2008-01-24
Where She Goes, Nobody Knows
I'm all over the road right now ergo the lack of witty writing.
I love roller derby.
It has been my primary focus, aside from work, for a year and a half. It remains my Number 1 on many, many levels and for many, many great reasons. It makes sense for me to love it as much as I do; the women with whom I consort are amazing, the friends I've made, the self I've found, and the solidly forward motion that it's given me physically but which has carried over into all areas of life like work and relationships with family and friends.
That said, I am going through this range of emotions that are completely unrelated to roller derby and leading me to be so exceedingly curious about a life without roller derby.
I can see myself doing something different for the first time since this adventure started.
Before anyone gets excited, I am not quitting, not even close. I just feel like I am at the top of the arc and that as the year unfolds, I am ready to unfold into other things.
So many of my friends are having babies and I'm texting back and forth with an old, dear friend of mine who lives in Kentucky last night.
She had put her toddlers to bed and was on her second glass of red wine and I felt, even through text messaging, how happy she was.
I felt how much I am shifting and understanding that I am not only capable of settling into a more traditional life but also how much I am yearning for it.
And it's complicated to track this, for those who try to understand what I say I want and what I really want as expressed through my choices, my actions.
I get that.
It's complicated because I sometimes don't know and because what I want actually does tend to change. Plus, because of so many things like where, when, and how I grew up (not to mention my gender), all I really knew how to say that I wanted was a husband and children and a house and some red wine at the end of the day.
But that wasn't really what I wanted, I think, for awhile because if it was then I have to believe that I would have gone after those things and made the choices that would have led me to familial domesticity.
I have to believe that I wasn't ready, that instinctually I knew that I lacked the confidence to not fuck up the kind of relationship I want or the children I think I'll probably have after all. I guess it's the idea that I was lucky enough to be guided by my gut, to make choices that fed me what I needed more than what I kept saying I wanted.
Because I was not ready at all to be patient or compassionate the way patience and compassion must be implicit when you really love someone, when you fall into all of it with him. I was not ready at all to be able to live enough in the moment to not be riddled with anxiety yet prepared enough to keep an eye on the future.
Now my gut is doing something different, guiding me to the place that, for a long time, I said I wanted to be only because I didn't know at all how to say anything else. I didn't have any reference point to know that I could want something different than to fall so much in love and build something up the way I've built myself up over the last five years.
The same words feel different to me know. They are felt, not recited.
Roller derby is pulling me to something bigger, I know that.
For today at least, I am thinking about what, where, and with whom I want that Bigger Something to be.
And can I just say for the record that I really miss rivers and prairies?
I would love to drive home and smell an air rich with soil, with mud and water and thick grass and industry.
arizonasarah at 10:16 a.m.