Forecast Calls for Fog

Thick Fog.

This is how I feel for about ten days every month.

Like I am wading through a swamp of unrelenting dense greyness. The emotional barometric pressure gives me headaches, low energy and the inability to cut through anything with clarity.

Writing this entry has taken five days. It has flashed through eight or nine introductory paragraphs like a blinking yellow light warning me, No, not yet. No, not yet. No, not yet. So, I listen, try again. Listen, try again. Growl, lie down.

It’s like heading down multiple paths with reluctant optimism and hitting dead ends with increasing exasperation and resignation. Sure, I can do menial physical tasks. Go to the gym. Make lunch. Go to work. Pick up the children. Do laundry.

But emotional navigation? Intellectual insight?

Uhh, no.

I persevere. I stalk it like a clever lion. And often, I get right up within spitting distance. But the wildebeest of ‘My Epiphany’ takes off. In fact, it kind of serpentines off, as if to rub in the ridiculousness of my eager optimism.

If you could see inside my head, it looks a lot like back-to-back reruns of Coyote and roadrunner. Including… falling off the edge of the cliff and getting flattened by the anvil. Oh joy.

I like ‘My Epiphany’ to be the result of artistic observation, emotional reflection and irony. The reality is: all that adds up to fluff without excavating a ‘Basement Truth’.

What IS a Basement Truth?

The thing I have trouble finding in the fog. It lives in the cellar with the forgotten furniture stacked on crate tops beside the mousetrap, holiday decorations and circuit breaker box.

It’s covered in rust, dust and must.

BUT, it supports the whole house. Illuminates it. Is it.

No one wants to go down there much less make it public. And yet, it’s the foundation for anything meaningful to be built on.

Unfortunately, fog clings to the lowest places, so my big epiphanies are like castles built on stilts until… the hormones clear.

Hormones?

It’s enough to make you stop reading, right. Please, anything but that!

Emotions run higher. And lower. Foggy brain is a problem. Not to mention memory loss, carb issues and sugar cravings… It’s kind of like the world of X-treme sports. Except more dangerous… for everyone.

That’s why I try to watch out for those blinking yellow lights.

And instead of seeing them as irritating speed bumps, I picture myself as the heroine of an Academy award-winning movie in which I, the beautiful heroine, have periodic slow motion shots, which dramatize the incredible hurdles over which I must jump simply to make it to the next scene.

I am 45 years old.

I wouldn’t go back a single year of it. I used to want to be recognized, respected and reluctantly famous. Not necessarily idolized, worshipped, adored and acclaimed but dangerously close. Now, close is not good enough. And I am not at all reluctant.

I want it all.

The main difference is with the added caveat, amongst my family.

Here’s the kind of hilarious truth. Even with the rather foggy monthly forecast, every year I settle more into myself.

AND, although I wouldn’t yet say I worship myself, I am more and more tolerant of, let’s call them inconsistencies, and have come to embrace my craziness as creative genius, amongst my family, twenty days out of the month.