It's official.
The cats have hid money and fire under my books.
Well. A twonie, and a book of matches... they pattered them around, got them up under the bookcase... but it's as close to divine intervention as I'm gonna get. I'm taking it as a sign: the blog has begun! "When there's money 'n' fire under yer words -- well then, boy -- ya know ya got somnthn' WURTH somnthn'."
And it's all gotta start somewhere.
Or out of somewhere; somewhere that feels like nowhere, a black suffocation, that I might as well call this entire night, wound too tight, choking myself on all the things that I should be doing, but am not: should be getting a move-on with New Zealand and my plans to relocate there for a while; should be writing my Beggerstown story; should be writing a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g; should be treating this creative force inside myself with the devotion and dedication it deserves. Those being primary, the source of the personal admonishments hurtling me through empty space, they are accompanied (kept company) by a host of woulds and coulds; the smaller satellites, just as prone to send me into fits of anxiety.
I've been this way for about six hours now. It started sometime around 1 in the morning.
It's amounting to that very old, very cliche, 20 something paranoia/breakdown: "What the hell am I doing with my LIFE?"
I hate living out cliches. I prefer to think that I am smart enough, savvy enough, to skip a lot of the stages everyone else seems to be universally prone to. My perception is pretty acute, both internal and external. I spend a lot of time thinking, it's probably the best thing I'm for, twisting thought into every conceivable knot I can find. What good is all that for if you can't find a loophole, skip out on some of the shit?
My last breakup, the Breakup, humbled me somewhat in this regard. It's a good year and a half past now, but that initial stretch, the first year, was a l-o-n-g year, during which I managed to watch myself (almost from outside myself) go through every stage every friend of mine has ever experienced, coming back from that precipice where you send a relationship hurtling to its death; and I couldn't speed up the process. It became sorely evident as I pulled myself, blinking and completely unaware of how I got to bed the night before, with a big alcoholic hole in my brain up and out into the day, that emotional processes have a timeline of their own, and totally independent of logical ones. I couldn't reason my way out of it. All the self-doubt, the fears of being unloveable, the anger and the resentment, they all had to bleed out in sweat and tears. ugh. This is so stupid, I would think to myself, absolutely EVERYONE goes through this. These feelings are transitory. I've made my mistakes. I'm trying to learn from them. Isn't that enough? What's enough, evidently, is debatable. How much booze must be consumed in order to definitively silence that voice which can narrate, in absolute clarity, every meaningful hurt and petty justification you experienced over a two and a half year period, is a little more standard. Lots.
Lots and lots.
But I digress. The point is, behavior can be rooted in emotions which one has no conscious control. Smart or not, you can't reason your way out of a broken heart.
Apparently, these life-anxieties are similar.
I'm about to turn 28. Since 21 I've been pretty much okay with time marching on, but 28, for some reason feels a great deal closer to 30 than 27 ever did. Besides working, I've been doing sweet fuck all with my life for a year and a half now. I feel like I'm losing time.
intellectually, I know that 28 is not across the finish line. There is still opportunity to get any number of balls rolling. Writers, frequently, do not even get warmed up until they're in their 30's, and my keyboard is not exactly cold. Emotionally....
Really, I don't even have the energy to get into it right now. I've been wrestling with my emotions right up to sunrise. Frankly, I'm tired.
I will say this:
I've decided that fear of failure has got to be the most puerile bunch of garbage in that dump we call self-sabotage. I've got no time for it anymore. I resolve that from now on, better and more extravagant problems are going to plague my ability to move forward, and get shit done.
What has to happen, more than anything else, is for me to get writing. Anything. It just has to be regular, and it has to be to a certain level of ability. Everything else is going to follow.
Thank god it's spring. I can breathe again.
Well. A twonie, and a book of matches... they pattered them around, got them up under the bookcase... but it's as close to divine intervention as I'm gonna get. I'm taking it as a sign: the blog has begun! "When there's money 'n' fire under yer words -- well then, boy -- ya know ya got somnthn' WURTH somnthn'."
And it's all gotta start somewhere.
Or out of somewhere; somewhere that feels like nowhere, a black suffocation, that I might as well call this entire night, wound too tight, choking myself on all the things that I should be doing, but am not: should be getting a move-on with New Zealand and my plans to relocate there for a while; should be writing my Beggerstown story; should be writing a.n.y.t.h.i.n.g; should be treating this creative force inside myself with the devotion and dedication it deserves. Those being primary, the source of the personal admonishments hurtling me through empty space, they are accompanied (kept company) by a host of woulds and coulds; the smaller satellites, just as prone to send me into fits of anxiety.
I've been this way for about six hours now. It started sometime around 1 in the morning.
It's amounting to that very old, very cliche, 20 something paranoia/breakdown: "What the hell am I doing with my LIFE?"
I hate living out cliches. I prefer to think that I am smart enough, savvy enough, to skip a lot of the stages everyone else seems to be universally prone to. My perception is pretty acute, both internal and external. I spend a lot of time thinking, it's probably the best thing I'm for, twisting thought into every conceivable knot I can find. What good is all that for if you can't find a loophole, skip out on some of the shit?
My last breakup, the Breakup, humbled me somewhat in this regard. It's a good year and a half past now, but that initial stretch, the first year, was a l-o-n-g year, during which I managed to watch myself (almost from outside myself) go through every stage every friend of mine has ever experienced, coming back from that precipice where you send a relationship hurtling to its death; and I couldn't speed up the process. It became sorely evident as I pulled myself, blinking and completely unaware of how I got to bed the night before, with a big alcoholic hole in my brain up and out into the day, that emotional processes have a timeline of their own, and totally independent of logical ones. I couldn't reason my way out of it. All the self-doubt, the fears of being unloveable, the anger and the resentment, they all had to bleed out in sweat and tears. ugh. This is so stupid, I would think to myself, absolutely EVERYONE goes through this. These feelings are transitory. I've made my mistakes. I'm trying to learn from them. Isn't that enough? What's enough, evidently, is debatable. How much booze must be consumed in order to definitively silence that voice which can narrate, in absolute clarity, every meaningful hurt and petty justification you experienced over a two and a half year period, is a little more standard. Lots.
Lots and lots.
But I digress. The point is, behavior can be rooted in emotions which one has no conscious control. Smart or not, you can't reason your way out of a broken heart.
Apparently, these life-anxieties are similar.
I'm about to turn 28. Since 21 I've been pretty much okay with time marching on, but 28, for some reason feels a great deal closer to 30 than 27 ever did. Besides working, I've been doing sweet fuck all with my life for a year and a half now. I feel like I'm losing time.
intellectually, I know that 28 is not across the finish line. There is still opportunity to get any number of balls rolling. Writers, frequently, do not even get warmed up until they're in their 30's, and my keyboard is not exactly cold. Emotionally....
Really, I don't even have the energy to get into it right now. I've been wrestling with my emotions right up to sunrise. Frankly, I'm tired.
I will say this:
I've decided that fear of failure has got to be the most puerile bunch of garbage in that dump we call self-sabotage. I've got no time for it anymore. I resolve that from now on, better and more extravagant problems are going to plague my ability to move forward, and get shit done.
What has to happen, more than anything else, is for me to get writing. Anything. It just has to be regular, and it has to be to a certain level of ability. Everything else is going to follow.
Thank god it's spring. I can breathe again.
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