resonance

do you ever read something and say "yes!" someone else has put into words what my heart has been feeling and I have been inadequate at saying. well, that just happened to me. so I'm going to steal from someone else and put it down here.

"I'm aware though that this is the last hurrah before I really do go do adult things....people will be relying on me. It's awful, really, to be relied on. Responsibility. All that. ... But part of me is really craving grandiosity and foolishness. Secretly: I'm not well-trained for foolishness--for listening to my absurd hopes and desires and taking them seriously enough to creatively figure out how they could be realized. This has been haunting me lately. Foolishness is very important. I forget that I am young. That perhaps it's more important (than) the suburban, midwestern middle-class practicality of longterm investment and planning-for-comfort that I was raised on." (thanks, nb!)

Wow...this yearning to be foolish has been driving me for months now. I became awake last spring in a red, red room with a deep fire in me to be foolish...to say, wait, I'm not 80! I am still young, and I still have a body that can dance, and I have passion and creativity and fun and silliness. For so much of my life I've played the role of the responsible one, and it is so hard for me to let go. People are always surprised to find out my true age...they always think I'm older because of how I act, because of my ability to be practical and responsible and in charge and in control. In college, when I still thought I was going to be a medical doctor, I pushed away someone very dear to me because being around them I was playful and silly and acted my age...that was too threatening to my practical self, so I told them they were too immature for me, and stopped responding to their emails.

For the last year, I've been on a pendulum swing back and forth between wanting to act with total foolishness and reckless abandon and wanting to maintain my 80-year-old, stodgy, practical self. Most days I am able to find the balance, the middle path, but occasionally I want to just chuck it all and start over with my life or push away all the playful, silly stuff (and people). Finding the middle path is not always easy. Maybe it is all just my saturn return.