“Breathe, L.”

My boss was quite literally holding me up as I couldn’t catch my breath, suspended upside down on a pull-up bar, trying to focus on keeping shoulders protracted, extended and engaged as hell and freaking out about this new maneuver. Skin the Cat, it’s called, and it looks cool but it’s scary as hell. I hadn’t done it before and I was super excited when my boss pushed me into trying it with his help. I’d wanted to try it for a while, and it was fun, the second and third time around. The first one though? I had to bail early and he had to give me a minute to take a deep breath, the aftershock of pure adrenaline and anxiety still coursing through me like a drug. I’d never been so terrified in a single moment. I’d never wanted to figure something out more.

Things are moving forward and the part of me that’s holding onto what’s missing is changing. It’s not necessarily going away or getting bigger, it’s just… evolving. I’m in limbo, the in-between, where I’m longing for what was but I wouldn’t change what is. I miss my old life, where I had weekends and someone to come home to, aside from the cat. I love my life exactly how it is, where I’m happiest working and home is the perfect, quiet sanctuary from everyone else’s energy, if only for a little while.

No part of me wonders what life would be like if I’d stayed in PR. The purpose I have in my life and myself now is so clear and straightforward it amazes me it took so long to find it. But when I think about what needed to change for this life to manifest, I find myself searching for the happy medium between where my life was and where it is. There is no happy medium though, because the happy part in the medium is the one thing I can’t change. And yet? I don’t know if I want it to change either. I want to move forward and move on, and in a lot of ways I’m doing exactly that. I also don’t want to move forward at all, because moving forward means letting go, and I’m not ready for that yet. Back to purgatory; back to the in-between.

Breathe, L. I gave Skin the Cat another go this week, and I took more time to focus on the breath, inhaling into the exhilaration and exhaling out anxiety, finding a moment of stillness to enjoy in between the two. Something I tell people who ask about meditating is to picture the inhale as the future, and the exhale as the past, and focus on finding that small pause between exhaling and inhaling – find the present, and stay there. Find the moment where you breathe into exhilaration and exhale anxiety. It’s the present, the in-between. It’s the middle ground between things that can’t coexist. That’s where I’m existing these days. I can’t change the past and I can’t predict the future. I’d make every decision exactly the same. I’m fucking terrified for what that means. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to make a choice to move forward or go back. So at least for now I’m going to exist in between.