Commitment and Change

I thought I would write more during this hiatus from my big social media time-suck, Facebook, but I haven't.  Has more to do with me than with true busy-ness.  I've just not felt like writing.  There are so many things I could write about, but when I start to do it, I can't find the words.  Then again, I don't try very hard to find them.  It's as though I don't want them to be found.  I can be very noncommital that way.

I have to laugh, because I have just been reminded how true that is about myself in general.  I'm so very noncommital.  I have long been aware that I struggle to commit to relationships.  And though I can easily point out that there have been good reasons to walk away from the ones I tried to commit to,  I've known I'd struggle regardless of the circumstance, and that has pained me some.  Today it's a dull pain, since I am less eager to beat myself about the head and shoulders for being who I am than I was when I was younger.   Acceptance of self can turn you into a bit of an asshole it seems.  Take me or leave me.  I am who I am.  Ha!  Yes, I know my singular self.  Still, knowing myself so well frees me to shine brighter in the areas where I do shine.  I don't feel like polishing those characteristics now, though.  I just have to laugh and look closely for a moment at just how my resistance to commitment affects so much more than my status of being serially single.

Of course I've known this for a long time, but sometimes I get a plain and glaring reminder, just as I did as I started to write this post.  As soon as I typed out the word "noncommital" with regards to writing, I knew that I was seeing a truth about my nature, and a possible answer for how to write more. Usually I need to talk to have a sharp epiphany like that.  Hmm....writing is like talking, as I'd hoped.  I should try harder to commit to it, because I'm tired of talking, really.  Tired of hearing myself.  Tired of giving people ammunition against me, too.  I want to seek my own council more.

I have been finding (or rediscovering) ways to satisfy my mind outside of Facebook.  It's so nice to read books again.  I've read a memoir about a couple who went sailing when the chicks left the nest, a novel about heartbreak and revenge which used food as a vehicle to tell the story and I am reading Guns, Germs and Steel in between it all.  I'm about to start a Toni Morrison novel. I'm sort of resistant, though.  I feel like I will somehow be going backwards to read Toni Morrison, though I know she's great.  It's just that I read so much of her and other Black American Women writers when I was in college and for awhile afterward, that I'm having a hard time getting excited.  I've enjoyed some movies and definitely got hung up on Downton Abby along with the rest of the women I know apparently, but it's a temporary lull in my appetite for something to engage my senses.  Lately I seem to want something to really shake me up.

That's about as true as anything I could possibly say.  I absolutely want something to shake me up.  Losing my job at Axium started that.  It shook me up alright, but I couldn't act on it the way I would have liked.  I wanted to fully embrace that change.  Every fiber of my being wanted to go toward a much simpler lifestyle after that painful 2 year long professional breakup.  I wanted to head back to Alaska or down to Mexico or off on a sailboat.  I wanted to capitalize on the change in my circumstance and fully embrace it.  Instead, I found another job, and a boring one at that.  It's anti-climatic.  It's deadening to my senses.  But I have to be here right now.  I have children to finish raising, and I don't believe they want a shake-up as much as I do.  Stella surely does not want any shake-up at all.

So I stifle the fires of my passion for change and newness and my desire to embrace a simpler  and wholly different existence.  I bank those coals while I wait for a better time, a more obvious opportunity to feed the flames.  I fan them occasionally with a motorcycle ride, or a lover's tryst, or an impetuous purchase.  The motorcycle is good therapy, but my other attempts to quell my current anxiety and feelings of stagnation only complicate things in a negative way.  I should stick to books and movies.  heh.

For now, I will sit with these thoughts.  Maybe I'll elaborate later.  Maybe not.  I can't commit.