Tue 6 Jan 2009
on ecesis
Posted by eliza under Uncategorized
[3] Comments
ecesis
n : (ecology) the process by which a plant or animal becomes
established in a new habitat [syn: {establishment}
I’m in a place right now. I’m not exactly sure what caused it, what the motivation was. It’s been, by all rights, a very, very good day — I was up exceedingly early (which makes me happy; I have delusions of being a Morning Person again someday), got everything in my usual routine done by nine a.m., worked steadily until noonish on soap and various other filler projects (got roughly a hundred soaps made before noon, even.). I even answered and/or edited my email down to under 60 for the first time in, oh, say, a year and a half.
I should be ecstatic. I should be bouncing off walls and throwing parties in my own honor and breaking my own elbow patting myself on the back.
But I’m not.
It almost feels like I’m warring with myself. Like some part of my brain is declaring on another part. It’s hard to explain.
I’ll try. Bear with me here. It might come out all stilted and crazy, because, really, that’s how it feels.
I’m ambitious. I’m driven. I learn quickly and thus, tend to get bored easily. Or, rather, not bored, really, but inquisitive. I’m an overachiever and a total perfectionist, which means that I’m also a procrastinator. (If it can’t be perfect, why do it at all? That kind of thing.)
In addition, I also have certain physical limitations. The accident in ‘03 left me with a brain that sometimes doesn’t make connections the way it should. Analogy: it’s like the word train is speeding along at 75 mph and suddenly, there’s no track. There’s no framework and no words. Not so good for someone who writes and talks for a living most of the time. (And to be fair, it’s not as bad as it used to be. It used to happen mid-sentence, during speech. I’d just…stop talking. Forget what I was talking about, thinking about. I’m glad that part has mostly passed, excepting times of stress and random intervals that are further apart now than before.)
Also a part of that accident — I effectively have no education. None that I can remember, at least. College disappeared with a nine-inch chunk of my skull. So did most of my first marriage. (Not necessarily a bad thing, there, but still…) So did my grandmother’s name, for a while. And portions of my childhood. Large pieces of who I am.
I’ve made peace with most of that. The ambition holds hands with my limitations. It’s just me. And I’m okay with Me.
Days like today, though — they happen. Not often, because I’m just not nearly as prone to sitting around feeling sorry for myself anymore. It’s a waste of my time, and time’s the one thing of which I won’t ever have enough.
See…from the outside, it looks like I’ve done a helluvalot with my life. And I have, really, when one looks at it subjectively through the eyes of someone interested in what I’ve done. I’ve built communities for ten years — first with online journal webrings and communities, then with publishing and the related arts, and now with Lime & Violet and all the places that’s evolved to. I get emails from people who tell me how much they love the stuff we do around here. How we’ve helped them in one way or another, or connected them with new friends, or led them into new things.
And I’m so grateful for every one of those letters. I don’t always answer, because it wraps me up in that little ball of wordlessness that my brain hands me, but I keep them. Every one of them. In a file folder, both on the computer and in the desk, and when I wonder why the hell I’m working eighteen hours a day sometimes, I pull them out and point at them and remind myself that that right there is why I’m working so hard. Those people. Every one of them. And every one that doesn’t write me, too.
It’s only when I start looking objectively at it all — or at least what passes for objectivity in my perception of the outside world — that I start questioning what I’m doing. Where I’m going with it all. What purpose this has in the larger scheme of things. How I look to the outside world.
I’m not doing anything. I want to be. But I’m really just spinning in place — in a place I don’t want to be (physically), doing the same things over and over, and failing to take any kind of root because my leaves are reaching for a different sun.
I want to be a part of the world, not just sitting here in relative isolation, butt grafted to the computer chair, occasionally taking breaks to interact with the world. I have all this experience, all this drive, all this innate knowledge — but I’m utterly unsuited for anything other than what I’m doing now.
I am, all whining aside, completely afraid of being something more, because tehre’s no way I could walk in and be the best at it. I just don’t know enough; I have skills, but not the right ones. Not the ones that would make this life so much easier.
Huge changes need to occur this year to get me where I want to go. Huge ones. Not all of them are decided by me, even, which leaves me in a place where I’m not even remotely in control. And I question every step I take, backpedalling and moving forward and learning and growing and finding that those roots…? Not in solid ground. I’m like a transplanted tree that’s in six inches of dirt — something’s eventually going to give, and I’m going to topple over.
At least that’s how it feels.
I’m aware enough to know that it’s not objective truth.
Sometimes, it feels like I’m looking out into my life from behind the glass — and I don’t much like what I see there.
I just wish I could acclimate. Find my footing. Find out who I need to be to be what I want to be. To make the right steps, the right decisions, the right moves. To be who I am, maintain and encourage the principles and vision I live by, and to get out of this rut where I’m doing too much for not enough. Because really, that’s what’s happening right now. I could go into it all, but it would read like a laundry list of complaints, and I have better things to do than dwell on what’s wrong. Too many steps left to get what’s right to waste that kind of time.
I know change doesn’t happen overnight, especially not for me. Thinking is laborious and involves a lot of note-taking and writing for me, thanks to that word-disconnect problem sometimes.
But could we speed it up a bit, please? I’m not getting any younger, and I miss the life I’ve never had.
Nobody can do it but me.
And until this unsure part of me finishes its battle with the ambitious part, I’m here in the middle.
Trying to grow.

















