It just keeps getting better and feels like more of the same...

'I am so tired, and my head hurts, and these life lessons seem to be the same lessons on repeat and I am wondering why they won't just shut up already! I really am taking the time and making the adjustments, and doing all the things to grow and progress and move beyond and yadda yadda yadda...but still, once again I find myself in the same situation but with different surrounding colors, and yes, not nearly as bad as the past. I am making progress, this is true, and yet I WANT TO BE DONE WITH THIS LESSON!!! There comes a point when I have to ask myself what's the point? What's the point of continuing to "improve", "change my perspective", whatever if I'm still going to keep running up against the same pressure?

I don't know what I'm saying and this is not a well balanced writing moment for me. It is clunky and full of terrible run on sentences I'm sure because I love run on sentences and I'm really not even paying attention and there's a piece of me that wants desperately to go back and sensor but that's not the point. So I challenge myself to not go back, because I'm sharing wildly. Because we are all wild. Because sometimes it's helpful to see each other's untamed inner landscapes and this is mine right now. 

Ugh, life is messy. It hurts. There is the question of "what am I not getting?"
Where am I going in life? Does any of it really matter anyway? No. No it does not. And yes, yes it does. Each and every moment is filled with that duality and it's exhausting. I want to get off the ride and just be firmly planted on the ground below. But when the SAME lesson keeps coming back I have to ask myself "what am I not getting?" Why I am continually brought back in to a cycle of struggle? What is the lesson?

Perhaps the lesson is that the lesson never ends, we just get better at the same terrible hardships that bound back into our life on repeat like a boomerang...and yet, I hold out hope for that not to be the case. I hold hope that there is a point when things click, and yes the tools learned from these repeating lessons are probably never cast aside, but that there becomes some ease and ritual that acts as protection from the raw hurt that previously boomed itself again my brain, and ribs, and heart, and ovaries again and again and again and again throughout this life's cycle...

I have an aversion to ritual. I feel the truth in that statement. There is something that feels claustrophobic to me about that word. I am looking for a right relationship with ritual and have been for quite some time. Honestly, I am looking for a right relationship with the word service as well. These two words (ritual, and service) are so hard for me to find comfort within and yet I know from soooooo much research that we can rest within ritual, and that service is a link to finding a sense of purpose AND I DON'T WANT ANY OF IT! That's not entirely true, I do want those things...I just don't want to welcome the words along with the rest and sense of purpose they supposedly provide.

As it stands now, ritual and service as words feel to me like a clawing trapped bird inside my chest that wants to break through the sinews of my body just to be free of the burden and weight these words carry. This bird wants to scream "but this is not my burden", "this is someone else's burden", "I'll happily carry my own, but this is not mine and should not fall on me to fix."

I don't know if there is a reason for me to continue in any direction. I am sifting through life's mess and searching for something to "click". My only steady comfort right now is writing. I write and scribble words on a page with ink the old fashioned way every single day in the pages of a journal. I now have a pile of journals that have been filled and the funny thing is that this is the one thing that has probably been the hardest for my throughout my life. Multiple times throughout the years between the ages of 7-17 I had tried to write words in ink on a page. It usually ended with me ripping out the pages wholly uncomfortable with having sullied a perfectly beautiful blank sheet of paper. It was a long and grueling process to get past my inner critic and the impulse to shred each page after writing one or two words because I was convinced that the world would be better with a perfectly pristine journal rather than with anything I would put inside that wasn't a pure and true reflection of how I felt and my writing very rarely was just that. But within the last two years or so I have been journaling almost daily and letting myself get out the ugly, the disconnected, the otherwise hidden and shy parts of my thought patterning and it is helpful. Perhaps this is a mirror for what I am going through right now - I remember that to establish a sense of ritual and service within my writing I had to wade through the bog of despair that desperately tried to keep me out of the beauty freeform writing had to provide.

I don't really know how we ended up where I am right now, but I guess the moral of the story (not that there is much of a story here) is that self-expression and a willingness to fail over and over and over again forever can be freeing and really is probably the point at the end of the day.
Fine.
So bring home the lesson that seems to be emerging from my rambles...I will remember to be kind to myself while I'm systematically beating myself up over failure...cause that's what we do right? That is the dance.

So on that note, goodnight.