From chaos, peace.

It's been nearly three months since I posted anything.  Life is kicking my ass, guys.

Virtually everything spiritually and mentally important to me has been put on hold in favor of the mundane.  Classes, work, and now a practicum have taken so much of my time, sapped so much of my energy, that I don't remember when I last cooked a meal for myself, or when I last did a devotion that wasn't tied to a holiday or some sort of special event where someone outside my own head was reminding me to do it.

And that, my friends, is NOT GOOD for me.

My schedule is down to the minute.  I schedule class, work, and practicum hours.  I schedule driving.  I schedule sleep and showers and trips to the pharmacy.  I even schedule my sex life, which is WEIRD if your partner isn't on the same time crunch as you.   "Sorry honey, we're going to have to make this quick, I have a paper to write."

It's driving me up a wall, in all honesty.  It's not even that there aren't enough hours in the week, it's that everything I need to get done has to be done within the standard business hours (8-5, Monday through Friday), aside from homework, which I dedicate most or all of my weekend to.  And this means that the things I never schedule, like devotions, trancework, and religious study, are all fallen to the wayside.

I even have a list of stuff on hiatus that I need to do, but don't have in my schedule:

1. ADF's Initiate's Program.  I stalled on this one back in December, with a visit to family, and it just hasn't picked back up again.  I'm EXCEEDINGLY grateful for the online component, though, because when I DO pick it back up, I'll be able to at least have a sense of what I need to be working on, and when I should be working on it.
2. Thiasos holidays and other assorted "stuff."  I've not really been doing my part on keeping the group up and running (which is why I'm even MORE grateful for the other four of y'all than I already was).
3. Prepare for the workshop proposal I submitted on ritual intoxication.
4. Meditate, or better yet, regular trancework.
5. Going along with #4, in part, is taking time to just... chill, and pray.  To sit with my gods and talk to them, keep them in the loop on all this crap that's been happening.

My boyfriend finally put his foot down tonight, when I was teetering on the edge of a panic attack, and forced me to go and take a bath.  I wasn't allowed to come out for at least half an hour, he said.  Gods bless him.

I remembered, laying there in the water, what life was like for me a few years ago.  Not as busy, but still as structured.  I lost my mind, in a very literal sense, to rigidity.  I fell into the trenches of bipolar disorder, lost in madness I couldn't control, because I tried to control too much.  I had to learn to let go, to go with the flow, to accept and adapt, to keep from being lost again.

Dionysos did that for me.  He taught me to embrace the uncertainty, to move like a dancer through the ups and downs of my own mind, to hear the rhythm of the music in my soul and play to the drum instead of trying to change the beat.  He restored my sanity by teaching me to embrace madness.

See where this is going?

I'm doing it to myself again.  I'm trying to control too much.  Trying to fit everything into tidy, neat little boxes, everything in its proper place.  And when one of those boxes gets tipped over, or the contents are not what I expected, the entire system falls apart.

Better to be rid of the boxes, I think.

This isn't a set of resolutions.  I'm going to screw this up again.  Things are going to be chaotic, I'm going to panic or become depressed, I'm going to neglect myself more than I should.  It'll happen.  But for now... I'm going to talk to Dionysos.  I'm going to ask for him to step into the role he has always played in my life, and free me from burdens I can't bear on my own.  I'm going to tell him everything I've never admitted to anyone: that for all my outward successes, I still feel like I am failing, and the world is running away without me.

I'm going to go pray.