Those cyclical meteorites of expression
I will not be saying anything new by saying that my thoughts return like lumps of frigid rock on regular orbits - some long, some short.
In the process of departing from ideas of what I should be doing with life, what I should have tried to achieve, what I should be pushing myself to attempt, what I should be trying to appear as, my thoughts settled into a solar system of silent slowly turning meteors which intersect at regular intervals with my slightly more active mind.
They speak again then, to clutter up the periphery of my day with their unanswered questions and stubborn objections to how life has progressed. So what do today’s passing celestials say?
Why did I leave the Workforce in 1995 and not ever find my way back into it?
Why do I have an intellect which could have done many things but chose to do none of them?
Why can I not figure out how to enter social interactions and stay there?
Why does life feel like watching someone else’s story through a glass page?
Why do I have an urge to write and nothing seems worth the energy investment to write about?
Why has life been about survival and finding safety rather than enjoying an adventure?
These are all me-centric, and why not? I stopped attempting to insert myself into the ‘solve the world’s crises’ questions, my body ran out of adrenalin for that. I don’t think I need the questions identified, they are all past-oriented, all hourglass shaped pins in expired moments and closed life trajectories. I’ve pulled up the strings and yet here they are, still orbiting, not yet slowed and absorbed by the gravity well of my larger self nor set loose to shoot off into less distracting lines of receding frequency.
So my next question is what keeps them as a record to remind at scheduled rendezvous that I might have missed something, and that the missing is causing me some kind of life failure or misfiring. I don’t believe that I could be anywhere but where I am and that place is not so bad.
Why is it inappropriate that I became a ‘home person’, putting all of my attention into caring for children, spouse and house? My husband is military and we once calculated that with deployments and training he was away from the home for more than 8 years of the past 24 (when the children were youngest). All that time I parented and managed the house on my own, in near isolation - no co-workers to help with tasks. It exhausted me. Some people can pull that magic off whilst holding down a career, all power to them, I was not one of them - and beat myself up over it.
It is highly likely that I am undiagnosed neuro-divergent, socially avoidant, prone to anxiety over things others don’t think much on at all. Why am I writing this out? Because I want to eject this particular pod of irrelevant ‘whys’. I don’t need them. I’ve done my absolute best. So what if I didn’t also hold down a paying job, get a degree, earn a slew of awards and have well-known people recommending my work to their peers? I haven’t made much money but I’ve saved 100’s of 1000’s of dollars in child care, cleaning, counselling and management bills.
The rub for me is that the energy expended in all this caring, raising and maintaining (combined with the outflow of years of solid stress over a situation or two not mentioned) appears to have been the majority of that lifeforce allotted me on a daily and yearly basis. I’ve got nothing left in the tank for anything more than knitting, crochet, the occasional potting of a plant, sporadic poetry, and spurts of verbosity on blogging platforms.
Why do folk such as myself expect so much of ourselves over our entire lives and keep on expecting from ourselves even after our mind and body has crumpled in a corner, arms over head, wailing ”no more”!?
It takes years to come back from the break moment which we often do not acknowledge as reasonably earned. Even amongst all this expectation we take on the pressure to also be saving the planet from the choices of our predecessors and peers, and handing it unsullied to our children who already see the writing on the wall whilst not feeling equipped to tackle it either.
What about you? Do you feel that life has been a dumping surf? A swamping tsunami of un-solidified goals which were not your original idea to begin with? Are you in the recovery phase, shuffling through the detox inflammation of decades of expectation, learning to not feel guilty that you have created a sedate life and are actually totally happy about that?
Are you like me, having no plans for tomorrow, thinking that your most pressing task may be to make sure your worldly affairs are in order; that you have sorted your garage-stored boxes to make sure you don’t leave a mess for someone else to think about, that you’ve pre-paid your funeral, written your will, established financial power of attorney, and set up a shared document so your spouse has all your device and online passwords ‘in case’?
During a wide-angle assessment of how I feel about life up to now, I realised that I may have been doing my very best to make sure the World didn’t notice that I am still here. And if it does, that it can’t prove that I am what it wants to think that I am.
If you read to here and have some thoughts, I’d love to read them in the comments section.
(Published previously on Substack)
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