Sometimes I try to work out if I could still be someone. Do I still have time to become Neil Gaiman? Or have I already fucked it? I definitely can’t be Elon or Sufjan or Jason or Guy. But there are a few options left on the table.
Why are all the people I want to be men? We’ve grappled with this before, Yve, and now is not the time to get into it.
Do we all ache for more time?
I’ve heard people hypothesise that death is a blessing specifically because if we had time stretching out into infinity we’d grow disinterested and depressed with life – no urgency, no impetus, nothing to make the endeavour worthwhile.
I proffer a disagreement.
I can see that being an option, of course – it’s easy to see how that could develop. But JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THE WORLD IS A MAGICAL PLACE THAT IT WOULD TAKE MILLIONS OF LIFETIMES TO SCRATCH THE SURFACE OF AND THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING OF IT! So many things unlike all the others, how could you ever get bored? I would like to dig and dig and dig.
So give me infinity. I’ll risk depression and stagnancy to find out how it feels. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
At the very least I think it would be nice to decide when the time should run out. But I also suspect that, if we had all the time in the world, our nature would gradually become less human and more like that of our universe. So, rather than transitioning from day to night, life to death, we would, inch by inch, transcend the dichotomy until, like the world around us, we simply were.
But what do I know? The Universe itself may ache for more time.
It’s hard, once you stop, to start up again.
My life is set up to be intermittent. That’s not my preference, it’s just the way it is.
As much as I inherently rail against routine, I do better with consistency and, knowing this, I have tried to seek it out. Unfortunately I have not been able to collaborate with the main actors in my life to create a level of daily consistency for myself. Instead I have a reasonably predictable, undulating, biweekly cycle, during which different areas of my life flash on and off for multiple days at a time. I live in binary. All or nothing.
I’m good at all.
I’m good at nothing.
The switching…I’m not so good at that.
I waste a lot of energy trying, and regularly failing, to make the transition from one to the other. My life demands I simultaneously switch one area off, and another area on, according to its schedule. The whole point of the cycle is that all things have their place, but what if I can’t get to that place on time, because I wandered too far into the depths of the other place and I haven’t found my way out yet?
I did better when, despite my schedule conspiring against me in ways I was unable to remedy, I constructed consistency for myself. Daily consistency. A reliable thread. Anything less simply adds to the chaos, as much as I’d like to believe otherwise.
The most successful thread I constructed was writing daily. Writing meaningfully and intentionally every day. But life got noisy and I let it lapse. I let myself lapse. I dropped the thread. And that was a mistake. A mistake all too familiar.
I haven’t figured out, so far in my life, how to keep on doing anything.
The only daily consistency I’ve had in recent months is my morning coffee. Its effect is dopaminergic enough and its procurement easy enough to ensure its inclusion regardless of my week’s topography. But everything else is up for grabs, and up for debate.
And that is, quite possibly, the crux of all my problems.
Nobody except me cares, really. It’s not their problem. I couldn’t make it their problem if I tried. I did try, in some cases, so I’ve learned that lesson. There’s no point looking outward.
This is my life. How do I fit myself into it?
Jesus fucking Christ I started this blog over four and a half years ago.
Imagine if it had been successful???
Could have changed my fucking life!
The thing is it did. It has completely served its purpose every step of the way – it has done everything I’ve ever asked of it. I just never asked it to be any of the things that one may ascribe to outward success.
So, what happens if I do? If I do ask it to perform some acts of material progression beyond the accumulation of words? Will it deliver? Will I deliver?
What a scary question.
I have been hanging over a precipice – an upturned Fool pretending to be a Hanged Man, if you’ll forgive the Tarot reference – for too fucking long. I have known what I should do, and have still not done it, for too fucking long.
And I’m not saying that BLOGGING is the thing I should do. But standing in my own power, and my own truth, and my own desire, and trusting myself to deliver most certainly is.
I don’t know how long I will live. Maybe I have a good fifty years left. Maybe I’ll perish far sooner. Maybe, maybe, we’re all gonna be ageless robots soon, limited only by the longevity of the Universe. But I know I have lived more than long enough to have learned my lesson by now. And every day I choose not to live it, at this point, is just a fucking waste of a very precious resource.
So okay. Maybe I broke my nervous system with a peak experience I wasn’t equipped to handle. Maybe there is now an anomaly sitting in my intuitive faculties that I simply have to live with. It doesn’t change the fact that if I do the things that feel right to me, by and large, good things happen. If I move toward the things that feel aligned to me, my life gets more beautiful. Who the fuck cares about the rest of the noise? Stop the fucking hand-wringing over whether it’s okay. Pay attention to the evidence. Live a-fucking-ccordingly.
Easy enough to say.
Yve Alecia Smith 