Life, and all its little traumas.

Another post snippet, but this time this was a little more premeditated. I'd been thinking about the term trauma for a little bit last night, and somehow it came up as if it'd been waiting for the thought to flower. As if it needed a little prompting to come out.

I don't know if I'm right, but lately I've been feeling like...maybe we've made the term a little overheavy. Maybe it would help us put our lives together better if we thought of things a little differently. Maybe...maybe it's just food for thought.

 

Let me tell you something pretty ridiculous. Like fantastically ridiculous. When I was young, not super young, but maybe like 8 or 10 or so...we were going to go on a family visit to see our cousins up north. I was so excited. I don't know why, I just really was excited to go see them. There's six of us in our family (or was before my dad passed away) four of us kids and two parents, I'm the youngest (and the most spoiled).

Anyway, for days, maybe even a week we'd been preparing for this journey - just really four hours drive, not long by North American standards but enough with a brood in the car. The day comes when we were to go, I'm all packed and ready, just waiting for things to get going. Time starts to pass. I know my dad prefers to go early to make the drive easier but it's not nearly midday yet, so I'm okay, if anything I'm getting more excited. It starts to get later. Midday starts to come and I feel a little anxious, though I don't know why. It's cold outside, sure, but I don't know why we haven't gone yet. The day is almost gone, it feels like.

A while drifts by. My siblings have been doing things, sometimes playing together in the background as I start out the front room window, sometimes upstairs keeping themselves occupied. I'm not that interested. To me it's not half as fun as what things will be like when we get there. It'll be so exciting, so much fun. My kid brain doesn't know why but I'm always like this, always excited to be around more people, even though my family is big and great and more than enough, I just...love it.

The time starts to pass more slowly. I realise something is not quite right. Perhaps something is wrong. Are we...maybe not...? I watch through the window at the car, my breath fogging the window pane. And slowly, like the stir of molasses, I start to see it. Something white, fluttery, light, falling from the sky.

It's snow.

Surely that doesn't mean-- But it does, it fantastically does. Those few small flakes, barely a spattering, have shuttered all the expectations I had. Maybe we can wait, maybe it’ll get better, I think. I even try to convince my dad, almost pleading for him to take us.

But he calls it. We decide not to go. He telephones my uncle, his brother, and tells him.

I watch out the window, looking at the flakes that have already started to dissipate, and something inside me quietly dies.

My siblings have tried to console me, briefly. They know I'm a little upset but what kind of person would be more than that? Why would it mean so much more? They don't know why I was so excited, it's just me. I don't know why I was so excited.

And slowly, I decide, somewhere in that child's brain, that they're right. That makes sense. Why should I be so upset at not being able to go. Even if my child brain doesn't understand why the decision was made, why a few flakes here meant ice and danger on the roads out of the city, I still trust my parents, I still know they made the decision for a good reason.

And slowly, I learn a lesson further than I was meant to. I decide I should not get so excited for these things. Moreover, I probably shouldn't get excited for them at all. I mean they're never as good as I expect them to be - well except those few times that were - but still, those must be the outliers, right? And after all, if it means feeling like this, then what's the point?

I mean...if I have to feel like this, why should I be excited at all?

 

Today, I'm something of a writer. Something, because I haven't actually finished anything. I've tried a few, some are on the shelves for later, some have been left at the wayside, but I do have one. One that I've been sitting on, near completion, for more than four years. It's not amazing. It's fun, and has heart, and that's me. It's fine, and I have better things to write, but I still love it.

But more than all of that, I want to finish it. I want to throw it out into the world and know I finally did something in my life. Maybe not amazing or grand, but *something*. Just this one thing that I know I can do.

But you know, for the life of me, I can't get excited about that. I'm so close to the end that I can taste it, but the energy it needs to write it? Won't manifest as excitement, because in my brain I've learned the lesson all those years ago, thirty years of this planet, that it will turn to ashes in my hands. The excitement of having the power to change my life at my fingertips, in my hands, my shot as it were, is contained so tightly by this rigorous structure of held feelings that I don't even know how to let it fly any more. I don't know how to not be afraid, how to not let go, how to set my soul free.

I don't know how to live. In the way that I most believe in, most endure for, most look forward to.

 

Why have I gone on about all this? It's simply for this reason, trauma isn't always trauma. Sometimes it's just life. Sometimes it's just learning the wrong thing, or the right thing wrongly, or missing it completely. Sometimes it's not being spanked by your parents, or not let out late, or not having your own room, sometimes it's just snowflakes...landing on a windowsill.

Sometimes it's just how you feel.

Post Snippet; Density

Not to be a cliché but I feel about love the same way I kind of feel about destiny. I don't like fate, I reject it because I don't like the idea of something happening regardless of what you do, but destiny...destiny is about something you can fulfil. And I can sit here and think my destiny will come to me but the reality is it doesn't work that way. It's a life quest, and I have to do a whole bunch of things to get anywhere near that - whether I do that sitting here at my desk or flying through the air doesn't really matter, as long as I'm doing it.

That's a bit of a tangent but my feeling is that...it's not supposed to be easy when you're looking for what you really want. Sometimes it's elusive, sometimes you have to track it down, and yeah, sometimes you have to be picky. If you're not finding what you want, that's not your fault or anything, but romance is like the science of an art. You have to feel the wind, feel the energy in the air, follow the flow along its course. It winds and curves like a living thing, because it is. The heartbeat of millions of souls creating pulses full of happiness and anguish, weaving together the beauty of wings with the shackles that bind. Following though that path is no easy feat, and yet we do it in so many ways all the time.

Why should it be surprising that love, that thing that can so rarely be defined, is one of the hardest things to find? Harder still to bind, torturous to let flower, excruciating to let live. And so joyous that it can mean everything. How can we treat that as if it is nothing, when we know it moves the world? When it's the one thing we can point to and say if there's anything left at all, of our doomed destructive race when it's all over, let this one thing that transcends all things, remain.

You can have love, you will have love, even if you never find a partner. Because you'll never be alone.

None of us are.

Post Snippet; Not Aunt

I know it's been a while, not that I particularly have anybody to account to except myself, but for anyone else reading this, I'm going to be shameful and just put a couple of posts up of...yes, posts, that I made elsewhere.

I don't think it's super relevant to anything, aside from the interesting idea that sometimes the only noteworthy writing I do for long stretches seems to just be talking to people. I sometimes wonder if things would have been different if I wrote for a newspaper or something like that, but for some reason I never thought that was an actual thing I could do.

Even now I feel like...it's probably more work than I can handle or that I'm not accomplished enough or something, which is an interesting thing to think of oneself. Mental blocks being what they are, I don't think I've ever thought that writing positions constituted an actual job that I could earn money from, and even writing books is more for the love of the story than anything else.

That's a weird one, isn't it? To have the feeling that the arts cannot be a job, even though we have arts jobs everywhere. An idea that somehow, doing something you're passionate about cannot be something you get paid for. That you're just telling stories or expressing your heart or feeling the wonder of the world, why would earn material, worldly goods from that?

Which is nonsense of course. People in professions considered far more practical have through time also been those with creative hearts and passions, and we need do no more than walk our streets to see that. So I have no idea why I hold this unreasoned view.

Perhaps if you hold it too, the only thing I would say to you is...don't. Just live, and be the wonder that your heart wants you to be.

It feels, at least, that you have a supportive partner-friend and a current living situation that, while not ideal, at least isn't too negative to deal with. It sounds like a tough situation that you're in but it does seem like one that can - and probably will - get better. It's kind of difficult at this age - at least for me - to feel things changing about my self and my appearance and still feeling static in where I'm going or have gotten. I'm never going to be this age again. And that's sad because I haven't done a whole lot with the years behind me. But somehow I just can't shake this little bit of hope that I have. It's almost gnawing, always telling me not to give up, that even if I've given up with my hands I can't give up with my heart.

Full disclosure, I just had a sandwich. A pretty simple one, and one I've probably been eating for decades in one form or another. I genuinely wasn't expecting it to kick as much ass as it did. That was a good sandwich, and it really had no right to be, with mediocre meat between mediocre bread, it shouldn't have moved me at all. But it did. It's probably why I'm posting here right now (even though I don't know if this will be welcome or not), and it's helped turn my brain on a little.

How does that help? Simply this, today a sandwich made my day better. Tomorrow something else will. And even though I'm a little lost in the void too, I know every little stone on the path helps me move forward. Eventually the work will pay off, usually sooner than we think because the world is a wild wild place, full of unexpected twists and turns, and when we're down sometimes it throws us a line to keep us in the race.

I don't know why.

Somehow I think it's meant to.