If there’s anything I’ve been chasing lately, it’s balance, which isn’t really different from any other time in my life because I think that maybe my whole life is being lived in the pursuit of balance, like maybe it’s actually my life’s purpose and someday I’ll experience this magical moment of balance in all the different parts of my life and then blue birds and doves will come and swirl around me and sing and chirp and braid my hair and I’ll be lit by a perfect ray of sunshine and I’ll get all glowy and sparkly and a unicorn will come and and bow in front of me and then we’ll high five and I’ll ride off into the sunset, never to be seen again, on a the back of a giant white tiger, accompanied by a blue giraffe, a pack of wolves and a grizzly bear.

I suppose it’s more likely that I’ll just spend forever chasing after it.

I’m working on it.

I work on it, in a very literal sense, when I’m in yoga, and Mary, my yoga instructor, has us pop up our back foot into Warrior III and I stand there, one foot allegedly rooted into the ground, but mostly shaking like a amber field of grain in the midst of a buffalo stampede, arms outstretched, face smushed into a scowl, shoulders creeping closer to my ears, no matter how hard I try to slide them down my back. I spend the whole time, first wobbling about on my right leg, and then wobbling about on my left leg, thinking about how all the things that happen in yoga can all too easily be applied to the rest of my life, and my mind slips deep into the realm of THIS MEANS SOMETHING, and I wobble about and think about how my inability to balance in yoga is all too closely linked to my inability to find balance in other things and that maybe, if I just mastered Warrior III, all the other shit in my life will fall into a state of balance as well.

It’s not that easy, sure, and besides, I’m probably never going to master Warrior III, so it wouldn’t matter even if it was that easy.

I work on it with running, because the thing about being a runner is that you can’t just run, you have to commit yourself to a whole host of other physical endeavors to make your body strong in ways that running doesn’t really help with. If you don’t work the rest of your body, like I wasn’t for a while, with strength training and core conditioning, eventually things start to hurt which is precisely what happened to me. I got a sports massage, hit up a Body Pump class, foam rolled with far more seriousness than I’d been able to muster previously, and suddenly the knee pain that had me flustered run after run suddenly disappeared. Because balance, y’all. BALANCE.

The hardest for me though, is to find the balance in repairing the broken things. When it comes to things that are difficult, and that have been difficult for a handful of months, it’s really easy to wake up one day, say ENOUGH, and stuff all those feelings into The Pit, that lovely gorge into which I throw all the shit I just can’t handle today or tomorrow or right now. But the thing about The Pit is that it doesn’t keep the things you try to bury within it forever. It’s a volcano, an angry, totally uncontrollable volcano that will vomit hellfire over everything until I’m curled around a box of tissues, cringing at the judging looks the cats give me each time I cry.

But when things are broken you can’t just be broken forever. At some point you have to get up, carry the broken bits with you, get out the super glue and try like hell to put it all back together again, realizing that it won’t be the same, but that the road to being unbroken includes facing the hard parts, balancing the reality that things aren’t perfect, but moving forward toward a different sort of better.

There are so many things I want to say, so many thoughts that pop up throughout the day that I want to write down and elaborate on. I want to sit down with a notebook and write it all out. I want to sit across a dinner table with my favorite person and talk about today and yesterday and tomorrow, but it’s not that easy. It’s not easy to write, not easy to talk. It’s not easy to make sense of things right now, really, and I’ve already written enough vague and sad blog posts that hint at, but don’t explain, my situation and I don’t know what else to say, other than that love is a mother fucker.

So I haven’t been writing. Not letters, not journals, not anything, other than an occasional long-winded, emotionally fraught text message. They don’t help, though.

My problem is I’m a dreamer and a fixer. I fix things. I fix wobbly tables at brunch. I fix broken shelves. I fix lawn mowers and door locks and all sorts of practical and personal problems, unless they’re math problems because math, like love, is a mother fucker. And I dream. I expect. I concoct the perfect scenario, with flowers and apologies and a few graceful tears and hugs and forehead kisses and I dream up unexpected homecomings and all the ways this could get better, the different scenarios that could lead us back to the best parts.

But things like this – tricky love shit – can’t be fixed with nails and I can’t dream myself out of this reality, no matter how much time I spend trying.

So I’m trying to be here. I’m trying to understand, trying to be the best version of myself, trying to wrap my head around something that seems unimaginable. I’m trying so fucking hard and I’ve moved backward, not forward. Progress was made and then, on a Saturday afternoon, it collapsed. I haven’t fixed anything. I haven’t dreamed anything away, and no amount of effort on my part to be present has gotten me any bit of relief or progress and I don’t know what to do.

That’s the worst of it, that I don’t know what to do.

I guess, at this point, the only thing I can do is wait and hope, hope that this thing fixes itself in the ways that I can’t and wait for the much-hoped for moment, when the fuzzy parts become clear and we get to be us again.

I’ve been in the trenches of deep thought lately, swirling around my past and doing my best to figure out the parts I must have missed. There’s a lot I don’t know. I don’t know how to alleviate the pain I sometimes feel. I don’t know what next year will look like. I don’t even know what tomorrow will look like. I don’t know what comes next or how to fix the things that are broken and half the time I don’t even know how to explain myself. I don’t know how to do this, this crazy unnamed, undefined thing.

Every day is different, which I guess is the way it goes when things get twisted and messed up. I can be happy, despite the hard things that are happening, but then I can be so, so sad and most days it just feels like I’ve settled into a steady state of an aching sort of sadness that’s always in the background. I can laugh and smile, but it’s still there, the hurt. It’s lurking just below the surface, looking for any sort of excuse to roll open the floodgates.

I’ve learned some things though. Because the mountains – literal or figurative – they teach you.

1. There is only now. Yesterday is done. That’s it. Yesterday is gone. I can spend hours going over and over the things I could have done differently, the decisions I could have shifted right or left, the things I should have done and the words I should have said, but it won’t get me anywhere. It can’t be changed – not here, not now – because it’s done. This is it. This is the reality that all of my previous decisions have created.

2. I define me. I get to pick the words I use to tell my story. I can define me by the hard stuff, by the bullshit and the tears and the heartbreak, or not. I can let this be all that I am, or not. It’s up to me. It’s up to me to tell my own story, to define myself in good ways or bad. I’m not just one thing, not just one experience, and just one experience isn’t allowed to define who I am.

3. Happiness is a personal pursuit. I’m not going to say that happiness is a choice, because it’s not that simple, but I believe that happiness is something that comes from you. I don’t think it’s something we can get from others. We can’t rely on friends or lovers to create it for us, because it’s personal. Happiness comes from liking who and what we are. Friends, lovers and adventures can enhance it, but they can’t create it.

There’s more, too. I know that I’m ok, even when I don’t feel ok. I know that I will be ok, no matter what, because I endure. That’s what I do. I’m really good at getting knocked down and then finding the strength to get up and keep going.

I know what I want too, which I think is important. I’ve weighed the options, uncovered the truest of my true feelings and found out how I really feel, which is pretty much exactly how I thought I felt.

I believe in love. That’s it. That’s enough.

I talk a lot. Maybe too much. I talk to myself. I talk to my friends, to Andrew, to the cats, to the dogs, to the wild cats, to the birds who visit the back yard and the chipmunks and the bunnies I pass when I run. I talk to Raccoon Cat and Possum Cat and the food I cook and sometimes my closet and anything I stub my toe on.

I have a lot to say.

I’ve got an opinion on everything and I’m a person who feels a lot of things. I have feelings about the weather, about politics, about what I’m going to cook for dinner, about the way Baby Cat treats Daddy Cat, about running, about the clothes in my closet, about the shows I watch, the music I listen to, the books I read. I have feelings and opinions on the choices I’ve made today, yesterday and last week and the year before that. I have feelings about most things people to say to me, about my marriage and friendships and about eggplant. I hate that shit.

Point is, I feel things. All the things. And I talk about things, all the things, especially feelings.

But not everyone is that way. And when things are really dark, or when I feel like my feelings might be a burden to someone I love, I don’t talk about it. And then shit gets crazy, cause if you keep that shit to yourself, you lose your shit. You might not know you’re losing your shit until after it’s been lost and you go forward with life (because that’s the thing about life, the mother fucker keeps moving, no matter what sort of shit hole you’ve fallen into), and then you look back and it’s like, HOLY SHIT. That was some shit. That I lost.

It’s just that some things are hard to say. It’s hard to say you’re angry when you’re trying to be supportive, when you’re trying to be a good person, and do what you know is the right thing. It’s hard to be honest sometimes too, to say, out loud, that shit is hard. Because it is. Life. It’s a mother fucker.

And sometimes it’s hard to say anything. Even the simple things.

There’s a space there, the space that grows between all the things that want to be said, that heavy burden that’s  carried around like an overstuffed ruck sack. And once you stop saying some of the things you want to say, it’s easier to add to the pile until you’re buried under a mountain of things that started small until they festered and mutated into a beast of bullshit and resentment. And then it’s all nearly unidentifiable. It’s a mess of little things that merged to create this big space, this big, ugly gap and it’s hard to identify any of the parts, so you look at it and name it I Don’t Know, because you don’t anymore.

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I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what my life will look like in a year, or even what it will feel like tomorrow. But I know that I love. And I hope that’s enough. I hope it’s enough to break apart the I Don’t Know and close the space between. Because I really, really love. More today than yesterday.

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