How to breathe where your feet are

I spend so much of my life counting the minutes until some upcoming anxiety inducing event is behind me. I am traveling this week to begin interviews for a new project, which has to be completed on a very short timeline. I awoke this morning to thunder, lightening, and pounding rain, and I lay there under the covers hyperventilating as I contemplated the fact that I will have to accomplish this thing, and I have no idea of the path through. My cousin Helen once advised me to write on a post-it these simple words: "I don't know how I will, I only know that I will." Post in a prominent place, she said, and then release the fear, replacing it with trust that the muses and the fates will guide me. It’s good advice. Even so, I'm over here trying to process the feeling of being adrift and afraid, to remind myself that I have been in this place many times before and have found my way, and I will this time, too. 

But you know, packing for the trip, choosing what to wear, contemplating showing up as my awkward self—it further ravels the anxiety I'm feeling this morning, which is making it so very hard to just breathe. 

I texted my friend last night: "I probably need some therapy around aging." I cannot stand seeing myself in the mirror these days, the circles deepening under my eyes, the skin creasing there just like my mother's, the lower part of my face morphing into the face I recall my father wearing in his latter years. And yet I loved my mother's wise and gentle eyes and the purposeful set of my father's mouth and chin. I loved every line, every crease and fold in their faces, but now I am struggling to love their faces on mine. It's all so weird and destabilizing. I lost fifty pounds four years ago now, and though I have not managed to drop any more, despite still having significant additional weight to lose, I consider it a win that I have kept those fifty lost pounds from creeping back on. But dear God, with each pound lost I seemed to age years, the skin under my chin loosening, the skin everywhere growing slack, making me actually miss how plump and smoothly filled out I was at the fattest version of myself. 

I had a hard time getting past the feeling that I ruined all the photos I was in at the bridal shower this weekend. I actually said this to my daughter, who put her hands on my shoulders and assured me that I was talking crazy. "That's some body dysmorphia taking over your brain, Mom," she said, not unkindly, and I just smiled and hugged her lovely self, because why make her play therapist to my crazy? But those same feelings are kicking up a holy racket right now, because tomorrow I travel to meet my new subject, and even though I know that two minutes after we sit down to talk I will forget about myself enough to give free rein to my curiosity about her journey, it isn't helping me settle myself in this moment. Hopefully my subject and I will build trust and I will discover what I need to know of her life to start writing. Even though I know this is how it has always worked in the past, and will probably work this time, too, I still have to get through the hours till I'm standing in front of her, and so I'm here this morning concentrating on trying to breathe. 

A friend posted the words below on social media yesterday. I alerted her that I would def be stealing it, because I sorely need its wisdom.