Let Me Not Die While I Am Still Alive

For a while I had been functioning as the rational being in the most logical sense. Everything I did and thought was governed with reason. To sum it up in the most (non)intelligent way, I existed using my brain.

A part of me was switched off. A part of me felt numbed, dormant, still, waiting to be resuscitated back to life. And I didn't know how to do it, I didn't how to turn the zest on. Like those moments when emotions overtook all reasons, the realization that life lived all out with reason alone was also paralyzing, it threw me into panic. Shit! Where did my heart go?

It was not the life I wanted, the half-dead. It's not the life I bargained for when I chose to live my every day. Pain is pain, but it feels so much better than being numbed. It at least offers me options for growth and discoveries and experiments. While numbness, it's a linear highway to death, everything is colored in monotonous black or white. Hello, Pleasantville!

I want color. I want chaos. I want a roller coaster ride. I complain, yes, and crave peace when it feels like my world is turned upside down. But I can manage to ride with the peaks and troughs in the series of life's crests better than gliding on the flat line of deadness inside.

Numbness only serves its purpose for a little while, when we're too damn tired to deal with the pain and worries. We're designed to live and getting out of it is a choice and it entails hardwork to thaw away the ice that frozen our heart. We're designed to live and not just exist. 

Let me not die while I am still alive. It's Hannah's prayer when she was depressed being childless and being constantly ridiculed for it. She refused to let her spirit die. Sheryl Sandberg also reminded herself of that powerful line to go on living after her husband died. And I am adapting it, to push myself to seek the essentials of what makes life worth living.

Whenever I feel my head floating and my heart sinking, I remember this phrase. Whenever I feel I'm switching on auto-pilot, I let the words ring in my head. To wake up what's sleeping in me, to pinch that part of my soul that hardened, to guide me in finding ways, any ways, to help me blow air into my own life raft. Trust me when I say, we have that power within us that knows what we ought to do and recognizing the internal disengagement is a breakthrough. If you find yourself in that cold boat, row, darlings. Row to where the sunshine is. Light that fire within you to guide and show you where you are going. Don't waste your everyday isolated in that numb, cold and dark world.

I'll leave this quote from Albert Camus:In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invisible summer. The seed to life is always within you. For God is within you.