I feel as if I’ve been undergoing some inner turmoil this week that I can’t consciously explain. As if there are new forces in me, active somewhere, that I know nothing about. I’ve been feeling so strangely and there’s nothing definable about it except that I’m so incredibly tired all of the time. It’s almost as if my body’s fighting off some infection, but it isn’t. I’m physically fine, even though my chest has felt full of cold air and I’ve had pains near my heart and my brain has ached as if afflicted with acid. While I know there’s nothing physically wrong with me, you couldn’t convince me of it when I have to get up and go out into the cold in the morning.
My mind has been odd as well. It’s working on some other level as if I’m constantly distracted but don’t know why. I find myself writing things that I never intended to write or even knew that I was thinking. Even truly simple English conjugations which give me no trouble whatsoever ordinarily keep showing up obviously wrong on the page. My mind wanders to nowhere. But when I “come to” I’m often following a train of thought that I can’t trace; and the trail fades away as soon as I begin to concentrate on it. Yesterday I was so struck by a wood carving of the Mother of God with her emaciated, dead son that I nearly wept right in the middle of class. A Pieta is supposed to have that effect on a viewer, but it’s never had that effect on me before. It’s not that such things do not affect me; rather instead that they have a subtle, nagging effect rather than an obvious and demonstrable one.
I don’t know if it’s that all the stress I’ve been living with lately has finally taken its toll, or if I’m off my rocker. Or if, perhaps, a certain dreamy trait that used to be a very present part of my personality has just as suddenly reasserted itself as it suddenly removed itself, around the time when I went back to regular high school for my Senior year. There is no doubting that I’ve changed enormously since I was fifteen. But the odd bit about me, is that I was always acutely aware that I was changing. I feel as if I’m in the middle of one of those periods of inner churning now, and that, something is about to happen that, while I will not be able to explain it, will still become a very new and present part of my personality.
Periods of churning are not really always pleasant. While I feel very calm today, I have an only half-conscious fear of changing. I know that change is not always positive, and I know that such knowledge has led me to abort the embryo of change in me before. I do not know whether I have been saved from death or if I have murdered my own salvation because change requires a certain sensory deprivation. Change requires a numbness which allows it to slice through years of prejudice and habit which have hardened as if into ligament and bone. It requires a blindness to conceal how narrow is the path which takes us up, as if as on a mountain side, with the sheer drop off of destruction mere inches from our toes; the path which leads us to where we must make our leap of faith. It requires a certain deafness to keep us from the knowledge of poisonous jeering, and of the howling wind, which, could we know of them, we would never have the courage to ascend at all. Change is terror personified and I am only glad that I cannot know what inner battles rage inside my psyche and soul as I write this. We shall see, very soon, and very subtly, I suspect, which side is allowed to win.
posted by Sarie @
4:29 PM
>Comments: 0
