Vices & Grace

I’ve never been particularly graceful during changing seasons. I can always feel in the air when a big change is coming, and I think because of how intuitively I can sense these things, I tend to throw myself into them quicker than fate has planned the timeline. Call it impatience, call it anxiety, but when I know something is coming in the future I usually just want to rip that band aid off. The thing about life though, is that the big decisions, moves, and seasons rarely spring themselves upon us, and rarely settle quickly. So in a time where recently I have experienced 5 months of huge life changes, I’ve had to learn to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. My go-to coping mechanism of letting fear hijack the agenda, anxiety hastening the processes, and dealing with the fall out with alcohol till the emotions are less raw, well quite frankly, would have turned me into a permanent drunk. The problem with that, among many obvious things, it’s that by letting my emotions dictate things I’ve cheated myself out of valuable and necessary processing time and the time to acknowledge that an era is ending. So lately Instead, I’ve been forced to (or rather forced myself to) sit with my emotions, reflect and reconsider, and to my horror, actually move through these changes through multiple weeks and days until it’s all sorted on it’s own timeline. I’ve found that when you take time to sit with those feelings in the moment it’s active acceptance and there’s less time needed for grieving in the aftermath. In that, I’ve also made a few friends lately; exercise, healthy eating, hydration, and self care. Remembering to turn to one of these things in a time when I feel overwhelmed, has made it easier to stack my the positive habits up and keep myself on track day by day. Waking up with a clear mind and a body that feels cared for, works a whole lot better then a hangover and a night of regrets that’s for sure. (I could be wrong but I think this what adults would call getting their shit together?) During this time I’ve also learnt that when something is going to change and you’re afraid of that, acting on it doesn’t make the future moment less painful, it just takes away the last moments of that time that you could have treasured. You can actually sit in the knowledge that something is ending soon, but know that its not the time yet, and wait and prepare patiently till it is. I still may not be the most gracious person in the world when it comes to dealing with change, but at least recently I’ve not been my worst, and that will do for now.