Sometimes you really feel like throwing everything in the bin. The silly tailor-made cookie cutters, the sketching pencils, the instagram account, the writing pad, the training mats. You put little pegs in this vertical rock face you find yourself climbing with great effort. Tiny little anchors of connection and good will that you use to hang in there. And to ascend even. Slowly, tentatively. One day a storm comes, a little darker than the others. And some fucked-up inner voice suddenly gets bold and loud. It points to how far you actually are from any ledge, it shows you the vastness of the face, the lack of life on it, the endless silence embracing it. Your little pegs now looking like some sort of a bad joke.
In the middle of all of this, somebody only too kind reaches out from across a great distance. She says “Those comments to your little theatre story, for example – they seem very real to me. You’re planting seeds, trees take time to grow.” A day later a person you’ve only met once sends some beautiful music. And is sincerely pleased that you like it so much. Two more days and a woman you haven’t even met yet tells you what it was like for her to be a single parent. These people are real. Their words are real, and they’re speaking to YOU. Your pegs might be tiny but they’re not a delusion. Or a hallucination. We are collectively so hung up on unrealistic ideas of human relationships and meaningful interactions that we (that is, I) manage to make our loneliness worse and to invalidate our own efforts all by ourselves. Twisted.
I kept the pad. And the pencils. And the mats. And the cookie cutters.
I reminded myself that I trust the process. That connection matters, whether it lasts three seconds or a lifetime. That most of us are hanging from one rock face or another. That I’m gonna get to a ledge eventually. And fucking dance on it like it’s my own personal disco!
#JustStoppedCaring 