Hello.
This is my new blog. Ideally this blog will have a readership of 1-4 people. These will be the people who might be interested if I started talking in detail about my feelings and opinions. I think this is a disclaimer. Like, this paragraph is a blog equivalent of buying a $2 pad from newsagency instead of a moleskine notebook. I think since I more or less abandoned my last blog (which I don't feel like going back to because feel like a different person than the one who wrote it) I've lost some of my ability to put my personal thoughts into words.
Intro'd. Commence blog.
I am fine these days. For the past year or two I have been fine. It is strange and I feel like a baby. The last time I was this fine I was ten. I had a parrot on my shoulder and I was using my $5 thrift store typewriter to type up what I guess was some kind of zine intended for intrafamily distribution only. It was an awesome zine thing! The headlines were things like "Photosynthesis: HOW DOES IT WORK?" (I remember typing the all caps) and "Good Climbing Trees Around Locust Street"* and I was listening to the Beatles a lot and I was so fucking happy. I had a feeling like hot coals under my heart and I wanted to consume the entire universe and shake it up and make it do something.
I am going to leave a big gap in this story. I was sad for a very long time. For about a third of my life I've been so sad it hurt to breathe most days. For whatever reason. It's dumb. I'm not convinced my pain was special. It's not unlikely that most people my age feel like they are recovering from their adolescence/early twenties. I'm just saying it was kind of debilitating. Everything was so grey and flat for such a long time. I was convinced that life was some kind of achey soup you had to get through and so much of my energy went into just getting through it I didn't have any left over to get any enjoyment out of having got through it or, I don't know, genuinely engage with humans.
But I am okay now and it does feel very, very strange. These past couple of years I've felt like myself for the first time since I was ten. It feels like I've gone through a portal. One minute I was parrot rearing/tree climbing and the next I was brushing my three-year-old's teeth.
This whole family thing was an accident. If I'd been given a multiple choice at the start I don't think this is the life I would have chosen. I am terminally broke and my family commitments clash with my personal ambitions like crazy. My friends (who are for the most part childless, educated and have real, grownup jobs) sometimes seem to have things a bit easier than me. They spend money and time in a way I can only dream about. But seriously. Right now I cannot be annoyed by thwarted expectation/jealousy if I try. My kid and partner are amazing. I did not know, previously, that is was possible to hold the amount of love I have for these two in a single human body. Also I get to spend my time reading/writing/learning languages and sorting through books at a library and even though these things feel like play they are actually considered legitimate, responsible things to do with my time. I don't feel like I need much else. I feel satisfied at any given moment. When I wash the dishes. When I see my friends. When I'm reading or eating. Even when I feel like things aren't going the way I want them to and my parents/siblings seem unchangeably insane and I am housebound for nearly four weeks because my body won't stop being sick. Real life! I want to eat it. Punch it. Make out with it. I don't even know. My heart-coals are back. I'm not used to wanting so badly to make the universe do something. What do I do with this feeling?
*My street in a small desert town: Ridgecrest, California, circa the early nineties.
