Tag: introspection

a good place to wait

The other day, I was at a good place to wait. I shuffled through my options and browsed a few job postings online. The job descriptions sounded inconceivable, leaving me tone-deaf. They were resoundingly plangent and eerily atmospheric like from a bad dream or an alt sci-fi world beyond me. They were lengthy and esoteric. Like, What does this even mean?

I’ve eaten the dust of trailblazers, envied the prosaic lives of my wealthy peers and known the ridicule of highbrow intellectuals. It must be common to feel like this: to live parasitically off others to satisfy, or at the least address, that pang of literary hunger, and to feel a tad dated with the slow, yet aggressive prevalence of artificial intelligence.

I am in this interim, but I was just here. I haven’t recognized whether to capitalize on what I know or deviate from a path I’ve been walking. Lately, it’s a lot of feeling stuck, waiting for any available opportunity to emote what this means. Opportunities these days mean a quiet empty house for a couple of hours, a good sleep and being aware of my thought patterns. If the opportunity presents itself as accessible, I’m lucky to string a few words together. A few years ago, I convinced myself to stop looking for meaning, but to start, to throw myself into the abysmal vacancy knowing I had nothing to lose.

I needed to humor myself.
I needed to write like them.
Move and shake like them.

a good place to wait

But I also needed to retire this idealistic view of where I needed to be and instead, identify the process.
I needed to write words on Post-its to keep words close to me at all. I found myself referring to dog-eared pages of books from seven years ago to recoil in emotion. My subjective attitude toward reality has always shackled me to this writer-life, far from a career that I found only exists in my daydreams or others.

I needed to continue feeling alive, despite feeling unwell. Recognize where the fount of my inexhaustible force, that zeal, is. Is it dormant in the continuity of thought and feeling? Found in the relentless quest of finding meaning? Is it deep in the crevice of struggle? Somewhere in between relationships or fact and fiction?

Lately, the world has been loud and infallible at cajoling me to move and live based on the grounds of logic. But as writers, we know that we are spurred by sensations and instincts, qualities we ration to keep our identities preserved, ourselves known or our sanity whole. It is our insanity keeping us alive, albeit brittle, and functional to seek greater depth in understanding and connection.

However, the disconnect, the chasm, never felt or looked so vast as it does now.

I’ll stand back here with the posers.

by Rina Pritchard

I think some of us resist delighting in our accomplishments or even, simply, the good times. Maybe fearing they’ll end too soon or that we are undeserving of the joy of this magnitude, the success of such weight, or opportunities this wonderful, as though our self-esteem hasn’t yet caught up. So, we examine it, nearly pick it apart. We end up not sharing these fleeting moments and they become archived in this backlog of experiences, filed away in a hard drive of “Things that didn’t make it.”

We aren’t left with regrets, just recollections.

But that feeling of h i g h .

Have you ever reached a level of High that although yields excitement, it’s still vertigo?
That although you’re lifted by the hands and shoulders of others, you’re still afraid of heights.

But you dislike mosh pits, intentional collisions and skin too close to yours.
So, you get down.

In spite of the thrill, flattery, applause and the people flooding your space,
The noise got too loud
The space dwarfed in size
The air suffocating.

You get down and think you’re safe
That you can breathe
You can see the floor
Your feet making contact with the ground

But no one knows about you here.
Your name – unheard of.
Your sense of purpose is lost on you.

It wasn’t that you wanted to extinguish your light, but it was that you didn’t want to burn too brightly, only to burn out.

So, burn out.
Burn out, so you can find that spark.
Check out
Check out to check back in.

Maybe it’s essential for us to get a little bit of ourselves out as if we are emptying pockets of quarters, so we can move better or walk a bit faster.

We may feel lighter for a few moments before feeling bogged down again. But it’s important for us to release, to unclench our fists. It’s important for us to get out of our way.

But how can we come back?
Is there turbulence on the return flight home?
What are we truly made of?
How do we stay self-effacing?

I will continue to romanticize the underdogs
The otherness
The spaces in between
The gray areas
The forgotten writers
The overlooked ones
The deep cuts
The arrivals
The departures
The returns
The ones and things that don’t stay for long.
The increments
The measures over full doses
The ideas over the real thing.

Can we write, can we make anyway, despite the output?
Begin to stop identifying with the form and start identifying with the formless?
Continue to see the cracks in spaces but also fall into them?

Rather than embody our personalities, can we embody moments?

Are we romping in the world of art like we are children playing make-believe because there are no right or wrong answers? Or did we already delete that thought at our first encounter with defeat? If art has fueled us or given us a purpose, I hope we return after long seasons of dry spells.

Return, arrive, show up as you are — wordless, uninventive, bare, ordinary.

We might lose all senses, go mad, and find a detachment from a reality we’ve known too well. Whichever medium we use to demonstrate our passion, we all share an acute understanding of feelings and a lot of it.

We meet in the middle.

We exchange afflictions.

We look at each other and say, “I see you.”

We toast to bad habits.

We cheers to old flames.

We look at ourselves merely by looking at each other.

And arrives this literary progeny we’ve somehow birthed simply by losing it.

Be full, indulge. Then feel empty.

Restore.

Have your seasons and embrace the patterns.

You’ll trip over your own foot, smack your face on the pavement, curse like a sailor and lose your better judgment, but you’ll have created an art worthy of sharing with someone in dire need of a reality from the one they experience every day.

So, although the sound of our voices, the spotlight and the social realm make us cower, we should allow ourselves the chance to claim our space.

To claim without attachment.