hope is that thing with feathers...

For as far as I can remember, the impulse has been to leave, to leave, to save what's left of my soul. Now, a small flicker of dull hope has appeared, and the impulse has become a little dampened. There's a tiny voice that keeps whispering, stay, don't you want to know what could be, what you can help wrought?  But I've had this small hope before, and it got thrown to the ground, shattered to pieces, trampled upon, and turned to dust under the feet of the more grasping, the more ambitious.

Self-preservation taught me to divert attention to myself by drawing attention to my flaws, by being just reticent enough, stubborn enough, and uncooperative enough that their eyes passed over me when considering people to work with. And for the past three or four years, it had gone well. While a small part of me resented not being recognized for what I could do, what I could be, and what I could give, the larger part of me was glad not to be seen, not to be unwillingly, unwittingly used to serve their schemes.

These days, the impulse mostly, is still to leave. But these days, the small flickering hope seems like ribbon, tethering me in place, because as much as I am embarrassed to admit, I'm curious where the story will go, and I want to know what role I will play.

Sometimes I wonder if I unconsciously keep myself isolated from others, and then wonder why the same shared experience seems to have a different hue and tone for them.

For the past day or so, I have been reconnecting with my block mates from my first year in law school, and in sharing stories and reminiscing, I have come to the realization that I have a tendency to isolate myself, and in doing so have missed so so much of how it was to be young and relatively worry free.

What I'm realizing is that perhaps I am an introvert and prefer to escape into my own world instead of engaging with the rest of the world. I'm happy reading, be it books, my favorite sites, or watching the various television series I find myself interested, and generally being alone.

of separating the wheat from the chaff

I will never get used to the feeling of realizing that the friendship I have been cultivating was not all that mutual. It's always disconcerting when you finally wake up to the fact that the person you have been calling friend has been nice because they need you for something. Disconcerting and hurtful. I feel betrayed, not only because I had invested genuine emotion into the so-called friendship, but also because I realized I had been wasting my time.
I read a line somewhere that states that the person is too old to bother with the trivialities and drama attendant of getting to know someone. Which is also why I am so happy when I realize that I click with a person.

reconnecting with what I know

Writing has always been a source of comfort and pride for me. I was confident in the fact that I could wield words and somehow form them into something coherent, something that made sense. A few months back, I planned to get back to blogging, at least to use it to process my confused thoughts and feelings. Then I felt like that would be opening my soul too much to the world, and that what somehow, writing about something like that was too shallow, too childish for someone my age, and so I let it fall through.

I always attempt to write when inspiration strikes, and in the past few years, inspiration has been a dull, dim spark, that while there, was almost unnoticeable, and so I never put pen to paper, or fingers to a keyboard, to try hash out my feelings and thoughts. Maybe, between going back to school and writing for work, the small spark of inspiration got obscured. I do want to get back to writing, to blog again, to think of my thoughts consciously (does that even make sense?), to examine my feelings and motivations, and lay them out to the world, even though I have retained my reticence at sharing these scribblings with the people who know.

to be me

You tried to change didn’t you?

closed your mouth more
tried to be softer

prettier

less volatile, less awake

but even when sleeping you could feel

him travelling away from you in his dreams

so what did you want to do, love

split his head open?

you can’t make homes out of human beings

someone should have already told you that

and if he wants to leave

then let him leave

you are terrifying

and strange and beautiful

something not everyone knows how to love.

Warsan Shire, "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love"

I can't be who I am not. I have never tried to be otherwise. Perhaps I should learn to compromise, but I think I'm too old and set in my ways to start now.

of finding comfort in the little things

Now I understand what people when they say they draw comfort from the company of their pets. These days I find something oddly peaceful in sitting quietly, reading or writing, with my little dog curled up beside me. I find myself less anxious, less stressed, although I still harbor the same fears and insecurities. I don't know if it has something to do with growing more mature or maybe it's just that I have learned to accept my circumstances. I don't feel so restless anymore.

fumbling for words

So. Three years after my last post in my other blog, I feel the urge to write again. Write for the sake of writing. Write for the sake of letting my feelings and thoughts out and not merely to meet another deadline.

For the past several years, even when I was more active here in fact, I was already writing to make a living. I was ghostwriting essays and editing journal articles here and there. In the intervening years,  I took on a fuller load and began to neglect writing for the pure pleasure of seeing the words in your head out on a page, to clear my thoughts and to hash out whatever it was that was clashing in my head at a certain time.

At the beginning of the peak season this year, I began to feel the jadedness set in. I felt as though my writing skills, such as they were, have began to be become blunted. I remember that I used to deliberately use banned words and write run-on sentences whenever I wrote my blog entries just so I could get out of the imposed constrictions of my writing and editing job. But then I became distracted with other things and before I knew it, writing was no longer a pleasure for me. It became tedious, something that I needed to do so that I could pay my bills, put food on the table, and survive. Writing took on the same hue as my other job, one that I had grown out of for a very long time but still cling to because I am indecisive that way.

And then the other day, I was cleaning my desk drawer and came upon a piece of paper where I had began to write something about my conversation with my mom  on my birthday. On the first line, I had written, I need to write for the sake of writing again. I feel like I am losing touch with who I am and instead have become buried in needless things. And I thought, I need to find me,  I need to be able to write just so I can get in touch with the M who was more attuned to herself and not the M who allows the days to breeze past her. Hopefully, this is the start.