The state of affairs is interesting. Nothing has changed today from yesterday, nor from tomorrow, and there is no revelatory experience to peel apart, I’m just saying…I’m aware of the gap between what I am now and what I want. I am aware instead of putting my head in the sand and sighing.
I’ve just now come across a Elizabeth Gilbert quote that rings true, even if it also hangs heavy on my shoulders, which I’ll paraphrase here: “If you find yourself stuck in life, you can be sure it’s because of a fear you haven’t faced yet.”
This is true in many areas, deflating, but true. So the depressive part, the tired part, the worn down, underemployed, insecure, freaked out, hypochondriac part can get better, but it has to wobble upright, and as slow or as quick as it can, do something in the face of the belief that it absolutely cannot produce or act at all. It just has to do something. Anything. Use gravity to fall from dead center. Despite the impossible physics, the bumblebee has to go ahead and fly.
These are the battles you can retreat from every day of your life. Nobody will mind if you do. Nobody will cheer you if you don’t. It’s your life. Your end result.
You can go on OKCupid. You can flip through page after page of earnest men’s faces. Read their best opinion on how best to sell themselves to the pool of available women, even if you are certain that just as you have this idea in your head of who you want to cull you from the herd, they have this idea of the woman who is meant to rise out of the ocean on the clam shell and anoint them with their love. You can look around at the mess that you drag with you, the veritable flotsam and jetsam and streaky, slimy seaweed that tinsels your hull, and say, fuck, I wouldn’t choose this, why would they?
You can look at these men who say they don’t care about reading, they’re real big on weed, sea and otherwise, and exploring moon caves on their jet-powered mountain bikes…men who want to put a slug of coffee in you while they size you up and hurry back to the primordial ooze in case Botticelli picks them out a good one. You can look at them and feel deeply disconnected. Angry, even. That life has its rhythm and you want to play along, but all you have is this broken kazoo. That what you want does not want you and what wants you, what tells you it wants you in its bed, provokes revulsion, never desire.
You can look and realize how far the roots of suspicion grow. That you may have to lose limbs to save the body when it comes to false beliefs held tightly round the throat.
A true belief: there is a place of alignment between who you want to spend time with and who wants to spend time with you. But you have to take your slugs and smile because you care. You want to have someone to talk to. You want a warm hand in the darkness. You want to travel to that set of coordinates. You want to figure this one out.
