The End of the Beginning

I think it's time to embrace the fact that I will never really be ok.

There was a time - a short period of time - in which I felt I had my life together.
I'd made a place for everything, and everything in it's place.

And then,
it was all unexpectedly scrambled. 
Like I was thrown to the ground had my brain scattered across the floor like a raw egg or ground beef.

I've been trying for more than 8 years to get it back together.  That's almost a decade.  Almost a decade of trying and failing to put the pieces back together enough to feel like 'myself'.

Those eight years each passed with a quiet unfulfilled hope that maybe sometime soon - with enough discipline, enough thinking, enough trying, enough rest, enough effort -  I could figure out how to get it all together again.  Certainly there are many other ways I've made improvements, many other accomplishments, many other things lost and regained… but it's been 8 years of feeling like I should come with a disclaimer "I am not at my best." "I've been better, I promise."  But, I've never been able to prove the latter by replicating it. Not sustainably.

Even when I look back on the time when had it all together, I didn't /really/ have it all together, but I didn't feel like I needed that disclaimer.

I feel like something came unraveled and I'm endlessly trying to 'ravel' it again… it's like I've never really been able to find the end.  Maybe I should take a hint from the fact that there's no English word 'raveling' for something that has 'un'raveled. 

Anyway,
I think it's time I embrace the fact that I will never really be ok.
Turn that disclaimer into a product description. 
If I've been trying for 8 years without figuring out how to feel like the 'myself' I thought I once did, then I'm probably not going to make it.
Not ok. not together. scattered. is the new self.

Those cracks are probably not going to go away anytime soon.  I might as well start setting my personal dinner table for myself and for each of them as well.


And, we'll try to say goodbye to the self I've been trying and failing to be.  If she becomes me in the future, it won't be by my intention.

In the morning, I'll wake up as me.  Same as every other day.  But this time, I'll embrace the fact that I am who I am now, cracks and all.
And, that I don't have it together.


(Besides ~
I suspect if there is any way through this hall of broken mirrors to another side,
it might start with embracing the image I have to work with right now.  But, I'm not going to think about that - that thought would just get in the way.)

(and by the way,… don't worry. I am ok.  I am physically, mentally, and psychologically well-off and stable.  Compared to most of the world, I am relatively excellent. But, that doesn't stop me from wanting to be ideally me...)

The art of losing

isn't hard to master

summer evening in May

according to the lunar calendar,

summer arrived in May

good thing

it's just in time 

for sitting on the balcony

with a calico kitten and a quiet guitar

curtains of laundry that dried earlier in the white sun

all resting together in the soft dark

parted by the hush of cars across the bridge below

beaded by the music drifting from a nestled iPad

in the orange-lamp-lit shaded dark

warm summer evening

国际劳动节

And on this May Day, one more international worker was liberated :)

镜子 - Chinese: mirror

People ask me why I'm interested in China and Chinese.  They've been asking me for 5 years.

I tell people that I seek contrasts, conflicts, contradictions, because where these things are, there is much to learn from.  I also think to myself that there is something about China that I feel I relate to - something that I see myself in - but of course that doesn't make much sense.  It makes more sense today, though.

I was reading this article ( http://www.theworldofchinese.com/magazine/articles/how-to-like-cheese-as-a-chinese-person/ ) about things that I have never experienced, but still desperately wanted to understand, as if this article about the 80's generation in China could tell me, as a 80后, about myself.

Do you remember that everything is a mirror?  I think that, as narcissistic as it sounds, one of the more compelling actions is to look oneself in the face - in the eyes.  I think that's why I'm interested in Chinese.

To seek myself in China is to explore the nature of this mirror.
And, I suppose,
to discover the nature of the mirror is to see myself. 

There are many many mirrors - China and Chinese just seems to be the one that's most fascinating to me right now.

For 5 years, that didn't make sense in words.  It still doesn't quite, but it's much closer.

Upon learning about the title of "The Thorn Birds" from the last sentence of Wikipedia, I thought...

I am on my 3rd life

one by one those gone before have found their thorns,

I am reborn

from their tragic ashes.

They sang themselves to death.

Who's next?