I'm in an era in my life in which I am waiting. In many ways, I almost feel like my teenage self. I've read countless notebooks and "on this day" FB statuses and notes in which teenage me says over and over that she can't wait, she just can't wait, she just can't wait to be done with this and move on to the next thing. I don't think she'd listen to me if I told her that, in the end, it all happens faster than you think it will. I think current me isn't going to believe me either. I'm not always good at being patient with myself, and I never was.
I'm also in an era in my life in which I've realized some things are not as they seemed. Where I stand in relation to other people is different than I expected, and perhaps has been for some time. I'm sometimes still in the process of organizing how to address being in places I never expected to be.
If this sounds cryptic, that's because it is. I went through times in social media that weren't my healthiest, and I don't air my dirty laundry out anymore, even if, from time to time, I want to post weird song lyrics to some song from 2006 like I'm on MySpace again. This post is largely a stream of consciousness thing. It's me reassuring myself that I'm doing fine, that things have cycled in curious ways before, and they will end and begin again. What seems concrete isn't. I'm just a dog leaving wet pawprints for someone to see later, and I can only hope seeing them made someone's day better.
This too shall pass.
I say it to myself a lot. I've said it to others too.
This strange state of being is a phase, just a phase, like scene mullets and wearing three studded belts at once.
Hey kid, this too shall pass.
Not fast enough.
Yeah, no, I agree. But it does pass.
I want it to pass now.
Don't we all?
This is stupid.
So's a lot of stuff. We'll figure it out.
I think this blog is supposed to be more about my writing than personal life. The website is my author website. I'm supposed to be hawking my wares, I think, but this state of mind and what comes out of my keyboard and into a book are braided together. I've written characters waiting before. I've written the words this too shall pass in more than one project.
Like this one, a chunk from a book called Nobody Asked You, predates everything I've published thus far:
[Note: the Garrett in here is a different Garrett than the one of the TTP universe]
"“That sucks,” Garrett told me. “I think I have Bio right now. Better go before they expel me or something.”
Garrett started humming a song I vaguely recognized but didn’t know the words to and tracked down the hill toward Gateway. When he left, the graffiti on the shack always struck me: in intricate letters, THIS TOO SHALL PASS.
None of it passed fast enough. I wished I could speed through reality, but I couldn’t speedrun through high school. I’d be here forever, wasting away.
Except some things had passed. Weatherbury passed. Joel Jacobs passed. My dad passed. Some of the worst parts of my life were gone, but they weren’t gone – they lived in my head, and sometimes I wondered if they’d live there forever, ghosts in the walls of my skull, screaming when I least expected to be haunted.
How many sets of stairs would I remember? How long would I clench up when I saw stags? Would shadows falling in the exact right place always take the breath out of my lungs? I didn’t know how I was supposed to function with all that stuff following me around, little Jeremy doppelgangers reliving the worst parts of my life over and over again no matter how far I pushed through the present.
And since the new meds seemed like they might be working, I thought that I might actually be doing this whole life thing as long as it played out."
Maybe I should talk to myself the way I talk to my characters.
And, as I wrote this entry, my partner texted me back:
Yeah. She's right.
It will.
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