When Your Spirit Runs Dry
You are tired.
You had ten hours of sleep last night but still, you woke up tired. You stayed on the couch all day, did nothing but watch tv but you’re still tired.
The city is celebrating a festival and you can hear the music and the people from outside but you’re too tired to even get up and take a shower.
You take a deep breath and you look around your room. There are books that you just bought from a nearby bookstore but haven’t been read. There are unfinished drawings scattered about on your drafting table. There’s a list of story ideas to write, and articles to publish. There’s also a pile of laundry at the foot of your bed.
You say to yourself, “I’m gonna draw this next, then this, and this, and create a page for my artworks.” You tell yourself you’re gonna finish your plates before the deadline. You said you’re gonna publish the article before midnight and start the first chapter of your novel. But you’ve still got five books in progress.
You have not the time to outline your months, your weeks, your days, your hours, your life.
You are tired of your life.
But I will tell you this:
The reason you are feeling so is that you are alone.
You have friends who stop by every now and then, a family whom you can go home to during weekends, a sister whom you can go shopping with, and a mother who visits you and cooks for you.
But you are alone in carrying what you do.
Because young woman, no one really understands you.
No one sees you when you jump from your couch and squirm when you read a killer line from your favorite Ayn Rand book. No one sees your smile when you reach clumsily for your marker on the end table to quickly highlight the line on page 264. There’s no one whom you can talk to about your thoughts of Catherine Halsey. There’s no one who really knows you and the books that make you.
No one sees you when you sat down on your desk to write the first messy outline of your new novel titled: “A Lifetime Away”. You are so excited. Then the excitement dies down when you’ve reached 103 words and realized you have to run a long and drudging research about the history of Pakistan’s civil war. You walk back to your couch and sip your vodka.
No one sees you when you do.
No one sees you as you fall asleep out of frustration and loneliness. No one sees how beautiful your heart is even though you never glance at the amputated beggar outside of your University because you don’t like him. No one sees how you make face when your Economics professor said, “We don’t know the reason why earthquakes occur.”
No one sees you mind to mind, heart to heart, and soul to soul.
You are tired because no one ever really gets the real you.
And you let yourself fall back, and think of that line from a play called “Ideal”, where the heroine speaks:
“I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it too. Or else, what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.”
