Overwhelmed

It feels like I’m filled from the bottom of my stomach up through my eyes with an airy substance, like grey smoke or pollution that’s been energized. It hurts, it’s tiring and I want to go back to sleep, but I know that I wouldn’t sleep and that it wouldn’t solve the problem.

I feel an urge to lash out at anyone around me in blame, but I know that they have nothing to do with what’s happening inside of me. It’s so weird because as these projections come up within me, just a picture here and there and I am able to read the entire story of the planned mind playout to project blame onto my external reality. Instead of following the mind’s path though, I just say no and push myself to do the absolute last thing that I want to do - write it out of me.

As soon as I begin writing, the pain begins to diminish. This is the key to dealing with emotional issues - stopping the projections, bringing everything back to myself and doing the opposite of what I feel like doing - writing it out of me.

Every year around this time, I’m required to give grades to hundreds of students, counting over thousands of assignments, blog posts, assessing projects, class participation, calculating it all together and then entering it into the university system. However, like so much of what I do and say these days, much of it is just guesswork. Interestingly, whereas I used to pretend that I knew what I was doing, nowadays I do a lot less pretending, but what I do is for the most part, still just guesswork. I bet I could write a thousand books on all of the guesses I’ve made, yet only a few that I am truly certain of.

The other day in a meeting, someone asked me how I could possibly make a decision without first doing that and that - which of course I hadn’t done for a number of reasons. I could have provided a technical sounding explanation sufficient enough to baffle those around me, but I didn’t. Instead, I simply said to give me a week and I would get back to you. Some persisted in wanting to know, so I mentioned my workload, the room went quiet and I even received an apology. The funny thing is, though I do manage a lot of stuff, it’s only a tiny fraction of what I’m able to manage. Yet still I feel somewhat overwhelmed - but that, too, as I’ve been writing has begun to diminish. 

Oh and I am actually moving out of this experience step by step. Beginning to write this blog post was step one. While I was writing it, I was also working on other things (work related) and I even went swimming a couple hours ago. Thus, the fog has begun to clear. 

When such experiences arise, we have the choice to drag them out and be dragged down by them or to step in and move directly through them.