No longer numb

I need some adventure. I need some risk.

It’s not that I am bored, but the way I have structured my life is with safety and low/moderate risk tolerance as priorities. And generally I like that; it has worked out quite well in my favor. I have a great life, a wonderful family, close friends, and a plan for the future.

But lately… I am feeling urges to occasionally do something different. Like what? Nothing as dramatic as blowing up my entire life, but small things that are outside my norm. Things like:

• Sharing my rawest innermost feelings with everyone via poetry (check).
• Driving — or even better, walking — across the entire country.
• Nice long hikes, for hours, miles, days, and preferably in the PNW. Campfires, time to think, and sleeping under the stars.
• I would absolutely be willing to get up in front of a crowd to read my poetry. 18 year old Katy, who did this in college and got so flushed/hot she almost passed out, would be amazed at 53 year old Katy.
• I might even be willing to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

Maybe to some of you, none of that seems particularly risky. Perhaps I am just a boring person, after all.

At any rate, risk seems like an insane strategy right now, given how simply existing in U.S. society is currently risky. So why am I wanting to break my boundaries and try new things in a time when it might be smartest to hunker down and ensure my family has enough resources for survival?

I don’t know the answer to that.

I have felt emotionally pretty numb for years, like I was made of stone and just pretending to have human emotions. And then, something broke open in me a couple of months ago and I am feeling EVERYTHING now, and feeling it hard. Love, loss, anger, regret, joy, grief. It all hurts and it makes me feel like I am throwing myself against the walls of my own skin trying to get out.

I’m listening to music again, all the time now, and the poetry, the emotion really punches me right in the stomach, especially when people sing it like they mean it. You know who sings it like he means it? Trent Goddamn Reznor. Every damn song, he is not fucking around — you can viscerally feel all his emotion just coming at you like a firehose. It’s glorious.

I don’t know exactly how to handle this flood I am experiencing, and I am not sure I’m doing a great job of it. I’m definitely oversharing my feelings with people. I’m sorry if you’re one of them and I am being Too Much. Just know it’s because I love you and desperately want to stay connected. I am trying to calm down and chill out but it’s pretty hard for me to do that at the moment.

Life is so short. Everything right now is so shitty and it’s getting worse and worse daily. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring — will we even have a country left? My previous future vision of myself, what I might be doing in old age has probably got to change.

I have no motivation to be dishonest about my feelings or to spend energy worrying about what people think. I think that’s why I am both writing and sharing all this very personal poetry. I am an open book. I’ll share pretty much anything now. What do you want to know? Just ask and I will tell you.

This plays into why I feel compelled to tell everyone I love them, to keep up my friendships better, to regularly write letters, emails, texts to people I love, and to tell social media to fuck right off — which is easier said than done because, as I have complained about before, it is the only way I am connected to some of you and without it, we’d probably simply fade away.

And… I don’t want to be alone. I want to be remembered, for something, anything. I guess those things are what it comes down to. I won’t need much in the end, but I will need something.