2014-03-05
Forty
All my life, since I was a little kid, I've felt like people have mostly felt sorry for me and that's how I've had any real opportunities. With that being the case, I've set myself up over and over and over to not meet an expectation that was never there in the first place. The only reason I've made friends, or done well, or experienced success is because I've tried.
There's no feeling of self-satisfaction, just relief. It was exhausting to live under the assumption that in order to be successful, I had to do double-time and the problem with that is that 'double-timing' through life leaves a lot of error in one's wake.
For now, all I can say is I know how to try. I want to get it right, I want to process it all and master the things that are new but it's a ways off. I can't rush it, either. I have to accept, and I aim to embrace, that I am not a kid anymore. The steps matter. There are stakes, and I know existentialism now in a way that a kid, no matter how old the soul, can know it. It lives in cobwebs, in the faintest creak of bones that you suspect you feel during those last few months before forty. It's got it's own smell, of slight dust and afternoon sun.
It scared me a little, to feel it so viscerally. There's plenty of energy still to turn away from it, to find the things that let me nurture myself, that let me grow and feel the rich warmth of a happy spirit.
The question here is to what does one turn? Church? Maybe, but that's a project considering I don't have any particular convictions about religion. Meetup.com, or even online dating? Not yet. There's a break-up in situ, the end of a long and luxuriously soft love. We met in derby; it's the break-up of derby, too. It's the end of a long phase, a set of years that belong together like volumes on a bookshelf. I'm still here, but I'm not. I'm not the same person... I'm who I always wanted to be, yet I had no idea that this is who that person would be.
arizonasarah at 9:46 p.m.