You hope that with the right opportunity what you had and how you were, fifteen, twenty years earlier, will return, but that opportunity hasn't found you yet and you haven't spotted it either. How can it, how will you when you're not the same person?
Something inside you has died. Possibly a million times over because sometimes there's a very short-lived flicker. A 'why can't I be that way again? I was that way once...'
Essentially, you're flogging a dead horse. You know it. Others know it. It shows in your face, in your movements. And probably on paper too as in, for example, emails and applications to vacancies you're not entirely convinced you actually want.
You list the positives to make yourself feel better and realise how lucky you are, but still there's a heavy dissatisfaction. A weariness. A dragging. That with each passing year you fail to do anything about, because although you want out, out of this stalemate, you can't conceive of an OUT.
What else can you do? What could you be taken on to do? Nothing is beneath you though you might lack skill and experience, or you might even be told you have too much or not the right kind. So you get mad, then frustrated, then depressed. None of which helps change the circumstances you find yourself in: how you feel about it or what you plan to do about it.
There is no plan. How can there be when all you have acknowledged to yourself is that it's wrong to carry on as you are. Where, however, are the choices not to? Choice, yes, to cast off the old shell, but you'll probably pay a high price. Sometimes for peace of mind the price is worth it, and other times although the price is paid there are unforeseen costs that make the initial outlay seem puny and ill-judged.
You can't be truly free if nothing renews your purpose. In living. In being you. Whatever that you is now. And what if all you recognise is that the YOU is different but you don't know what that means? And neither does anyone else.
Maybe being like this, feeling like this is a luxury. Others don't have the time to give it serious thought, or silence it with activities. Perhaps, unlike me, they have more pressing considerations, and I'm just pie in the sky, head in the clouds. Living in cloud cuckoo land.
But if that is the case, why is it I feel ostracised? Have I cut myself off or has society airbrushed me out? Because the world has moved and I refused, in part, to move with it. Nobody forces me to do anything I don't want. I dig in my heels for as long as I can or until I'm ready. And by then the world has moved on to something else. The Next Big Thing. The next revolutionary development that saves time and takes convenience to a whole new level.
That's how it is with me. I veer between you and I. You to accuse and depersonalise; whereas I personalises, somewhat pathetically, and provides an overly critical or apologetic tone, occasionally revealing more than I had initially planned or even something different altogether. You would think it would be within my power (of key tapping) to control this to-ing and fro-ing, this chopping and changing and put an end to the confusion, but it's not you know. One or other always cuts in just as I think I've got myself straight.
I go through life, as you may have gathered, much the same way. The I constantly jostles the You, though it's the I that feels inferior and, at times, invisible because well, there's not a lot of me to see, at least nothing distinguishing, whereas the You is usually disgruntled with someone or something, if it's not feigning indifference or picking up on others' emotional cues and indecision.
Some years ago if I'd been asked what my superpower would be I would have said invisibility, but now when it's happening organically (and I'm not menopausal or over fifty which is when this mostly female effect is supposed to occur) I want to matter.
Picture credit: In the Wilderness, 1998, Paula Rego
