Be Careful What You Wish For...

Last night, for some reason that only my errant hormones understand, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep. You have no idea what a tragedy sleeplessness is to someone who is working seventy hours a week under an unaccustomed load of stress. Or maybe you do…especially if you are a woman around, say, fifty-ish…

So I dragged myself out of my unwelcoming bed and turned on my computer. Thinking that reading over some of my old journal entries might be just the narcotic I needed to push me back into the Land of Nod. I lit on my old private journal, "Brainsurfing." I closed it down after the AOL Exile. Haven’t written a thing in it since January. But I can’t seem to bring myself to delete it. Now, I’m thinking of reviving it, and getting rid of "Better Terms," the blogspot journal I created for my own intended exodus from journal land. Which I never quite got around to doing.

"Brainsurfing" was intended to be the repository for my more "artsy" endeavors, both literary and graphic. I started out declaring that I didn’t want an audience, that "Brainsurfing" was going to be just for me, just for the pure joy of creating good stuff. But, in the end, I couldn’t help leaving a trail of breadcrumbs (as big as basketballs) for my "Coming to Terms" readers to follow to my new place. And from there, it morphed into my "bitch and moan" journal. Which is something I have always needed. But I just felt, after a time, that it didn’t need to be public anymore. After the j-land blow-up, I felt that the stuff I needed to write would be too maudlin for readers. And, considering some of the stuff I HAD written there for other eyes besides my own, "too maudlin" would have been difficult to achieve…

Anyway, as I was saying, I delved backwards into the "Brainsurfing" archives last night. And found that many of the entries had to do with my deteriorated relationship with my dysfunctional family.

And how I needed to "get a life" so that I could be free of the need to keep going back for the kicks in the head I always got from them, sooner or later.

This is what I wrote on New Year’s Day, 2006…a week after another particularly painful interaction with the clan:

In 2006, I want…more. More of something. Anything. I want to load up my life with so many things that, by the time the holiday season rolls around in 2006, I may or may not have room to squeeze in those people who have let me know plainly that I have not the importance in their lives that they have in mine. It only makes sense… You can only knock on a locked door for so long before you realize it’s never going to open.

At the dawn of each of the last six new years, I’ve made the same sad decision to walk away from that door. But the world has turned, changed, gone forward without me. I’m out of phase. I’m a twentieth-century seeker in a twenty-first century reality. My skills are rusty; my contacts outdated. Still, each year, I get a little further down the road before the brick wall of pure aloneness rises in front of me. Blocks the road and sends me creeping back to that same old familiar doorstep.

May this be the year that I finally break through that wall. Reach through the hole and grasp a new reality. One with warm bodies to welcome and enfold me. Or at least hold me back from turning back toward that old, locked door.

Hmmm…..

Looks like I got what I wanted, doesn’t it? :-P