I’ve been feeling stuck lately and having a hard time writing. When I reflect on my stuck feelings…I feel frozen, a sense of impending doom if I make some wrong decision, it’s hard to feel my body and when I do it’s mostly just uncomfortable, my mind wants to take over and SOLVE something but mostly doesn’t know where to begin.
I’ll call this experience of stuckness ‘Elsa’. I feel angry with her at the moment. Elsa is getting in the way of my writing, and I LOVE to write. She’s probably also impeding my ability to do other things that feel important and urgent. Why is Elsa dictating how I spend my time? I refuse to let her win.
But what if Elsa is trying to help in some way? What is Elsa’s core intentions? Most often the parts of me that inhibit action tend to be protective. I identify as both a freezer and a fawner when it comes to high stress situations. These responses are protective measures to keep me safe and stop me from escalating any danger that is happening in my vicinity.
Since the pandemic, my vicinity has felt like it expanded a lot further than the North American bubble that I generally, mentally lived in. Elsa came and went for company. When she went away, I furiously covered the walls of my apartment in paintings like my life depended on it despite not identifying as a mural artist, and I watched and waited as a global disease unfolded. There was a level of connectedness with the rest of the world that had begun through my privileged wanderlust and it was both challenged and solidified through the shutting down and reopening of borders. The mandate that had trapped me on the other side of an invisible wall from most of my family challenged the privilege of border crossing I had experienced the entirety of my life.
Elsa supported me through this experience. She turned my brain off when I became overwhelmed by the things I lost before I was mentally too far outside of my window of tolerance. She kept me company during the many, MANY hours of alone time I experienced during the lockdown since I was living alone at the time. She generally helped me pass the time and likely the tension of her departures helped generate the fire of action that comes forth through me in her absence.
What if Elsa is the precursor to action? As I get older, I realize that often the most challenging part of challenging feelings is the judgement I heap upon myself for having the challenging feels in the first place. An unkind way to respond to someone who is already struggling I know. And then Elsa comes to the rescue to shut it all down. She is the emergency switch that takes brain offline until I can find a little thread of compassion for myself.
Heal Into Your Desires 