All Aboard the Stress Express

I have been away from the blog world for longer than usual this last week and that is not very conducive to fulfilling my goal of actively blogging this year. My apologies--both to myself and to all the people kind enough to take a sec and read my stuff over here in the corner. It has been quite a busy week. Between scrambling to leave my old job in some semblance of order for the next poor schmuck and doing some intense over-analyzing of our wedding registry items, not to mention beginning our "wedding invitation creation" process, it has been a full week indeed.

I don't really know what is going to happen in the next six to eight months or so, and I am half happy and half terrified about it. I mean, I am finally leaving the job that has always sort of just been a gig I have to do for money, and going forth into unknown territory. What if I love the new job? Or hate it? Or feel overworked? Or can't keep up? Or what if it ends up being a great place for me? This could be a huge change to my daily life as I know it, and also my career (or lack thereof) as I know it.

And on another note entirely--I chose to have a destination wedding, come what may, because it really does not require a lot of detailed planning. I pretty much won't have a solid sense of what we will do until a few weeks before, possibly even a few days before. I did this for many reasons, one of which was to relieve myself of the stress of planning. But I find that there is a whole new beast clawing at my brain now--the stress of not planning! It's crazy, I know. But somehow, the unknown details are causing stress in their own weird way. Maybe brides-to-be are just programmed to have some sort of anxiety about the whole occasion no matter what they decide to do. Or maybe I am just a spaz. All perfectly good explanations for the stress I feel sometimes.

So anyway things are tense and busy and will be for the next six to eight months and I have no idea what will occur and what will be good and what will go wrong and here I go diving in head first. (But in an actual true- to-life metaphor, I never learned to dive as a child, so I typically end up doing a half belly-flop with my nose plugged. How about that for self-realization?)

So amidst all these changes and stresses and fun and terror, something really wacky happened two nights ago. I know talking about dreams is pointless and all, but here you go anyway:

At 3:30am, I was deep asleep. In my dream, a film crew was making a movie about my mother when she was 30 years old. They were filming my actual mother at her age now (which is somewhere in the realm of retirement age) and going in and photo-shopping her face so that she appeared as she was at 30. She was wandering around a Theatre lobby with a sweet, innocent look on her face, and I knew (like you do in dreams) that she was waiting for some man she liked who was in charge of said Theatre. There were also a few picture frames with shots of my mother set up all around the place with actual pictures I have seen in my home growing up. I was watching it all like a movie, but was somehow part of it too (as is common in dreams). At one point, I was so moved by the scene and my mother's youthful beauty that I started crying. Heaving, shuddering, convulsive sobs came over my body like a thunderstorm of emotion, and I suddenly became aware of myself, aware of my body lying in my very real bed, starting to quietly shake. The shaking turned into that sort of spasm that crying does to you--your stomach clenches and your head thrusts forward like a pigeon's. That was me. In bed. Now sort of awake and crying uncontrollably.

My fiance shook me until I was fully conscious and asked if I was okay. I could barely speak, I just continued to cry and cry the way dumped girls do once they have a bottle of wine to their dome. It was so strange. I mean, when you dream of peeing, your body (well, most people's bodies, anyway) does not actually pee. Or when you yell at someone in your dream, usually people don't yell out loud in the bedroom. That is the beauty of the body while dreaming. You think you are doing all these things but actually your body is on idle mode and nothing is usually happening but REM. So to have been woken up by my body reacting to the emotional response I had in my dream--well it was so unnatural and downright freaky! And I could not stop crying once I got going. I did not even know what I was crying about and all I could do was let it take its course until it passed, which took some time. Eventually I was able to sleep again. But I was definitely unnerved by the whole experience.

Thinking back about it, I realize that I have been playing it as cool as I can with all the things I have going on, and making efforts not to dwell on or think too much about any of it because of my tendency to fret and worry too much about things out of my control. I guess in doing that, I must have been shoving some emotional responses deep down in that gut of mine for safe keeping. Well people, turns out that shit will manifest itself somehow in another way. The energy will be released.

As a wise character named Dr. Ian Malcolm once said in what might be the greatest film of my generation, "I'm simply saying that life, uh...finds a way."