Confess. At least every so often - I'm guessing more often that less - you wonder how you got here. 'Here' being shorthand for your life (isn't it interesting that we use a vague spatial indicator to refer to this 'thing' (again) that feels like an undiscovered dimension). I wonder why I have been so lucky (I haven't been: I have worked myself into diagnosed exhaustion and fought my way through every obstacle, with dirt and flesh under my fingernails) and why it feels like reading an autobiography and identifying with the author. Hey, but then, my brand of nihilism allows for this.
This is not actually my point now, although it makes for a meandering tangent (oxymoron intended).
My career was always meant to be enough - to be the thing that defined me and filled me and distracted me from all the pain in the world. I predicted that I would have nothing else for fear of turning around one day (unforewarned) and realising that I had nothing. Forewarned, after all, is forearmed. Now, destructively curious, I am turning around (more like turning my head cautiously so as not to alarm anything, anyone, myself) and there is... almost everything. Almost everything I had written in a list a year and a half ago in a crisis similar to this one now.
Damn right I'm watching someone else balance on this precipice! I say. You respond: but what's the problem?
Did you ever have a mantra that you leant against when life overwhelmed you because you were young and needed something? And did that mantra ever have sprout from some perceived deficiency? In other words, did you ever think you weren't 'good enough'? Urgh, you've read this story before, probably some Catcher-in-the-Rye-esque coming-of-age tale, about the misfit made hero, the duckling made swan, hopefully the damsel made the narrator of her own tale. Well, I am reading the story of my own life, so just think about it.
If you lean there long enough, you grow around the mantra, like a tree around a chainlink fence. You hold onto it just as closely as you do your fantasy of your future. Maybe the two even bond and so break each other down and so create something else, corroding, like rust on said fence. My mantra was work hard and achieve (implicitly convincing me that working is the same as being). Obvious, but not so obvious to me until I turned 16. Logic driven by emotional distress (this is why you should never send an email when angry) concluded that the only way to be whole would be to work hard. Ta-da, the secret of life!
A decade and a bit later, blah blah exhaustion. Believe it or not, this is not the problem.
Heaven help me, I have a will and a sense of determination to fuel it that need an outlet. At the risk of dissociating, my will always reminds me of those horror movies where the living dead are crushed by something and then stand back up, clicking bones back into joints. No, my will is really a Nancy Drew who wants to learn (oh, knowledge!) and keeps sneaking back into the library, perhaps because it drafted every line of the building plan.
I have seen so much and learnt so much, and can appreciate that no 'problem' is unsolvable, and that people are damaged, and who to trust and who not to, and now my life is filled with people and passions and hard-won security. I can appreciate how 'lucky' I am, even if from afar.
The problem is that I hadn't really thought further than this point. For that decade and a bit, my world has been the curling of bark around the chainlink fence. You can't chop a gap between them without damaging the tree and even if you were to separate them cleanly, there would be a gap in the tree trunk in the shape of the wire with a plaster of rust. To compound my dilemma, scrutinising and defining this isolated point of a larger system has brought me closer to myself, just not close enough.
What now? I can think of at least 50 things, but choosing one of them would mean accepting that the wire should be there, rather than accepting that it already is. Surprisingly (to me), my will wants the latter - perhaps because I want to have my own story and perhaps because I have tried a few of the 50 things and the latter seems like a greater challenge. (Discarding the metaphor now - can you see in the previous paragraph how it started to blur - and that that is the point - that it cannot move and it cannot change and it is but a tool of dissociation.)
I have already chosen: to 'pull myself toward myself' and with arms accordingly folded around myself slowly stand and scrutinise the world around me rather than scrutinising my huddled self with the world's eyes. Confession made, liturgy recited from behind a veiled screen (what that makes you, you'll have to figure out), and as I leave I wonder why I am confessing that which is not a sin. Why I asked you to confess, whether you heard my instruction and sat yourself on the other side in the confessional, or heard it, held my hand and let me talk it out, or heard it and had heard enough and walked away.
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