Come across you, lost and broken. You're coming to, but you're slow and waking. You start to shake, you still haven't spoken, what happened?

Confidence -- what a stranger you have been.

Ebb and flow. This feeling will no doubt ebb and flow. But I don't want to sit in silence anymore. This is a turning point, and I'm writing it down.

I want my life back. I want my confidence back. I want my thoughts back.

I do not have to stay a victim. I will not be beaten. Yes, I will still struggle. I will have bad days. I will be anxious. But this is not who I am, this is not who I want to be. I do not feel this way because I want it or because I am doing it to myself. But I also don't have to feel this way.

Now we're here and it turns to chaos, hurricane coming all around us. They're gonna crack, don't you back from the window, you stay low.

I do not have to be ashamed. I do not have to internalize. I do not have to blame myself. I do not have to apologize for feeling sad, even if I hate it. I do not have to apologize for anger -- I must feel it, or it turns in on me. I do not need to rationalize my anger. I do not have to doubt my every ability. I have been blessed with a future.

I do not control what happens day-to-day. And so quickly someone can take away control. But no more will I sit in silence. This is a new chapter -- I will not be ashamed.

I am reclaiming my life, slowly.

Some of this was here before us -- all of this will go after us. It never stops until we give in...give in, say when.

it's a fight between my heart and mind, no one really wins this time. in the endless fight of grace and pride, i don't want to win this time.

Sad when each day becomes a reminder of what you aren't capable of. Frustrating when most days taunt you and your lack of progress. It becomes impossible not to internalize.

Then one day you think about how you aren't able to do things you love because you've become immersed in an unattainable goal that you aren't smart enough to conquer.

you stole my overture...oh I can't escape. who are we? i can't forgive you and i can't forget. why?

I started this post with the following:

"Somewhere I learned to rationalize away my emotions."

Then the cursor sat there, blinking at me. Deleeeeeeeeeeete. "Alright, think, Angelyn -- what do you actually want to write about?" ......moments pass. And finally! Ready to write!

"Somewhere I learned to rationalize away my emotions."

Blinking cursor.

I'm having trouble writing. :)

Rationalizing my emotions is obviously on my mind; I think I just hate the sentence.

It's because I know where ...I know why.... I learned to rationalize my emotions. That's not why I'm writing. I did it to deal and to cope. To eliminate at least a few worries and concerns, I learned to find the source: if I know where an emotion came from, I am much more able to handle it. I can either fix the problem or learn to deal with it. Not to mention that determining the problem source reduces hurt feelings when communicating.

But I couldn't do that today. I knew the problem, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't understand it. Today there was a moment where I was flat-out told "seriously, don't try to rationalize...stop trying to explain. How do you feel?"

Suddenly I realized I was in uncharted territory. So I explained around my feeling one more time. I explained the when-where-why-what-how. But at the core I simply felt. In all my rationalizing of how I felt I hadn't realized how I felt.

Then, suddenly, I said how I felt out loud.

A thousand thoughts jumped into my head:

"what?? no, angelyn, are you sure? don't feel like that. you can't feel that way. do you remember what happened? think about it, you know what the problem is, you know why you feel this way, you understand what was really going on there, you know what happened, you get it. how can you still feel that way?"

I'm not sure. And I don't understand. I just know I do.

So...maybe this is vague. Maybe, like I did, you sat in your 2nd grade classroom and learned that emotions were normal. Hopefully you were also like me and at the same time were dying your Elmer's glue red using a red Crayola marker.

But maybe I'm only writing so that I remember. <3 xanga.