empty bottle of pantene

I’ve been trying to squeeze out meaning from my life like the last few drops in my shampoo bottle.

Shaking it, whacking it against the wall, turning it upside down & squeezing with all my might (which isn’t much, as I can’t even do a full pushup) to coax out any remaining drops.

HI MY NAME IS ABIGAIL AND I’M AN ALCOHOLIC ADDICT TO SELF-IMPROVEMENT.

And not self-improvement in a fun, exciting way… but a viciously whacking myself against the wall trying to extract a deeper meaning kind of way. Mercilessly analyzing those precious few remnants for the deeper truths. The story. The meaning.

“Healing journey…” but no return ticket. More of a nomadic existence.

On a sacred pilgrimage to uncover everything that is royally f*cked up with me: my symptoms, conflicts, traumas, patterns, & the million reasons why I am totally justified in being a little bitch.

Don’t you know Mercury is in retrograde??

At some point, I realized I had turned my life into one long autopsy report. I needed to understand the ever-elusive why?!?! behind every symptom, bad mood, failed relationship, or existential pondering.

Even needing to understand the why behind why I liked what I liked or why I am the way I am.

Perhaps I thought that safety could be found through understanding. Through analyzing.

[at one point personality tests were most definitely my drug of choice.]

Every symptom became a scavenger hunt. Every difficult season transformed into a project to write a detailed analysis on.

It was…. exhausting.

I kept putting off ACTUALLY LIVING because I was too busy dissecting my life under fluorescent lighting.

And, man, my eyes hurt.

Meanwhile, the world kept offering up precious little tiny miracles that weren’t asking to be analyzed at all: the smell of freshly cut grass. Dogs prancing around with squeaky toys like prized possessions (they are). A perfectly gooey chocolate chip cookie with a cold glass of raw milk. Cloudy night skies where you can still see puffy clouds drifting by a backdrop of stars.

No deeper meaning needed…. just allowing life to be delicious and mysterious. Not needing to unpack and analyze the why of it all.

And, perhaps that’s enough.

I don’t want to become the most healed, optimized, and self-aware woman on earth.

Maybe I don’t need to turn every experience into a thesis statement or profound realization.

Maybe I can stop trying to squeeze profundity from an empty shampoo bottle.

Anyways. I’ve been playing around with this concept of “playing around” more instead of “working” on myself.

More imagination.
More creativity.
More weird little experiments.
More attempts to make life feel magical and whimsical again.

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