As I sit to write, the melancholy scores to The Hours and Portrait of a Lady shuffle beautifully together, reminding me of the mental space I am trying to capture.
Since late spring a feeling has revisited me, one that is not unfamiliar, one that is clearly not resolved in my heart. It is actually less a feeling and more of a realization of absence of feeling.. an awareness that my life exists somewhere outside of life and that, if you were able to take the vital signs of my true heart and my true engagement with the world as we know it, you would see I have long since flatlined.
Moments pull me out on occasion, but they are moments, not my life.. my life, which is outside of life, like a dog forced to live outside all year round on a short leash in the yard while the children of the house play inside the manor. It is oddly self-imposed on many levels.
My life is divided into the before and after, I know most people have an event that defines that for them. Sadly, I was flatlining before, and I briefly came to life after, only to flatline again.
My whole life lay out before me. I had ended a toxic relationship and had started a promising career, but I had no idea how to live. Then my mother got sick, and I had more responsibilities than I’d ever before imagined. It was at this point that I began taking every un-lovely thought and feeling that I had and stuffed it down so that I forgot it existed. It is then that I became the person who faked smiles, who held it together because there were more people counting on her than there were for her to count on.
When my mother passed on a couple years later, there was a surge of feeling so powerful and vital, but it could certainly not be called happiness. It was a deep sense of being alive only allowed by initiation into the deep mysteries of life and death. It strengthened my connection to those who experienced it with me, and it allowed me to see my own life and to hope and even actively search for better, more, for drinking in each days’ light because tomorrow was not promised. I made some life-altering decisions regarding relationships and career, but then settled into a new stasis and returned to a new phase of stuffing down feelings and putting on a brave face. A new phase of flatlining.
It’s July 2010, halfway through my Year of Self-Love. It has been very trying to stay true to my chosen word. Yet I have managed to make micro-movements towards improving my health, I’ve gone into therapy and discussed plans with my naturopath to go off The Pill. I’m planning to go vegan in an attempt to rid my body of toxins as well as to support my healing from endometriosis and an autoimmune disorder.
But my life is not built to fit me; it is built to mollify my fears. And yet it is not working. I am faced daily with a deep dissatisfaction with my life, and a feeling of powerlessness towards achieving the things that could bring me joy — namely, friendships that do not exist here since most of my family and friends are elsewhere. Since my surgery last year I have been keenly aware of this isolation but have felt unable to fix it. It’s deeper than just my life.. it’s something Western society, with its emphasis on individual liberties, has made it difficult to overcome. There are invisible walls miles thick between neighbors who live inches away. There’s the world of the automobile, this canister of space that separates us so much we don’t see each other as people, simply as other cars. Even in this time of technological connection, with texting, cell phone calls, and email, people are communicating meaningfully and in the present moment, less and less.
I think of my life with an eye towards what I can change. I remind myself of the fabulous people I have met who have touched me deeply with their example of building their lives from scratch to reflect them and their passions so perfectly. For those whose capacity for joy teach me something every day. There was a young man who rebuilt a barn into a house, replacing the knots in the wood floors with moons and stars with his own hands. There’s the woman who recently proclaimed on Facebook that she had laughed so much in the past few days that she’d nearly peed herself, and that this proved to her that life was indeed good. There’s a sign in a sandwich shop that says “We do not stop laughing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop laughing.”
I have the capacity for building my own life from the ground up, on my own terms, and I have the capacity for immense joy, even if I must pursue it with all seriousness. Towards this end, I think I’ll dust off Martha Beck’s The Joy Diet and dive back in at the beginning. I attempted it with Jamie Ridler’s Next Chapter Book Club but found it hard to maintain the pace to keep up. I commit to doing the book at my own pace, even if that means I spend 3 weeks on the first ingredient.
I will go to this post by Goddess Leonie and read it as often as I must, to wring feeling from the depths as few blog posts can..
I will seek the Now, because soon it will be gone, wasted, missed, passed right on by. This Now-ness is the standard by which I’ll measure decisions by. Which means many of my escapist tendencies will need to be examined.. too much television, too much internet, too much.. too much.
My thanks to Linnea for her Wednesday wish post, inspired by her own group of blogger friends, for inspiring me to express myself again in this space, not knowing what lies ahead..
..but all beginnings are endings and all endings are beginnings.
