It’s Friday morning and I’m doing my thing. This. The dust has settled now from the shakeup of my relocation, and here I am, feeling a bit lost, wondering if this whole narrative I’ve created about my life, this so-called journey of self-discovery, has been nothing more than a fantasy, a game I invented to give a sense of meaning and drama to the particular sequence of choices and random events that have delivered me — more or less in one piece — to this fine Friday morning. The internal knot I’m picking at right now has a dimly foreboding feel to it, like stifled waves of nausea. Deeper still there’s a sense that I’m missing something very, very important, something that is being communicated to me by everyone and everything all the time, yet somehow remains elusive for being so glaringly obvious. If I would just turn the dial a hair to the right or a smidge to the left, I would be tuned in clear as a bell, but I seem to have forgotten the basic things, like what a dial is what a bell sounds like.
It seems the fog of amnesia has settled over me, again. Yes, I’ve been over this ground before, I’m certain of it. Whatever is being communicated to me is something I already… fucking… know. Been here, done this. And yet…
Until the age of 30, the rules of the game were simple: every thought, emotion and action of any significance was wrapped up in the grand project of finding “the one” who would love me the way I needed to be loved. With each “failed” relationship, I understood a little more about the folly of such a project. At 40, I can note — with more than a little gratitude — how each morning I emerge from sleep to the joyful discovery that I am not alone. In fact, I wake up each day to the knowledge, rather unsettling at times, that I presently have everything the 30-year-old me ever truly wanted, and everything that any human being could reasonably hope for. And yet…
Am I spoiled rotten? Have I gotten too soft? Perhaps my edges were forged by the years of burning angst and the constant hammering of struggle and failure. It’s as if I don’t know how to be… comfortable.
Maybe I’ll invent a new game, create a new project and lose myself again in the drama of it all. Maybe I’ll stop all this navel-gazing and focus my creative energies on those less fortunate, those who would consider it a luxury to wrestle with my itty-bitty demons. Trouble is, I’ve been there too. I’ve been the martyr and the saint. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve been over every inch of this territory, wherever the hell I am. It’s just that my tracks have been covered up, and I can’t remember for the life of me what it was I discovered here that seemed so earth-shattering at the time.
Whatever it was though, it was somewhere deep down.
Better start digging.