Downgrading dysphoria.

Some weeks I just feel so squashed between two heavy plates of dysphoria. I feel almost like the plates will leave indelible marks on me. Like maybe they have been tooled with iniquity and ineptitude. And I feel almost like the discomfort and disease is a learning time, a time to be reformed and reworked into something better, and more beautiful, akin to the butterfly struggling with her chrysalis. 

But I feel like my expected growth or gain is immature and the dysphoria returns, perpetually lurking in the shadows of my otherwise carefree and happy life. 

My baby brother has recently gone off on a three year mission to Germany and then Afghanistan. His job is high risk, high output, but high yield, high gain. He is doing what he wants. How many of us actually get to do that. The attainments of ones dreams and goals are so few and seldom that when it happens we congratulate the person, and then stand in awe of them. How did they get their ducks in a row and know that A +B =C? 


I disintegrate it. Is it maturity, adult awareness and decision processes, is it drive, ambition, knowledge, opportunity, fate, grace, all of the above? Is it simply leaning backwards into the breeze, like a kite on the beach, and surrendering to the will of the wind. 


I often spend a huge amount of time plotting and creating and researching my five year and ten year plans, ruminating, pondering, obsessing, cow chewing the cud through four stomachs, over and over again, plans that never happen for whatever reason. Then I am bereft. I feel a loss for what was not. So then I tell myself next time to be more relaxed, laid back, colloquial, less rigid and confined, and I skip along essentially aimlessly and find myself watching a lot of late night TV, incapable of reading a book or being able to fall into the arms of sleep. 


I sound like I don't have much going on in my life. But the opposite is true. I make about 45% of the money in the house hold. I have two daughters that I do 99% of the caring for. I drive them to school, to sports, to the library, to parties, to friends, I dress them up, photograph them, read to them, make birthday cakes, love them, revel in them, dote on them, adore them, do all these ancillary functions for them that benefit them, all the supportive motherly functions, etc... for them. 


So I am thrust always into activity for them. But then in the stillness in me, I feel like I am living someone elses life. That I didnt chose this for me? But maybe it was chosen for me? 


My question is, how do you get to the part where you stop chasing pipe dreams, and just learn to purely exist in the here and now. Because my here and now is absolutely perfect. Just why do I always feel like I could have done something more, or I could have been smarter, or I could have made better decisions. How do I let all of that go, and just be okay with me?