Now that the external demands on me have receded and my inner universe has become my life work, I am plummeting through layers of protection, like it or not. Some days, I do not feel this as progress, although surely it is, but as falling apart.
Fatigue can be close to the surface on these days, looking a lot like boredom: a lack of will, purpose and drive. Lethargy breaks out in beads of meaninglessness, a chilled fever bringing my temperature dangerously low. It’s a warning sign to pick one’s self up and throw one’s self back into the heat of life. But it takes even greater courage to instead refrain from whipping one’s self into action, forcing vitality, to instead allow one’s self to disassemble.
One senses sadness and its close cousin anger struggling to crack through, and one worries about falling into the void. But these are not just the wounds of the child who has never fully healed from parents who disappointed, bullies who transgressed, events that stung and narratives that burned. This is also the general but no less acute sorrow that the world as a whole has to be quite so out of control. And so, at long last, the void it is.
This is a hard-won benefit of age: the freedom to face the many ways in which one has been wronged—to shout to God that one has always and continues to deserve better. One deserves to live in a better, kinder world, to be loved unconditionally. One deserves to be respected.
No need to act on this anger, to defuse, resolve or quell it, either. Rather, one can shiver one’s self fully alive with the sheer passion of it—authentic emotions that simultaneously burn and heal, fueled by as much truth as one can stand.
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