The way I write for myself - like on this blog, or in my journal, or on the twenty-six dirty scribbled-on napkins currently populating my purse - is different from the way I'd write, say, a paper. Or an email explaining to a client why the company I work for has yet to provide whatever it is that got paid for in full up front two months ago. ("Thank you for the donation! Sincerely, Lindsay.") For that kind of writing, yeah, I'll probably consult Purdue OWL for the most up to date information on what the fashionable placing of periods is. But if it's just for me, or for you (I LOVE LETTERS. Be my pen pal, I am absolutely not joking), I'm less concerned with form than I am with where we end up.
“…having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok,
but technically I don’t know what’s happening, nor do I care.”
Charles Bukowski, in a letter to Anthony Linick (1959)
The destination is usually a secret until we get there.
Sometimes that's frustrating, or even scary depending on the subject matter. (If you've ever tried writing for catharsis you know what I mean. Ooh, that's a good example of something I'd google if this was getting graded. Is it "for catharsis" or "as catharsis"? "Was getting graded" or "were getting graded"? ARE THOSE QUESTION MARKS IN THE RIGHT PLACE? I MUST DOUBLE CHECK IF I WANT TO GET ANY SLEEP TONIGHT. Etc.) Sometimes I don't like where something is going, or I can't get it to go anywhere at all. Sometimes it just wasn't meant to go anywhere. Sometimes, things get deleted or thrown out and I move on to the next thing.
But usually it's nice. And I like it, the element of the unknown. It's exciting, it keeps me from gouging my fucking eyes out from sheer boredom of myself, it's addictive.
At this point, regular readers (HI MOM) have probably realized that this is yet another one of my sloppily applied metaphors for life. Stay with me, friends. One of these days I'll come up with a good one.
Anyway, here's how my brain calendar goes: School starts, and then the next day Christmas happens. I like the stuff that happens in between, and I love me some Christmas. Everything smells good and is sparkly and there are bells. I'm so down. However with the holidays also comes a constant low-grade anxiety that starts right after Halloween and gradually builds until just before Christmas Eve, when I have my annual fight with my mom over whether or not I have to go to a family function. (Don't tell Diego, but the main reason I want to marry him is that he was born on December 24th and is my official ticket out.)
I don't have contact with my extended biological family, for a lot of reasons that I lack the mental and emotional energy to deal with. If "deer in headlights" can be a feeling, then that is what I feel. I'm thinking about this a lot now because it recently occurred to me that I can't use work as a "get out of holiday functions free" card anymore. I've always felt stress about these end of year gatherings, whether it be from actually having to attend or from having to come up with elaborate ruses to get out of going. Which is stupid, and self-inflicted, because the people inviting me are kind and lovely creatures and I ought to be flattered that I'm included in anything and not left alone to count my dusty coins while Tiny Tim's dad sneaks out the back door. But that's what happens when you don't deal with stuff, guys. It manifests in inconvenient and often ridiculous ways. IT WILL NOT BE IGNORED.
Oh my god, I'm so far off topic and you guys don't even know it because I haven't even gotten to the point I intended to make when I started this fifteen minutes ago. You poor sweet things.
What I meant to get it is that a large part of my unwillingness to go to a thing with a group of people who are family-like is that there is almost nothing I like less than a bunch of people I don't regularly see or speak to asking me what I'm doing with my life. I don't love when people I do see all the time ask me about those things. STOP ASKING ME, I'M GETTING HOT.
When I was a little younger I thought those kinds of questions made me sweaty and want to cry because I wasn't doing life right. In other words, I wasn't doing what the other people my age in the room were doing. Then I got a little older and a little more okay with doing whatever I wanted, but it still made me want to throw up when people asked me about whatever I was doing. THEN I realized, hey, these people are asking you lots of questions because they're interested in what you're doing because what you are doing is kind of interesting. (We transitioned into me talking to myself there, did you catch that? I told you I wasn't worried about things like quotation marks.) But then I just got more nervous about describing whatever thing I was doing in a way that did that thing justice, because it actually was usually a kind of a cool and interesting thing. Finally, and this is the thing that still makes me wish the floor had a throat into which my body could disappear into, there were/are the follow-up questions: "What are you doing next," or "What's your plan after that," or "When are you going to be finished?"
GAH I DON'T KNOW. And when you ask me that I automatically think I should know, which makes me very frantic because I have not the faintest idea. This is the real reason people eat so many Christmas cookies, you know that, right? So that there's something in your mouth and you don't have to answer when someone asks you terrifying questions.
My goal this year is to speak as confidently as I feel, and not get weird while talking to people unless it's in a fun way. I like my life, I'm proud of the things I've accomplished, and I have enough of an idea of what my next steps are to feel good about where I'm headed. I get scared and I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm not scared and I know what I'm doing. I don't always know what's going on, but I don't care - generally, I come out okay.
