Quilts

My grandma tells me all the time that the act of doing nothing is a perfected art. I hate resting. I hate doing nothing. I know it is supposed to replenish the soul and the body, give it time and space to just be, but I don’t ever feel that way. It makes me wonder if there is something wrong inside me, something that is there that shouldn’t be that is eating a piece of me that it shouldn’t be consuming. When I rest I feel sad. And not that it is a bad thing to feel sad, but when I start to get sad there isn’t much I can do to make it better. I’ve tried creating things, seeing new beauties, driving and driving until I’m exhausted, distracting myself with a new comedian or watching prancer eat a new toy in seconds flat. It’s not that I haven’t tried to be restful, it’s that it doesn’t seem to work for me. I do not feel refreshed. I do not feel revived. I feel more exhausted than when I started. I feel like I’ve cheated myself out of a day that I was gifted, just to sit and wallow. I don’t like that.

Resting makes me ponder life and allows me to stress about all the things wrong with it. I see so much more shit when I’m trying to rest. And I’ve been told this is the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. So it makes me wonder if resting looks differently for people. If we’re all made to restore and recoup in different ways, just like we’re made to discover and seek adventure in different ways. Perhaps, adventure is what sets my soul on fire and allows me to rest all at once. Perhaps, I have been doing things correctly for my own soul this entire time, yet instead of listening to that I have focused on what other “normal” people do to recover. Perhaps, I’m not messed up at all.

When I see newness, everything that has hurt me and is hurting me becomes dust. Every hour that I’ve lost sleep to stressors and endless strings of thoughts are gifted back to me in the mere seconds it takes my eyes to adjust to newness. When I wake up to stars all around me or a brilliantly bright moon in a space I’ve never been before, with air I have yet to breathe, I become entirely complete. I become undeniably alive.