Tori Amos has played a major role in the soundtrack of my life since I was fourteen years old. She helped me cope with adolescent angst, and as I got older, she helped ease my broken heart as I learned to love, lose, and let go. Lately I've been finding myself increasingly drawn to lines that reflect a sentiment of regret for unfulfilled hopes. I saw her in concert a couple of weeks ago, and the line that made me cry was "So sure we were all something; Your feet are finally on the ground." Tonight, listening to "Little Earthquakes," I felt a few pangs with the lines "I hear my voice, and it's been here, silent all these years," and "Hair is grey and the fires are burning, so many dreams on the shelf."
Tonight is Halloween. Halloween has for many years been my favorite holiday, topping even Christmas and Thanksgiving, both of which I adore for the abundance of delicious food and the gathering of many of those dear to me. Halloween is a chance for hedonistic fun--a chance to escape your identity and become a character (in public, without fear of being judged as clinically insane), indulge your inner child, eat (lots of) candy, get drunk, and enjoy being alive, in the moment. I always swore that nary a Halloween would pass where I did not dress up and get out in the thick of it. Indeed this year I contemplated my costume long and hard, and eventually I came up with several that would be fun, reasonably unique, and--most importantly since I'm no longer 18 and looking for the attention and approval of strange men--not "a slutty (insert noun here; e.g. nurse, cop, pirate, bumblebee, etc.)." Not to judge, of course. I've been two of those four examples before.
But where am I this evening? Why, I'm curled on my bed with my laptop, typing away and listening to Tori Amos. I worked late today. I finished my run even later and, starving, came home and made a quick dinner, had some tea, looked at some job specs and marked those to which I will be applying this weekend, then got ready for work tomorrow. It was just another day. I never even made one of the several costumes I envisioned; I just didn't have time. I am not out with the thousands of other New Yorkers, celebrating, drinking, and dancing in costume, weekdays and hangovers be damned. I'm being a responsible adult.
I hate being a responsible adult.
I am doing what I swore I'd never do. I'm working for the paycheck, working at a job I don't like at all because I'm afraid to take a pay cut. I'm chained to a computer under fluorescent lights. I don't see daylight for very long, and soon, once Daylight Saving Time is over, I won't see it really at all. I breathe recycled air and endure ridiculous building-regulated climate control. I smile at people I loathe. I endure verbal beatings and tell myself it's a "learning experience." I pretend to care about what I do, when in reality the atmosphere in which I work is so toxic that I no longer care about anything but leaving for the day.
The real world is quickly beating my personality out of me. Not only do I now not dress up for Halloween, but there are a whole host of other things I used to relish that I no longer do. I don't sing loudly in the shower or car anymore; in fact, I hardly sing at all. I don't dance (rather, flail) in front of the mirror for no reason at all when no one is looking. I don't draw. I don't paint. I don't look for cool photo opps. I don't perform. I don't randomly call my friends just to talk or hang out with people with the sole purpose of engaging in a great conversation. I barely write.
I feel like I was once a creative, interesting person. Life was inspiring. Now life is just...life. And I'm not coping well these days. Many mornings when getting ready for work, feelings of deep dread and anxiety settle in my chest and threaten to crush my lungs. I feel like I'm going to scream, going to snap, going to explode. And then I convince myself to make it through one more day. After all, it's not as if I have nothing to look forward to. Weekends in New York can be amazing--there is so much to explore and discover. I have a boy that I (dare I say?) love (even though I still can't bring myself to tell him that). When I spend time with him, everything sort of seems like it's going to be okay.
The problem is that I don't know how much longer I can continue living for the weekends. I swore to myself I wouldn't be this person, a person who wishes most of her time would just pass so she could get to the good parts. I was going to be a person who made a living in the good parts. Then I moved to New York and learned the implications of having rent that is twice the national average. You can't just do whatever you want without regard to the size of your salary--unless, of course, you have a trust fund. Alas, unlike many of my Williamsburg counterparts, I do not. In fact, for the last two years I saved money just in case my father didn't get his job back.
I also don't quite know what to do with myself. I have some realistic goals, a bit of ambition, and every now and then, I still have dreams. But increasingly the dreams are but wistful thoughts that come and go and just leave an aching twinge in their wake. I don't really believe in myself anymore. I believe I can be successful by a certain standard, but I've lost that certain kind of faith that allows a girl to believe in herself and believe that everything is potentially within her grasp. Instead, I'm watching myself reshape my internal framework and expectations of life so that I don't feel like I've let myself down.
But when I listen to Tori, I remember. I remember sitting in my room, listening, memorizing every musical nuance and imitating every vocal inflection of every song. I remember singing my heart out, liking what I heard, and liking how it made me feel. I remember dreaming huge dreams, envisioning what would happen once I got beyond those four walls in that house in the woods and was released into the world. I remember how it feels to be passionate. I remember who I am capable of being.
I want to find that girl again, that girl who is a more innocent and perhaps more unadulterated me. I want to embrace her, tell her that it's going to be okay, tell her that I'm not going to turn her away and tell her that she's silly any more. I want to let her know that we can work together, her with her fire and me with my experience, and together we can still do something; in fact, maybe we can do more than either of us alone.
I want to tell her that I'm sorry for stifling her emotions, for making her be controlled and closed. I want to tell her that it's okay for her to feel, to vibrate with emotion, whether that emotion is excitement or heartbreak or something in between. I want to let her know that it's okay to let others know how you feel, even if it makes you vulnerable. It's okay to cry and to sing and to laugh with abandon. It's okay to dream, and okay to love. I may be older and perhaps experience has given me more insight, but I think that if she forgives me, I can learn a few things from her yet. Maybe there is still time, and hope.
"Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again."
3 comments:
Your blog is in my bookmark toolbar, just as a reminder in my crazy life to check it when I get a chance! So my apologies for the lack of timeliness here...
Funny thing: I read this post, and the one after, and one of my immediate responses to both was, "Hm, ecstasy... and, ecstasy..." ;) But I guess we had that discussion last night, so I won't beat a dead horse here.
It was obviously a powerful show for both of us. You questioning the direction in your life, both of us still sorting out various troublesome relationships - and I didn't mention it at the time, but the emotional threshold was irreversibly crossed for me once she played "Winter," because I sang that song for my sister on her deathbed the day before she died. :-/ I guess that's why Tori is the icon she has become: the universal emotions in her lyrics speak to everybody in one way or another.
I always struggle with what to say to people about this stuff. Sometimes, to stroke a faltering ego, I pat myself on the back for being in the fortunate position I'm in now. On the other hand, in the back of my mind lurks the ever-present guilt built up around the fact that I most likely would not be here at all had my family not afforded me the financial means to do so in several ways, regardless of how hard I worked once given the opportunity. So I can hardly judge other talented, hard-working people who are forced to do the best they can with more limited resources. Not to mention, often I wonder if the real reason I am so psyched to have a more creative job is that in a sense, this gets me off the hook to actually be creative in my own life. I can just get a free ride creating for a cause that ultimately means nothing to me, because socially, it sounds cool. And yet, the girl who used to eat, sleep, and breathe writing just for the sheer joy of it, the girl who would just use a job to pay the bills while she worked on what really mattered in her free time, has been "planning on" writing an in-depth, already outlined novel for over a year now... and has yet to pen a single sentence. >_< Why? Lack of faith. Misuse of energy. Laziness. Fear. Life. (sigh)
Of course, it's not like ours is a unique problem. I'm hard-pressed to find a single person, at least in our generation, who is really satisfied with their work and life at this point - even people like Mike, who makes big bucks doing something he's into and didn't even have to finish college to do it. But instead of being reassuring, that just makes me feel worse. It tells me that no matter what we do, how hard we work, we will never escape the deep-seated sense that we could be so much more.
I could say something like, I think you are probably deliberately filling your schedule to the brim with honorable activities like exercise and volunteering in order to reassure yourself that you are still a good and worthwhile person, and to escape the dread and self-questioning that comes with any free time. (Trust me, I know the latter all too well.) I could tell you to give up a night or two, just to focus on your own shit. But I have been pursuing this fairly single-mindedly for some time now, and thus far if I even do my Morning Pages every other day, or actually get in an Artist Date that week, I'm doing really awesome. :P So I'm not one to talk. At least you're in shape and helping people and such.
So - and I apologize for not getting back to you on this count sooner - maybe we really should focus on your idea of getting together once a week or so for expressly creative purposes. If not for a specific project, at first, then perhaps just for creative play, like finger painting or collaging or watching an old favorite cartoon. This sort of thing is crucial for creative stimulation anyways. As you have so insightfully noted, creativity and dreams are inextricably linked with the child you were, who is still there, and who needs to be coaxed out with familiar silly pleasures if she's going to stick around and endure crappy adult life.
Your post spoke very strongly to me on this count, because it much mirrored two of the most spiritual experiences I've had in the past couple years - one last Thanksgiving, the other a bit earlier, that summer. Both chemically induced. :) The more recent one, I literally had a sharp and sudden epiphany, when explaining to Bryan about all my Merlyn's Pen crap and how much I used to love writing and playing outside, where I felt exactly as if I was waking up from a dream - a dream that had lasted 10+ years. To the point that I just stopped talking mid-sentence and said, "Something is happening." I suddenly *remembered* exactly how it felt to have a voice, to express for the sheer joy of expression. On a more dire tone, the other experience was much less pleasant. Went inside my head, and actually was introduced to the 4 various archetypal components of myself that make up who I am. (Did I talk to you about this? It was mind-blowing.) But along with this came a knife-deep and shattering sense of loss, of grief, enough to set me crying in the fetal position for near 12 hours - and the overwhelming sense that what I was grieving was "my lost daughter." I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out what that means, or to make the connection with what you are obviously also experiencing on a more conscious level.
I will actually dig up the post I made about this and send it to you. Mean time, let's try to work out a schedule for a once-a-week Play Date. :) Tuesdays, Thursdays...?
Hang in there, chica. And take heart in the fact that you are thinking so heavily about this at all. For our parents' generation, these thoughts didn't really surface until the mid-life crisis - and by then, yeah, it almost is too late to do much about it! We may feel old, but in reality we're just getting started, and there is still time to fumble around and figure out what the fuck it is that really fulfills us.
I'm surprised you still call your significant others 'boy'.
It occurs to me that your journal title may be outdated.
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