Nothing to say

I don't know what to tell you. 

When nobody's looking, but anybody could - how do you conduct yourself? When you want to be seen, but you're terrified that if they really saw you, their reactions might be just as you imagine in your most insecure moments, how do you determine just how much to expose? 

I have so much bitterness and rage living in my body. I'm ready, itching, to fight. Someone, almost anyone really, about nearly anything. It's closer to the surface than it used to be, but I think its depth is still hidden from most. It shows itself at inconvenient times, in fits and starts. Sometimes it makes me feel powerful. Other times I feel tired of my own self, depressed at all the whining and annoyed that telling myself to calm down has the opposite of the required effect. 

What could I do if I had the energy? If it wasn't whittled away each hour by the grind and the pain of trying to make it look like I'm merrily ticking along. Shouldn't I be there by now? In my life, doing my thing? What is my thing? How can it be I don't know yet? Will I come to the end before I even have something to call a story to tell? I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but I want it to be something. And not a series of unconnected micro-somethings, short stories with little in the way of an arc or a direction. I want a body of work. But I need to know what I'm working on. 

It feels like everything needs fixing, and I am pulled in all directions -- and yet, I recently determined that I need, for my own self, to desist in the notion that the world's problems are mine to fix and fixable by me. So what, then, can I do? What can I say? 

The hats I wear, the roles I fill, sometimes I long to be an advocate, a force for empathy and change for those who sit in those same spaces and feel, silently, the way I've felt. But "It's no fair!" is a child's war-cry. I want to go a step further, and find the way to "We can do better!" I don't know the answers though, or even the mechanisms the unfairness uses to thrive. How can I find "better" if I can't explain what better looks like, can't explain where to find the resources for better, can't see a way through the problems that trying for better will create? And then, who am I even, to be trying to reshape the status quo to fit me better? What makes me think I have ideas that are somehow better better for us than this? Surely, if I'm helping one, I must be hurting another. And if I keep on making it all about me (my this, I that, me the other thing), can I really be serving others with all my talk? And what am I really talking about anyway? Ugh. 

~ ~ ~ 

I'm tired of thinking. Tired of trying to find something helpful, relevant, important, powerful to say. My brain is fried, and I'm so, so tired. I need to just let it sleep a while, but like a toddler who late for their nap, I've been short circuiting ever since I missed that magical window of easeful transition. Now I've forgotten how; I need someone to usher me into it: to thoughtfully suggest through my frenzy that I might do well to be still for a time, to sit by and nod in understanding as I thrash and resist, to wait without censure until I blunder toward rest, and to cover me for a while, whenever it may be that I finally succumb. 

The unedited self

I listened to Glennon Doyle's We Can Do Hard Things podcast yesterday afternoon. I'm not caught up on my listening, so it was an episode from a previous week. In it, they talked about Glennon's emergence as a writer. It all started when someone else shared a 'tell everyone 25 true things about yourself' letter, and she decided to go along with it, happily writing and then sending out her 25 things -- and then discovered she'd accidentally set off a torrent of raw and important truth telling because the things she shared were, unlike the mostly fluffy surface facts that others had shared, vulnerable and deep and life-shaping. After that, she began writing every day, and then sending it out into the world for others to see, eventually settling on the form of a blog, allowing herself to share her undivided and unedited self, and I felt like maybe, just maybe, I might have found some footsteps to follow in. Listening to them talk about it, I felt like this was what I've been trying to find. A way to be my true and real self through creating, without sacrificing the social boundaries that we all need in order to know where we end and others begin. 

This, together with another episode today with Tarana Burke and the idea of needing to get our truths out of our bodies in order to release them and not carry them as burdens and bonds... That episode made me feel like she described feeling, when she first encountered Dr. Angelou. She talked, too, about documenting her joy. Releasing secrets, documenting joy, sharing the self undivided. 

Maybe there's something to this. Maybe I can make a commitment, work some of it out. Maybe if I can make a commitment, then I can build a habit and then I can discover it's the habit for me.