I guess the endless head injuries are starting to get to me.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about work and what that should mean and what one should look for in the 80% of life that gets tied up in the pursuit of money…and I’ve noticed that most people seem to be okay with the whole pointlessness of it all and I wonder whether they’re just better at accepting this than I or they’re just that much happier with where their choices have led them – you know? Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit or them not enough? Probably both-really. Regardless, even knowing I need to leave my current job sooner not later, the prospect of going to another job doing essentially the same thing, even when I consider the more money aspect, just isn’t all that appealing when it comes right down to it. Not that I wouldn’t leap at the chance but I’ll still be spending 80% of my life doing something that doesn’t actually matter…not in any real way…at least, not to me. I guess I’ve come down to the cliché yet again that you have to do what you love and let the rest take care of itself…sigh…enough – I’ve been playing this tune in all it’s endless variations for years now and I’m still sitting here feeling sorry for myself about it – bleh! Waaaa, poor me – don’t you just want to make it all better for me yet?? What drivel!

So, what is it that I love and why don’t I do that? It’s ultimately both tied up with so much that it’s ridiculously complicated and so simple in itself that it would seem the easy choice if I could just take that last step. I’ve been working my way toward it for as long as I can remember.

As a writer, I think I need to accept that I suck at dialogue. I’m going to chalk this up to my somewhat regrettable conversational skills in most situations. People just don’t talk the way I hear things in my head and I need to stop fighting myself about this. I’m not quick-witted or funny or sincere enough to endear myself to people with what comes out of my mouth. I have to write things down and rearrange them and tweak them for hours sometimes before they say what I want them to say and, any dialogue that happens along the way inevitably ends up sounding horribly staged and far, far too structured to ever come close to mimicking real conversation. I have flashes of good dialogue from time to time but rarely enough to fill even half a page and it’s almost never anything to do with anything that I’m actively writing anyway…and often it’s not anything to do with anything I’m gonna be passing out for general consumption no matter how much I like it.

So, the point is-writing is work that I love, whatever roadblocks I run into in the process so, obviously, that’s what I should do for a living in one form or another – right? Right. Problem being…well, scares the shit out of me to think about it too closely and that’s the truth. I don’t know why I should be scared to do what I love – maybe it has something to do with the possibility that I’m just not that good at it and, for good or ill, I need to be good at what I do to feel okay about myself, to feel I live up to expectations – both my own and those of people to whom I feel some responsibility. I think as long as it’s just a dream, I don’t have to think about it not being a real possibility. As soon as you take the chance, you could learn things you don’t want to know about yourself and about your abilities and the dream will shatter like so much glass. ‘Course, there’s an argument that at least you’d know and could then move on to the next thing – whatever that might be? I think my terror comes from the complete lack of desire to do anything else…’course, that something may not be apparent until writing is no longer an option…hmmm…see these circles I wander around in all the time??

A good friend once compared a relationship to a fragile glass ball – surpassing beautiful and surpassingly breakable. The relationship is a game of not damaging the ball – of trying to keep it safe and unharmed, protected. Further, once it’s broken, even by a little hairline crack, it can never be what it was before, never have that fragile beauty again, perhaps never have any beauty…perhaps, when looked at with the crack, never be seen for itself again – only what it once was, what it once was and can never be again. Ahhh, the possibility of the bitterness of a shattered dream that can never be recovered…this holds as much fear for me as the possibility of it never coming to pass at all, in any form. And that’s the wall I keep bashing my head against despite all my best intentions…despite the ladder over standing right next to me or the door a few paces to the right or the hole in the base just big enough to squeeze through. The other side is the unknown and thus frightening whatever its possible beauty – what if the grass really isn’t greener? What if the wall is all there is?

Forgive me whatever impatience I may have shown towards any poor sap pounding his/her head against a wall I could clearly see over…or for watching some one at the wall I’ve just conquered and feeling in some way superior…or even for envying those who’ve reached the next wall to bash their heads against for being ahead of me…there is a part of me that realizes how very childish I must still seem to so many people and I cringe at the thought but, if there is another way through all this without all the dramatics, all the…I don’t know…the slogging through the muck, the endless head injuries…I don’t see it. That bloodless path must be beyond the next wall, eh? One can only hope, maybe…and keep bashing away, I suppose. Do we ever get to the point where there are no more walls?