Tenderness and Relief

No matter the path you walk or where you hang your hat, sometimes the wolf is at the door or following close behind.  An illness sneaks in and the creditors won't stop calling. There are no clean towels for guests and the lawn looks like nobody lives here anymore. You can't stop eating the crap food you can barely afford and you no longer recognize what your swollen body has become. You are somehow desired and quite ravenously revered by an older, wealthy gentleman who's pretty creative in the "Let's try this" department, but all you really want through and from any of this is some tenderness and relief.

Sometimes a songwriter like me isn't always inspired by the dark, hidden corners of real life.  Sometimes it's just shitty and difficult to navigate the map of your own making. Sometimes some navel-gazing reality-check reflection and replenishment is required, if you're as sensitive to the world as I unfortunately am.

So for several days you disconnect from the noise, moving fully into the breakdown and pizza binges.  Embracing the lactose-intolerant reactions to some self-inflicted punishment for being a 40-something person who hasn't yet figured it all out.  You wake up knowing you're destined to flip burgers with the college kids very soon and forever if you don't figure at least yourself out, but that thought alone is too heavy to bear so back to bed with you.  You're clearly not done purging the self-pity yet.

The good news is, after a few days of unplugging the phone and feeling sick as a dog, the cloudy poor-me haze begins to clear again. Everything from the first paragraph remains the same, but you and your attitude have started to shift. You notice how wonderful it is to keep finding creative ways to bounce back. You're grateful that in spite of all the belongings you've sold to stay alive, you still have your guitar and lots of places and people inviting you to play it. You realize that your former boss was right.  "You are responsible for your own happiness at work." A sentence that enraged you at the time, but holds such raw and lovely truth.  If you can't find the beauty in what you have and what you do, who can really do it for you?

And so you become aware again that you chose this and that you actually do love this live-moment-to-moment life that happens to allow you to stay in bed for 3 days when the need strikes. In spite of how your waistline has expanded beyond any of  the waistbands in the drawer, you know you are growing more than physically. There is tenderness and relief everywhere and you are learning, sometimes the ridiculously hard way, how to recognize them and sometimes even point them out to the other down-n-outters around you.

You're not quite yet ready to answer the phone, but your guitar is by your hip and your cat is at your feet and the rain out there makes you feel steadier and more safe in here.

You write a blog post about it. You close by wishing your readers lots of tenderness and relief when they need them most, too.