Do you know what 1.5 days on the beach can get you?
I mean, aside from a gloriously crispy rack?

Some time for thought, introspection. I mean, yeah, there was a lot of giggling and talking and having fun. But, there was also hours at a stretch with nothing but a book I wasn’t quite interested in reading right that moment, the sun, the water, and my thoughts.
Some of those thoughts were just those random, floaty things that most people who have some anxiety live with. I did my very best to smoosh those thoughts into a small, glass jar on a back shelf in my head. They weren’t the important ones, you know?

But the other thoughts? The big ones? Those came crashing in with the sound of the surf.
Just recently, I had been hiding from them. They’re scary. They’ve got some long-reaching implications.

Here’s the thing, though. When you reduce all the headnoise, all the thrashing and flailing that your Christ-Don’t-Make-Me-Change! Psyche throws up at you? You come to some serious plateaus of realization.

And I say “plateaus” on purpose. I have roads of work ahead of me. Because what I realized is that I am an awesome person – who hasn’t felt awesome for a good bit of time.¹

Thank goodness for therapists and fantastic friends. They help keep you on the sunnier side of sane(ish).
_{That feeling as though, you never belonged. This feeling is not sadness, this feeling is not joy.  I truly understand.. Please don’t go.}

In conclusion, I want to say something to any of my readers to whom this may apply. If you are feeling that you don’t matter, that you are awful, that you are gross, that your friends are only faking friendship, that you will never, ever get ahead of the things that are bad in your life?
You’re wrong.
And you need to talk to a professional someone about that.
Because you’re awesome.
Trust me. I know.

¹  – nobody panic. I am just saying that I haven’t felt that feeling that I used to have. That Stride Into a Room, Point Like a Lounge-Lizard Superstar at folks and Be One With the Groove. Anxiety, grief, and the illusion that I didn’t matter had eaten my rockstar face off.