This morning I untangled a knot. This is not a metaphorical statement, although the metaphors will come fast and furious in a moment. I literally untied a knot from a very long string (on a spindle) that my 6-year-old had created.
I like untying knots. My husband is a fan of cutting knots out, which sometimes is necessary (and in fact, was necessary for the start of this one, when I found myself holding three ends to the string and realized I should confine my attentions to the continuous portion of the string), but I prefer to unloop and loosen, shake and follow over and under. It reminds me that no knot cannot be undone...and when worse comes to worst, like the Gordian Knot, once can just cut it out.
Now hold on to this image for a moment, while I start building from another direction:
I am reading "The Elegance of the Hedgehog". I am only in the beginning chapters of it, but already the author has broached such subjects as giftedness, social expectations, and dissatisfaction with one's life. . . all of the issues I find myself battling now.
It is now T minus two days toward my thirtieth birthday and thus, one hell of a mid-life(ish) crisis. I feel my life is meaningless. I am unsatisfied with my life (I have been for a decade or so), I am angry at myself for submitting to social expectations, for selling my dreams to keep up with Jones's, and for thinking that I would be content to keep a kernal of freakiness until such time as the full freakiness could once again blossom.
The water is, indeed, holding me down, and it is the same as it ever was in these "Days Gone By".
I awoke one day to find myself so ensnared into a life I specifically did not want, that I no longer know how to get out. So now we see the metaphor of the knot. I am tangled. How do I make the string of my life unfuck itself and start shitting me Tiffany Cufflinks (to paraphrase "Full Metal Jacket")?
I spent many years sleeping through long bouts of my life. Not that I was actually sleeping (although I know many who do, and consequently, I do not like to sleep), but perhaps guilty of the same things. I met my responsibilities, mostly, but I ignored my own needs until they became so urgent I could not.
Again, it's not as though I was unconscious, but more that I told myself to wait. If you've ever sat for a long time in a waiting room then you know as well as I do that the word boils down to two groups: those who can wait and those who can't.
I can wait, but it requires a dissociation with the world around me. I literally need to just zone out and be calm and Zen. In fact, sometimes waiting is my calmest time.
But what I found happening was the opposite. I waited, but I became paralyzed to improving my own life in the meantime. It was "later, later".
And then other important, but not urgent, things were put on hold. Date night with the kids? "Later, later". And my anxiety would grow, and the guilt would grow. And the guilt would paralyze me more.
I've always been a procrastinator, but this was too much!
So, even now, this morning, I find myself dissatisfisfied and stuck in "WAIT". What to do?
Wake UP! Take control. Quit selling your future to 5- and 10-year plans that don't materialize! Keep working, even if tomorrow does show a different road; it doesn't make the attempt any less valid. Besides, how can there be more options if one does not create those options. We are, after all, the authors of our own lives, and this author has made it clear (through such works as "Straddling the Picket Fence") that the picket-fence life is not for her.
As much as I can "Carpe Diem" myself, I really need to just pop off my duff and get going.
No comments:
Post a Comment