in between
I’ve spent a really large portion of my life pretending to not be creative. I focused on logic, rhetoric, mathematics, chemistry, biology, computer science; pretty much anything that allowed my to go through life on stress-driven autopilot. While I attempted to only show the world a driven, logical, and stoic persona, my true essence was shrunken back to somewhere within. A shadow-self. I honestly thought this was the safer bet. Keep your head down, get your shit done, and don’t make waves. And my reprieve from this staleness was escaping to my imagination, cultivating an inner world that fulfilled me in ways my reality failed to.
But… I have a temper. Oh lawdy, my temper like a forest fire. Rooted, somewhere within, was a deep sense of justice and a desire to be seen. I could never remain in my perfectly constructed boxes, or boxes others had provided for me, without my passionate temper erupting to mass destruction. I found being in the wrong place, surrounded by the wrong people, to be suffocating, and so unbearable, that, when given enough time to brew, I was willing to do almost anything to escape them. This lead to some very dark, and isolating, life chapters…
As I get older, even after a lot of healing work has taken place, I’ve found myself still living an unfulfilled half-life. No matter what country I’ve lived in, no matter what job I have, I can’t seem to root myself in reality. It’s like I live in a world between worlds, partially existing in both but never fully living in one place. Yet the constant experience of isolation has weighed heavy on me, with notably compounding force.
Reading and writing has always been an outlet for me in my solitude. And with my travels, my Instagram stories have also severed as an outlet for me to share what’s going on in my life with others while I spent the majority of days, alone. I chose this life, of hyper-independence, because, again, I thought it was the safer bet. I felt like I would always fail to strike a functional, fulfilling, balance between my fantasy world and this shared reality, and living in my inner world was simply easier than dealing with people. While living like this has been a successful coping strategy for me, it’s coming to the end of it’s usefulness.
And I know it. I’ve known it. But, where to start…..
How can you connect fully with others if you don’t share yourself fully?
Gah, the agony of this question! I have the solutions to my own problems. I get it. I GET IT. How can I feel connected with others if I don’t share where I spend 99% of my life-force? I can free-write, and I can free-talk, with relatively little editing or thought because, when I allow it, the words really do just flow out of me. That inner world’s got a lot of content, and a lot of juice, so there’s really no shortage of ideas or directions I can take my writing So I started to write here and there, again, then journal every day, then free-write.
The words in my mind keep getting stronger, and more persistent; so writing has become a required outlet to release the pressure. But, so has this inner nagging to share my ideas with vulnerability. I keep feeling like it’s time for me to stop hiding… and allow the “correct” people to see me….while also allowing the “incorrect” people to reject me. Private notebooks aren’t going to cut it anymore; I’ve got to go bigger, and more public (LOL to the abyss of the public internet…). Thus, I gave into the idea of writing a blog.
I don’t really know where this blog will go, how it will grow, or if I even keep it up long term. And, with certainty, I don’t imagine any of my thoughts and observations to be revolutionary by any stretch. But, I’m pretty fucking done with shrinking. If my temper is a force of fucking nature, maybe I’m just generally a force to be reckoned with. I wonder what will happen if I remove all my energy blockers, and just unleash havoc…
Let’s see what happens.