I can't today

The news is heavy today. I see it. I hear it. I know.

But I can't today.

I know that there is action to take, good work to do, right words to say, and I see the people I love deep in it.

But I can't today.

I want to be the kind of person who sees a need and leaps into action, who fights the good fight, who makes all the right kinds of trouble at all the right moments. Who goes after the guns, who protects trans kids and reproductive rights, who saves Ukraine and stops climate change. I want to be that kind of person and I love and admire those people and I know I KNOW there are right things to do.

But I can't today.

Today is heavy, and I have a brain and a body that crack when it's heavy, that need quiet to process and feel, that buckle under the pressures of tragedy and conflict and the unbelievable enormity of the world's grief. Tomorrow I will write my congressmen. I will do whatever it is I can think to do, whatever the people who are braver and smarter and stronger than I tell me to do. And you won't necessarily see it on my social media echo chamber. But I will be doing what I can in my own way. Tomorrow.

But I can't today 

Lost

 I am sitting on my bed in the middle of the morning. My kids are at school. My feet are cold. Outside my window, the sky is gray and misty and I have to turn on a few more lights to be able to see in my room.

In my head, it's gray too.

I am feeling lost in my life lately. I am fairly certain that I want to create, that I want to make something that's mine, that's special, that I can put out into the world. I am fairly certain that it's not optional, that not creating anything is eating away at my insides. Festering. 

But I'm still just sitting here, lost.

A few years ago, when both my kids started school, I went into a place when it was time for me to go out into the world. When I was ready to try things. When there was time and space to be not just mom. And I started, tentatively. I substitute taught. I wrote, some. I ran. I tried a variety of things, and I was just starting to maybe find my way.

And then the pandemic hit, and my kids were home with me all the time again, and there was no space in my head or in my life for everything, and I went into stasis. Survival. Get through the day mode. And that was okay.

But now I'm back to this place with the space, with the wide open world in front of me, and I don't know what to do. I'm paralyzed. I'm stuck. I'm hiding in closets or under the covers to keep from being alone and lost in the world. 

I know that I need to do something, make something, but I don't know where to begin.