What is it with you?
“You’re too much.”
“You’re not ambitious enough”
“Oh, that’s wild. Where did that even come from?”
“You’re not worth that.”
“Do you even care about this? It’s not about you, you know, all the time.”
“I have heard it so many times,” she said to me with a resigned sigh.
“Outside of my own head.
Inside my own head.
A barrage of opinions constantly jostling for space. Desperate to make sense of what the truth is, to understand the rules. If only I could follow the rules.”
Making you small validates their fear of you. But why should they fear you? I wondered.
I watched the dust glitter in a beam of light. Lift up and down. Up and down.
It makes no sense.
Up. Down.
“All I want to do is share my view. Broaden it. Not shrink it. I want to know if you can taste colours. Can you conjure the smell, at will, of tomato seedlings propagating on the windowsill of your grandparents spare bedroom. The bright little green shoots of life in stark contrast of the dead, heavy oak furniture. Can you see the quartz glimmer through the frosty foot prints? Can you smell security? I can and it is always…always… a cats belly.”
“Does the way something you have brought into your space ever make you want to inhabit it, engulf it, be consumed by it? Put it on against your skin and breathe into it.”
“Does it all have to be about ticking life boxes? I know it doesn’t. We all know it, but why are some of us bound to those rituals? What are we really missing out on?”
Here’s the thing, I say. Only you can choose your truth. Whether someone chooses to take a chance and look at it, at you, well, that’s on them. You can’t control that, all you can do is create it and put it out there
I see the words sinking in. Like when the warmth of the morning sun peeks over the crest of a hill. Warming, soothing and seeing.
I think some more how it’s certifiable that those with far less can impose such heaviness on another who needs to feel, to see and taste with such richness. The need to ground the thought in flight.
Insane.
So, what’s stopping you? Really stopping you? I know this on the surface is a simple question, but the hardest too. It hurts to acknowledge, because you are constantly reminded from the other end of the spectrum that you are different. The bandwidth of “normal” has become very slim indeed.
Your difference isn’t in a self imposed, self conscious, try hard way, but you were born into this world to carry, to feel, really feel and to see, not just on the surface but see so deeply that you can change your perception of your reality of another in an instance.
It’s not contrary.
It’s feeling.
It’s being.
It’s humanising your animalistic senses.
For your life, create for the sake of creating, because that is who you are. You didn’t train to become an artist because that is what you have always been.
Don’t create and you will shrink, wither become a shadow.
“45, still here, a mother, and I’m just getting started. Be afraid if you will, because I won’t be.”
