Metamorphosis

This year I was told by a friend that I had previously considered family that I needed to know the difference between friends and family. He was not family, he said, and therefore not bound to certain obligations to help. In part, he was right. In another part, I decided that, the line having been drawn so plainly, I would just honor his request by pointing my life in a different direction.

These days, I am in an odd place, and I am not sure what to make of it. I had prayed this year that I be transformed inside and out--caterpillar, cocoon, metamorphosis, butterfly. Other friends, my mother included in that, asked me not to change at all. But something most definitely is, and aspects of that are out of my hands.

Perhaps this is another blog I should save for the book I want to write call the Unpublishable Pages, all the things I wanted to say that I shouldn't say. In my limited experience, I have learned that I hurt with words more than I thought possible. And, despite contentment with many issues, I carry a sort of deep-seated frustration, a kind of anger that seeps out of me. My struggle is to know about it this: Is it normal? And why is it so shocking to others when I become the angry one?

I used to be depressed, and looking back, I see that it was there on and off for a long time. Depression is a hidden thing, swept under the rug, leaving a crust that really doesn't completely evaporate. It's a cancer. You remember you had it, it was there, it made you crazy. It can return and make you crazy again. But a therapist once told me the most insightful thing about it: Depression is repressed anger. When I heard that, a haze lifted and I knew she was right.

These days, I allow myself to be angry. The frightening thing for others is that while I can accidentally wound in casual conversation, the true and confrontational conversations are where I mean exactly what I say, and what I say is often awful.

In a falling out with family and friends this year, something that happened this summer, I was accused of being selfish and essentially responsible for the unhappiness of others. I spoke plainly in response to that. Things didn't go well at all. Or did they go as they were meant?

And so I regroup. I have even been reconsidering writing so publicly at all, the effort to do so considerable with the new job and new schedule. Something is definitely happening to me. And I feel it when I am alone in my office at work, and when I am home engaged in good conversation with my first born--I am changing seasons.

With that said, today is the first day of fall. A season of death, really, but yet it is shrouded in brilliant hues and changing light. A fellow blogger once mentioned to me that with every rebirth comes death first. And so this fall, as I curl in my cocoon and attempt to emerge from the chrysalis, I wonder if I will leave the anger behind, and unfurl wings as light as breath in the new dawn.