Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you've ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
Its only life after all
Yeah
~Indigo Girls
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I was reading my friend's LJ the other day - and came across her most recent post. It's long - but I thought I'd share it with you. I think it pretty much describes how everyone feels at some point in their life. She's a great writer:-)
Hang in there everyone. You are all loved.
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It's like this.
You live your life one way for a long time and never expect that it will change in any direction except the one you're preparing for. From a young age, a really young fucking age, you know that something is coming, always coming, always right behind you, and you can't get away from it no matter how far you run. There's no safe place to hide and there's no place it can't touch you, so you learn to live with it. You make a place for it in your world and then you make choices. Small choices that shape you and big choices that create you and suddenly you're this person that can deal with a big, scary thing that lives in the dark.
More than that, you make yourself think that you can fight it. You steel yourself to face it but then, many years later, on the day you think it's finally coming, you find out that you've been wrong all along.
The monster was never actually there and for the first time it feels like you can breathe. Except you don't seem to know how to do it properly, the way other people do. And you know, you know that you shouldn't think like this, because you're lucky, you're so goddamn lucky, but still. You're unhappy. You have to find your feet when the rest of the world is already running.
So you look around and see the wreckage of a battle fought against air and for the first time you see the damage, you see that you are damaged. The person you are was only created in order to deal with one particular problem and now there are a million other things to be dealt with and they all seem so big, so incomprehensible that you just want to bury your head in the sand. It suddenly dawns on you that you might live a normal life, but you can't be happy because there's still a part of you that hears things going bump in the night.
You wonder, you always wonder, if there's been a mistake.
Sometimes you're awake and you forget things have changed and you find yourself thinking about when it will come. Sometimes when you're sleeping you find yourself caught in a nightmare where you're being eaten alive by it. You tell yourself that it's not real, but it feels more real than the life you've been actually living so you just can't wake up. There are days that you're angry that decisions weren't made earlier, but you know you shouldn't be mad because you all built the fortress and barricaded the entryway together. You understood that it was the best way to make it through, but you still find yourself mourning for the people that didn't make it. You wonder who you all would have been if life had just been different.
Thinking that way doesn't help though, because your life is your life and you still have to live it. You even feel you could get somewhere if you just had some time to adjust. The thing is that there is never enough time. It flies at you and past you and you can't catch it or your breath, so you run because it's all you really know how to do. Except you're not getting anywhere and this time people notice.
And they ask you to stop.
They find you after the monster makes an appearance on a television show and they cry and say that they're sorry and that they wish, they wish, they wish, and that they didn't want you to turn out the way you have and that stops you cold.
You're not that bad, surely. Maybe a little wrong in the head, but not so bad that they would wish you were someone else.
Then they ask what you wish and you can't say because you really don't know. You've never wanted much and what you did want you didn't get anyway. You figured it didn't matter in the long run, though, because eventually nothing mattered except that you beat the monster at his own game. You were going to take from him before he took from you and that was the only real plan you'd ever made.
You don't remember who you were before, you don't know if you ever really had a before. You just know that you've tricked yourself into thinking that all was well. It's not, though. You're still living there, stuck there, in limbo there, because, while you've been pardoned, you still can't find your way out of jail.
So now this time that seemed so quick before when it passed you, seems to stretch out before you endlessly and you wonder if that poet was right when he said that life was very long. You wonder how he got to that point and how you got to this point where you just wish it would hurry up and go by instead of dragging on and taking you with it. And you know that's ungrateful, you know you should be so happy and that you should take this gift and do something great with it, but that's not the kind of person you are now.
You've been created in it's image and it's in your reflection and you can't shake it. It still lives with you and even though you want it gone, the fear now is that it owns you and will never, ever let you go.
