In the last few years as I have been blogging, I don't always get a lot of direct feedback. I often get the feedback I hear through the grapevine that there are others (especially women) who find themselves identifying with the same feelings I've been having, and that they equally don't know how to do anything about those feelings. I think it's unfortunate that so many of us are not living our lives in the way we wish to. And though I now find myself at the beginning of a new path, for which the way isn't even paved, I don't know what the answer is.
In my case, my life was changed at least in part by force.
I've written about the maelstrom of crazy events that have swirled around my husband and I over the last few years: the storm that blew through his home town, leaving him forever changed; the ebb and flow of unfulfilling careers; his bilateral pulmonary embolism last year; my miscarriage last year; the deep dark depression I fell into and couldn't find my way out of for many months; and the deep sense of failure we both felt when we considered where we thought we would be in our careers and in our lives.
We thought all of those things were enough. We thought all of those things should shake us into a place where we would start to seek out new ways to find peace and contentment in life. They weren't.
My husband had to suffer the blow of a ten-year career coming to an end on someone else's terms. And we had to find out that we were finally going to have a child at a time when celebration hardly seemed the right thing. We were still in the eye of the storm.
Maybe we had to have all of these things happen. Maybe they gave us the foundation for something we couldn't know we wished for. We found out who would stand by us, even when we were at our worst, and deserved friendship the least. We found out what we were made of, and sometimes, what we weren't. We found out who would tell us the truth, even when we didn't want to hear it. We found out who would push us toward our dreams, and what would push us to the brink. We had to break.
It's all still too close. I still feel I can only speculate.
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| My kind of mountain living. Wicklow, Ireland |
In my new life as a nearly constantly nauseated, pregnant house frau who might throw makeup on once a week, I find myself needing to hang out on the couch a lot, just to keep the room from spinning too much. I've currently got a penchant for "American Pickers" on the History Channel--completely obsessed. I've become aware of another show I probably will never watch on this channel--"Mountain Men." I find the idea of this show intriguing because the commercials are very compelling, and my "people" are from the hills of southern Missouri (very similar mentality). One of the men firmly states in the current commercial: "What do I do for a living? I live."
It sounds like such a simple and straightforward thing. "I live." And yet, two weeks into having the freedom to recreate my life, I still know that for most of us who do not live out in the mountains, surviving on what we can hunt or fish, "living" is actually easier said than done.
We get caught up in what we think other people think we should be. We get caught up in what we think we should be. We get caught up in everything that we aren't. We constantly fail to see anything about who we are and what our true potential is in life.
I remember a time when I didn't know what to do with myself in my free time. On my days off, I would spend crazy time running around, questing to find "things" I was sure I needed--almost like there was some hole in my life that I couldn't fill. I found myself in therapy trying to understand what that hole was and why I was so compelled to keep trying to fill it. The answers were complicated, and though I think the time was well spent, I seldom find myself going to that place in my soul where my little Sammi goes to the center section of grass in the trailer park I grew up in to contemplate my safety there and what it is I am really looking for. I think not too differently than my agnosticism, I find it a little hard to think of little Sammi without looking around to see if anyone is watching and calling me crazy under their breath. The short answer is, I probably am crazy.
I think I started to accept that craziness, and to understand that the hole was a life I had created out of all the things in which I had gotten caught up. Somehow, I was inspired to write a poem--somewhere between discovering the band Muse and the release of the last U2 album--and though I didn't openly acknowledge it, a part of me understood that was at least part of the hole. I'd lost my voice, and I hadn't even mourned it.
Sometimes, life comes to us by force. Sometimes we don't get to choose when it starts, or even where. The reality is that while we continue to be at war with who we are instead of embracing and accepting who we are, we can never live without someone else holding most of the cards--and usually the ones with what we believe to be all of the power.
It's easy for me to wax eloquence about all of this, because to a large degree, my life has changed through external forces. I wasn't brave enough to choose life. My husband found a job in an area that made my easy ebb and flow (whether happy or not) less easy. We moved at a time I thought it would be kind of unfair to start something new, only to turn around and leave again due to looming motherhood. It was a push toward deciding to do what I had been afraid to do for years--stop doing what was easy.
And while it's easy for me to say all of this, I still also want to say, why should anything or anyone have more power over your life, who you choose to be, and how you want to live than your soul? And the people who love and care for you the most know when your soul isn't being fed and when you are dying because of it. So arguing that you have a responsibility to them and you have to be solid and grounded is actually a big lie to them as much as it is to yourself. I would argue that nothing and no one knows what your true path should be more than your soul, and everything you do to run away from that steals from all of those people who love and count on you the most. There is so little authenticity in being tied to things that don't truly matter to you. You cheat everyone in trying to make a go of such lies.
Many times in recent years, terrible things have happened in my life. I have chosen to get swept away in the darkness of those things and to turn away from the opportunities they presented. I have chosen to ignore the messages in those things, because I was afraid to choose my soul over comfort and expectation. We all do it, and we often don't even realize we are doing it. We think we are making the responsible choices. We think we are doing the right thing. I'm still speculating, but I am beginning to think that when we ignore those messages, our souls start desperately trying all the harder to communicate to us, and we are open to a siege on our existence. After three long years at war, I was forced to put my sling and arrows down, or else I may never have found the courage to do so.
I am being forced to live. I am being forced to choose what I do from moment to moment. I am being forced to rebuild my life. The ultimate tabula rasa, on which I can write anything I like, and I can bring with me any part of my former life I might choose.
What am I going to do for a living? I don't know for sure yet. Maybe I'll live.
Kite--U2
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