I don't know if it's because I lived half of my life near the mighty Pacific or the fact that I'm a water sign, but it's often seemed fitting to compare the transitions in my life to water metaphors. When times were chaotic or overwhelming, I'd dream of getting drowned out by a tsunami of water. When I had just come up for air from one major shift, I'd feel like I'd just been tossed, wet and weary, upon a waiting shore.

Most recently, my sheer exhaustion from this rapid-fire succession of change and transition has left me feeling like a tumbled rock or large piece of driftwood, tossed upon rough waters only to be pulled back onto shore, intact but just barely.

I am utterly exhausted. There is no other way to say it. I feel like life right now is attempting to pull me under in a riptide and I'm just doggie-paddling to save myself, no life jacket, just kicking and making sure my toes don't drag across the bottom of the mysterious ocean floor. It's that in between place, where your brain wants to make sense of what you're feeling, but your body is having a completely different experience. 

I know it won't always be this way. But I feel it today, and yesterday, and the day before. In the endless list of bills that pile up, to-do lists that just keep growing, and responsibilities old and new that now duke it out to co-mingle harmoniously in my life, I am just utterly fucking exhausted and overwhelmed by all of it. I used to use the tactic of making a deal with myself to just tackle one thing, anything as long as it was making progress. But my life right now seems to be this tidal wave of change and stuff, tumbling and growing all together at rapid speed and I just hope I can survive it all without drowning. Today felt like drowing. I have found myself waking anxious, tired already before I even step out of bed and living in a new world that is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Some days it feels safe and inviting. Other days it feels ominous and threatening. I am alone in it, older now, seasoned and prone to hiding in my shell. 

And then I try to remind myself, especially on days when my focus is straining under the weight of the water, that I direct the ship, I choose how much I want to give of my energy to one thing on any given day. That feeling of being this limp, cast away, washed up tangle of seaweed arriving battered onto shore may feel true and real in the moment, but I have to keep finding ways to breathe new life into myself. Change is good. Life is not meant to be lived stagnant. I know that I yearn for familiar, safe, comfortable, a zone in life where I know who I am and it's just easy. But I've also been waiting for this moment, the one where I get to start over, where all the years of being battered at sea finally cast me into the warm sand and the sun hits all the spots that have been lived and worn smooth from experience and I twinkle like a jewel, transformed and ready for another chapter.