addiction |

Hey everyone.

Workout – 6 miles in Central Park.

I don’t know what it is, but my legs have been feeling super dead since school started back in August. In fact, my entire body has just been feeling exhausted. I know that I don’t get enough sleep, but I didn’t get much sleep at home… So no change there. I also am working out significantly less than I was over the summer (which I need to change)… So I don’t get why I have been feeling this way.

That being said, I am so happy to be running again after having to take almost 3 weeks off. I just wish that my body was as happy to be running as my brain is.

I also just need to state for the umpteenth time just how much I love running in Central Park. Not only is it aesthetically beautiful, but it is also just such a…. I don’t know… spiritual(?) place to me. The vibe is just amazing.

I love how busy it is. I love seeing people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, etc. out running, walking, and biking. It’s one of those unique places where you can be surrounded by activity, but still be enveloped by a feeling of absolute serenity.

I also love how it feels like a completely different world than New York City. Here you have what is one of the busiest cities in the world, yet it couldn’t feel any less like it.

I found myself in the middle of the “woods” today during my run. I hit a dead end, and very unlike myself, I felt compelled to stop an meditate. I sat down on a rock, closed my eyes, and meditated in the style that I spoke about the other day. Yup, I did the chants and everything. I seriously felt myself leave myself if that makes any sense. I was surrounded by nature and the sounds of the birds and the wind (today was the coldest and windiest day every, I swear) blowing through the trees. I just kind of felt at complete peace with the world and with myself, and that is not a feeling that I am used to. Typically, I am just constantly consumed by my complete self loathing.

I really want to become a more spiritual person. It’s funny actually… We live in such an amazing and storage and magical world. I am grateful for the air I breathe and the sky above me and the grass and the water and for all of the places that I have been and for all of the places that I hope to someday go. That all being said, I can never get myself to just sit and meditate and really take it all in.

In my mind, I am the kind of person that wants to run around barefoot to absorb the earth’s vibrations and practices yoga, and meditates daily… But I’m not. But I want to be. Does that make any sense?

I wish I could pinpoint exactly what is holding me back. I don’t know if it’s some sort of fear or anxiety surrounding this.. Or if it is just my putting obscene amount of pressure on myself as I always do.

I, like many people suffering from eating disorders, addiction, etc., am a very extreme person. When I focus my attention on something, I feel that I need to give that one thing 110%. Anything less absolute perfection is a complete failure and failure can’t happen because then I just spiral downward into a self-inflicted cycle of despair over my, “not being good enough.” I want to be this spiritual person, but I also like makeup and clothes and don’t want to just get rid of everything and start living a life of complete minimalism. I am not in the place right now where I want to go 100% vegan (although I will say that my diet is predominantly plant based). Because of these factors, along with my not meditating every day or living and breathing yoga, I feel as though if I were to try to discover a type of spirituality… I would be a fraud.

That being said, I know that I need to, in some form, live a more spiritual life.

I grew up attending Catholic school my entire life. I was never one of the super duper into the church/involved in every type of church organization type of kids. But I did, in my own quiet way, have a deeply routed faith. And I cannot even begin to tell you how many times that faith, quite literally, saved my life.

When I was younger and having my severe suicidal thoughts, it was a fear of going to hell (I had a teacher who told me that suicides go to hell once and it stuck with me) that kept me from going through with the act. I now believe that if there is a hell, any God worth loving wouldn’t send a soul there that was hurting so deeply that they felt the need to end their lives. Still, this fear kept me from doing the unthinkable.

When I was in the hospital, having incapacitating panic attacks that had me screaming into pillows and shaking so violently that my IV would come out, it was a little rosary that my mom gave me that was the only way I could calm myself down. Each night in the hospital, I would fall asleep running those little beads through my fingers and praying.

Then one day, I woke up and my faith was gone. I kid you not, there was no event (yes my dad had died the previous year, but I never felt an anger towards God or a doubting in His existence from that) leading up to it. I just woke up this morning and poof. Nothing.

I had never felt so alone.

I don’t know what I believe in right now. I don’t really believe in anything, but I so desperately want to. Need to.

I always used to say to whoever would listen that I felt that there was nothing sadder than believing in absolutely nothing.

“I don’t care if you worship dogs as gods,” I would say. “You just need to believe in something. Because without a belief, what is there?”

And now I am one of those people that can’t believe in anything. And trust me, it’s just as sad as I believed it would be.

I have been listening to a lot of podcasts recently, and a lot of them feature very spiritual beings. Now, none of these people that are so inspiring to me are spiritual in the traditional sense. They aren’t preaching about Jesus (not that I have anything again this, because that couldn’t be further from the truth), nor are they hippy-dippy types (again, nothing wrong with that) going on about the vibes and pseudo-buddhism or any of the dogmatic stuff that everyone seems to love to claim they believe in more so because of it’s being trendy or different than their truly loving and understanding the religion or belief system.

No, these are people who have been in the depths of darkness. People who have overcome some truly heinous things and have transformed into some of the most amazing human being that walk this planet.

These are people who have found a type of spirituality that resonates with them and that they fell in love with . There are people who read and studied everything and felt compelled towards specific beliefs by powers greater than themselves. These are people that you know are spiritual beings, not because of what they tell you (in fact, most of them on the podcasts only speak about spirality for a tenth of the episode), but by the words they speak and the energy and vibrations that they emanate, even over just audio.

I feel that I need something, anything, to make me believe in something. I was to be free from these thoughts, this disease, that is keeping me from becoming the person that I want to be. I am tired of being tired. I am tired of hating myself, both physically and mentally. I am tired of feeling unfulfilled, and I am tired of feeling guilty for my feeling unfulfilled.

In one of the podcasts that I listened to earlier this week, the guest (I can’t remember who) said something along the lines of that once you have been at the point where you were truly suicidal or caught in complete and all consuming addiction, that you have already died. The time that you have when and if you get out of the darkness? It’s a gift. You were dead, but somehow you came back.. And now it is your responsibility to use that time that the universe has so generously gifted you and use it to give back to the world that you wanted to badly to leave. That is all I want.

I just want to be someone that is worth something.

This post was actually supposed to be about my trip to the Brooklyn Museum yesterday and how amazing it was.. But then, in typical Erin fashion, I started rambling about super deep and utterly uninteresting things… So, now I am just going to share with you a few pretty pictures from yesterday! Woohoo!