Yesterday I failed my second driving test.
In my idle room, I sloppily chose a watch. Soft White Under Belly. Settling into a drabby mood. The scuffling video soundtracked the defeated feeling of the day. Carrying a hazy dullness.
Since my little life change, I’ve been trying - from the tip of my toes - to keep a hold on things.
The feeling in this environment can be quite pressing, both mentally and physically. So I fell into indulging myself with the plan to action that would create my soon to be better future - diversion against the current unchangeable.
Planning and preparing for things; earning enough time and gathering enough money to materialise my skills, possessing the tools that would become my allies to reaching my desired reality. I’d have something good going. The promise. To create and live more desirably to my chosen needs and urges.
These notions I could use to get through.
A bit compulsive but acceptable and sorry. A wincing, reaching. Endurance against things being scratchy and undesirable. A buzzing soother.
So, after my failed test, while dutifully packing my little suitcase for my return to the hassle of London, this conversation played as a backdrop against my carrying ons.
During a moment that I listened in to, my attention sharpened. Past the story that was being told, there was the response that was being given back by the interviewer. For an hour, the interviewer, Mark, had been hearing this girl describe her hardships and misery. She spoke of her abandonment and the shapes she’d taken along her life. In response, the interviewer, tells her that she should stop trying to find refuge in wishing her life had been different and stop trying soo hard to understand herself. He says, even if her circumstances were different, she would probably still be the same way, just as pessimistic, depressed and misunderstood, it was innately who she was. I felt that he cursed her this way.
As the dialogue continued, I staggered between objection and arousal.
He continued on saying that she should try to find something better to do with her gloominess because this same dark, isolating disposition she has, is what makes her wonderful and special and gives her the gift to able to create so deeply and beautifully. That she should embrace all of the darkness she feels and create through it. And she shouldn’t try to be anything else.
His engagement with what he heard from this girl, was to call to the strikingness of duality and practically dismiss all else. Giving a slashing reminder that life breathes in paradoxes. This made for a sombre reception in my open-spiralled mind.
It’s taken some time to adjust to living here, working as I do, having less time to play with, getting up, being confronted with my reality and knowing that this is it for now, this is what I’ve got to work with. Through the routine and sobering conversations and blunt realisation, I have taken to swallowing this reality with a decisive gulp. Both eyes open.
The more space I give to my mind, the more I become familiar with it’s fleeting states and the simpler it becomes to just drop it. Drop the fickleness of things. So now, resigning to surrender, my efforts have to become simpler. My situation is still good enough to live and create, as is any other. I feel a satisfying simplification in this.
If I was to think about myself ‘creating’ I would be tempted to judge in line of the things I look at, the people I see creating and the way that I see them. But I know that naturally, as I live being the person I am, I express my own creation just through my way of being. By the way I string things together to form the life I live. One way or another.
But I feel stuck at a boundary of committing to living through this expression. At this threshold, I hover, feeling my momentum seep out softly.
The kind of creating where I am producing something for my own self-expression, intentionally and freely. I try every now and then but It feels spotty and coughed out rather than a pouring flow.
Making something, sometimes the whole thing feels off to begin with, too consciously crafted and packaged for reception. Or when it is made, too painfully lingered upon and gaped at. And that’s if it even gets a chance to emerge from the fog that says not enough time, skill, ideas, patience.
I’m splayed. bored of chasing my own tail.
My situation will remain as it is for now. I’m hopeful that my surrender to creating will bring forth emergence. Disregarding the attachment to the idea of becoming, and rather moving and doing - something, anything. A reminder that I have the agency and birth right to create through discomfort and pain.
I pray this change takes me to good.
:)
Hoping my writing will become smoother and freer. I’m still settling here…
We’ll work it out.
Till next time.
_
I must confess. I began writing this at the top of the week and now I’m continuing on a Saturday, my workman’s holiday. A whole, very different day so I feel a bit jaded stretching out this constructed Monday (or whatever day it was). But questioning the same thing on a new day is something in itself, so I pushed through.
beautiful! thank you for this!