Blooming trees, falling leaves—the seasons remind us when it’s time to grow and when it’s time to let go.
AmyAnn Cadwell & The Good Trade Team
Regaining focus has been a theme of life lately. I can write well enough to jump out of my intrusive thoughts, however, working on releasing them into the atmosphere so they no longer fester in my brain is a slightly harder task. Life has been progressively doom and gloom recently, and I am holding out for the bloom. It’s come to the end relationship wise, it’s not longer great on the finding-a-new-job front and between panic attacks, uncontrollable crying and bursts of zero self confidence, I am somehow muddling through.
Quite a few times recently I’ve found myself losing that hope that I’ve always had. Just momentarily, thankfully. But it’s been so unsettling to feel like that again, but even deeper this time. I really worked so hard on being mentally strong and I’m saddened that I’ve not been as strong this time. I guess though, someone who knows me or regularly reads, maybe they’re thinking “but Anna, you’re so resilient, look how far you’ve come”. And it is that, when I try to think what others would say to me, that I realise I need to be kinder to myself. There’s no dramatic need to be someone I’m not, and when I really wish I am just to escape the thoughts, that makes me feel even worse. This is clearly the ‘era’ – in the words of Taylor Swift – where I learn to let go of my expectations, fears and thoughts that I am the problem. There’s always going to be a list of things I can work on about myself (I have a list longer than twenty things), but the cruelty in my thoughts all directed at me just has to stop. And that is why I write.
Listening to women in a cafe talk about their children, Whistable and the overpriced nature of renting Airbnbs – that’s what my environment was for a short while. Inhaling orange and ginger cake with a sweet icing, a frothy large cappuccino and typing away on this laptop in dodgy yellow-hued lighting that feels cosy yet is unsettling to the eyes. Coffee has become a little bit of a painful memory, but I’m forcing down a cappuccino when out and about at every opportunity – because I refuse to tie every little moment to a person, a place, a past experience or memory. My over-romancing the world makes it beautiful but it also makes it so painful. When I am deserving really of just as much grace as others. Feeling so deeply is an absolute blessing, but there’s a curse in it too. However, the vulnerability of it and then writing it all out, that flow that happens as the words tumble. The pattern, the softness, the strength of the words – that’s why I keep writing and writing. I could write about nothing at all and my observant mind would still pick up on the sounds of a room, the smell of varnish that coats these tables and chairs, and the damp November air that is sweating on the windows.
All my sorrows over love, as my joys, are written privately in a journal because those painful thoughts can only be private until I’ve dealt with them and can set them free like fireflies from a jar. Heartbreak when you’ve made a mutual, mature decision isn’t easier I can tell you that. This pain is so great that I don’t even feel like it’s happened. The anxiety over losing someone, the pure and bitter emotion that crawls up my back and sits in my lungs and my chest that I feel like I have to howl to get out. There’s no way I’ll have been the only one to feel this so intensely, there will be others. I’m not sure that this will be only grand amour because how can you ever really know. I just don’t know how to work this one out for now, so I’m just going to have to allow time to pass, and time to heal.
So I will sit here for now, eating the froth from my empty cappuccino mug with the silver spoon, as the floors are being swept and the music is overwhelmingly relevant.
Hope will come. It always comes back.
Love,
Anna
kulayrosas 