It's starting to feel as if there's no point to me. You know those times when everyone else seems better at what you do than you? That's what I'm in now. The part of me that knows how to play, how to function creatively, is stalled out, and that never feels fun.
I can't even put words together in interesting ways right now: "that never feels fun." Where's the lift in that, the scope or the poetry or the sigh or the wail? Where's the balloon release of it? It just sits there, metallically, like a piece of something you dismantled that you couldn't find a place for when you put it back together, it sits and glowers at you for failing to find its purpose.
This is when you look in the mirror and only see grey hairs, only see the age, the weight, the milage of your face. There's no wisdom there to balance it, no earned grace or maturity, just someone past their prime aging badly. You're the mom on the teen show: tolerated, humored, sidelined. Your chance to be integral to the narrative has long since passed, and you are a minor character in your own life, ricocheting from reaction to reaction, always in motion towards or away from some more important character's views.
This is when you go running and instead of endorphins, there are shin splints and sore hip sockets. When you run you think of all the years you didn't, and you realize you can never catch up, never run far enough or long enough to outpace all the bad decisions you made then.
You can't do your taxes, it's too depressing. Facing down the slow slide of your money into nonexistence would take a backbone you don't have.
You can't leave town and get a fresh perspective: you're in that wilderness between the youthful backpacker and the aged tourist, and your responsibilities hold you firmly in place. Maybe you were never a butterfly at all, but the pin that holds your moth body to the placard is just as inexorable, just as inescapable.
You need some imagination, some belief. You need some romance and some sleep. You need to be the one who tells a story and holds everyone rapt - it doesn't even need to be your own story, it just needs to be your pacing, your artistry that holds them. You need to matter.
But today you don't. Today, the best tactic you've got is to furl your wings and pack them away for now. And somewhere inside, very privately, you nurse the hope that there will come a day where you unfurl them, let them catch the wind, stretch them very wide, leap ahead, and find yourself again airborne, laughing, laughing, laughing.
