Tag Archives: real life limbo

Searching

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” – Emily Dickinson

9.27.26

Today was the first day in a long time that I did not have an impending sense of doom. Not doom in the normal sense, but the inability to be fully in the moment because there’s too much hanging over you, a backlog of to-do’s that may or may not ever be done, trying to hold all the pieces of staying in touch with others and with myself.

I’ve been in some level of survival mode for months now. Life doesn’t care or slow down. I’m busy and overwhelmed daily…except for today.

I think I’ve been searching for a me that I remember fondly. One who held to a routine, sang for the sake of singing – and posted it for strangers on the internet, one who got home from work tired but would still make dinner feel far from mundane; the one who wrote, who relaxed – from the past. I miss her. I don’t know when she left or the real reason, but I’ve wanted her back ever since.

The version of that me I have been desperate to have back, is highly romanticized. All of the pain and struggle that existed simultaneously to this version of me, has been muted.

So, I realized today, that I can never be that person again – and that’s okay. Current me, future me, are just as important as the one in my memory I’ve been trying to hold on to. Instead of looking for those pieces of me, and trying to make them fit into my current life, I must accept the me that exists now. How sad to leave her waiting, while I conduct a pointless search for pieces of the past.

I am not the same person I was, and yet I still am me. Celebrating that sounds silly, especially since I don’t harbor as much love for this me as the other, but what might be a turning point, a perspective shift, that is worth a small celebration.

How else do we move forward, if we do not let go of the past…

So hello, Strangers and Friends. It’s so good to speak to you again. I’m hopeful for the future, even though unknown.

Forward

I wonder, if someone was to write the “forward” to my life right now, what would they say?

I have such an overwhelming desire to create, to push my boundaries, stretch my wings and see how far they can take me. I want the time to devote to these pursuits, to learn and grow.

This pandemic has given me so much but also left me wondering where can I really go from here? I would love a creative field to be my sustaining career but currently, I work in an office position that drains me emotionally and fills my bank account better than any previous employment. I have ideas that I want to test and joy that I want to bring to people but my energy after a work day is close to zero and my weekends are spent trying to catch up on the “adulting” to-do list, taking care of myself, and preparing for the week ahead. This does not leave much room for the things that I am passionate about.

Does anyone out there have any advice on this?
The logical, responsible, side of me says, this is how it is and you just have to do the 9-5 thing in order to be taken seriously, to properly provide for yourself, and to make anything of yourself in society’s eyes.
The other side of me, high on imagination and dreams, keeps saying that there must be a way to make it possible. This blog is the only step I’ve been able to take in the direction of my dreams lately. I don’t know if it will be able to ignite the others and bring them to life as well, but it’s a step.

My very idea of what I would want to do for my own creative business rests in the idea of a mental escape. We all need that excitement, that adventure and glee, like the kind you get from immersing yourself in another world through a good book or a fantastical movie.
Not all of us can go study at an elite university in Europe, get caught up in a dramatic love, worthy of poetry that lives through ages of history. Not (any?) of us were born royalty, struggling to make the right decisions for our kingdom, while pacing the halls of our castle in elegant garb. There are some who live in cottages or on farms, surrounded by the quiet morning until it is pierced by the rooster announcing arrival of a new day. Dark, hidden hovels, tucked into the lush forest, rafters strung with herbs and the aroma of fresh bread, all of these beckon to me as lives I do not have but want a taste of.

I’ve been trying to bring bits of, pieces of, these feelings and ideas into my own life as much as I can. The way the sun shone on a stand-out piece of moss or the mud squished under my boots, on my walk with a friend, these are things that I find myself clinging to.

There are many things for me to be grateful for, many provisions, I just wonder, if I reached out, could I touch the stars?

Thank you for reading my brain explosion/rant/excitement. If you work in a creative field that is considered much less likely to “succeed” by society, (artists, musicians, creative writers, etc.) do you have any suggestions?

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