Posts tagged with "growth"

nowhere near as morbid as it sounds

All I want to do late­ly is go out and shoot and edit and post, but I have no sto­ries to tell. I’m still try­ing to write them, so I can put them in these cuts and look back and live for­ev­er in the mem­o­ries. To dance among the motion and glim­mer, and blink against the bright­ness of the sun.

I’ve been filled with such tremen­dous inten­si­ty, and hope, and excite­ment, buoyed by the fact that I’ll always have a gui­tar and a dis­arm­ing smile.

burlesque cake

 

Peace has been made with this new-self. It’s as if every change, every cycle I go through, takes time for me to get used to the new skin. I know I’ll always be flawed. I’ll always make mis­takes, but that means I’ll always be learn­ing.

I’ve had enough of crazy devel­op­ments. I’ll be hap­py once the dust set­tles and I’m back to my reg­u­lar life again, some point beyond the sum­mer. The spring is nev­er remark­able; it’s just a haze between the heat and the snow. It already smells like hot sum­mers nights, a com­fort­ing mix of pollen and con­crete. It’s gonna be oh so good.

stability or stagnancy

I’m liv­ing a dra­ma-free life.

____ used to tease me about my dra­ma, con­vinced that I loved it because I always seemed to be cre­at­ing it. But dra­ma is just a by-prod­uct of the strug­gle when you’re dis­cov­er­ing your­self and try­ing to become the per­son you’re meant to be. It’s nev­er an easy path; oth­er­wise, you’d already be that per­son.

I don’t have bad days any­more either, but I can’t tell if it’s because I’m han­dling things bet­ter or if I’m not chal­leng­ing myself enough.

And now that there’s no more dra­ma, it feels like I’m fin­ished. Like there’s no next step for me to take and nowhere else to go, because I’m here. All that’s left is to enjoy this exis­tence.

That’s not to say my life is with­out a touch of inner insta­bil­i­ty. I still have mem­o­ries, thoughts, lust, and love, and they’re enough to fill the mind for an entire day. But now I know every­thing’s gonna be okay.

cats in sunbeam

 

Now that I’m work­ing from home full-time, I bare­ly step out­side. Living like Foul Bachelor Frog, cause yes­ter­day’s pants are today’s pants if they have the belt in them. There’s noth­ing for me out there. It’s nev­er worth the trou­ble any­more. I’d go out if I was­n’t so con­tent in my com­fort­able home with two cats and every­thing I need to sing or write or cre­ate.

I’m just won­der­ing if I’ll ever get tired of this.

Baby talk

One sum­mer in my teenage years, I vol­un­teered at a kinder camp1, and that filled a gap in my knowl­edge about any­one under 10. Unfortunately, that gap only spanned chil­dren between 3 and 5, and aside from that range, I knew noth­ing about kids.

So inter­act­ing with chil­dren who’ve yet learned to speak I found espe­cial­ly awk­ward. I nev­er under­stood how to talk to some­one who did­n’t seem to under­stand what I was say­ing. It was like talk­ing to a stuffed ani­mal, which I’m pret­ty sure can’t be done by any sane per­son with­out feel­ing creepy.

Rosella in the car

 

Not to men­tion how pho­ny it sounds. Why do peo­ple raise their voic­es, as if a child trusts them more if they sound like them2? They don’t nor­mal­ly talk like that.

Then I real­ized that I do kit­ty talk, with the boospy, and the schmoop­sy, and the pokey of the bel­ly. I talk to my cat all the time, a habit I’ve prob­a­bly picked up from liv­ing by myself for the last three years, com­bined with the fact that I’m an extreme intro­vert and stay in my house for the major­i­ty of my time.

Which is strange because Dolly does­n’t under­stand any­thing I’m say­ing (though I’m sure cats are intel­li­gent enough to evolve to talk if they believed any­thing a human had to say could be impor­tant). And this is after I wrote an entry sev­en years ago, specif­i­cal­ly about how awk­ward I found it to talk­ing to cats.

Maybe I’m com­fort­able enough with cats now to hold a con­ver­sa­tion with one. Or maybe I’m going crazy.

Rosella with tongue out

 

I’m get­ting more com­fort­able with kids too. Not just talk­ing to them, but the idea of hav­ing them myself, maybe because my friends are get­ting mar­ried and giv­ing birth and I’m spend­ing more time with a few adorable boys and girls. I can talk to them even though they only respond in mono­syl­la­bles.

Jodie Foster once described hav­ing chil­dren as the most cre­ative thing she’s ever done, and I com­plete­ly under­stand that now. I can’t think of any­thing more cre­ative than nur­tur­ing growth, curios­i­ty, imag­i­na­tion, and ideas in anoth­er human being. One day, I’d like to expe­ri­ence it for myself.

  1. Cause I had noth­ing bet­ter to do. Seriously. [↩]
  2. Though it worked for Owen Meany. [↩]

The Price Of Moving On

Remember this one, or even this one?

I wrote those entries four years ago1. Amazing how much they apply to the sit­u­a­tion I’m in now. Except this time, I’m stronger because I know that I sur­vived this once already. It’s sad that at the end, all my efforts turned into an attempt at mak­ing sure I would­n’t regret any­thing by giv­ing more of myself than I should have. Because when all that you’ve giv­en makes no dif­fer­ence, and you have noth­ing left, you know for sure that there’s noth­ing else you can do. You can always say that you took the chance, and it does­n’t mat­ter if you get hurt in the end, because often you can’t sep­a­rate the two.

That’s the price you pay to look back with­out any regrets. That’s the price of mov­ing on.

And I always pay it glad­ly.

  1. It’s quite a trip to see that I was mature or smart enough to fig­ure this out back then. [↩]