Est, Baby

My brain is a jumbled, churning whirlwind of thoughts and emotions. Fifty urgent tasks ticker-tape through my mind at a frenzied pace. I've got so many different interests pulling on me, it feels like my limbs are being racked on a Medieval torture device. To compound my frustration, all this turmoil only leaves me utterly spent, exhausted, collapsed. I feel like I'm being sucked down, stuck to the earth, unable to get up off the floor. Sick or not, I've gotta get a grip! If I can't catch the whirling ball of my own reality before it crashes to smithereens, nobody will!

So I turned on the Werner Erhard documentary Transformation, about his infamous est seminars from the '70's and '80's. Last year his hard-core philosophy of personal-responsibility, wrapped up in a bunch of insults aimed toward the stupidity of humanity, helped me reign in my out-of-control life. Somewhere between now and then I regressed back to my old patterns of anger, bitterness and avoidance. Indulging those feelings is a mighty short road to total self-destruction. I've worked too hard, and come too far, to let a weak mind simmer away my progress into oblivion! 

Did watching the documentary transform me? No. Anyone with chronic illness knows life is too complicated to make a "decision" and get instant change. But Mr. Erhard's dogma helped. He reminded me so much more is in my control than I believe. The notion that ones reality is perceived by their emotions choked me up a bit. Man have I fallen back into that trap! His unrelenting belief that a person's life is their own responsibility, and theirs alone, was like salve to my aching soul. I realized that's precisely where I've gone wrong. Somewhere in the last five months I lost sight of the importance of owning my life, 100%, and not expecting anything from anyone. Things got so hard I was unable to be there for myself. I stopped standing on my own two feet and became a gaping hole of need. In fact, I've fallen on my ass and am being sucked down into the quicksand of my own creation!

Est. It is. It is what it is. What is, is. The past, which swirls together to create the present, isn't changeable. But the future, right now, is. Each moment is the future, and that is where the fork in the road emerges. Where I can go from victim to victor, angry to actualizer, stagnant to mobile, stuck to progressive. I can clear my mind, pick what's most important to move forward, and sink my hungry teeth into the juicy flesh of personal responsibility.           

Thanks for joining,
Leah

*Please vote once a day in Healthline's Top Health Blogs Contest! Currently in 10th place, thanks so much for the votes!

#fibromyalgia #fibro #fibromyalgiablog #wernererhard #transformation #est #pickyourselfup #moveforward #personalresponsibility #healthlineblogcontest #healthblog          

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back In The Saddle

Image
Well I got back on the horse. What else am I going to do? Take a long walk off a short pier or go play in traffic? So here I sit ready to try again. Raw, insecure and uncertain, but here I am. As I sort through the disillusionment in my mind I realize many of the sanity-saving tools I employed along the way got dropped in the dust a while back. I fell into my old behavior patterns. I allowed negativity and demands to infiltrate my sense of responsibility to myself. It's a big job, to regain my lost ground. I can do it, though. Not all at once, perfectly or on the first try, but it can be done. Of course this requires a significant amount of isolation and reflection. Accepting some will grumble over the selfish action of me taking care of me. Realizing that is not my problem. In fact, expecting myself to get a handle on my issues and then resume a level of interdependent living is exactly why I wound up back here in the first place.  I have finally accepted I cannot go back....
Read more

Waiting On the World to Care

Image
This blog has sat silent for many moons. For eight full ones, more or less, I've been imprisoned in an exile of my own creation. Initially I was so angry about my health relapse I didn't know what to say, other than to hurl epic amounts of fury at my keyboard. I had no solutions, no answers, and nothing positive to contribute. So instead of spewing hate all over the permanent cloud of internet technology, I donned the hair shirt of self-flagellation and turned that anger inward. It's been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad eight months. As I got sicker and sicker, I got madder and madder. The angrier I became, the more I sequestered myself. I refused to talk about my problems or how I felt. It seemed pointless, like it didn't matter. Nobody could do anything about it or begin to comprehend my reality. There was just me, an isolated island of misery, who wanted to do anything but talk about being an isolated island of misery. But nobody understood that either. I...
Read more

Incurable Fog

Image
One day while driving down the street I forgot where I was. Mind you I just left Target and was headed toward home so had certainly been there before, but in that instant I couldn't have told you where I was on the planet if my life depended on it. I had to pull over and cry for a while, gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair over the fact that I was thirty years old and becoming so sick with something so unfixable, I was literally losing my mind. Flash forward a few years to when I had settled into the reality of living with fibromyalgia. Working retail was a painful necessity that was quickly running its course, so I set about trying to figure what on earth to do to earn a living. Naturally, this required me to take a Spanish course at the local community college. Not because I wanted to earn money off my non-existent Spanish 1 skills, but because I desperately needed to know if my brain was capable of learning and retaining new information, and I took French in high school.  I wo...
Read more