Dear Internauts,
I have far too much I'd like to say and little sense of how best to say it, so here's somethin anyway...
Earlier this month, I went with my folks to visit family in Massachusetts. I've mentioned here before that I've not found HOME to be any place I've ever lived. I suppose sitting on the cement beach wall, looking out over Wollaston Bay and out toward the Boston skyline, sipping a raspberry lime rickey in the humid summer haze—that could be the closest to home I've come to see in a location.
Mostly, I find home in people. Moments. Ideas.
How often to you does home simply mean settlement? I think we strive for contentment. At best we hope for stability. A sense of place.
Three years ago, give or take a week, any hope of stability was stolen from me at the end of a silver barrel. What sense of place I'd managed to build down in Nashville collapsed with my sanity like a sandcastle with the tide.
I've often thought that the believed stability of a life, like the height of a great mountain, dares a challenge. Does our contentment rise like the smoke from a signal fire to beckon unrest?
With time, counseling, and medication, my restless mind has reached something of a crossroads.
Perhaps a place can be a pit or a prison even if it wasn't before. For a time, I had to learn how to think again, to wear away the trauma which froze my bones. To walk again, I had to tread and pace this ground for a time. It's taken much longer than I thought, and I've lost more than I thought I would. Or could. I paced till my legs grew strong again. I paced until my feet dug a trench.
At some point, it's time to stop pacing and climb out of the pit.
Trauma can be grief. The loss of an old life like the death of a close friend. Fear can be a paralytic. We expect it to hold us in the moment, but it can grow on us, choke us like a vine. Squeeze the breath from our motivation. Confidence can be fickle. Moreso, I think, for those of us who find it in the opinions of others.
So I went to some career centers and am on the path to moving back to New England. I don't have nearly as many friends there as I used to, and some of my family has grown and gone out onto their own distant roads as they should. But now I have lived a whole lot more life than I had.
The validation of others is no longer the defining trait of my perceived self-worth.
The trauma I've faced is still very much a part of me. The past is still part of my story.
But can any of us truly find courage without knowing the weight of fear?
Important note: I couldn't have gotten this far without the love and support of my parents.
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On another note, I realize there is a lot of talk, understandably so, about the politics of language. Why must everything be so political? Why can't anything just be loved or hated on the simple level of what it is?
For instance, why can't I just go and see some hilarious and thrilling new movie without the thought that I'm making a mostly weightless statement about gender representation in Hollywood?
Why can't I support the cast and crew of a famous comedic director without making some kind of ideological statement about disregarding his blatant history of sexually predatory behavior?
Why can't I eat a hamburger without contributing to the massive amount of grain production which goes to feeding herd animals, increasing air pollution, depriving millions of food, destroying natural ecosystems, and causing the violent torture and death of innocent animals?
Why can't we just say what we mean?
Perhaps it is part of our humanity to be able to see everything from multiple angles. Not everyone who likes a work of art unquestionably supports the artist. And yet we support the artist by the way we enjoy the art.
To truly experience the fullness of anything in our 3D world, how can we only look at it from one side?
And as far as politics go, everything I was taught in school about American democracy seems to be a lie, with "representation" in government a very loosely interpreted concept.
So tell me, am I more responsible for the actions of the one I vote for or for the one I don't?
And what does any of that matter when children are murdered by those who swear to protect them?
I have no answers. Only a bunch of questions like grapes on a vine of serendipitous narcissism.
Thanks,
Odist
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