The big reason I kept posting to Facebook was that the audience there of family and people I’ve known for years, plus a few others, kept me from spending time talking about myself too much. Well, maybe it didn’t, but I felt that it did. Now I have to develop my own filter. I’m not good at that. I’m not good at two things: at knowing what will happen and at filtering myself. I respond to the latter by not sharing much of anything about myself with most people, so I don’t need to filter. I respond to the former by trusting my instincts, even though that’s often a painful and anxious process. Even typing this feels like too much.
Why do I bother? I’m tempted to type, ‘I don’t know’ but that isn’t true at all; it’s because I have an unbelievably powerful sense of mission, one so powerful that I’ve largely been helpless at resisting it. Or maybe I should say I don’t realize ways in which I’ve resisted, because I’m so full of doubt about myself that I often believe I must have screwed it up and maybe I’ll never even know how badly I’ve done.
And then there are oddities. Like the way I was driven to take up running after years away from it, despite the obvious problems: I have a foot that needs surgery, a knee that’s been painful for years, and a left hip that’s sometimes worse than the knee or foot. And yet I did it. It hasn’t been long but now, at lunch today, I found myself saying, ‘I’m in less pain than since I was on toradol’, which was when I was hospitalized some years back for a feral cat bite and they were feeding the stuff into my bloodstream. It’s often taken extreme concentration to work through the pain but my instincts told me that if I kept going the pain would get better, not worse. I trusted that.
If you’d asked me some years back, I’d have said that when I’m my age now I’d want to look like I do now, that I’d want to be in the physical condition I am now, that I’d want to understand as much of my life’s work as I do now. I used to say out loud to people that I wanted to live my life backwards, that I wanted my life to become more interesting in its last third to half.
Funny, but over time, beyond the things I work on every single day – and I never take a day completely off from work – the one thing I’ve never had is external motivation. I don’t care what other people think of me, though I like them to like me, to find me attractive and to find me interesting. I regret that sometimes, it seems, people have a hard time talking to me, that women in particular seem unable to come out with words, which really bothers me because I prefer talking to women (and men who have feminine sides they acknowledge). I used to think it was because I must be repulsive, either physically or in my manner. I have never had much in the way of physical self-esteem. It isn’t easy being green and it isn’t easy being a pale-skinned, freckled red head with a hand that won’t work well for sports. I once tried to count the red heads in my subdivision of probably 400+ houses, and came up with me and a few possibles. The only red heads in my junior high were a couple. To my knowledge, I never spoke to either of them; she was a cheerleader so heaven forbid I could even open my mouth around her and he was jock. It wasn’t until I started watching soccer that I realized ‘short’ people could be great athletes. Not that I could have been one: any athletic chances I had were crushed when I had to switch hands. That threw off everything: I couldn’t hit left-handed or throw left-hand because of my hand and yet my eyes and balance and coordination are set up for being left-handed. I could do OK, but it was never me playing and I think I lost that joy of the experience of doing a sport naturally.
The closest I’ve ever had to external motivation is ‘her’. She has taken a variety of forms in my head but they’re all versions of her. I started to identify her with an actual person, but I often feel that’s delusional if only because I find it almost impossible that anyone could actually match and exceed the her in my head, which she does in every way if I read her correctly. This has caused a lot of arguments in my head, mostly having to do with my sense of mission: gigantic waves of negativity that take me to the edge of giving up completely followed by massive break-throughs in my work. It’s not pleasant. It’s anxiety ridden, especially since I seem to have developed an acute sense of what and when ‘stuff’ appears about this person, as though I’m reading a stage-managed listing that tears at me, that teases and entices, that generates these horrible feelings and which then drive me to deeper work.
I wish I knew what happens next. I don’t. I’ve given up the idea that I can know because it’s clearly a skill that has been left out of me, that I’m meant to follow my instincts toward the solution. Over the last weeks, I’ve almost daily seen my work come together. It’s become so deep and yet so simple that I’m starting to harbor thoughts that maybe, just maybe there’s the slightest chance that I can say it in a way that people can actually understand. I don’t know. I do know that nearing the end of this rope and I have no idea if there’s another rope to grab on to next because I’m not capable of seeing ‘next’. That skill was left out of me so I could focus on my task. I just hope I come out of this either alive or not alive but not having failed. Being ‘alive’ to me is not particularly important except as it matters for my mission. In that regard, I’ve taken to referring to myself as operative 8, which is also O, which is Oxygen, which is each of my names. I love to go down the rabbit holes of meaning but then I step back and feel terrible for believing. I have a very hard time liking myself or liking what I do, even when I know it’s right. Driving myself – or being driven, as I feel I am – requires a high degree of self-critical, self-loathing that masks itself as self-love as though there’s an infinite, fine sheet or net drawn over and around me. I hope it doesn’t choke me to death.
I’m going to stop before I type so much I’m put off by how much I’ve typed.
jomi: playing with perception 