Did I mention that I really like Natalie Goldberg? I do. Today I read about how she has dozens of notebooks filled with crap from when she lived in Taos and felt like she had nothing to write about but she wrote anyway because somewhere under that surface ennui there is something that needs to come out. That is exactly how I feel at the moment. I feel like I am supposed to write. I’m a frustrated writer working as a librarian. I am not doing the job I feel I was put on this earth to do. But I am so out of practice that I don’t know even where to begin. So I am going to just write crap until it becomes natural. Until good stuff comes out.
So lets talk about that ennui. I feel numb on the surface. I feel like I’m just drifting through life like a ghost. I am a cog in the machine. And I don’t like it at all. I want to be doing something. Anything. Traveling. Inventing. Coming up with brilliant things to say. But I’m not doing that. I’m just a cog. I’m a nobody. Just a worker bee. A rat in a cage.
What the hell happened with my life? “how did I get here,” to quote Talking Heads. How? When I was in my early twenties I had big dreams. I had things to say. I had something inside of me that wanted to come out. I felt creative. Somewhere along the way that feeling was deadened inside of me. I’m 40 now and I have become like everyone else. A working stiff. A zombie. How does this happen? How dare society take those dreams away from me! I am bitter about this.
Why have I let societal pressure decide my fate? It’s like the whole buying a house thing. I thought, for years, that I had to buy a house. My dream was to buy a house. I wasn’t a human being until I bought a house. So I bought a house. I moved away from my favorite fucking place in the whole world, moved back to a place that I loathe, so that I could buy a fucking house. And what did I learn? That a house is not the be all and end all. A house is not, by any stretch of the imagination, going to make me happy at all. And it doesn’t. In fact, it kind of causes me more pain than pleasure. It feels like a ball and chain. I don’t care about the security. I would rather not have to deal with all of the responsibility of owning a house. Now I’m stuck in Spokane because I bought my fucking house. BFD. So, yeah, that so-called “American dream” is a piece of shit. I was totally duped into that. that’s for sure.
Note from the future (9.9.2011): post goes on, venting and blathering. We’ll just delete and end it here. There. All better.
