Some days...

The hours are quickly passing before I have to make my business trip.  As much as I worry about leaving, I also recognize how badly I need to get away and gain some perception.  Over the last few weeks I have felt my footing slipping, my will to do anything, draining away. It all feels like too much effort to force myself into an existence when I feel so overwhelmingly invisible.

I feel the need to slip into someplace where I don't expect to be seen or paid attention too.  I crave a world where I have no expectations of my loved ones, my career or my ability to be heard and noticed. It is the expectations that crush me. If I did not set expectations, then I would not have to register the disappointments. I need a crash course in how to live life without expectations, for myself or for anyone else.

I'm grateful for what I have in this life. I wish that felt like enough all the time. I wish my many blessings were enough to make me feel full and complete and successful at this stage in my life. Some days though,  they are not. Some days all I see are the failings, all I feel is the loneliness and the tide of darkness slowly creeping up on me.  Some days my accomplishments feel far too few and insubstantial and whatever ambitions I may have, seem to be overreaching.  Some days I wish I had someone I knew would pick up on the other end of a late night phone call or be the voice that asks me, "am I okay?".  Some days I wish I it wasn't so hard to feel seen.

It is crazy that someone who feels so alone is somehow looking forward to spending time actually being alone.  It is crazy that I actually find comfort in knowing I'm going some place where I will be actively ignored. Maybe its because for once, my expectations about people and situations will prove true and I won't be disappointed. For once, for the next few days, things will be exactly as I expect them to be.

I think I might be in the middle of a mid-life depression or something. Maybe I have felt some of the losses this past year more acutely then I thought.  I don't know.  I just know I feel vacant, like a placeholder, not a real person some days. I feel robotic and pedestrian. I oscillate between rage and an acquiescing numbness. I feel like I want to shine but can only manage the weakest flicker, like some dying candle losing its battle with the dark. At least I am not manic, wildly swinging from joy to despair, but rather I'm stuck in the middle of the grays...all the shadowed hues. My days of vivid color are too few and far between. I tell myself this will pass, this stage of my life is just some mediocre plateau and eventually I will wake up. I will wake up to me, to the woman in the mirror. I see her at least. She isn't invisible to me. I think she's just lost.