Happy...or just new, year.

I used to be the type that would make resolutions, talk about how 'bad' or 'good' a year was, as it comes to an end.  The past few years, but especially this one, have changed that.  I look back at 2011, and see the positive and negative as exactly what they are (or were).  Simply events that occur in a life.  The possibility of foreclosure looming, no steady work in sight, debts from a divorce reaching critical mass with no way to satisfy them, these are the things that I wish were not happening to me, yet I know I am not alone in my problems, and experience and my limited scope of wisdom that I have acquired has taught me that I will survive them, somehow.  These are offset by the joy of each day spent with my daughter, who is the love of my life, being in love with my partner, and being happy to the best of my ability.  Which for me can mean utter bliss one day, and the desire to crawl under a rock and die the next.  I know I am not alone in these circumstances either.  Life, and nature, are in flux, constantly and forever morphing, changing, controlled chaos that extends and manifests in all.  I am just here for that ride.  There is no place I would rather be.  Happy New Year.

What is so frightening about being 40?  Take a look at TMZ or Twitter, and you realize how age-obsessed a huge swath of the population is.  The truth is, when I turned 40, there was no 'I'm 40' freak out.  There was no rush to the mirror, checking for new lines on my face, no pulling at the gray hairs that have been creeping in for some time now.  There was a feeling that perhaps I should be doing this things, as some of my friends suggested, but alas, looking back, all I felt was a sense of relief.  The Dirty Thirties were over.  And I was finally getting all of the mud out from under my nails.  My thirties were a cesspool, nasty divorce, nasty physical and mental abuse perpetrated by myself and others I loved, and nasty addictions.  The only obvious beacon of the entire decade was the birth of my daughter, but amazingly, from the rest of the filth that I thought would suffocate me came a hidden, divine light that I never thought possible.  At 40, I was finally able to recognize this light.  I came to see what is possible, and what I am capable of.  I finally feel as though I fit in somewhere, and where I fit in is within myself. What a revelation.

Heal

Have you managed to find all of the broken pieces of me, hidden in the corners of our life? I think the pain-staking process of gluing them back together falls solely on me, so I make sure each tiny shard of my heart finds its way back into the dustbin that I shall pack up as surely as the rest of my belongings as I take leave of you.
Healing cannot come while we share this existence together.
I looked deep inside of myself for years, and I saw nothing. I felt nothing. There was a chasm that could seemingly never be filled. Sex. Work. Money. Alcohol. Success. I gave them all a try. They all seemed as light as a feather at first, I floated through time and space with them, until gravity hit and they all sank, deeply, dissolving into this nothingness. At some point, I came to believe that they were all useless. They were merely filler, and the more I stuffed, the larger the problem became. I gave in, and gave up.
In doing so, I thought I gave up on love.
I was mistaken.
I gave up what I thought I loved.
I discovered there was no love in the places I’d been searching for years.
One day, I went to look for that dustbin, with all the broken shards of my life in it.
I was poor, I was sober, I was single, and I was happy.
The dustbin was empty.
I looked at myself once again. I saw everything. Me, you, sex, work, money, drugs, success, the past, the present and the future. All of it spiraling through me, a kaleidoscope of colors and light and memories, and I felt hope, for the first time in a very long time.
I am becoming, love. I am becoming.

Dreams

In this place I was nameless. Silhouettes surrounded me, reminders of that which I longed to not be. Yes, I know they were not of flesh. Merely shadows, whispered remnants of the past. Part of me yearned to be just that. Sheer, like gauze, to wrap myself in a place where I could only be discovered centuries from now. Shearing off the flesh that bound me, the fabricated beauty of the eternal lie, the knowledge that you never even knew me. Wandering through long corridors, finding myself further away from any escape. I propelled, forward, always forward, descending into noxious haze. There was no space for another on this peculiar path, yet all of you kept falling in line next to me, only to fall off the rocky precipice that loomed on either side. Couldn’t you see that my road was dangerous, deadly, filled with switch-backs and crumbling stacks of lost dreams? How I wanted to reach out, scream, tear at your withered limbs when your lips formed perfect circles and the space between us grew, but the darkness looming over the edge enraptured me, and I wore its cloak of fear around me like a tender lover keeping its paramour warm and somnambulant in a winter storm.
When I awoke, I shed the cloak, I shed my fear, and I shed you.
I prefer the waking hours.

Inequality

At some point it's always the same
You're not like those others they say
You don't sound like look like smell like them
(I wonder)How can that be when you said a fraction of me is worth nothing to you?
Can't you see? (Don't you know?)(You don't know?) Of course not (I would be a minstrel)
What a minstrel I would be (I know to you I already am) to believe that with the privilege afforded to your lineage that you deign to use in this day when you are soon to be the minority - like you always were (As it's always been, your strength comes from metal, it is not you, fleshy and vaporous)
You never have had to venture into our savage world talk like walk like smile at you
Innards churning
How it makes us retch knowing what words you exchange in the company of one another
Don't fucking imagine that you know who we are
I can still hear the crack of the whip hurtling through air
Young flesh strong so innocent split open like watermelon pregnant on the vine
Voices that now speak from the universe not the grave – (See, you were right to be worried, we learn so quickly how to speak to each other and ourselves in ways you will never comprehend)
At times welts still rise up inexplicably on my skin when you stand too close to me

To All The Men I've Loved Before

I often think of you. The first time I saw you. Or I should say, what I imagine to be the first time, as my memory sometimes gives me images I would rather see than how things really were. I thrash, twist and turn in my bed when I think of you. Often with desire, other times with distaste. This one pierced my nose. That one pierced my side. You all pierced my heart, for the most part. To you, I gave a piece of myself, and you left behind some part of yourself with me, to hold onto forever. You and I didn’t make love, we made out for hours on end. He and I, we fucked until the neighbors complained. You were scared to touch me, yet you over there, you could not keep your hands off of me. I remember how the weight of your body felt on top of mine, and I remember the weight of my heart when you said goodbye. We partied as if the world was ending, whereas your drinking made my love for you die and our world did end. If I lay myself bare before you, will you still love me? If you see every bit and piece of what I am will you understand that I am not what you would like for me to be, nor what you would expect me to become, yet will you accept me for who I am? I say to you, don’t take it personally, but you do. Oh, how you always do.

The Power To Be Wrong

Can I tell you just how wrong I am, or have been, for most of my life? Will that make everyone that has been a part of my life feel better if I make this admission? Perhaps. The question is, can they themselves do the same? Or is that wrong of me to ask?

My entire life, seemingly since I emerged from the womb, I have been deemed to be a ‘chosen one’. Opportunities granted to me by the mere happenstance of my birth. I’ve been declared by some to have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Are these things true? I suppose by the standards of some, sure. I am no trust-fund baby, nor was I able to take off and backpack across Europe on my parents’ dime when I was younger. However, I have been comfortable for most of my life. However, as some of you may know, having the term ‘chosen one’ applied to oneself can lead to a serious case of high expectations and low aspirations. I’ve found this to be true in varying degrees and cycles throughout my life. And frequently, this moniker also gives one some heady sentiments about being wrong.

Being wrong is failure. Or so I used to believe.

Sharing the fear of many women, and recoiling at the thought of behaving exactly like my mother, I decided about a decade ago that I should start looking at my personality, and admitting when I was wrong (my mother is completely lacking in the "I made a mistake department", but she is of course allowed to be who she is as much as I am). This proved to be much easier said than done. It didn’t help that a few years after this decision was made, I went through a horribly traumatic divorce and decided that the only way I could face my reality was to seriously self-medicate into a state of complete desolation and simulated death of the life I had known up until that point. I entered a state of reality where my every action was completely wrong to my very core, or so it seemed at the time. If I was living in this state perpetually, how could I admit I was wrong all of the time without feeling like a piece of shit every second of every day? Do you know what that can lead to? Unadulterated fear and loathing. Which I did not need any more of at that time. My boyfriend during this phase of my life loved to tell me that I could never admit fault, and that in not being able to admit fault, or denying that I wasn't wrong about whatever we may have been discussing at the time, that I was always wrong by default. How's that for circular argument? I assured him that I just liked to keep the lines of debate open, but he wasn't buying it. Truthfully, I think he was projecting his own insecurity with being wrong onto me, but hey, I could be wrong about that too.

Did I mention that as time has gone on, it has gotten easier, this absolving of guilt and shame in being wrong, and that the freedom I find in being wrong, or at least admitting that I could be, has changed my life completely?

I have discovered that being wrong isn’t failure at all. Fear is failure. So if I am a chosen one, I choose to have no fear of anything any longer. Especially of labels and demands made on me by anyone or anything, including my own Ego.