The promises we make ourselves… I go to a strange withdrawn and almost broody place when I’m around family or “parents,” and my goddess confronted me with it, so I’ve been sitting with that. I have no legitimate reason to dislike my parents or family, id est there was no significant abuse or substantial neglect, but I have completely let go of immediate relatives, which is my entire maternal family, to the point of a kind of “giving up” on them, but what exactly have I given up on, and why do I have such an aversion to the version of family that I grew up with?
I feel like the obvious answer could easily be interpreted as selfish, but it could also be interpreted as a demand of experiencing life and searching for purpose in this mundane place… this life, and what they told me life is… and what I want my life to be… the potential beauty of what life could be… not settling for someone else’s journey, in the circle of settling for journeys, because I want to have my own unique journey, experiencing this life to my fullest, which is easily not someone else’s fullest. I willingly accept all the fullness presented to me, as long as there is an openness to fuller, but it usually feels more like settling for something less than what it could be because someone else is fine with just this. I never wanted to just be here until I just die, wasting my experience accomplishing someone else’s goals and reading someone else’s story.
Part of the reason I hated my childhood was because it was a painfully mundane and good-enough existence. All I ever wanted was the potential excitement of an adventurous life. I wanted to experience everything, good and bad, and always felt reduced to a kind of generic life: we have to do this, just because; we can’t afford that; ad infinitum. This is obviously in relation to our current life on the road and stopping to spend time with family, which I love, but am also strangely shut down to, like it’s an obligation that I don’t necessarily want to do, but it must be done. There is more dynamic to it than just that, obviously, but that is the gist.
I’ve got this new family, my partner’s family, which I am learning, and I’ve got this old family, my paternal family, which I never really got to know but am learning, and those are new, exciting dynamics, but I am still confronted with not being my true adventurous self because they are doing their things and I am doing my best to exist in them. Everyone is free to exist how they choose, without judgement, and I am perfectly fine with that, but when I get to the top of the mountain I want to keep climbing, and I have often felt like everyone around me is asking me to come back down because they’re cold or tired or bored or we have somewhere to be. It is strange to write that down, or even feel that, because a lot of souls in my life see me as someone who is perfectly fine occupying a space and reading or writing, which they view as non-doing, but that is the space I took on to go on the adventures in my mind because my reality had been reduced for so long that I had relinquished control.
The internal adventure, sitting quietly in the corner and observing human behavior, became my escape as a child while my family was sitting around doing good-enough. The obvious secret to happiness is being perfectly ok with good enough, and I am, but I want my overall experience to be something different, fun and strange and weird with laughing and smiles and deep breaths in deep places and not worrying about silly things like the things that everyone has always worried about.
My childhood wasn’t all just sitting around in the mundane. We did go on some extensive road trips when I was a kid that could’ve been epic adventures, but my ego wanted to stop everywhere and explore. That was never really an option because I was a passenger on my parents’ journey, and we always had somewhere to be, my mom always had a complaint or fear, and my dad always had work to get back to. There isn’t much that is fun about that for an adventurous soul who wants to stop and feel everything, take everything in, now, capture everything and write about all the beauty that I feel everywhere.
My parents didn’t get me, at all, and I didn’t get why they tried to cram me into the existence that they decided was even remotely ideal, but I did what I was supposed to, and I kept doing it, though I always had a difficult time pretending like I was happy about it. I became known for my grumpy and broody attitude, but that was never who I was. Who I actually am was never seen or recognized past how other people decided I was supposed to be; what life was supposed to be.
I always celebrated things beyond the mundane that most were afraid of or guiltily avoided, because I just wanted to live my life and feel everything in a world that told me I didn’t. One of the hardest things about being a parent is encouraging your little souls to have their own journey, whether you decided you know better or not. My parents didn’t give me that, so I took it for myself, to an extreme, if only to show them that I will be perfectly fine, and I have much better stories to tell.
Tangent. Feeling and Flow; day to day. We are not who we were yesterday; we are not children, suffering our parents anymore, but here we are, still reminiscing about our childhood complaints and allowing them to unconsciously affect our current relationships. My partner tells me I just see the negative in everything, but I don’t to that basic extent; I just want to enjoy a life that everyone else on the planet isn't also enjoying, right now. What I’m currently reading is confronting the ego aspect of all the never being good enough, and I understand that completely, so I am also sitting with that and trying to wrap my head around it.
Maybe I’m just the mundane person and I haven’t really accepted that yet because I have spent my entire life demanding extraordinary and no one can live up to that, especially mundane me? The girls just want to dig in the dirt and go swimming, I want to move mountains and cross oceans. All I wanted was for my parents to show me that, and I can’t teach my girls what I’ve been waiting to learn, and at the end of the day they don’t care to learn because they’re on their own adventure of silly games and collecting rocks and sticks and bones and insects. Observing them and feeling completely ill-equipped to be the dad they need just makes me feel like there was always something wrong with me, all the way back to all my overwhelming childhood feelings and anguish, but I just try to be as present as possible and love everyone here, while dealing with all my swirling ego shit.
I am also fully aware why most of those who I could call friends disappeared on me, and why those who could potentially be friends are a bit scared off by my energy, but I also feel like I’ve spent most my life pulling my energy way back to try to fit in to all this stuff that they tell you is living. I have been having a pretty hard time trying to find a happy medium there, and that hard time has been going on for over a decade. This feels a little like an emotional unravelling, but that’s where I am… torn between knowing that everything is beautiful exactly how it’s supposed to be, and wanting to follow my heart and desire at every turnout and dirt road, feeling like I’m missing once in a lifetime opportunities in a temporal lifetime of infinite opportunities, waiting for one of them to find my nature.
Ego, though. I am more than ok with this, with thus; I am aware of ego; all I need right now is to just sit back and breathe, and I feel like the only time in my life I got close to that was when I was at rock bottom, because I had no control over anything but breathing. I sit here writing in the light rain next to the Missouri River with a smile on my face, genuinely feeling the beauty of it all. I feel like I could sit here for days, sorting through my ego and laughing about how silly it all is.
This is an extraordinary life, living in a pop-up camper with this amazing family, drifting from place to place, staying when we feel like it, and happily leaving when the universe asks us to, in this moment it is the lawn around our camper getting mowed in the wee hours of the morning. The feeling that things could be better is fuel for this ego, but I don’t necessarily feel like things could be “better”; I don’t even know what better might look like, aside from doing more creatively; I feel like we aren’t truly taking the time to enjoy this, which is partially creative, but also ego not just enjoying this.
That has been a huge struggle for me because I always enjoyed thus by capturing it and sharing it with anyone who couldn’t see what I was seeing or feel what I was feeling. There is that part of me still flailing to find my purpose, but the secret is letting go of that. There is a kind of panic in not really knowing who I am and what I’m doing, but who I am is just beyond all those definitions and expectations, so I’m just going to dig in the dirt and swim for a little bit, and get back to writing about all the mundane things I’m processing without judging myself for its worth or relevance.
