Different Ways #18, Sound of Silence, Part Two
Some lives are not so straight forward in their trajectory. I have one of those lives. Years beyond this particular evening, I can reflect upon what I now understand as my issues and my intention in this life. It looks much different from here. I have a life that requires that I walk a particular fine line.
I am, by my very nature, a delusional and easily influenced person. I have the mark of it by the stars and it is tethered to a penchant for aggrandizement, to boot. At this time of my life - the time of this event, especially - in a heightened state of confusion and anxiety, I had a very hard time understanding how I could be so displaced from what appeared to be real to me in this situation. Fortunately, I'm not a violent person. The stars dosed me with just enough empathy and ineptitude to keep me easily addled so I could slowly grow into understanding that I would need to learn some life skills to live with such a sensitivity and imagination. This event was designed to let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I had to learn how to be in the world as unloved by everyone. I am in this life with my kind of peculiar personality on my own. That sounds harsh but it is not really. I am loved but I'm not a goddess in charge of everything. I am a human. This experience, as hard as it was, was very necessary. Like most things that happened during this tumultuous time, it was a difficult lesson and it stretched across decades of my life...but then, I have that kind of life. There is a method to the madness which is why I wrote the memoir in the first place.
Thank you for listening.
Different Ways, Chapter 14, The Sound of Silence, pp 102-104
Music: When this song hit the airwaves in 1992 it immediately triggered my memory of being misunderstood as someone who intended harm. It doesn't matter if that was or wasn't a reality. It was how I remembered it. It was how I felt. It was how the memory was wedged in my unconscious and festering. If you were around in the 90's and knew of this song, it was played EVERYWHERE all the time...bars, shops and cafes...and every time I heard it, the worm turned. In time, of course, I came to understand just how fortunate I was in finding my way back from that experience when so many have not made it through. It is now, for me, a song of accepting and respecting how resplendently flawed I am.
Thank you for joining me here. The memoir Different Ways: Revealing the Feminine can be purchased through my website using a link to Village Books at AlltheDifferentWays.com. There will soon be an eBook version available with an independent retailer.
The BlogCast that outlines my intentions for this series of readings from my book, Different Ways, Revealing the Feminine can be found here in the post, Between the Lines.
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