The year is coming to a close. 2006 hasn’t been the best year for me. The rut I’ve been trapped in has gotten deeper and the numbness of the daily struggle to maintain above the water has taken over. I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel joy. I can’t feel sadness. I feel nothing. I just finished an amazing book last week and the final paragraph of the book speaks volumes to me, to my situation, to my struggle.

Already I know it’s not enough. Already I feel myself becoming bored. I’ve been idle for a year now and it’s all begun to grow off me, the smell of dust, the sight of long grass rolling in a breeze. I’m used to things happening. But I’m afraid too. If I have nothing else right now, I have control, and I don’t want to risk losing that by doing something, meeting a man, making a friend, getting a job. I know I’ll have to do something eventually, but right now there’s just the bedroom, and that’s enough for me, the bedroom and the bed and the idea of sleep. One morning I’ll wake up and I won’t do something I always do, and then I’ll know it’s time to make a change, or else I just won’t wake up and that will be that. Sometimes in those last minutes before sleep my heart feels like a blood-filled bellows, and if I turn and look at Martin’s side of the bed, I can see it beside me. It labors mightily, inflating and deflating, and each time if deflates it spews out a viscous pool of blood which spills everywhere, and all I have ever felt is love and hate, rage and joy, terror and numbness, and there is no center to any of these spectra, only north and south poles which I sway between like a pendulum which exists only at its two high points. Nothing I know tells me that life can be any different from this, nothing except for the experience of these last few months, when there have been no high points, no polar opposites no extremes of emotion, and it’s as if I’ve ceased to exist. Everything tells me that if I want to survive I have to find a middle ground, a place where I can stand and not feel as if on one side a sea rages to consume me and on the other side a vast open prairie waits deceptively to engulf me in immense emptiness I don’t know what the place is I’m looking for, I only know what it’s not, and it’s not that, it’s not all or nothing. It’s something, but it’s not that.

Martin & John by Dale Peck

That paragraph floored me when I first read it. I sat with it and let it sink into my being and for the first time in my life someone else’s words filled me and told me I’m not alone, my experiences, though uniquely mine, are not so different from others. I continued to sit with this paragraph, reading it over again and again, catching new meanings with each reading, and understanding more of myself with each word devoured.

I’ve been stuck on the proverbial prairie for the longest time and numbness has taken over my life. Not sadness like I had convinced myself, because I’m not exactly sad. I’m scared about the changes I’m undertaking because of what they may uncover. But I can’t continue to exist without passion, emotion or activity in my life. I’m not waiting to die any longer. I’m wanting to live.