I woke before dawn on Thanksgiving to start my shift. By the time I logged on, a thermos of coffee had been brewed and my omelette was done. On these early winter days I prefer to sit by the sliding patio door rather than head to my basement office. While the latter would provide me with greater productivity, I like to watch the day change over our two little trees and the current foot of snow blanketing it all. Pretending that it’s a full forest and that it’s ok that with every passing day my disdain for people accumulates.
By dawn the sky was a warm gray and I breathed a sigh of relief. The unrelenting sunniness of this state can sometimes be a little much. The pressure to conform to those blue skies. We get our variety in the form of snowstorms, of neon purple lightning strikes that make you want to believe in a god, of torrential downpours in July that flood streets. Not without a price, right? I don’t mind the wildness of it, really.
It’s a holiday and most people are sleeping in, taking time away from their office jobs, or else working as the class that continues to smile and sweat and produce for the desk-bound. Floating in a sort of limbo, I happily chug away at one of my two jobs in morning silence, admitting my privilege that remains inextricably and paradoxically connected to my ability to work this job without benefits. As in most things, I find that I straddle two lifelines, two lifestyles.
I am the coin constantly spinning on its thin edge, unable to actually fall one way or the other.
So many times I’ve desperately clung to the belief that by just simplifying who I am, by picking a side, I’d be infinitely more content with life. I tried it a few times. Stepped away from music once. Another time tried to sing just one genre. Another time tried to quit freelancing and just take one office job along with my music. But something has always fallen apart in my attempt at editing the universe.
The trick is to seamlessly blend into any milieu and work that True Neutral energy, but the art eludes me. This is the cornerstone of duality, but I constantly find myself failing. Seven and a half years left in this decade, so my all-consuming quest should be to fully inhabit that Loki, that Puck that looms within but hasn’t gained full confidence yet.
How does one achieve this state? From childhood I was squeezed into a mold, painfully tight. But taught that it should be so. My instincts to rebel never culminated in much at all until my late 20s, when my hero’s journey had already taken me far from home. Yet, the relics of my good girl life remain as ephemerally around me as a lightly-sprayed perfume. Lingering.
Too clean-cut for the metal show, too rebellious for the opera.