Priority
At 2:07am on August 23rd, the Moon was New again. I am admittedly still working on getting any kind of a rhythm back, but I’m getting better – in many ways.
In the last post, I recognized the sense of Dualism I was living through. I described how my mind and my body at first felt disjointed, but eventually began to walk together on the path toward healing. That healing is ongoing, but the Impatience and Dualism have given way to appreciation.
I am still in a frame of mind where I reflect on those weeks in the hospital. The moments of joy and the moments of despair turned into a soup of existence. Everything distilled over time into its essence. There was a weird kind of freedom in that soup. I began to look at life through a very different lens.
With very few exceptions, my life has been spent playing a role – most often that of mediator or peacekeeper — but regardless of the role, there was outsized responsibility that really didn’t belong with me. The effort to live up to those responsibilities drives most of my anxiety, which then exacerbates a lack of confidence. It’s an exhausting cycle.
But something remarkable happened in the hospital. I recognized that I was off-stage. There was no role to play. In my last post I said that I knew “I was a slab of meat and the hospital and staff were there to coalesce me back into a whole”. The only responsibility I had was to be there. This clarity was more than conceptual – it was physical.
I know what I want to hear when I play keyboards. I know that 90% of the time I can play parts exactly the way I want to. But that other 10% is when the pressure is on – and the yips happen. If I screw up, I’m going to let down people I care about. I will be bad, wrong, and ultimately unlovable.
But in the hospital I could feel what it was like to live without the yips. I felt what it was like to trust myself. More than that, to believe in myself. I looked around at all of those people who were taking care of me, who were healing me, and who were simply caring for me – and I felt like I had an intrinsic value all my own. I was worthy of being a Priority.
In those moments, all of the other fabricated Priorities began to melt away. Not that things outside myself became unimportant, but their position was usurped by something inherently present – my self. I could be a Priority without guilt or shame. I still need to uphold my obligations and be impeccable with my word, but I should never fear taking my own needs and wants into consideration. I used to feel I had to negotiate (or brute force) what I felt was best for me. No, just make the decision. It can be that simple. The people who love and care for you will understand or adapt, or not – in which case, where is their level of capacity for understanding? This does not take negotiation off the table, but it does remove fear and anxiety from the equation.
So the focus for this cycle is Priority. Recognizing that I am worth being a Priority to myself, and recognizing that the causes of anxiety that I had placed ahead of my well-being do not deserve the Priority I had unwillingly given them. The lyric from the companion song says it all, wrapped in the reality of my summer: “Don’t think about all those things you fear, just be glad to be here.”
Categories: Blog, New Moon
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