I am still blissed out that I get to do it, to be on stages and in rooms talking about reading and writing and being alive.
-Cathy Rentzenbrink in her newsletter
This is it. Not the stages and rooms, but talking, or in my case writing, about being alive, writing about life as it is happening. This is what my heart screams yes to. This is what brings the smile to my face and makes my head move up and down in the quiet agreement with the heart. Writing about life as it goes on is one of the very few things my heart and mind agree on.
I don’t have many memories, not from my childhood, nor from the later years of my life. I don’t reminisce, I don’t believe that my best days are behind me. I don’t remember the names of my teachers, my classmates, my colleagues from the previous job a few years back. I don’t recall the times gone over and over again so that the memory would stick. I just don’t like to look back, the life here and now is so much more interesting.
For me feeling alive means being present, trying new things, doing something just because I want to, trying things just because I can, failing at it and making mistakes. My anxiety rises when I’m careful, when I’m doing my best to make everything the right way, when I’m slowly dipping in my toes. And with the high levels of anxiety I tend to close up, shut myself away from the world. I feel like everything is wrong, like I’m wrong. I don’t feel that I’m living my life, I feel like I’m surviving it. This is a straight path to another depressive episode.
This time we live in can be stressful, it makes me worry about the future, about everything we will be going through. It’s enough to carry, I don’t need to add to it by not getting out to the playground, by not letting myself be, write, read, try things out, make mistakes.
I want to write bad stuff, read only books that make me want to stop the world so I can finish them. I want to fail and make mistakes and learn my lesson from it, or not. I want to stand in the middle of the playground I created for myself and just do what it was made for, play. I want to be present in this life of mine, I want to be awake. And I want to tell about it as it is happening. Not in the retrospection, but right now, because I simply don’t know if I’ll have the chance to look back. Maybe this is the only time I have to talk about my experience.
I know it sounds a little bit morbid, but I believe that realising that my life is limited, understanding that I don’t know how much time I have, makes me want to experience the days I have with complete presence. It makes me want to talk about what is, write about what is happening right now.
Any thoughts?
This summer I fell in love with Deborah Levy’s books, she calls her Living Authobiography. The life told as it was happening. It’s brilliant, it made me want to do things, experience things, try new things. Maybe it sparked all of this too. I don’t know. What I know for sure is that I’ll be re-reading this books soon and probably many times after that.