This Is What a Good Attitude Looks Like

From the vantage point of February, 2011:

My past looks like an amazing, ambrosial junk shop, piled high with beloved toys and delicious trinkets.

My present looks like a heart-stopping, breathtaking challenge that loves me back.

My future looks like a to-do list that is actually beginning to scroll forward, each action I take adding to a sense of increasing agency.

I’m not trying to feel like this. These aren’t affirmations, but honest depictions of the inside of my brain. After so many years of struggle and hell, something’s finally clicked. Where to go from here?

Lover Of Life

In her blog Whitehot Truth, Danielle Laporte discusses her answers to Eckhart Tolle’s big question: “What is your relationship…to LIFE?”

Most people don’t write about the questions they haven’t answered. Danielle’s no exception, and neither am I. Putting the question to myself, the answer was immediate: I pictured life as a force and myself alongside it, and I knew I was its lover.

Like the topic of sex in general, the lover-of-life relationship is fraught with cliches. It’s as if, in our uneasily-erotic world, we feel relief at the trite phrases and cynical jokes that enable us to mediate sex, to talk around it, without actually delving into it. The same is true with our talk about the ecstasy of life.

Look how often the conversation about joy veers into safe language: bliss, faith, spirit, belief. One of the reasons I avoid self-help and life-coaching is a tendency for that scene to whitewash the goal…to sanitize happiness, to make joy into this wholesome, pristine emotion. It’s downright religious in its studious transcendence.

I want to be life’s lover. It’s my greatest calling. To overcome, to release, to progress—screw that! It’s like saying parts of life are not worth loving, are to be dealt with, disfavored. And if life’s my lover, how can I selectively reject the parts of it that don’t measure up?

I don’t want to overcome anything. I want to drink life in, until it and I are one.

What does it mean to be a lover of life? Does it mean shoving things into yourself—food, drink, experiences? Does it mean doing things to other people—changing their insides, their minds, their behavior? Or are those things pale substitutes or uneasy mediations?

What does it mean to be a lover, of people or life itself? We all know. We just don’t think of ourselves as one of those individuals, the lucky few who are picked up by the Universe, bandied about, and turned out. Truth is, life desires us back. But like a shy admirer, it wants us to declare ourselves first.

It’s not about finding out what the lover supposedly wants, and doing it automatically; to be either martyr or machine allows nothing inside you. And it’s also not about finding out what you want, asking for it, receiving it, and giving thanks. That’s sure to bore both of you after awhile.

To many things are turned into a performance checklist. Or, in rebellion against that, they’re touted as the next arena in which blissful “self-fulfillment” is the yardstick of success. To be life’s lover is to exist in a state of ready receptivity, of attentive action. To hold life, as you’d hold a lover, in the deepest attention. To cradle it, even as it surrounds you. To adore and worship it. Life has so many things begged of it, so much raised to it in supplication. Maybe it just wants to be seen. To be wanted. To be lusted after. To be chased.

I’m the opposite of zen. It’s the opposite of detachment. I wouldn’t have chosen to be born, if I wanted to rise above this world. Instead, I want to sink into it, to let it envelop me. I want to swallow it until it swallows me, dissolves me from the inside. Only then will that radiant violet flame inside me be free to shine.

Reverb10 #31: What’s your core story?

December 31 – Core Story

What central story is at the core of you, and how do you share it with the world? (Author: Molly O’Neill)

My core story is that I’m amazing, but can’t let myself admit it. It is unsafe. I’ve always known who I was, and fell into the temptation to love this thing that I am at an early age…but the constant, constant punishment, both for being this thing and for having the gall and effrontery to love myself anyway, they’ve taken their toll.

I’m going to have to choose an identity soon. It can be one of two. My self—or the false self that rejects the real one. The soul I came into the world with—or the false consciousness I’ve adopted in order to hide it, not realizing that it would do so convincing a job. How does one express, in this bastardly world, the inner feeling of being seven feet tall and made of holographic glitter? How does one begin to live life out of that place, if one is stuck geographically in someone else’s miserable swamp?

I’m going to have to be myself, soon, or it will kill me. And “myself” is something even the people who tell you to “be yourself” wouldn’t much like. I’m not like most people, let alone most women. I feel like a giant freak in a deceptively tiny, tense little body. And I am so fucking tired of other people’s rules.

When I look deep into my heart, at the core of me, I don’t see a story. I see an eternal glowing presence, flaming and ultraviolet. The story begins right outside that core—the narrative I’ve woven all my life to explain myself to people who hate me. Two braided strands, of love for myself and abhorrence for myself. I must follow those strands from my surface to my interior, unweaving them, and discarding one.

I hope I choose wisely.

What’s in my NaNoWriMo bag?

photo originally uploaded by the catalyst….

Purple Bar, my lovelies!

Stats:

Days Where I Wrote:

Highest Daily Word Count: 13,498 November 10th

Write-Ins attended:

Awesome boyfriends acquired: 1

Countdown: NaNo deadlines

Well, here it is—another NaNoWriMo end. God I hate these things.

It’s that the month is so boss anyways. And this one was better than all the other three put together. From the fair and karaoke trips, to the early win, to just the awesomeness of my story this year, I’m sad at the idea of everything ending in just a little less than three hours.

I watch the date line moving towards me. First New Zealand, and India; then Europe and the U.K. Now it’s on its way across the Atlantic, eating up my few remaining minutes. I’ve already won—I’m not worried about that. I just hate

hate

hate

NaNoWriMo being over.

Final Sprinting

photo originally uploaded by the catalyst….