I finally know what I want to do when I grow up!
I am so, so excited. I’m 34 and it hit me…
I AM GOING TO SPEND THE NEXT YEARS OF MY LIFE AS A WRITER.
I am going to write as I did when I was a kid, a teenager, a very young adult … when it really was all I wanted to do. I am going to live out a plan I stopped pursuing a decade ago for a string of reasons that don’t seem to matter anymore.
So I celebrate this realization, no – this decision – with my first public blog.
Time to stop being too afraid to say what I think or how I feel. Time to tell the world I don’t give a fuck about what it expects from me anymore.
Time to live. Time to write. Time to let go of my former life.
I already know I’m going to enjoy every single day of it. I’m even going to enjoy the pain and the depressions that come with writing. The ancient suicidal tendencies are already resurfacing — there is that odd curiosity again — what if I jump off this building? What will it be like to die? The need to walk out alone on dark nights and soak in the rain and the dirt of the city is back. And I am grateful.
I was half dead the past few years, living on the shallowest, silliest, most materialistic plane a soul could possibly survive on without actually dying. A Stepford wife, but based in QC. Overdosing on Lucky and shoe shopping and the Daily Ten, flying back and forth to a favorite yet entirely antiseptic city. In between playing boardroom games for personal entertainment. Leaving great books on the shelves and walking away from intense movies because I didn’t want to feel anything.
So I wouldn’t be pushed to question. My life. Particularly my inner life. And where it was going. Or not going.
I drugged myself with a series of acquisitions. Stopped reading fiction and replaced it with how-tos. How to be a robot. How to dress like a robot. How to treat everyone in an equally robotic way.
I didn’t look very many people in the eye and I certainly didn’t talk to them. I didn’t want to see them as people. If I did, I wouldn’t have had the capacity to do everything I had to do to get where I got.
Now I see them. And my heart goes out to them. I feel like jumping into a sea of emotion … like going to a concert and heading straight to the moshpit. When in the past I never would have tried.
Too dangerous. Too noisy. Too many warm bodies pushing too close.
Not anymore.
The years of walls are finally over.
I look the same to everyone. But inside I’m almost unrecognizable. I’ve started letting go of roadblocks and barriers. I’m vulnerable again and it scares me. But in the process, I’m starting to remember who I really am.
The girl who survived on almost nothing for years because she thought she was changing the world through her work. The girl who had the courage to be real, even when she often lost her battles. The girl who had a heart.
I am both terrified and shockingly happy to find her again.
