Close Friends

They're a blessing aren't they.  They don't care how paranoid you are they pick you up, dust you down and set you on your way again.  Hopefully I do that for them too.  I've been having a really difficult time of it recently because I don't actually know how to cope without all my defence mechanisms in place and all my fail safes.  Where I go when I can't cope with the world or my situation or life is into myself, I retreat into my head and I used to be OK with that.

My head though is these days a not so good place to be as a few Monday's back will testify.  It is full of conflict and that's because I don't really speak to anyone in depth about the innermost stuff that's gone on, even this blog doesn't go into the depths of the stuff that can fester inside my overactive head.  Hence this whole change in me these past 3 weeks (yes that's all it is).  It has been unbelievably releasing and inducing great freedom of thought but precious little action.  I've explored letting my emotions loose and keeping my analytical self as far in the background as possible and its been brilliant and its been hell, ups and downs, highs and atrocious lows.  

The problem has been an almost overload of things happening to me that have been suppressed most of my life, strong emotional things just normal stuff to many I suppose but to an INTJ this stuff is just way off beam - it doesn't even come into the normal day to day experiences.  It's like standing on a breakwater during a storm, watching lightning and thunder flash and crash around you, the Aurora Borealis overhead, the reflection of a calm sea, the stars in the firmament and so many experiences all suddenly unleashed and thrown at me in a few weeks.  It's almost as if I haven't lived all these years.  I know that's not true but that is what it feels like.

I said many many times in this blog that I never really celebrated life and living and never really shouted about being clear or having survived.  I questioned WHY had I been spared, what was the plan and what was I going to do with this great gift?  

The very first thing is to start living and so it has proved, these past three weeks I have put in place all the steps to do that but - someone superglued my running shoes to the starting blocks.   Most probably my head - it doesn't approve of being frivolous or having fun too much it doesn't understand that concept and it doesn't compute in the rational world built inside my brain. Stuff has to make sense.  If it doesn't make sense it is discarded.  It can never see that sometimes it is what if, why the hell not, for the crack, for the rush, for the danger, for the thrill, for the beat of your heart, for the spectacle, for the experience itself, for the emotion for the love of it.

Today finally dawned after a chat last night with a very close friend and things were different for two reasons.  First another friend had sad news - he has upper GI Cancer he doesn't want to talk to anyone - so I've suggested he write emails to me and I've given him some words of mine.  This is particularly sad to me this morning but it suddenly spurred me on to then think about my own situation a bit more.  I had this chat last night and I realised that my friends are going to help me more than I thought they would.  They are on my side and they want me to pull out of this long period of mourning for myself and get the hell out of those bad places and into somewhere new and wonderful.  I said something wonderful is about to happen a few weeks back well it has or is happening now.

Today the gloom lifted a little and some of the mourning and grieving for the old me moved away.  My friend has cancer - I know exactly what that is like, I know the agonies that he is going through, the utter mental anguish and the fear and terror for that is what goes on inside.  Look at photos of me 6 years ago and you can see a drawn face, grey pallor and in my eyes you can see fear, terror and it is disturbing for me to go and look at those photos because I look sick.  It would be unfair on my friend or all other sufferers to survive and not somehow deliver on a covenant we probably all made at one time "If I survive this I'm going to........." (just add in whatever it should be).  Somehow I have an obligation to those who didn't survive to go and make more of my life and do something useful with it. 

For me I thought that meant go build something, go help someone and I worked at the Charity, I worked on big social ideas and ended up here wondering what the hell do I need to do?  I finally realised sometime ago that whilst it would be nice to have stuff and things, material things, money to go do great things or just to spend that in fact, there are very few material things that I have that I can't do without.  I like a few things but the remainder no longer mean anything to me. If I take Maslow's hierarchy of needs and suddenly, whilst it is a somewhat simple explanation, it sums up where I am.  If I can have these things then why should I want any others?  

I'm not saying that I've suddenly made a huge step overnight but I've got over the grieving for changing my life albeit in a little way.  Whilst it is great being an INTJ, an "intellectual" or a "Scientist" in terms of being alive, they don't come close.  Achieving a higher intellectual plateau is an interesting thing to achieve but surely not at the cost of your life, your experiences, love, happiness and just enjoying life for the sake of it.

I've already made the choice and hadn't realised it was going to be so difficult for me.  I'm blessed with some wonderful friends who I know are rooting for me to climb out of the huge rut I was in and emerge blinking into the light of the day.  Today is a small small step in that process but finally I don't feel so full of dread as I have these past weeks.  Today it feels right and I'm beginning to make some progress towards living my life once again.