What’s left at the end of my eviction
The worst 100+ days have been dotted with acts of kindness and ..
(journal alert, you’ve been warned)
The worst 100+ days have been dotted with acts of kindness and … also with being too overwhelmed to speak or to be a human in the presence of others,
It’s felt like as if I had run a marathon, been beaten up and cried teacups of tears incessantly WITHOUT any of these things having taken place. (Ok, I may have shed a couple of teaspoons worth of tears once.)
I wish I could share in words how it feels to grieve for relative certainty and look ahead and see only planes and too few parachutes. I spent 4 full days just under the duvet, licking my wounds. Trying my best to reconfigure because I SHALL dazzle everyone with my unexpected comeback. That’s the plan anyway!
The biggest glimmers of joy came with the calmest humans converging in my corner of life, sort of like gentle life vests thrown into the torrents of life. Offering medicinal calm and (this week) an hour of generously paid work that will feed me for a few days. I felt uplifted and soothed. You know who you are. You were my pastel coloured bandaids.
And everyone who couldn’t be my bandaid: I still felt the care deeply. I just needed more pastel colour, more cotton wool, more silence, more solitude.
What is your vote? Diaristic Journal or professional image cultivating curation?
I CAN do either. But who do you want to know? Me in my entirety with my Achilles heel, life rollercoasters AND my superpowers or just the superpowers?
Do YOU personally place competency judgements on people if you know a few fragments of their inner world? Even though their integrity, talents and knowledge are the same as they would be if the public persona was tightly curated.
Some days I think it shows courage to be imperfectly complete or incomplete. Other days I think I am committing an act of self harm by pondering private thoughts in public. Yet other times I think: But doesn’t THIS make me approachable to others who are trying their best to build something ambitious but are held back by people around them placing them in shoe boxes & type casting their perceived abilities?
So much talk about diversity but at core it will never be entirely welcome. Sure, as a trend statement for a few months or years, but then the laws of nature seem to predict a return to ‘toughen it out’ and reigning in what we share. This is why I write under a pen name I think it is a smidge safer that way.
