I feel like I'm on yet another annoying precarious edge overlooking yet another stupid abyss. I'm cranky as hell. Why? Thanks for asking. My friend Bravadita is fighting breast cancer, battling insurance companies and doctors with her bare hands. My brilliant sister is on the verge of financial ruin, even as she treads the rues of Paris. My mother is disintegrating, shedding her sense of self, a few memory cells at a time. I can't fix any of it.
I'm trapped in self-centered fear. My inability to earn enough to cover my expenses makes the last 20 years of recovery seem like a stupid pointless mirage. I suspect I should have turned left (into finance and accounting or maybe computer programming) instead of right (into art and teaching). That crossroads came and went years ago, no use in whining now, I know. Alas, alackaday.
To top it all off, it's fall, which always brings me closer to the edge of despair. The slant of the watery sun prods me toward hibernation, as if that were actually a solution. Is it possible to go to ground until spring? Perhaps, through the magic of the Internet and UPS. Everything is harder in winter: the frosty ground, the wind-whipped air, my blue-tinged cuticles, my sluggish blood. Okay, now I'm starting to really wallow. Look at me, I'm rolling in it from side to side. Ahhhhhh.
I admit, I miss this, this self-centered whining. Where else can one say the ridiculously egotistical, embarrassingly selfish things that need to said? I guess it's good my audience has dwindled to mostly auto-bot spammers. I would feel just slightly less inclined to whine if I thought people were reading this drivel. I feel fortunate my mother cannot find her way to this blog.
I was challenged this week to honor my creativity. Somewhere in me an artist still lurks, but she's been hibernating, mostly, for about 15 years. She surfaces now and then, in this blog, for example. She sleepwalked through graduate school. She dreams of days when creating was a compulsion, as essential as food. These days, creativity is a dry-bones memory of a once-verdant shelter. Parched. Hemmed in by clutter and white-knuckled fear.
I'm waiting. Waiting to find out if Bravadita will survive. Waiting to see what solution my sister will conjure out of the rich European ether. Waiting for my mother to decide how she wants to live until she dies. Waiting for spring. Waiting for the miracle to inspire me to stop the self-seeking long enough to feel something besides despair and resignation. Hope is a real thing, I know this in my brain. But my heart is disconnected. Untethered. Falling.
