"why don't you come on back to the war"

[omnia_mutantur]

 Day 2.

 

I feel paused. I feel like my only job is therapy and housework and I’m pretty sure I’m not doing those right.  I feel like I can see everyone around me having all these things they crave, even if what it is is just more of the same. And I want that, I want to know what it is I crave.  

 

And those words roll around again. Grace, mercy, safety. And none of those are really within my grasp, because they’re not destinations, they’re just things to keep striving for, to keep unpacking.  Do I want grace because I want to be invisible, because I want to be tidy and small(er) and not bother anyone?

 

One of my therapists told me something about me having a lot of tension between my desires. I want to be taken care of, I want to need no one.  I want to be seen, I want to be invisible. And it goes back to that Nemerov poem.

 

What might I want?  To work with kids? To do nothing but read? To find something I feel truly good at and do that? To walk dogs in shady places? To travel?  To find a narrative thread to follow?  To find something that is truly my own? To actually run a commune? Is it too late, is this what a midlife crisis looks like?

 

I feel like I’m coasting on past triumphs, worn out by pills and surgeries and addictions and heartbreak.  And there’s the lingering conviction that everyone goes through similar things (or worse) and deal with it so much better than I do, that I’ve run out the clock on trauma, I haven’t actually done anything, I haven’t gotten better.  And I don’t know how to talk about this without sounding like I’m fishing for something, so maybe I am fishing.   

 

And it gets so tangled, I feel like pity is what you experience when someone thinks they could have made it through the same situation and ended up less damaged and on the one hand I believe almost anyone could have been/would be better at this, and on the other I still want to be the strongest person you know.

 

We saw Atomic Blonde last night, and though it was a lot of other things, it was also a love letter to vodka, cigarettes and 80s music, all of which were kind of my jam once upon a time, and it made me feel strange and old and faded.

tomorrow's breadcrumb: people no longer in my life/"with me"
 

Comments

[minerva42]

*pebble*

[keplers_angels]

me too



There's this great line in the film Adaptation. It's the best thing about the film. And what the film (maybe) is about. Actually there are two:

"I suppose I do have one unembarrassed passion. I want to know how it feels like to care about something passionately."

"There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more managable size."