sometimesihatemycat

I have been absent, mostly absent, from my writing and from engagement in my previous passions. I’ve always worked in fits and starts, but this time the fit of pausing has thrown me. I don’t know why I share the following musings here or now, except that I feel the need to write it down, and send it out, into the ether…

So I am sober, have been for over a year, and what has it done for me? It has made my body and brain healthier, connected the two, which holds great value for someone like me. But…it has also revealed a mess, a mess that I can now actually see and feel. When I was drinking, I was indeed also a mess, but I was numb enough to think I had the answers, or at least some answers. The problem with sobriety is that now I cannot turn away, or numb myself, from the glaring truth that I actually have NO answers. And, it has stopped me in my tracks. I have been stuck. How in the world can I be an activist, a thinker, a speaker, a creator, a lover, a liver (pun)….with no answers? I have felt helpless in the face of my own smallness, my own humanity, and the bigness of human searching and the world’s problems. This election has in no small way made this immobility worse. It has been a year of big changes, upheavals, disruptions, and hunkering down. But it has also been a year of grit, of connection, of tenacity, of learning to feel, love, and trust. Maybe now it is time to reexamine my small plot of land. Where do I now stand? Perhaps it is time to look down, and around, so I can know where to step…so I can know from where to leap, to begin my next “witch’s flight.”

I’ve always asked lots of questions, but I was comforted (comfortably numb) by thinking I had some answers to those questions. Now it seems clear to me that I do not have any answers, and may not ever. But, perhaps there is a space in this life for one who asks questions, a contrarian thinker, an embodied seeker, a dark and aberrant but curious creator. Maybe I start there, and just maybe there is value in that: knowing I am a human mess with no answers, but one with countless ways to ask hard questions…and one who is brave enough to know she may find no answers, but she still lives embodied each day, moving forward, asking and seeking anyway.

I defer to Samuel Beckett:

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

You must go on.

I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.

You must go on.

I can’t go on.

I’ll go on.

…and so I will…

…and I’ll  keep asking…

Image from the play Not I, by Samuel Beckett

Posted in Body, Death, Humanity, Identity, Love, Ramblings & Observations
Tags: Answers, Beckett, Body, Connection, Death, Feel, I'll go on, Life, Love, Prose, Questions, Sober, Sobriety