This is not the blog I intended to write today. But in emailing a friend, I realized this was a moment when I could be vulnerable. I tend to keep things close to the vest. I don’t tend to share when I am hurting, or sad, or even when things are going really good.
I am an Enneagram 5 – the investigative thinker! Independent, insightful, perceptive, curious. We deep dive on subjects and long to be seen as experts. I become paralyzed when I don’t feel like I know enough. We can also spend too much time in our heads. We pull away and shut down. We live under the lie of scarcity – meaning, I think I don’t have enough time, mental resources, emotional space, etc. to deal with something. Or I lack what I need within me to show up, to give it my all, to commit – so I pull away and don’t try.
It is part of the reason why I hold back sharing struggles as well as successes. I feel bad “dumping” on people. Often times I don’t know how to reach out. At the same time, I never want to be seen as flaunting what I have – so I tend to hold good things in because I don’t want to brag or make others feel bad.
It’s a complicated place to be.
It also plays into my anxiety and depression.
When I was home over Christmas I was on edge, emotional, lost in a fog from moving across the country, my dad’s cardiac arrest, feeling guilty abandoning D in DC, slipping into a winter ennui attached to the cloudy, gray nature of DC. What did I do – I looked up, “how to fix a broken 5.”
Find enough information and logic your way out of emotion. I have 3 pages of notes in my journal on ways to ID a healthy and not-healthy 5 and then ways to “fix it” – which did not help because the moment I needed a way to get beyond the logic to what was happening in me. I probably needed to talk to someone but didn’t know how.
Which leads to today – my mom and I are leaving for Central America tomorrow. It’s a trip we’ve had planned for over six months. In the wake of my dad’s cardiac arrest and recovery, I thought we would cancel so tempered my enthusiasm. But we are still going and I am so anxious about it. I know when I get to the airport and see my mom I will be excited. But sitting here, I’m not there yet.
I worry something is going to happen.
I worry I will be in my head and miss everything.
I worry something will happen back home.
I worry about going to a place that is not entirely “stable” right now (but where is?).
I worry – I am anxious – I feel my chest constrict and my shoulders pulled low. I feel this weight and just want to weep and be rid of it.
I am trying to do breath prayer in the AM (or get quiet with God for 10-15 mins) and the other day the prayer was: be anxious about nothing – pray about everything.
My anxiety is rooted in control (of which I have none!). It robs me of a lot of joy. I never trust, never fully settle in, never breathe fully. I catch myself holding my breath all the time! In the shower, on the couch, writing. I remind myself to take a deep breath and then spend a few moments just breathing.
I don’t have any profound answers.
Today is a hard day. I have to remind myself to pack. I have to do more than just sit here. I don’t have a week until our trip. I have 20 hours and the list of things to do keeps getting longer. Will the world crumble if blogs don’t get written? Is it defeat if I watch Netflix all afternoon? What is the balance?
Today I am overwhelmed and anxious. Today I want to pull my turtle shell on and hide away. Today I want a dozen things in me to be different. Today I simply hurt and cannot truly identify why. Today I let worship carry the words to heaven because silence in overwhelming and all I have is, “I gots no idea.” And that is okay.
Amanda Lunday 