Sc/een.e from a Balcony 2-10th -25 7:30am
Feeling Unmoored: what's real? what's ever been real?
I'm just gonna let my mind ramble here ...
In light of the confluence of my life stage shift, co-mingled with the annihilation of my historic psyche narrative relative to the current political upheavals, I am really feeling the longitudinal impact of not only losing a role, an identity, in retirement, but also sensing the obliteration of everything that was rooted in my psyche which provided a groundwork for building a solid sense of who I am and who I have been throughout my life trajectory.
What any of it real? and how have I played small in taking 'the easier softer way'? Thinking a bit more deeply, I wonder how things could have gone differently. One major change might have been to choose not to have bought in to the heteronormative pair bonding directive embedded in the then socio-religious family culture that bore and bred me.
The interesting thing about this retrospective moment, is not so much about any regrets that might potentially be inovoking this excessive occupation with 'me', where I stand in the relinquishing of a life I had committed to when I stood at the altar and said "I do", when I really didn't, and knowing that, typing it out, and having it glaring back at me from the page, leads me to eschew denial that my life would have played out quite differently had I followed my heart and not 'tied the knot' nearly 50 years ago.
What might have happened had I not spawned 3 children who became the sole meaning of my existence, not primarily out of a sense of accountability and responsibility (that too!), I remained committed to the consequences of my actions, blindly chosen though they were.
Typing that offers a third person glimpse into the values that characterize who I am as a person, and truth be told, I don't give myself enough credit for the allegiance I've paid to my morals and values; very real human values, not ones fabricated by the enforced demands by some parental super power. It is the one thing that will follow me as I traversed the many many bridges that have dotted the peaks and valleys of my life line, and realizing this dissolves any doubt I have that my choices were wrong, and that I wasted my potential. It seems reasonable to conclude that when you're at the door of awareness that at this stage in my life my powers of capacity and ability are slowly, surely receding, and underscores the fact that the brain, while plastic, has its limits pertinent to its growth and expansion potential.
It's hard to accept that I have a diminished level of power, and that is not something that can be reconstructed at this stage. Welcome to the world of the Serenity Prayer writ large: grant me serenity to ACCEPT things that can't be otherwise, COURAGE to change the changeable, and the WISDOM to know the difference.
The nescient world of the unthought known beckons like a huge middle finger in the screaming silence of the void.
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