Arn't I A Woman?

I really wanted to end the year on a great note. I wanted to tie up all these neat lessons I learned in a fancy, sparkly bow and gift it to myself to illustrate all my growth and success. A tangible, measurable growth that I would put up on my shelf with forgotten teddy bears and hoarded gold medals to gather dust in eternity, readily available for me to take down and proudly show off at any moment.  I wanted to dust the leftover fragments of inadequacy under the rug and produce a bright shiny new version of myself. Not a new me just a better one, I wanted to turn myself inside out and give the world the best of me. But how often we get trapped in the cobwebs of our minds.  It's as if someone stuck a bunch of magnets to the backs of tiny particles of stress and they are forcibly attracted to a strip inside my brain. They are all stuck there. The truth is I am going back down, down the rabbit hole....I won't know what's on the other side til I get there. 

A Winter of the Mind “It's a season governed by the recluse, the hermit. Activity gives way to dormancy. Life is still, indwelling and silent. This is a time of introversion, contemplation and going within. Symbolic winter invites us to quiet the mind, still the soul, and crystallize our inner workings. This is a time to ice skate through winter whites as a means of gaining purity and clarification.” A depressive landscape emerges: it is marred with oblique jagged rocks shooting out of deep crimson sand, stabbing at lonely, barren air suffocated by a putrid smell of rotting flesh. I live here, for now. A winter of the mind has settled inside me; it is dark and all consuming and unquenchingly eats away at my hope and joy. A vanquishing, cancerous Pac-Man. As much as I tried to fight it; as many positive affirmations I muttered under my breath, glasses of water I drank, and moments of mediation