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gementSo I've started grad school and recovered from the week-long cold, and I'm having some financial aid problems, but this is actually going to be an emotional post for once! First time in like two years, eh.
I skimmed through my sister's journal for the first time in months and found that I'm all jealous of her. Again. It always used to be because she was perceptibly cooler than me (or at least I was perceiving it that way) and I felt clumsy and un-hep in comparison.
See what I get for using the word "hep".
Now she just sounds... happy. Or plugged in. Spiritually in touch, I think that's the phrase I'm looking for. She has the usual life's worth of work and health irritations going on, but she's using the shiny woo-woo vocabulary for them. She thinks about her emotional health. She wants to join a commune. She talks about losing a member of her "heart community," by which she means the people that she considers members of her close spiritual family, and I realize I've never built one of those, or if I did, I don't remember.
She sounds like she's living on mango juice and organic grains and love, all the time, and I know most of the bare facts of her life are on the same scale as mine, but the framing, the context is always more important than the facts. I want to live on mango juice and love, and instead I'm living on sensibleness and lists and trying to be responsible.
Because maybe if I'm careful and responsible and do the things on my lists, I'll do better than when I was an undergraduate fuck-up. That's running away, not toward. When I asked L. about her plugged-in-ness, she thought about it, and said that she didn't have any particular advice, or even any particular goal, except "I'm trying to be me just as hard as I can, all the time." And I'm afraid that my me is boring and mundane and makes lists and worries and does not get mango juice.
Jason suggests that L. sounds like she has something to believe in. When I think about that, all I get is wracking sobs, deep body regret and sadness. I'm crying in the computer lab right now and I hope no one is noticing how my face is dripping. What do I believe in? Nothing. Lists. Being responsible.
When I sit with it a little longer, I find a belief, but an external one. I believe that the best thing I can do with my life is help people grow up more and better, which I can do by offering the right tools, the right information, for where they stand right now. Hence, library school, so that I can do that on a sheerly practical level and get good theory on how to do it in other aspects of my life.
But that's how to help other people. I don't know how to help me. I don't know how to grow myself up more and better, and I don't know how to plug into the big good feeling, and I'm very sad about that.
I skimmed through my sister's journal for the first time in months and found that I'm all jealous of her. Again. It always used to be because she was perceptibly cooler than me (or at least I was perceiving it that way) and I felt clumsy and un-hep in comparison.
See what I get for using the word "hep".
Now she just sounds... happy. Or plugged in. Spiritually in touch, I think that's the phrase I'm looking for. She has the usual life's worth of work and health irritations going on, but she's using the shiny woo-woo vocabulary for them. She thinks about her emotional health. She wants to join a commune. She talks about losing a member of her "heart community," by which she means the people that she considers members of her close spiritual family, and I realize I've never built one of those, or if I did, I don't remember.
She sounds like she's living on mango juice and organic grains and love, all the time, and I know most of the bare facts of her life are on the same scale as mine, but the framing, the context is always more important than the facts. I want to live on mango juice and love, and instead I'm living on sensibleness and lists and trying to be responsible.
Because maybe if I'm careful and responsible and do the things on my lists, I'll do better than when I was an undergraduate fuck-up. That's running away, not toward. When I asked L. about her plugged-in-ness, she thought about it, and said that she didn't have any particular advice, or even any particular goal, except "I'm trying to be me just as hard as I can, all the time." And I'm afraid that my me is boring and mundane and makes lists and worries and does not get mango juice.
Jason suggests that L. sounds like she has something to believe in. When I think about that, all I get is wracking sobs, deep body regret and sadness. I'm crying in the computer lab right now and I hope no one is noticing how my face is dripping. What do I believe in? Nothing. Lists. Being responsible.
When I sit with it a little longer, I find a belief, but an external one. I believe that the best thing I can do with my life is help people grow up more and better, which I can do by offering the right tools, the right information, for where they stand right now. Hence, library school, so that I can do that on a sheerly practical level and get good theory on how to do it in other aspects of my life.
But that's how to help other people. I don't know how to help me. I don't know how to grow myself up more and better, and I don't know how to plug into the big good feeling, and I'm very sad about that.
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Date: 2005-10-04 05:13 pm (UTC)Being able to plug into that big good feeling, which is, if I am reading you correctly, a belief in something, some binding force bigger than ourselves or even the sum of our parts as pieces of the social machine, stems directly from our ability to turn off that part of our brains that makes lists and worries about the bills and whatnot. Belief is, by its nature, irrational. It is the willing suspension of disbelief, in fact. Hence the leap of faith.
I like to think I know you passing well, not as well as some, but better than...well, some. I think, for you, it would be harder than for most to let go of your lists and let yourself turn to something bigger than what fits in your head. At least, you have always struck me as someone like that. Perhaps I am projecting.
This is not necessarily religion, or god, big G or little g I am talking about either. Your sister seems to be in contact with a more communal energy, the vibe generated by many people on a single wavelength. That sense of being in-step generates, I find, that same euphoria found in a religious experience. It is, I think, the feeling of making contact, real contact, with something outside of one's own shell. It is the feeling that one is not alone, in thought or action.
If that is the case, that is something attainable for you. Perhaps that is the first step towards mango juice for you, to surround yourself with people on the same wavelength as you, so you can all vibrate at the same pitch. This much, I know, is attainable, if not sustainable. But there's always room for improvement.
*takes soapbox and leaves*