I suspect that this is not sustainable, waking up daily and having to choose to not be frustrated by the absolutely frustrating things around me.  For now, I’m managing to reset and refocus each morning, but I imagine I’ll either not be able to do that forever or the frustrating things will have to stop.  I’m not sure which.

I do actually feel amazing today, but part of that is related to my acknowledgment that I don’t actually owe anyone anything.  There are several situations in my life recently in which others are attempting–unintentionally–to obligate me into participation in their lives and in their situations.  I’m trying to find the lines and the balance between caring for the needs of those I love and taking care of my own life.  I spent ten years being the person my parents needed to be.  That was my choice.  I don’t want to complain about that because I value the time I spent with them, but I have a choice in these other situations.  I think it is easy to look at the past decade and assume that since I was able to put myself on pause for Mom & Dad, then I must just be a person who will do that for anyone.  I do want the best for everyone, but I’m starting to realize that they don’t always even consider what the best for me looks like.  

This is all vague, but it is important to my journey of self-actualization that started with my need to buy clothes that would fit my body.  It started with weight; it did not end with weight, and I don’t see myself giving up on finding ways to improve myself and achieve a life that is as fulfilling to me as I deserve.

Yesterday I spent a lot of time packing up things at my parents’ house.  I could see some big issues with my thought processes during packing, but I’m trying to be patient with myself about them.  One is my absolute desire to get back to creating art.  I love it, but the craft room was a room I shared with Mom and it made me sad to go back in there after she died, so I have spent years just wishing I would get back to it.  I packed up a lot of tools I’m looking forward to playing with.  The other was an issue plaguing me lately, and it sometimes causes me a bit of existential dread that I’m not sure how to handle.  I don’t have children.  I’m perfectly okay with that, but I want our family to carry on into the future.  I think my niblings will eventually care about some things, but all of them are so young that they don’t seem invested in their own pasts.  That’s understandable; I certainly wasn’t at their age.  What worries me is how to carry that legacy forward until they are ready.  A lot of people pass down the debris of the lives of their ancestor and my family is no different.  I have some of my great grandma McGuire’s pitcher collection, my second great grandpa Fuchs’ Bible, my grandpa Tucker’s pocket watches, my mom’s diaries.  But the list goes on and on.  My dad was a hoarder, and really the message I internalized was that severing oneself from the items of a loved one is disrespectful.  That thing was important to someone who is important to you, so keep it.  Keep everything.  Keep the photos, keep the quilts, keep the sugar dispenser, keep the wooden spoons, keep the emergency sewing kit, keep the receipts from 1972, keep the unopened mail from 1998.  And I realized when I was packing up everything to put it all in storage yesterday that I don’t want it.  

Now, this is a realization I have been having over and over and over.  Typically it ends in me distracting myself into not thinking about it too deeply.  I have used it to get rid of massive amounts of stuff, but often with especially well-loved things I stop and think those things need to be preserved.  For whom?  That’s the wall I keep coming to.  I love learning about my family.  I might love knowing that my second great grandma Spencer had a book that she loved a great deal, but that does not mean I would want to have her copy with me for the rest of my life.  

People are not the sum of their acquisitions.  I think about the people I’ve lost a lot more in organic ways than I ever do because I saw a ceramic tortoise or a coin purse full of newspaper clippings.  I have no obligation to shoulder the people I will spend my future with, but equally I have no obligation to shoulder the lives of the people I miss from the past.  My Mimi doesn’t exist in her Santas, and I don’t have to find a space for them.

[Walk #85]