dis-integrated

Lately I've noticed a new (or maybe not new, but finally at the head of the line thanks to all of the other things that have cleared out...) feeling about my life.  At first I started saying (in my head and maybe sometimes out loud to a trusted person) that I was living a double life... but the more it showed up, the more I realized I am living a much more varied life than that.

I have so many connections.  So many relationships.  So many things that I love and treasure, but they are mostly separate from one another...  I drew a diagram in my journal this morning (who draws diagrams in their journals?  awesome people.  that's who.) of what I wanted... it ended up being a giant mess of circles and arrows because I was trying to show that I wanted my relationships/connections to have relationships/connections with one another.  The drawing of what I'm existing in now, one circle in the center with unidirectional arrows pointing to the other circles that surround me, is a much prettier drawing... no wonder I've been living in it (comfortably?) for so long.

I long for connectedness, but I have connectedness...  really what I long for is integration.  I long for a tribe.  I want the people I love to love one another.  I want us all to live on a circular street with homes that all face each other and pop in and out casually with news and pies and seedlings and...  yeah, I guess I want to live on a commune...  Truthfully, I don't care if there is a street or homes or pies...  I just want the people and the space and some comfort.

In previous versions of my life I felt like I was a part of something...  but it was someone else's something.  I have been a member of many groups, but they've always been someone else's groups.  There's something appealing about that too... getting absorbed into a group that already exists... there's something very lonely about it too (sometimes).  I've also lost myself in these somethings and these groups.  I've given enormous amounts of time and emotional energy being a part of somethings and groups that weren't my heart's true desire... and to which an authentic version of me didn't really belong.

So, as you've read, I started a journey to discover my authentic self... and honestly, she wasn't that hard to find.  The first 6, 7, 8 months of this journey have been mostly enjoyable.  Now that I'm her, however, and am having to try and figure out how to remain her and live as her adding in all of the things that are real about life... it's way super awful painful rotten a lot of the time.  And that doesn't feel authentic... even though it is... or at least it may be...  so that's confusing.

me.

I've identified that I seek integration...  that I have a life I love in thousands of millions (okay, maybe 50 something... I exaggerate) of disjointed parts.  They are not integrated.  They are dis-integrated.

Disintegrated... hey, that's already a word!  (this is a conversation I had with myself)  Hmmm... what does disintegrated mean?  It's when something has fallen apart... it's crumbled... it's gone from solid to liquid (no wait, that's dissolved)... it's when you become one with the earth again (no, that's decomposed) it's from being a whole to being many millions of parts and almost seeming not to exist.

And yeah, that's what happened.  I was a whole, but not the whole I was supposed to be, so I had to disintegrate to start to identify my own ingredients as individual parts.  Now it seems like it's time to start deciding which ones make up the next version of whole...  Does anyone have a recipe I could borrow?