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.
