It’s been ages since a song has come along and makes me feel such strong emotions and speaks to me so deeply. So long, in fact, that I think the last time I was 16 and sat in my bedroom with Sarah McLaughlin’s “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” playing on repeat…the message fairly obvious: I won’t fear love. Kind of not surprising for a teenager dealing with a lot of strange emotions, energies that I couldn’t identify, and numerous heartbreaks, right?
So it came as a bit of a surprise for me when Florence and the Machine’s “Shake it Out” completely hooked and enthralled me at age 28. Am I not over those gross emotions that I’m not sure where to place or how to deal? Apparently not.
It led to a very interesting conversation with one of my dearest friends about the concept of adult adolescence. As women in our late 20s and early 30s, with pressures of career, marriage, family, is it normal that we feel a bit lost and confused amongst all of the unidentified emotions and pressures bubbling within us?
I think of my own circumstances…where I’ve pretty much given up everything that I had been up to this point: living in Edmonton, working for a large organization, and being part of a pretty strong community of people. This big fish in a small pond decided to swim south – to the mouth of the ocean, surrounded by a hell of a lot of giant fish…to reinvent herself as something completely different. And it’s left me feeling lost, confused and unsure in the process; similar to how I felt about the concept of love and heartbreak at 16. But this time I’m a little more stronger…a little wiser…and instead of defining myself as what I do (as above), I’m trying to define myself as who I am – which really shouldn’t have changed during the swim.
Like Florence says, I’m having a darn hard time leaving my past behind. It’s time to stop dragging this stupid horse around and bury him…time to cut out my graceless heart. And for peat’s sake, it’s really frigging hard to dance with a Devil on your back – that bugger is heavy. But the shaking thing? That’s kind of hard…I’m still working on that one. 🙂 I think I have a lot of shaking ahead of me…
Adult adolescence, I’ll be happy when you are gone – I’m kind of sick of the roller coaster you’ve put me on. But at least I’ve been on this sucker before, and I know I’ll step off of it mostly OK – aside from maybe a bit of messy hair and dizziness 🙂