Brief Check In

So I just wanted to get some more thoughts down, since this period of time is both weird and unsettling, and also deeply familiar.

It's weird and unsettling because I thought by now, I'd never again have to feel so scattered and unsure. It's familiar, because once again for the millionth time in my life it feels, I am scattered and unsure.

But of course it's not the same, because this time around I pay my bills on time, Hydro Quebec isn't going to track my down at work to tell me I owe them 2600 dollars. I am not going to hop on a plane and go to BC on a whim to chase the woman of my dreams either.

But I feel the weight of my obligations, and my dreams pressing down on me and the typical response is to run away.

It's weird isn't it, to have dreams and ambitions and to want to run away from those too.

I am too much for myself sometimes. I wish I had smaller aspirations, or at least that my aspirations didn't make such an insistent chorus. You have to be doing some awesome YESTERday, stop putting things off until tomorrow. DO it NOW.

So i've been going out a lot, 'laying groundwork' but also ingesting a lot of liquors and seeing a lot of people and basically staying one step ahead of the important question. I figure I can get away with this pattern until my job officially ends.

This is the question:

The problem with having so many ambitions, is they aren't really about me, they are about how I want the world to see me.

I know the first week I am not officially employed, I will sit around the house and the weight of the question that is continually flitting about in my head will press on me, until I have cleaned the house from top to bottom, and gone out for a pedicure, and met someone for dinner, and said a bunch of witty things and maybe offered some entirely unnecessary advice.

So that's happening. What else?

I read this amazing post by Roxane Gay about the Hunger Games and about surviving assault, and it reminded me of all the times I had left my body to get through a difficult situation mostly when I was younger.

She writes :

It never crossed my mind to say no or that I should say no, that I could say no. He started pressuring me to have sex with him. I didn’t say no but I didn’t say yes and I did not want to say yes. I wanted to say no but could not because then I would lose him and I would be nothing again.

I remembered when they started offering Wendo classes at my high school the first thing they taught us girls to say was NO in very loud voices, and then ironically to run away.

A cluster of us gathered outside the high school doors, dispiritedly talking about the first class.

"It's called a 'self-defense' course not a 'chicken' course, not a 'yelling dumb shit' class."

Reading Gay's piece I realized I still don't say NO.

I say maybe, I say "I don't know" I say "I'll see what I can do", I say "I need time" I say "I'm not trying to be difficult" "I say it's upsets me when.." I say all sorts of things. Most of them are adult versions of "please don't leave me".

The problem with not knowing how to say 'no' is that it somehow reaches out and poisons saying yes.

So then I sit there, looking at the question: "What do I actually want?" and the answer though scary, seems to start with I want to say NO for a while.

Until I've racked up enough no's that a YES starts to appear out of the murk that is me, trying to satisfy what I imagine are other people's expectations.