the universe wrote that you were for me ..

The sun is high and bright and shines in my eyes, warming my skin and reflecting off the deep blue of my nailpolish. And I am tired, a kind of tired that is foreign to me because I cannot understand what has happened to my energy. Except to consider that what I need most in the world is a proper vacation. That would make it the first I have ever taken since I began to work at age fourteen. But something in me resists. It seems so gratuitous, so frivilous, so antithetical to my Protestant Work Ethic.

Except I am not Protestant, I just picked up this belief like so many things, it came up through the concrete and seeped through the shoes cast upon my feet, and invaded my being and made me believe. The only way you will succeed is to work. And there were more words, describing the quality of the work and how hard I must go but those words were but hazy reflections of this unrelenting force. A pressure. An expectation that comes from something I know is sick, but I am still under its spell and it drives me to imbalance. It is everywhere, vibrating off the glass paneled towers that line these streets and it reverberates in my ear, whispering lies like it spoke the truth. But it doesn’t and I know this in my head but my heart is scared.

And so I resist, which is a losing proposition. The paradigm is the problem. But it reminds me of what the doctors told Miss Fitts when she decided to quit benzos: If you stop taking these drugs you will die. Lies to line the pockets of someone else. Fearmongering profiteers controlling the populace with whatever it takes, and in my case, status issues. Which isn’t even it, that’s just obfuscation.

It’s this: charting a path that has no precedent. It is, total independence from everything and everyone. It’s Self Reliance. Is this Emerson?

Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

I started writing this essay yesterday standing on Madison Avenue, waiting on what might be the beginning of a new chapter sure enough. And it was that feeling that I have been set adrift. Allow me to rephrase, for I am not a passive actor in my fate. I had cut myself off from all to which I had held, to which I had wanted to believe could be my salvation because I was too scared to put it all on me. And the further out I go, the fewer ties that bind, and perhaps one of the last tethers that moor me to the shore is the fear of simply being me. Free from all that I have been taught to believe. Free to discover what it is like to live as God and the Universe always intends.