“My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether,” [she writes.] “Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.” —Joan Didion (via Michael Specktor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Positions of Privilege: On Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, 24 Oct 2011)
And just like that, 5 months have passed since I wrote here… Five months with me living almost exclusively in the cavern of my self. Thinking the words that I never write. Looking at people, planning a life, and never writing the words that I think. What’s worse, is, as Joan says above, my cognitive confidence seems to have vanished for I am very much in one of the strangest places I’ve found myself as an actual adult, no longer caught up in the games of children, but utterly lost as a child left in the mall. In many ways, I thought I’d protected myself from this kind of confusion. But I was kidding myself. Clearly.
I am quite possibly on a number of shit lists. I have not nurtured the relationships that I value most in the ways I see fit. I have not even nurtured myself in the way I see fit. I come close. But I’m still learning.
Not to mention the words.
Perhaps me and a public blog is not that great a thing. For when I sit to idly pen, I want to spill every bit of myself onto the page, all that I have been holding and carrying and mulling and suppressing. There must be safer spaces in which to put it down.
Sometimes, I see, my usual circles become so laden with the circles’ members’ own difficulties, that even the circle is not a safe place. It’s a stone, cold world, I guess. Punctuated by love, sex, and hot, warm, temporary places, but ultimately, it’s just stone, cold, alone. As in death. As in birth.
I can only hope that those I have wounded are able to look, as I also genuinely try, far outside themselves and into the hearts of those who have wronged them. I hope they, as I do, see that we are all just constantly being wounded by people who are not even THINKING about us in that way. And that’s the unfortunate thing, for how grudges are born. And nurtured. And held. And kept until they hurt no one but the holder…
Let go.
I’m trying everyday.
To let go of anything that is not for me to hold.
I can’t even hold on to the child I brought into this world. Not in the end. Not for long.
And so I go on. 34 now. My dad died. My heart broke. I’m raising a teenager. I work. I watch. I don’t sleep enough or pray.
Nonfiction Woman 