The past two weeks have been emotionally relentless. I've had to get to grips with the most basic and the most complex of emotions, facing each one of them unarmed and unguarded. I've had to embrace each one of them, face them and then let them go the same way they came. I have spent most of my adult life ignoring those I could or did not understand, and pouring all of my energy on those I felt equipped to handle. A few months shy of 30 I am finally faced with the challenge of becoming an adult. I was brought up to believe growing up meant being financially independent and moving away from home, emotions were not even part of the equation, or perhaps more accurately showing you had them was a sign of immaturity. Hence you can see how a nearly 30 year old woman who has lived away from home, in a different continent for the past 13 years, has been working for almost as long and has had to grapple with some of life's more difficult situations finds it a personal failure to admit that where it matters, she is still an adolescent. I'm not saying I have always been emotionally immature, I have been at times incredibly and painfully mature, and as it has been pointed out to me recently, often without my knowledge. That makes me think that maybe, in spite of my efforts, a part of me has embraced emotional maturity, even if only fleetingly. However, or maybe because, I have what they now call Bipolar Disorder—I prefer manic depression—I have found the perfect reason to excuse my lack of emotional empathy and maturity. It is very easy to justify one's actions when something that is beyond one's control can be the cause. And yes, many times this sometimes euphoric often mercurial Carolina plays a leading part I now have to own up to the fact that I have behaved like a scared child hiding behind my condition's skirts.
Two weeks ago I made the decision, or rather fate and life made it for me, that I could no longer drink. Not only because it interacted badly with my medication, made a huge hole in my already porous pocket and generally made me behave and look like a fool at the best of times, an evil bitch at the worst, but most importantly because alcohol became yet another skirt to hide behind. I had been so set on not growing up I even used the quintessentially grown up thing to do to arrest my development. So just imagine my horror and surprise when all I've had to do for the past two weeks is face all those "adult" emotions I had been avoiding all these years. I've had to move from one to the next with the dignity that sobriety grants us, which sometimes means crying in public in a city where "soft" emotions are frowned upon. My oversized Hepburnesque shades are now a permanent addition to my handbag, they manage to at least spare me the shame of sad eyes on a spring day. Other times the anger is so intense I have actually had to look at it in the face and ask it exactly what it wants instead of ignoring it like I always did. Fear however has been the hardest. I never realized how much control fear had over my life and I didn't even know it. I always thought having done all the things I'd done: moving away while still in my teens, travelling to far flung places all on my own, stubbornly choosing to deal with crippling breakdowns on my own, had proven to me and the world that I was beyond fear. Oh how wrong was I! These two weeks fear has been right in the middle of things, and it has become apparent that I often used other emotions to mask fear, that in the past I acted in contradicting ways trying to compensate for the fear I wasn't aware of, I had become fear's bitch and I didn't even know it.
I am petrified, scared shitless to be honest, of growing up. I was reading some of my previous blog entries, and some of the notes I wrote last year when the emotional rollercoaster wasn't as severe and I could still handle it with my childlike ways. There was wisdom there, and some foresight. There was a lot of dignity and gratitude; I was surrounded in the emotion I treasure most: Love. The rollercoaster was manageable at that size and I felt love: ideal situation for me. However, months later, introduce life changes, both planned and unplanned; the horror of mixed states (the bad bits of mania and depression combined in a lethal potion); excesses of all kinds and the inevitability of growing up and I was just not equipped to deal with my emotional self, and fear took over. Fear has a really ugly face in my life, which I am finally seeing, it is called self sabotage. In the clutches of fear I went on a rampage against everything in my life, both good and bad. I'm still trying to find out to what end, I really do not understand this emotion, fear. It is still alien to me, I don't know its purpose, I don't even know if I am supposed to yield it at all. Its aftermath has not become fully evident at present...
These two weeks I have had to surrender to my emotions, I've had to be patient and wait for them to do what they must; to show me whatever there is for me to see and to let them go when I'm ready. All this without a single drink, not a drop, without skirts to hide behind, or people to protect me from them, all on my own. It is daunting. Terrifying. But there is no other way, I cannot be a puppet master any longer, I cannot just live life when it suits me. I have finally realised that actually the quintessentially grown up thing to do is not drinking (duh!) but taking responsibility for our own lives. It sounds simple, and it is, but it is rarely done. Being responsible for me means three things: surrendering control of the things I have no control over (obvious for most but it wasn't for me) and accepting them as they are; actually engaging with the things I have control over (I often just delegated that to other people, I was too concerned with the state of the world to pay attention to my own life) and the most important being capable of realising which ones are within my control and which ones are not. At the moment I feel like a toddler learning to walk, I still catch myself thinking I have power over people's minds (how deluded is that?) and I have to just come back to me and try to have control over me, and my today. Of being responsible for the single moments that make my days, and then hopefully for the days that make my weeks, and so on, until I can walk again. I don't believe in god but the synchronicity of the past few weeks has left me speechless, I have been given an opportunity I never asked for but desperately needed, and I was granted the humility to accept it, even if I didn't want it. The road ahead I cannot see, and I am scared, I don't want to walk it, I want to hide, but I have to grow up at some point, preferably before I turn 30…
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