I got back into my novel one day, feeling I had lots of energy and the project seemed leading to an excellent point with a lively conclusion. Then that enthusiasm went away and in its place is this reluctant exhaustion. I feel that so much is wrong, yet everything is right. I feel like everything is hopeless, yet the spring is bright. What is this curtain of immobility that drags me to the chair as though I have beans in my butt like those faddish stuffed toys, so that I waste my life in others imaginings. I did not used to feel my reading was a sucking mudhole. I used to feel creative and alive and I have no true reason to feel differently now, except that I feel middle age creeping onto my body and deadening my curiosity.
Is this a symptom of age? Even as I am only 36, my passions are tempered. I often feel outraged, yet somehow act on that outrage seldom. I am more sensitive to being bothered, to having to move outside my settled sphere and feel discomfort than I had in my college days. I have too long lived in fear of my own shadow. A shadow that grows longer and darker with every passing winter. It engulfs me in the winter but is is never gone in the summer, so that each month passes either in my shadow or running from my shadow, denying that it has ever been a part of me. I need to live in the sun, I need to accept the shadow as my own reflection but not allowing that reflection to cause fear. Where did I find that courage in my twenties? Where did I find that relentless fierceness saw depression as a challenge to be read on , to be hunted out. Is there still in me that girl who enthusiastically embraced change, change of mind, of self of perception.
I drastically need a change of perception - how I perceive myself, my ambitions, my life. I am in a rut, a muddy sucking rut that drags me back into its center as I pull the opposite direction. I need to pull back, to drag my lens back to see that the rutted trail goes through a wooded glen, that there are cobwebs over my caravan because we no longer move, and that there is a pathway that perhaps does not need a wagon that could become mired. I need change. I need to embrace the strangeness of the world, to stop the sarcasm and the curled lip approach I have to wonder. I have not wanted to be mocked, to seem as a fantasy-filled person. I have wanted to be a person to be taken seriously. I have stopped looking for wonder and magic because I want my views to be taken seriously by the mainstream - yet the mainstream will not value my views or beliefs no matter how rationally I state them so why am I allowing my bliss to be cruelly chained and left in the cold dark? I have been denying that I feel. Partially because there is so much pain in feeling. Anger and scorn have become my primary feelings and there is no room for wonder in such cold supremacy.
I have allowed myself to become a victim of cold, hard facts. My house is something that needs painted and cleaned. My woods and grounds are something that need mowed and cleared. The tennis court is where I play tennis, and I must do that well and adult-like. Books are what I read to pretend, and an adult should not admit to reading fantasy or to playing out other scenarios in their mind. My mind should be given over only to politics and other serious, important matters like bill paying, scheduling, planning. I don't think it is so much growing up as it is giving in to peer pressure. Becoming so self-absorbed - as in so sucked into the mediocrities that make up everyday life that they become the root of thought, the root of feeling and life. But in sweating the tiny details to perfection, the glorious wonder of life is lost. How can I become so absorbed in those leaves of grass and their length that I don't notice how they feel, how lovely the slope of the hill? How can I become so fixed with irritation on what I should do to the woods that I don't see the hidden ways, the gnomish mossy hollow log, the beguiling gurggle of the creek. The imagination could carry me through the hard tasks, yet I don't allow myself to meander the paths of the inner fantasy because as I grow older and more staid I become frightened of the insane and ashamed of unconventionality. Our community is very conventional - and in small ways suppresses me with scorn and mockery. Yet I could fight that with spirit if I understood and could make measure of how important the unknown and fanciful wonder was to the health of my soul. It is one thing to say "I am important" and try to justify that and make up reasons you should have self-esteem. It is a far better thing to say "this is what makes my life important, this is the heart of me" and let what really causes me wonder, sustains me.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
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1 comment:
Wow. So much written. Don't know where to start.
I see my snarkiness as a safety valve for my Shadow.
Don't be afraid of your shadow. You may find that you like her.
What if rather than running from your shadow, you turned and faced it head on? Don't forget that in addition to putting our "bad" in our shadows, we also put our gold there as well. If you face your shadow, you may see in her the change you seek. And you may be able to reclaim your gold.
Love,
Shameless Agitator
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