting it in my head, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between myself and an intruder. Sometimes I mistake that voice for my own and take it on board, only to find it makes me feel worse. That's mostly when I can tell it's not me.

I'm hoping it's just a feeling of being in limbo... I've finished my classes, and now it's like I'm in the waiting room for exams. Waiting never makes anyone feel good. You often get bored, restless, trying to distract yourself from the slowing down of time. Fiddling, playing mundane games in your head, checking the same thing over and over on your phone. It's uncomfortable, you want to rest but you can't because you need to be alert when they call you, you need to be ready. After a long time of waiting you start to go a little crazy. Especially if you're alone, waiting to be released or moved on to something else. It's just you and your thoughts and time.

I guess I haven't been making the most of this time though. Instead of studying I've been waiting. Waiting for this to be over, waiting for freedom. I'm sure I could do something more constructive. I'm focused on my peculiar mental state though, which tends to make it worse.

Tomorrow, the goal is to study. To fill my brain with info. Then there won't be room for any crazy talk.

Isolation

Feeling really down this week. Couldn't figure out why until I realised that I am feeling really isolated. As an extrovert, I gain energy from being with people I love, and people in general. And as someone with anxiety, I hate feeling excluded; I want to be a part of everything that is important to me. This is a tricky situation, as it can make me feel like people don't appreciate me, when really, I am excluding myself, due to exams which are in a week.

I am missing out on Wah Wah's 6th birthday tonight, which wouldn't be a problem except that my boyfriend got me a special invite because he DJs there. And since he is part of the 'Wah family', I really wanted to be there and show my face. But I can't, and it's really upsetting because everyone is going... even people who I don't like. I just feel like they are there to show their support, and I can't be, and it makes them look better than me. And they all get to have fun together while I'm stuck at home. No this is not the most important thing in the world, I know that, but everyone is making it out to be.

I can't get around this either, because I live at home, and my mum is my boss, and she will be livid if I go out partying all night when I'm taking work off to study for exams.

On top of that, my friends seem to be going out and doing stuff on the weekends together and I can't be a part of that either. Irrationally, I feel excluded from my own friendship group, like I'm not important. Even though it's my own doing.

My mind is going crazy.

Nothing gets me down like isolation does.

Faith

Had a great chat at uni the other day with a vibrant girl from the Christian Union who approached me to talk about faith. After viewing a short cartoon, she asked me how it related to my own faith. The whole conversation that stemmed from there was surprisingly awesome, and I found that I connected well with this Christian girl, that in fact we shared very similar ideas about the world and the same values. It reminded me that we see the world from all different perspectives but what really unites us is love and understanding! 

I want to share with you a few things that I shared with her, as through this conversation I realized how very little I get to talk about something that I am so deeply passionate about. I also never thought of myself as a person with a faith, maybe because I don't name it. I just think of it as my set of beliefs.

God, or the Source, is for me, like in other religions, where we all came from. I like to think of the God concept as the Big Bang. At the moment, the widely accepted theory is that the Big Bang originated from a singularity- a single point of mass in a void where space and time did not exist. Considering that everything in our universe supposedly came from this singularity, it's rational to say that, since we were all 'one' when this happened, that we are still 'one' with everything around us. Everything we are made, the stars are made of, even what space is made of, originated from this point. This is why I love to say that we are all pieces of the puzzle; The puzzle of the universe! 

Another thing about my faith that aligns with others is that I have a similar set of values. When talking with this girl, we both believed that we should have love and compassion for one another, and that we are too selfish now and scared of connecting with people in this 'dog eat dog' world. For me, this stems from the belief that we are all one... If you are me, and I am you, what am I afraid of? Why would I want to hurt you? For me it's really sad that we compete and are jealous and hateful of one another because this reflects on and creates how we treat ourselves... We did an exercise at Reach once where we had to make a criticism of another person, and then ask ourselves whether we had said the same thing about ourselves too... Every time. Another one of my favourite sayings is 'you must love yourself before you can love others'.

She also spoke to me about her underlying feeling that there's something wrong with the world, that its not working in the way it was meant to... I get this a lot. I got it from a young age. I always questioned why we work all our lives and then rest when we're too old to enjoy life properly. Now I question it in a deeper way, and try to remember that while I can't change how it works, I can work around it. I can do things to avoid having to rely on money and greed, such as remembering that my worth isn't dependent on my looks or possessions. Everything is impermanent, so it makes no sense to attach myself to anything. I can go natural, buy organic or grow my own food, which is like growing your own money, but allows my body to absorb pure, rich nutrients rather than the chemically altered crap that they sell in supermarkets. I can center myself in a more natural environment. All these things make me more at ease and closer to nature on this dying planet. 

The last thing she asked me is where my beliefs came from. I thought about it for a minute, and realized that my beliefs materialized one day out of nowhere. I was always drawn to spiritual and space talk when I was young. I think when I watched zeitgeist I really awoke. Everything sort of clicked into place and I thought, this is right. My morals stem from my empathy as well, which allows me (or forces me) to feel others' pain, to really absorb it in my mind and heart.

I really believe that we can only find the answers within. I always want to know things, and I keep reminding myself that all I have to do is look within to find what I'm looking for. The trouble is trying to find the time and also the discipline to let the material world go and meditate without the interruption of my mind or anything else. I always plan to. But what if I am planning until I am old, and one day I realize I never did it? I was always waiting for the time when really, time doesn't exist, it is an illusion of the material world. I have to let go of time as well in order to properly explore consciousness....

I have a lot of self work to do.