On why I am sitting here, on the ground

I feel that I have been cheated.

And I am angry about it. A good question might be: who am I angry with? I don't know. I am just angry.

I grew up reading. Ever since a thief made off with our TV in the middle of the night (through a hole in the window that my parents insisted a bird had made) and so my father was obliged to get us each library cards to keep us entertained. I read just about everything I could get my hands on - until I was 16, when I ran out of things to read. But that's Another Story.

The point is that I grew up believing in magic. The magic of stories. I believed - honest to goodness BELIEVED - that my life would be lived like the plot of a novel. I believed that I would encounter challenges but that I would overcome, effortlessly, simply because I was destined to be the heroine of my own life. I believed that events in my life would have climaxes and morals and resolutions. The morals would be the magic - like a hero in a quest, I would accumulate them until I had solved The Mystery (of Existence). So, I jumped headfirst into new challenges because I believed there was a mystical safety net to catch me when I fell.

(Wrapped up in this is also Another Story. Another Story for Another Time.)

Then, almost a year ago, I began moonlighting as a project manager at a leading education publisher. I moved across the country, leaving behind everything really, even myself to an extent. (I set off with such naivete (albeit made of a bronze that hadn't been polished in some time), with such hope and so many expectations. I had been tested over the last year and a bit. So I was tired, but here I was facing my Moral, possibly even my Resolution. I was going to be rewarded. I was going to be my own heroine.) I started off with a slow jog, and worked up to a solid run. I stumbled, I fell, but I kept picking myself up, dusting myself off, and setting off again, first at a jog and then at a run. Although I didn't notice it at first, eventually I was so scraped and bruised and bleeding that it wore a hole in my soul and in my heart so big...

Just then, as I was contemplating my mortality and not looking where I was going, I hit a brick wall that reaches up to the sky and stretches along the horizon as far as you can see. It stretches on so high and so far that it fills up your vision and your whole body and you are transformed into brick, rooted to the spot, on your ass. And so I was lost. If you can see it, the wall has already won your soul. What I only realise now, as I type, is that the wall was there all along; this was just the first time I had seen it.

So there is no magic. My life is not a story; I am not destined to succeed. There is no Grand Mystery and there is no moral. I have been abandoned. Abandoned. Lost. I am rooted to the ground, sitting before a wall; I am part of the wall; its pattern adorns my skin. I will not get up again. I give up! I yell. Not too loudly. I give up.

The only way that I get a happy ending is to retreat back into my world. The world made up of stories others have invented and those that I weave around my own life. It feels less like giving up than going home.

So, folks, I am angry. I am angry because I have been cheated. I am not angry with anyone, but I am still angry. I am sure you can understand.