no matter the weather

I'm always reminded to not go too far from her. The little me inside that will make sure I hear her if I stray. Tonight I'm babysitting a 13 month old girl in a hotel room. I started to experience some panic over my heartbeat (I felt a fluttery, weird, irregular thing as I do now and then) which led to forgetting to breathe which only added fuel to the fireball of anxiety brewing. I hadn't really experienced that type of anxiety in awhile and didn't know the trigger. And there I was, in a hotel room that felt like The Shining (dark except for a tiny light so the baby can sleep), no noise of the TV for distraction, no Carrie Bradshaw on the screen to keep me safe in the clouds. I was simply me – earth, here, weighted, and alone. Alone with my racing mind and my attempts to breathe into my belly. I got a message from a dear friend:

“Today I make room for the good that is waiting for me. No matter what the weather is, my body is always comfortable.”

As I tried to find the home in my flesh, in my machine, the baby started crying from her crib. Of course this was happening. Of course when I needed space and breath, she needed proximity and to scream. I picked her up and she fell back asleep, snuggled on me on the bed. Maybe this was good. Maybe having to tend to her would pull me out of my head funk. It did, eventually. After a few minutes I re-swaddled her and put her back in the crib. I took note of the change in my body, how it felt like the feeling of stepping off an airplane and back onto your ground. The familiarity that anxiety prys you away from.

I then happened to get on the computer and within two minutes the blog “Existential Parenting” found its way in front of my eyes. Babies. On the brain lately, along with all of the other tethers to this world. It's odd being at this age, where all of “the things” are actual things in people's real lives- not just the pretend lives of their Barbies. The thought of being pregnant is terrifying, but what isn't. I've always hoped and kind of felt that it would actually work like a balm to my anxiety. A place of constant connectedness, a portal into the miracle of existence. A home that's rooted in something real, at least for now, or nine months..I wonder if I would feel trapped or set free – probably shades of it all. What traps us, or what we fear will trap us, is often simultaneously the tunnel that leads us to freedom, to wholeness, to acceptance instead of denial. It's written about beautifully in the book The Untethered Soul (which I highly recommend and pretty much serves as my Bible).

I can't put a finger on it, and don't need to try to give it a name, but things have been stirring the past couple weeks. I've felt some deep, beautiful shifts which seem to have also kicked up some anxiety-dust. As change and transformation and transition usually does. I'm getting better at sitting back, at trusting in the opportunities for growth and in the calls to awareness. I know that the degree of resistance is equal to the degree of growth hanging in the balance, waiting on the other side. The more that I let go, the more I surrender, the more I am able to receive. Like the line I've kept close to my heart ever since the same dear friend gifted it to me: I am ready to receive the gifts of the goddess. Because it's all a gift, really; the happy, the sad, the scary, the exciting, the uncomfortable, the sweetness, nothing is real without its foil...and they are all gifts.

I start a new part-time job next week at an organization I've been married to since age 12. I'm trying to refocus on the “business” part of acting, while the actual acting part is feeling really good at the moment. I'm also taking more classes this fall (whatever I have to do in order to get a new pair of glasses, seriously). I'm a fucking wife. So many big things are going on and coming together right now and then there are the baby cravings and the strong desire for gold stacking rings from Etsy. It's slightly alarming to feel the pieces of you fuse, for the little girl me to recognize the me in the mirror from her dreamed up life so many moons ago.