Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

Lotus in bloom

There are moments in life when you know you’re living the life you should be living, but most of the time you know you’re living the life you’re living because it is the life you’ve managed to reach and conspire with while hoping that you’re dreamed of life will come. The distressing part of living through this cycle cyclically is the finality of accepting that it is, alas, your cycle because your limitations can no longer be breached and the only way to live with any degree of fervency is to absorb the bitterness and disappointment. How else can you find the strength to life through the howls of sorrow that lodge in your heart?

Is it harder to live within hope or defeat?

At least defeat gives you a marker, a place to stop and rest, instead of continually being confronted with the self that tantalizes in the space that exists between dreams not yet realized and the realization that they will never come to be. Yes, hope is a hard place to be, full of fog and drifting currents that are as impermeable as a wall of brick and mortar.

But it doesn’t feel as bad over here as I had feared; there is a calmness once you stop waving your lance at windmills. Sure, I fought against this imposition for years, pretending that I am other than I am, but now that my shell has dissolved there is a unity of self that I had not expected to find so comforting. This is the place where barbs lose their poisonous capabilities, offering faded reminders that cease to paralyze. This is the place where I can play with who I am, finally living moments untethered to hopes that cut and bind. This is the place where I breathe, accepting that succulence requires air and sun and water, elaborations are unnecessary.

There is freedom in this narrowed down self that no longer lingers endlessly in the fight for relevance. There is time to simply be. And time to watch (from this place that I think is called wisdom) my daughters and my students begin their trajectory of life lived externally.

This is not to say that I am free of the tidal waves of envy that have always echoed within, rather, they no longer propel me to flagellate myself for what I am not.

I was a promise. I was an excuse. Now I am a person with capabilities who strides along, day to day, uncovering and covering tracks in a formidable cycle that cannot be contested for it yields itself up, saving nothing, living moments as they come.