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I’ve been trying to start this for forty-seven minutes now.

I guess that’s as good a start as any.

The theme of the week is something like, “is there somewhere you feel at peace.”  I was going to write about it, but after forty-seven minutes, it occurred to me that, really, there isn’t.

I’m constantly stressed about something or other.  I am never satisfied, never at peace. 

I’ve been working on it, though, trying to find moments of peace in my cortisol-colored life.  It’s hard, being this high strung.  They say stress impacts your health.  Of this I have little doubt, but at the same time it’s hard to drop a pattern of behavior that was once necessary for survival.

I can’t seem to convince myself that this fight-or-flight thing can stop.  For years, we were on the verge of financial ruin.  Probably from the time I was 12 until quite recently, I had no stability in my life.  I lived in constant fear of losing my home, and consequently I never felt as if I had a home.  Home was something that could be taken away, so I’ve never grown too attached to any place. 

“Home” as a concept, or feeling, can also be taken, or at least, never achieved.

As long as I live with people from whom I must hide the majority of my character, I will never have a home.  There is no place where I can be myself, without pretense or pretend. 

But I am finding moments of peace, moments of “home” if you will.  Moments where I feel like I actually belong somewhere, that I’m not cursed to eternally aimlessly drift.  Honestly, it’s terrifying.  I don’t know how commit, how to…anchor myself. 

To a place, to a person, to anything.

Saying, “I have commitment issues” is so cliché.  But I suppose that’s what it comes down to.  So many things have been taken from me, dangled in front of me and snatched away, or threatened, that I just cannot attach to anything or anyone.  I am a drifter, and that’s safe.

Even if it means that “peace” remains a foreign concept to me.

But I am getting to a point where I want to commit, I want to attach, I want to let go.  I don’t know how.

I sat here for 45 minutes today, though, feeling something that might have been peace.  It’s a start.