I am exhausted.
I am tired of walking on eggshells. I am tired of every word feeling like a probe into the darkness, guiding the way to someone else’s right path because I don’t know my own right path and I know that the path I am on isn’t right for anyone–even me–and doesn’t lead anywhere except to loneliness and an empty life at the end of a quickly shortening road.
I am exhausted with the act of choosing. I am drained even in success when every moment of success met with a flash of joy followed by a continuing deluge of fears and i told you so’s. I am tired of feeling like nothing I find value in in my life has value to anyone else and feeling that all my choices wind up in failures and dead ends.
I am tired of being told that I am a good person, but to the one person that I need to believe in that, I am not good in the way I need to be in order for them to be happy, successful, healthy, and bright.
I am tired of being other people’s darkness and that shadow dimming my own light to the point where it is hardly even there anymore and, in most ways, I am hardly even there anymore; a function of depressed keys, graded papers, empty kisses, and stories that move through me but don’t take any bit of me with them when they leave.
No, this is not the ‘God, take the wheel’ moment. I would not be so bold. I believe in listening to the universe and leaning into fate as well as other energies that fluctuate through our universe, however that is part of what got me to this point.
I don’t know what to do. Giving up is not an option. Surrendering control to anyone doesn’t work for anyone involved. I am stuck in a change or die circumstance where I don’t actually understand how to change fast enough and, well, even enough to save what I expected to be the rest of my life.
This is not a mid-life crisis or empty nester stuff. I had a plan for what things would look like until my kids left the house. Then I got divorced, and the plan kept evolving; changing to fit the circumstances but always preserving the core idea of what I wanted to give my sons in terms of a life. It has worked to a point at the cost of everything else that comprises my life. This dogged defiance to change –fundamental change– has destroyed everything that I felt was the after.
So, what was that after? Travel. Exploration. Possibility. I didn’t have a plan short of whatever my partner wanted. All I wanted was to be a part of it and have a laptop at the ready. I still want that. I don’t know if it, or anything is possible anymore.
I’m at zero again and I am so much more tired than the last time I was here.