I am a boiled noodle.

In grief, the world feels distorted, like you're under a bell jar, the voices filtering in from behind the glass.  Life carries on, glassy and a little distant.  The grief has lessened now, the waves less regular.  The world is less distorted.

I moved from grief into a few weeks of unrelenting anxiety.  In anxiety, the world becomes very small.  Whatever occurs, you return to center, and the center to which you return is the thing you are anxious about.   It's like being in love, but instead of your beloved at the center, it is your worry.

The grip of anxiety has finally loosened (the external stimulus for the worrying almost gone for a few minutes anyway), and there, at the gooey center of myself, I am pummeled and tender.  What will be next?  Sickness? Depression? Healing? Transcendence?  I intend the latter.

I have this unsettled quivering thing in my center now (very different from grief, which is carried in the chest.) It is also very different from anxiety, which is a tight knot that makes it hard to breathe.  Now I can breathe, and ask myself, "What's this?"

At the gooey center, I realize I will never be the same again.  Now that I am getting to know death and cancer and heart defects and divorce and unimaginable loss more intimately, I cannot close my eyes to these things anymore.  I can't go skipping along daydreaming about my garden very much.  There's so much suffering.  I read on Facebook, on all those captioned pictures people send around, the message to enjoy your wild and precious life, seize the day, design your life, live your best life, go down your bucket list, and on and on.  I get the message, I really do.  But I'm not there.

Right now, I'm just a pile of overcooked noodles.  The dullest knife can cut me up into mushy pieces.

I think the thing to hope for is that, as life keeps cooking me, the tenderness blooms into compassion and understanding.  It isn't really any of my business, though.  My business is this moment, right now, drinking my tea, breathing, before I get back to my actual life: feeding cats, feeding children, watering gardens, washing dishes and clothes, packing snacks, living.   This moment is my teacher.