Exhaustion

by Caz Makepeace on August 24, 2011

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Yesterday, I wrote a post on gratitude. I was feeling so much gratitude for the many wonderful things in my life.

Today, I feel exhaustion and with that comes a weird sense of sadness and loneliness.

Photo: Jason A. Samfield

I was up for quite awhile last night with bad back pain. I lay in bed mentally checking off my list to ensure I had my bags packed. I started rehearsing in my mind a positive child-birthing experience.

But, once again I found the pain disappearing, eventuating into nothing as it has been doing almost ever night now for several weeks.

It is exhausting.

It’s not just the sleep deprivation part that it is draining, but moreover the mental strain that comes with managing the pain, preparing yourself for what’s ahead, embracing it and then, bam, it goes nowhere.

So today I am physicaly and mentally drained. I can barely type or sit up. I just want to lay down and cry.

How you can go from a high emotion one day to a low the next, at times, baffles me.

But, this is life. There are no flat plains or plateaus, it rolls, sometimes gently up and down, sometimes steeply with sudden falls.

Instead of fighting it or allowing it to make us feel like failures or that we are unworthy, we just need to feel every bump of the journey. Our emotions are there to be felt, that is why we feel them.

So today I embrace the exhaustion, the sadness and the loneliness, because I know just like my friend gratitude yesterday, this too shall pass.

I think of my little baby who understands this truth to the human experience. One moment she will wail the house down with her pains of hunger and the next she will giggle with glee at the silly face I pull.

Babies don’t hold onto their emotions and drag the baggage of them around for years. They just let them pass through.

And so shall I