Osasis

I have been praised for my creative relentlessness, but it exists to such a fault that I don’t really know how to interact with people on a basic, human level. All I ever knew how to do was communicate and feel creatively. Even in writing this down, I feel like I’m doing something wrong because I understand the function and futility of it all, but I have to because this is how I process on a deeper level. I also refused to really put my work out into the world because I really was just doing it all for me. I needed it.

The dissonance came from me needing to process, and no one wanting to read that, because why would they want to? The deeper need to be the tortured creative that I chose to be as a child, and the single-child-who-was-praised-for-their-talents attention that I needed never lined up, but it was the perfect formula for the misery I needed to be what I wanted to be. Now I’m finally starting to step away from that, and I’m just like, “wait a minute, who the fuck am I, exactly?” I’m not who I want to be, but I’m also not who I always was, and everything feels like a pin being pressed into my voodoo doll by some ex lover in a rickety, Louisiana cabin, with the faint sound of a banjo playing from next door.

My life has been a miserable conundrum, and in trying to accomplish something I keep destroying everything, because I thought everything needed to be destroyed to truly fulfill that hero’s journey, but I was mostly a tyrant, a detached manipulator, an addicted lover, and a fucking masochist, to get all pyramidy on you (that's a word now). I guess you could say everything did need to be destroyed in order to learn and grow, but, standing in this charred rubble, I can see it was me that needed to be destroyed the whole time, and my hair is on fire.

This isolation has forced me to really stare at myself, and for a while I just wanted to break all these fucking mirrors, but I’m really starting to feel grateful for this opportunity to see the beautiful things I have in my life and appreciate them. All of that lined up perfectly with me feeling like I needed to step back from everything and reevaluate anyway. I was thinking I needed to reevaluate my purpose, but it was my priorities that were out of whack. I was so blinded by my drive that I didn’t realize I kept driving all over my family.

In the worst of it I was actually annoyed that they were in my way, which is a pretty awesome thing to come to terms with, like lay-down-in-the-street awesome, and while I refuse to admit that the only value I put on the love of my life was that of a muse, for a while, in the beginning of us, I was pretty put out by going places or doing things that didn’t involve accomplishing something and going home with a product. Anyone who has experienced that level of relentless, creative madness can more than likely understand how lucky I am that she’s even still around.

Looking at myself, at my work, and this drive, has made me realize how fortunate I am that the universe gave me this firecracker. I just wish I would’ve stopped lighting the fuse earlier in this journey, but if I did we wouldn’t be here.

I am no longer worried about what people think, or how many people are even paying attention, because I don’t really feel like I’m trying to get anywhere. I’m having a hard enough time just trying to be here, because I’ve never really done that before.

It’s about time I started being relentless about my family, because without them anything I could ever accomplish creatively is useless. At the end of the day, I have to write, and I fully understand that this is something that no one really wants to read, but I have to write… something… in this limbo of figuring out who I am, and who we are, and what the fuck is going on, so forgive me if I just write about my brain fighting itself for a little while.

*The title of this post is a contribution from our six year old mispronouncing the oasis-esque little spot we found in our mountains. When you get to the point where everyone stops, keep going. That applies to everything.