The farther I travel, the more I am disoriented.

🌿 I might desperately need healing, but I also know I must not victimize myself.
I might desperately need security, but I also know I must not seek comfort.
I might desperately need clarity, but I also know I must not paralyze in front of uncertainty.
I might desperately need rebirth, but I also know I must not dramatize pain into dying.

🍸 I might desperately need connection, but I also know I must not force attachment.
I might desperately need truce, but I also know I must resist the current.
I might desperately need nourishment, but I also know I must not mistaken it for consumption.
I might desperately need fulfillment, but I also know I must sit in the void.

⛵ I might desperately need reassurance, but I also know I must not chase validation.
I might desperately need alliance, but I also know I must embrace solitude.
I might desperately need tenderness, but I also know I must not legitimize weakness.
I might desperately need confidence, but I also know I must surrender to ignorance.

❤️‍🩹 I might desperately need self-worth, but I also know I must not inflate the ego.
I might desperately need purpose, but I also know I must not impose a superficial purpose onto life.
I might desperately need answers, but I also know I must not rush to premature conclusions.
I might desperately need anchors, but I also know I must not settle for short-term contentment.

🎺 Perhaps I should add color to my life, but running back to distractions is no remedy.
Perhaps I should add sound to my life, but filling the silence muffles the faintest whisper.
Perhaps I should find an exit, but the walls are echoing back what meant to be heard.
Perhaps I should take it easy with the fog, but I'm drawn to what's beyond and what has always lurked.

🌵 Perhaps I should trust my growth, but I risk looking down to those I've outgrown.
Perhaps I should be more assertive, but it's hard to tell it apart from being stubborn.
Perhaps I should take more time to think it through, but that could be a disguise for procrastination, and now the disguise is blown.
Perhaps I should keep searching for what I want, but why am I so hard to be pleased? I hear my own scorn.

🦄 Perhaps I should reunite with what I walked away from, but I fear it would undo all the effort.
Perhaps I should make peace with what I've long fought, but the image of the boiling frog frightens me more.
Perhaps I should cultivate a sense of home, but home cannot harbor the ambition to sail far.
Perhaps I should slow down, but I've forgotten how to rest, and trying to rest exhausts me more.

I ran across someone else's writing that strikes me as brutally accurate: "At this point I honestly can't tell whether I need a hug, ten bottles of beer, a visit to a shrink, six months of sleep, or an exit from life courtesy of a passing car."

There is distortion in my sensing, dissonance in my cognition, and contradiction in my reasoning.

I have renormalized everything so I no longer know what's normal.

I have strayed so far from my old sense of comfort that familiarity itself becomes unfamiliar.

I've asked for support, but advice offered by others feel like nuggets too small to light up the vast hole.

A voice inside keeps murmuring “it's the last stretch, it's the last stretch …” But after a thousand proposed “last stretches”, belief has faded. Yet I fear that my unbelief would disappoint my soul.

Perhaps I simply need help, help in every imaginable sense.

Also perhaps I simply need nothing but being present with myself.

Perhaps I simply need truth. A truth that illuminates why I see distressing dead-ends everywhere.

Dear me, let me tell you, the truth lies in the paradox.

Dear me, listen:

Open your eyes.
See what you see, not what you wish were there.

Move your feet.
Not forward, just away from where you stood.

Make some noise.
Garbage feels better to create than nothing at all.

Hold the paradox.
Drop the impulse to justify and let the silence talk.

Hold the paradox and caress both sides.