Break out

I have been trying to break out of the world of work for as long as I can remember.  It has been an overarching theme of my life.  Elsewhere in the culture, there has been a return to Stay At Home Mothering (Hat tip to Penelope Trunk), a re-upping  of women to the idea of domestic engineering.  That really hasn't been my thing as I mostly did not have the Mom gene.   I just hate going somewhere each day.

It seemed to me if I could just hone in on the right skill set, or enhance the ones I have naturally, I'd have been able to be self-sufficient and happily ensconced in home a long, long time ago.  But no body gets health care if they stay home.  Not without a lot of money.  With my bronchitis and asthma, I needed work...at least until after 50.  Now that I'm there, I have this continuous record (er CD?  Spotify tune?) playing in my head..."Do your own thing.  Be who you were supposed to be."

But was who I was supposed to be ...a poor elderly woman?

Sometimes I believe that if I mastered the things that vex me my new "able-ness" would be tantamount to a lifetime scholarship that would allow me do what I love...write, read, learn stuff I want to learn, etc.

Here's the truth:  If you want that life, make it happen, even in a tired, broke-down 50 + body.

Period.

Thank God nobody but me reads this crap.

Twenty years on and nothing has changed. Yet.

It's been a long dry spell since I've placed anything here.  Most of my writing has been offline or on other platforms.  Still...I have to say, I haven't written anywhere where it was as satisfying as it has been to write in Blogger (wait...geocities was wonderful but is no more).

I think I don't write here anymore because I lost faith in my ability to make a difference---to get people to read what I'd written...as raptly as I digested other writers on line.  But no one came to my party.  I know, that's my fault alone.

***
In the world, no one...almost no one knows who I am.  I have a very few close friends.  I have a small family.  Just a handful of people are aware of my interests and loves, my passions.  It is very painful to be mostly someone else for the better part of the day...but isn't that what happens when we make compromises for security and supposed comfort?

My world hasn't changed much because I haven't changed it much.  I haven't made the full on commitment  to putting myself over and over and over into the slipstream.  To foreground what I take to be important.

It is instructive that my horoscopes says I am both intensely ambitious AND a ruthless perfectionist.  The combination is strangely suffocating...because I can't be the best ( I am an authority on the fact that I am not the best) I don't try.  I don't telegraph enthusiasm, I don't even feign tepid interest.

Instead, I project a blank slate upon which others project their image of me...typically it's an image that works for them and is quite separate from reality.  I'm a sweet and quiet person.  I am good with technology.  I am a political wonk and a bleeding heart liberal.  I'm a loving daughter and probably a wonderful mother, etc.

Take for example my glass frames.  My family bought me some eye glass frames...very expensive ones.  I hate the frames.  But because I felt bad, I spent a ridiculous amount of money filling a prescription for them...and I didn't even like them.  Why do I acquiesce on such things to my own detriment???

Here's the truth world, I'm none of those things I listed above.  But I admit to being the one who lets these myths persist.

I just continue on the road that I'm on, covertly resentful, bitter and resigned.  Ok.  If someone else told me that they were doing that...I'd say they were seriously damaged.

Acknowledged.