Sleepless night

I stayed up all night, researching a specific place in South America that looked really good to me, and the more I look, the better it sounds to me. At least, if I could gather up a bit of excitement and this wasn’t a last-ditch effort to save my life, and heal from trauma and everything, I might be auite giddy about the possibilities.

Spanish lessons, music lessons, dance lessons, a plethora of different potential accommodations (and though I am not exactly in the market for a house I was even surprised to find a nice cute one that wouldn’t be too far outside my budget). If I knew how to buy a house in another country and I could finagle residency and such it would not be such a bad thing to have a little house somewhere.

I just started thinking about money a bit last night: I hate thinking about money but it can actually be a grounding and empowering thing to be mindful of, somehow or other, though that gets a lot harder if I am all blah and don’t have the motivation or passion for anything. If I can’t think of anything that interests me and I don’t want to think about money and I don’t have a safe space to stay while I am working on things that can leave me feeling pretty hopeless on top of everything else that is hurting my heart and confusing my brain.

It is hard to think, this stuff will likely actually start get much easier from now on… if I can ‘get my act together’ as my host here often says and keep my chin up and believe in myself, but a part of me would almost rather be freaked out about money as a distraction than deal with my enormous feelings about everything else when that is no longer a concern. It opens up a big unknown: who am I, what am I doing, what am I doing it for?

Then I am left, with what, enough money to start moving forward as I might want, but no passion, means to visit friends but no one to visit, and it may become clear that the sense of social isolation and disconnection I feel was never about money, but something else, and I don’t really want to find out. Maybe it is about money. But I don’t quite know what the connection is anymore and I have a hard time imagining myself being sociable and happy right now even if some of the most perfect conditions appear before my eyes. Having been where I was, and having been through what I have, is awful, and I don’t know if there will ever be a time it will feel appropriate to stop being scared… what happened to my adventurous spirit?

When I do feel a little bit of excitement about the future or about some interest I try to taper it down a little bit because if I let myself get too excited about something the way my life is right now I could burn out in about five minutes. I want to do stuff that interests me without getting invested in a way that might being up emotions that leads to burnout and such things. I have no idea if the path I am taking will give me space to allow healing to happen or if I will just end up being really really sad. I don’t know.

Maybe because I decided this is most probably my best path forward, and I let myself get a little bit excited about it, I was able to read more in Spanish last night: the first two chapters of Gótico, or Mexican Gothic, and I find it quite easy to read plus it engaged me with a lot of traditional gothic tropes right from the beginning. It sounds like it is going to be set in some places that, though in Mexico, are not really distinctly Mexican in character.

I guess I will head out today, walk or something, I don’t know, and then hopefully I will sleep really well tonight…