I’ve spent the weeks and months since I lost my job flailing around, my hand unmoored from the side of the pool, reaching frantically to find another side to hold onto, rather than facing my fear to swim. I watch a world of people in the pool, stretching, reaching, gliding through lives of their choosing, and I so want that for myself, and all I keep feeling is the fear of drowning, or the fear of getting lost at sea, rather than the excitement of being, for once, alone out on the great ocean of life, charting a course of my choosing, to whichever port is forward, finding a life while doing the living of it.1Yes, I mix my metaphors. So they’re mixed. I’m made of multitudes.
I’ve found myself with a thing before me that I, intellectually, want to do, and yet keep finding other things to occupy my time rather than face it and do it. And in a conversation with myself this morning, I came to realize that at the foot of it is fear. Fear of it failing, of having done it and it being a poor attempt at something I was not capable, or worse, something I believed done well that was still rejected.
For that is the fear I’ve most faced in the reaching, these past months. I know who I am, of what I am capable, of what I have accomplished and could do again. And in presenting that self to the world, I’m continually given the glimpse of the backs of shoulders, of turned heads, or nearly worse, of interest I’m certain wasn’t feigned, but that sours in the seeing into “not you, not now, not for us.” I’ve chosen a life of small rejections, of quick cuts at my confidence, slices through my self-perception that make me doubt who I know myself to be, to have been, to be able to be again. Chose this, instead of different risks. Different lonely lakes away from the faces and voices I know.
Every decade of my life has had an unsettling of itself. The first decade ended in a disillusion of a relationship and a fractured family. The second with my own fractured relationship and an upheaval and removal to a new land, hundreds of miles away, and towards, a new future. The third, with a final transition into a professional life, a dedication to an organization and a structured life of confined goals and the security of certain certainties. The fourth, with death and death and death and death. Of family, of position, of a path upon which I thought I’d been set. Of the ballasts that held me firmly upright, or at least kept a keel in me, kept the water from flooding over the sides.
Sitting in the rubble of a life, one has the urge to try and rebuild a familiar form. Structure what came before from the pieces that remain. But there are other shapes, other ways, should one have the courage to assemble them and the drive to do the building. Fear is a useful thing at times, but only if one needs safety more than they need to have what safe allows: the space to live a life worth having lived it. As it is said, the port is safe, in the time of storms, when the seas shake and shudder, when wakes turn to waves. But ships were not made to live in ports, hands not made to clutch stiff-knuckled in gripping at the sides. They were made to sail, to swim, to live a life unmoored.
Notes:
- 1Yes, I mix my metaphors. So they’re mixed. I’m made of multitudes.