break.

i am a firm believer in relationships. i am talking about like the ones you have with your hairdresser or your therapist. i adore both of the women who carry those roles in my life. my hairdresser is the best and she’s been listening to my shit since i was in grad school. and my therapist; well she’s been on team alix since two thousand eleven. she got me through my first major heartbreak. she’s been there through the absolute garbage phases of my life and helped pick up all the pieces when grief left me broken. and it was no different when i plopped down into a chair in front of her last night and told her that life is literally standing on my chest, heavy like an elephant. ask me how i am right now. i dare you. do it. it’ll be a blast. ask me. how am i? literally on the brink of imploding. not exploding. but collapsing into myself. full implosion. why? oh for like a million reasons. my work schedule, my dissertation, my dedication to my mental health, my strong desire to stay committed to my physical health but also my exhaustion and this damn cold that has my head feeling like it’s full of cotton. oh and all the people who are my friends but only when it works for them and all the millions of things that i want to cross off my to do list but absolutely cannot because I haven’t found an ounce of time to actually do them. i dropped all of that into the lap of my therapist around nine o’clock last night. tears streaming down my face. exhaustion looming just behind my eyes. i could’ve fallen asleep on the drive up there. it just came spewing out; that lately i am carrying the weight of the world with nowhere to put the heavy stuff. so i am just walking around, arms full, chest crushed as the heaviness sinks my heels further and further into the ground. i have been holding onto expectations and hopes and guilt and frustration. piled even higher by failure and disappointment and change. feeling like there was no one to talk to and that nobody would listen anyways. and before you @ me, here’s what i mean.

what i often find in life these days is that when you’re feeling like existing is just massively aching and crushing you, anyone you tell is just gonna say, ‘yeah, so what?’ and that’s my issue. so what?! ugh. how bout- hell no! i know, i know. trust me i do. every single person is busy. every single person is doing the most. or the least. or whatever. i don’t care. it’s the fact that i am filled to the brim; practically overflowing with things that are bothering me, or things that are tearing me down, or things that are keeping me awake at night. and they are all just sitting here, spilling onto the lap of my therapist. we are all doing hard things. i totally get that. i really really really do. no, what i mean is- since everyone is doing hard things, since everyone is busy, since everyone is going through something- can we all just give ourselves a break? my therapist said this to me four times last night. she stopped me and said, ‘okay. give yourself a break. you’re doing hard things. you’re doing a lot. you’re doing more than others are. and even if no one sees it, you can see it.’ which basically means that you can acknowledge that you are busting your ass at work and commuting an hour and cooking and cleaning and writing massive papers and maintaining a skincare routine and actually wearing clean clothing and still making sure you hug your husband and your dog. and so when you lay down at ten o’clock and binge an episode of love is blind instead of sweating to a thirty minute workout, that’s for damn sure okay. so stop guilting yourself. stop being hard on yourself. give yourself a break.

we are not kind to ourselves. we put ourselves under the finest of microscopes. we drive ourselves to insanity but beating ourselves up. over the stupidest stuff. like a b on a paper or forgetting to run the dishwasher or not sending a payment in on time. it’s time to give ourselves a break. ya know, like allow ourselves the slack we have definitely earned. without a break, we may actually break.

and i don’t know about y’all, by my pieces never break evenly. so it requires a whole broom situation so.

let’s give ourselves a much needed, well deserved, very much so earned B R E A K.
before we actually break. okay? okay.

xo.