A moment for "the cycle"

Today was hard again. I stopped many times along my drive because I was on the verge of sobbing. I couldn’t figure out why I was crying, but I was. I wanted to give up, to drive back home. On the side of the freeway in Nowhere, MN, I was absolutely panicking. I had no clue what I was doing and it felt like I was surely not achieving what I had set out to do.

I decided to go out on this trip because I needed to break the cycle I was in. I was constantly being pulled, by one part of myself, completely out of alignment. Some weeks, I was so in my body that I have no memory of that time at all. Other days, I was so debilitatingly stuck in my head thinking, rethinking, and thinking again. Some moments of pure connectedness would feel like ecstasy but would leave me dried out in the sun faster than I even knew it had happened. All of this is to say that even though I knew of the parts of myself that I needed to be in balance I felt like I had no control over any of it. I was constantly being pulled in some Direction by some demand and there was no time to even try and realign. So I needed some way to rip myself away from my demands, my routines, my cycle of life. This trip seemed as good an answer as any. And it was. I now wake up when I want to because I decide to. I go to bed when I am tired. I spend my day doing nothing that is really all that significant. I'm seeing places that don't seem to believe that they even exist. I am no longer being pulled by demands, no longer facing any responsibility except for what I decide to take on. It is liberating. but it's also scary and not necessarily what I think I wanted.

I villainized my " cycle “ that I was stuck in. I thought that it was the barrier to balance and therefore the barrier to happiness. In some ways this is correct. My cycle gave me ample opportunities and reasons to not for a second even think that balance was possible, let alone worth my time. My cycle was filled with distractions and coping mechanisms that would allow me to never confront my lack of fulfillment. But my cycle also gave me something to do. it provided me with ways to be productive, The chance to work hard at something already deemed significant. The cycle gave me peace of mind.

The cycle must give us all something or else we wouldn't use it. Maybe it is a result of propaganda from a time ago but it isn't enough to just exist right now. We have to do something. Our lives have to mean something. The cycle is just a cookie cutter way to ensure that we have something to do and, if we take it at face value, that what we are doing is meaningful. The cycle seems like a gift right about now. I'm still really struggling. I feel like this trip is far more than I signed up for. The issue with breaking from the cycle is that I'm risking a lot. I'm risking all of this being meaningless. I am risking that I produce nothing that people care about. I am risking that this is a waste of time. I am risking failing. A type of failure that I can't blame on some nebulous system on some so-called cycle but only on myself.

I find myself thinking that the way to combat this is probably to try and shift my perspective. Try to convince myself that if it is meaningful to me then that is enough. Throw out capitalist standards with the bathwater and screw productivity culture. But, right now, that feels disingenuous. That would just villanize the cycle all over again and that, as it turns out, isn't my goal. Maybe what I need to try and do is figure out a way to incorporate balance into the cycle. When I return I don't want to go back to wishing that I could just drive around the country again. I need to find a way to balance “balance” and the cycle. I don't think the cycle was my problem. I think it was my inability to see beyond the cycle that led me to being swept back out to see any time there was a deadline coming or a party to go to or simply a way to be distracted. As I continue on with this trip I want to spend my time looking around at all that exists and can exist when I look up and slow down and observe. But, as I create habits and new routines, I want to remember that the cycle exists and it's not going away just because I ran away from it. I want to remind myself that this time isn’t wasted, because I am simply trying to iterate the already existing cycle. If I can make it more effective, more efficient at creating meaning, then this will all have been worth it.