Hibernating

Did you know hibernation isn’t animals actually sleeping for 3 or 4 months? I didn’t. I learned a lot of things in school, but somehow I missed that. I had full plans to hibernate out here. I brought all of my pillows and blankets inside (thank you Jackie for quilting me the greatest comfort blanket ever and thank you Adam for finding my favorite book printed on the softest blanket ever), and I made this room a little quiet den of books and candles. And then I set out to research how many hours a day am I realistically allowed to sleep. I could feel my body pushing back against me for not loving it enough, and the only thing I really know how to do to reset that feeling is sleep. But then I found hibernation is not just sleep. It’s basically animals eating as much as they can (uh, check. I was in the south. If you think I didn’t gain 20 pounds you’re definitely wrong.), then chilling for however long their little bodies need to to conserve energy when food is scarce. 

So in that sense, I am hibernating. I’m just not doing it with sleep. And since I am an animal with access to a grocery store, I don’t really need to conserve the food energy.

What I do need to conserve, however, is my emotional energy. 

Yeah we’re about to get vaguely deep here so either grab your scuba tank or enjoy snorkeling, I won’t judge you if you bail. 

The last few years have been weird for me, because they’ve been good but they’ve also been a lot of me trying (somewhat desperately) to figure out what I wanted, what I liked, and what would make me happy. And if he made it this far, Dad, you were right. I did indeed just need to chill out and let things happen. 

I went through my phone at 3 am the other day to clear out old photos because that’s what you do when it’s a virgo full moon and you can’t sleep and are a somewhat confused 27 year old with no real responsibilities. And what I found made me very happy and very sad. It was a lot of screenshots of conversations with the people I was dating at the time, or photos of work. That was about it. For four years of photos. There were occasional family or friend photos interspersed in there, or silly things I see on the internet and save to make me laugh later. But mostly, it was me trying on about 15 different personalities to figure out which one I liked best (and by that I mean, which one people liked best).

I’m aware there are some of you on here who have known me for a long time, and are probably acutely aware this is not a new phenomenon for me, and it’s something I’ve been doing for a long time. Unfortunately for me, it’s something I only realized in this past year, and something I was not fully confronted with until that night.

And it’s not a bad thing, but it is a tiring thing. It’s weird and strange to not just relax into your skin because you want to make everyone around you happy and stimulated and excited and intrigued all the time. It comes and goes in waves, but looking through my phone, it was definitely present in every relationship, every work project, and every moment I spent crawled all the way up inside my head evaluating an interaction instead of enjoying the moment with people I loved. Seeing it all laid out like that just made one thing really, really clear, I wasn’t letting myself be happy. I was monitoring and adjusting myself to nobody’s detriment but my own, and it is a little silly to live like this now that I’m aware of it. 

So it was weird when I found myself smiling about it. And happy. And grabbing my notepad to make sure I remembered that I did this in the morning. I’ll spare you the pages, but the final notes made me happy, and are still making me happy. 

I can do better.

I am doing better.

I am here.

It is right now.

And this is all I have.