The Serpent Appears

I feel myself shedding my skin. What sticky-slimy serpent is now peeking out of the folds. Yet, I feel pieces of my old self clinging to me like giant wrinkled sheets of old skin, waiting to fall off. 

Automaton

This cold is ruining my concentration. It's hard to get anything concrete done. It makes me irritable, unfocused, and sleepy. I didn't get much writing done yesterday or the day before. It's frustrating that something as simple as a sore throat can trip me up this way.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was doing yoga, the doorbell rang. Standing at the door was about a nineteen year old black man. He took one look at my expression and said,"Hey, I'm not the bad guy, I'm the good guy." I blushed three shades of purple.

The truth was that I did flash on the face of the thug who robbed me at gunpoint a couple of months ago. I felt like I'd been caught in an ugly, irredeemable thought. As a result, I felt guilty, and as a result of that result, I flirted with him and bought two magazine subscriptions so the guy could build points for a scholarship. I desperately wanted him to like me and to see that I wasn't some horrible, racist white girl.

     
The fear is that I have become, not the unique individual I had hoped to become in my youth, but rather just another generic automaton  with characteristics determined by my race, class, gender, and the psychology of my parents. I observe myself having such programmed reactions and then overcompensating. It's so disappointing.  Even my own disappointment is a adolescent cliche. 

Erotica

Check out my return to writing erotica HERE.

Late Bloomer

  A bad cold, headaches, and mild depression have crept over me, washing away yesterday in restless sleep. I read about the great poets when they were my age and I feel like I am  years behind them. Meaning, they had all accomplished as much at 15 as I have at 23. I know I had about five wasted years since I started college.

  One of the hurdles that I have to get over this year, is my fear and disappointment about arriving at adulthood, not an artist, not a millionaire, not a decadent burnout, not an accomplished poet or painter, all these things I dabbled at "being" (tried to be or wished I was) without much success, rather I arrived as a directionless, unemployed, blogger. 

  I walked back onto campus yesterday. It's interesting that I think I took exactly the same walk five years ago. I remember watching myself, as I bounded onto campus, 18 and starting school all over again. It felt like a Renaissance, a second chance, a burst of unbounded energy. Then, yesterday, I was 23; school was finished, and I was just tying up some loose ends. I felt melancholy but wiser in some sappy sort of way.

  I got all the important things that I needed out of college, I guess. But no matter how hard I worked, I could only get about 50% out of myself. I worked like a madwoman trying to do everything at once. But two things I didn't do . . . I didn't prioritize well and I didn't take care of myself emotionally and  spiritually. By the last semester, I was burned out. I jogged through the finish line... way behind, and exhausted.

  A part of me desperately wishes I knew (at 18) what it has taken me so long to learn: The habits, routines, and little choices one makes in life. I always told myself that I was good at the big things and bad at the little. I pretended to be the savant, but the truth was that my concentration was scattered over disparate discontinuous points of focus. My "backbone" was weak. Art requires a combination of recklessness and precision. Most of the time, I was just lazy.

  If I look back at the journals I wrote five years ago, it is clear that there were many other problems I had to deal with before even getting to the point I'm at now. 

     My hope is that for whatever reason, my timetable is different. Maybe something inside me is still growing... an unrealized potential, gestating, waiting for an opportunity to be born.

Creative Trance

I know my writing is going well when I notice that I have been in a creative trance. The sounds and images have been playing themselves out in my head, like a waking dream or hallucination. Not once, when I was hammering out a draft of my novel did I descend into this creative trance. It only happens with poems.

I'm hoping that through quiet meditation and creative delirium  I can get ready for what is to come. I shouldn't spend too much time in my room, however. I don't want to turn out like Catherine Deneurve in"Repulsion." 

Walls

I'm noticing this morning the beginnings of that dreaded feeling of malaise and indirection. It's important for me to focus myself on specific creative tasks. Otherwise, I can fall back into my most wretched and pathetically ordinary habits - mostly involving food, vodka and the internet. If there is one thing I feel that I must do this year, it's change my basic routine. I worked yesterday. I made tiny bits of progress on a number of poems. No breakthroughs.

On days like that it feels like I am tapping a stone wall with a hammer. Not pounding fiercely, just tapping. As I do this, little strategic fishers begin to appear. I tap and tap, day after day. Then finally, after the wall has been covered with a spider's web of hairline fractures, I apply one firm blow, and the wall comes tumbling down. Only, of course, to reveal another wall. I start tapping anew.

Hope.

A New Life

I am about to embark on a new life, A new chapter. A new movement. For the last year I have been kicking and screaming, like a child in a tantrum, not wanting to go forward. Hopefully this blog will help me in my work. I think my only chance of continuing to develop artistically is to better my physical health, sexual health, and of course, my biggest hurdle, psychological health.

My one great failure has been lack of balance and discipline. Can I write every day? Can I practice yoga every day? Can I really be a poet and prosper financially? Can I temper my intake of alcohol and other drugs? I have faced these challenges before and failed over and over again. Laziness, despair, and self hatred have always tripped me up.

And yet I have always been able, despite it all to go on. But in order to do more, I have to find balance in my life. To become a goddess, a mentor once told me, a woman must overcome herself...she must bend her emotions and escape her to overcome "habit." My habits are my tyrant and the tyrant must be overthrown.

I knew this a year ago, but I didn't act on this knowledge; I've had this information for a long time. I think I knew it when I was fifteen. I must be temperate and controlled in my life so that I can be intemperate and extraordinary in my art. My art is banal because my mind and body are distracted by ordinary excess (drugs, alcohol, internet.)   My biggest fear is one of identity. Too much of my identity is locked up in these petty habits. I am nothing more than what I do every day.

So every day, I will now write a blog.