Month: June 2020

Time to level up?

What am I doing?

If I wanted to be a blogger, there are a whole lot of other ways I could be going about it that would be better than this. But I don’t, especially. I want to be a writer.

And I think I only mean that in the most basic of senses. Just that I am a person who writes. Ideally, a person who writes well.

I have always, when allowed to exist unfettered, been a writer. But the bleakest times of my life coincide with the most pages left blank, because I let myself be easily stifled. Part of this endeavour has been to consciously resist my tendency to fall silent in appeasement.

When I started this originally, while pregnant, my aim was just to write something every day. I failed fairly quickly. This time around, my aim was to write something worth writing every day. I confess I’ve actually missed one day, and a few of my posts were maybe scraping the barrel, but, even if I have failed, I’ve failed less.

The thing that is irking me now is this: I’m not trying to get people to look at this. And so not many people are looking at this. And so, I may be writing something worth writing, but am I writing something worth reading?

To find that out, I need more feedback. And that’s going to require me to do work that isn’t just writing. And I don’t fucking want to. But that’s where we are. And that’s my choice if I want to level up. And that’s very inconvenient for me.

So what’s it gonna be?

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Straight lines

Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.

I’m bad at boundaries.

Most people I know are bad at boundaries.

Is that because most people are bad at boundaries? Or because only people who are bad at boundaries can tolerate people who are bad at boundaries?

I notice, when I try to instate or uphold healthy boundaries, that a lot of people don’t like it. My first thought, of course, is that I’m doing it wrong. Which may be true. But I suspect it’s probably more to do with violated expectations.

I also notice, when I try to instate or uphold healthy boundaries, that I often don’t really like it either. It’s hard work. It’s effort to maintain the balance of empathy and kindness with drawing lines. I fuck it up a lot.

I also notice, though, that when other people set clear boundaries, I love it. It doesn’t happen that often, but I feel so free when it does.

So I know what I am chasing: People to draw adjoining shapes with.

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Blurred vision

Have I been holding too tightly to my own point of view?

Have I been refusing to see what they were trying to show me?

Sometimes, pain constricts our vision – sometimes our field of view, sometimes our focus.

I think I’ve fallen victim to that of late. So now I’m forcing myself to look differently. And it’s uncomfortable, and it feels a bit wrong, and I don’t like it. And part of me keeps chanting don’t do it, you’ll just get hurt again.

But how much is it hurting me to continue as I am? And can I not trust myself to learn from my mistakes?

If we become too rigid, we begin to die. If we stop using our vision, it atrophies.

Learning to open up again is probably the most important and difficult part of healing. If you don’t eventually get there then, really, what was the point?

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Every wand’ring bark

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to make a decision and not waver.

There is part of me that knows how to be unshakeable. At my core I am fixed in love, and if I drop down into that, I am certain.

It’s my mind that wanders – looking for a new approach, exploring different avenues, finding all the angles. Everchanging curiosity and insatiable questing prevent me from keeping my feet in one place for very long at all. The only way for me to stick to a path is for me to dance all over it. And then, if a fork comes up, all bets are off.

I scare people when I’m fixed on something. Maybe that’s why I often lean so heavily on my tendency to flitter. I am intense. Not many can withstand my gaze for more than a few seconds. I burn through things. I’ve never really learned to own that.

It’s easy to imagine that life would be simpler if I could just pick a reality and stick to it. But, ultimately, I think I still believe that I’d be losing something if I did that.

I also think there’s a way to acknowledge the multifacted nature of truth while still mapping out a defined path for yourself. But I’ve been failing at that for the past few weeks. I’ve been feeling directionless, and lamenting all the decisions I haven’t made.

Life can be a lot sometimes. It’s okay to get blown off course when you’re trying to do difficult things. Just gotta keep The Star in sight.

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Please don’t go back to sleep

It would be a whole lot easier, wouldn’t it, if systemic racism didn’t exist? As a basically white person, it’d be a whole lot easier, and a whole lot more comfortable, to just go on as before, ignoring what I’ve seen play out over the past month. It’d be a whole lot easier to ignore the thinly veiled but heavily defended racism getting posted on Facebook right now. The distortion of truth, the picking apart of black individuals’ characters, the diminishing of human life against an overinflated consideration for public property.

I can understand why I’ve heard gaslighting getting talked about so much in anti-racist conversations, because it’s starting to make me feel crazy. Sat on the bed earlier, I thought about what it might be like to be a black person seeing what I’m seeing right now. I’m not seeing the worst of it in my social circle, and neither am I seeing the best. But I’m already viewing almost everyone in my life with suspicion. People who were quick to disavow racism at the start of this are now changing their tune to disavow unruly protests and whatever else allows them to deflect from the problem, and nearly everyone else is silent. I guess it’s just the same old story, but, man, is it bleak.

I’d be sleeping much better if I was silent too. Multiple nights recently, I’ve gone to bed not long after seeing a hateful comment or deliberate misinformation online. Whether I’ve had time to address it before putting my phone away or have saved it to look at again later, it echoes around my head while I lie in bed. Not because I’ve seen it, exactly, but because I have accepted the responsibility of addressing it. I’m not even doing this that often, but the burden is still significant. So I can see the lure of returning to (wilful) ignorance.

For that reason, one of the people in my life I am suspicious of is me. Putting aside all of the resistance that anti-racism work is met with, both internally and externally, diving deep into a subject for a period of intensive engagement only to abandon it and move on quickly after is kind of my M.O. So, based upon that, I’m not a good horse to bet on. I guess my saving grace may be that the one thing I have always stuck with – with admirably dogged determination if I do say so myself – is trying to be a better person, and there is no way to extricate anti-racism from that.

This is too big a problem to even wrap our heads around, and new distractions are popping up every hour of every day. The system wants us to forget about it. I’m starting to understand that most of us probably will. But I need to find a way to make sure I don’t.

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Aft agley

At the beginning of lockdown, I started finally ‘bedding in’ to my flat. I started putting things on the wall, and growing plants in the garden. I started assuming I would be here for a while, and acting accordingly.

I’ve rarely lived in a place for longer than a year. Often shorter. I have a habit of not ‘fully unpacking’, whether that be physically or just mentally. But, with a two year old and no reason to go anywhere – no better prospects – I figured it’d be nice to fully exhale into the space I found myself in.

Now, it looks like it’s time to move on. Which is kind of a pain. But also exciting. I was exhausted by the idea of moving again a few months ago but, as I scan through property listings now, I feel that familiar sense of new possibility piquing my interest.

So this wasn’t the plan. But my restless heart won’t mind.

I’d always instinctly felt that my relentless movement was a symptom of my restlessness. But I do wonder, now, whether my restlessness was in fact an adaptation to necessity. Because I didn’t want to move, but, now that I need to, I want to.

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