The Pendulum

The first rains of autumn have fallen, early this year. Such portent, such magic in that first downpour. The cracked Earth so thirsty you can almost hear a sigh of relief. Certainly you can smell it, that incredibly alive smell of rain after a hot, dry summer. A scent so evocative it has its own name— petrichor from the Greek words for “stone” and “ethereal blood of the gods.” The smell of earth awakening after summer’s drought. 

This time of year always marks an inward turning for me. Spring and early summer are so busybusybusy I rarely have the energy to think deeply or introspectively. I am straining outward, flinging my new growth everywhere. But some time in July I begin to slow. Late summer is slack tide, the pause, the stillness of changing direction.  

The first rain is when movement resumes, direction reversed now, the tide flowing inward.

I often feel the itch this time of year. The writing itch. Writing is my tool of choice for sorting through this internal landscape, and there is much to be sorted and processed. 

As a first step, I have cleaned up my work area. It needed to be done. I fear that I have been too embarassed to return to this space since the debacle of my Big Sales Pitch, and things have gotten messy in my mind in the interim. Last year at this time, when I got the writing itch and happily chattered out a couple of simple posts, I just couldn’t hit publish. They lay dormant in the drafts box all year, waiting for space to be cleared.

So. Now I have cleaned up. I have claimed a corner of the internet entitled calamityjane.org and sorted myself into chapters therein, hoping it will stop me from making a new website every time I want to write something. As I look over my old writing I see such clamoring, such a need to be somebody in particular. I create heroines and then clamor to be them. I do this with my life as a whole, but my writerly life is the most decisive evidence of this pattern, because writing is the perfect medium for such striving. When you write you create yourself, or at least you can believe that you are doing so.

This time will be different.

This time I will reinvent myself as someone who does not need to be constantly reinvented. Irony? Brilliance? I can’t tell yet. 

I like to think I am finally settling in to middle age. It’s been a hard journey. I feel like my “mid-life crisis” started around age 32, raged strong for a few years then thrashed around fitfully until age 43. Eleven years! Is that normal? I guess it makes sense, I’ve never been graceful about change. 

What I’m realizing these last few years is that my so called mid-life crisis was really just the fuse on a bomb that had been ticking my whole life. A recipe for disaster which combined a genetic predisposition to notice faults, no matter how small and especially my own, with a sense of self-worth which hinged completely on my accomplishments. 

As a budding adult in my 20s, I didn’t have to worry much about any of that since I was fucking rocking it, according to my own plan, accomplishments up the wazoo. I had as much energy as I would ever have, and did not need to divert any towards caring for anyone but myself and my goal of a Good Life, which I succeeded at admirably (as long as humility wasn’t taken into account). 

By the time my 30s rolled around, some cracks had begun to show. My energy for doing things the hard way had waned considerably, and I had a growing family to care for. I was starting to see a lot of gray around what had previously seemed so black and white. But I was still a zealot. I told myself so many things to keep my motivation going. Re-wrote my idea of what a Good Life was so many times, to try to fit it onto the life I was living. Named and re-named who I was and what I was all about in a desparate attempt to keep things consistent. 

The dissonence got bigger as I got older, harder and harder to grapple with. I needed heroic accomplishments to feel worthwhile. But they were getting fewer and farther between, I was getting less and less heroic. In fact I was becoming just plain human. 

I fought all the way down. Kept fighting as the waves of years crashed over me. My ego battered and broken by the time I finally, slowly, began to unclench my fingers.

And I think I have, now, at least begun to loosen my grip on that need to prove myself worthy through what I accomplish. At least I can name it? I don’t yet know what it might feel like to deem oneself worthy apart from all accomplishments, but I’m beginning to try to imagine it.

And so, here I am, spit out on the other side. It’s always the other side, and I’ve been here many times before, used those exact words before in this space if I’m not mistaken. I’m learning that there will always be more “other sides” to be spit out on to. But also perhaps that every time, every other side, is closer in to some center, some central me-ness. Like a pendulum that swings wildly at first but slows with every swing. Every swing an “other side,” but every side closer to stillness.

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Come on over and see my newly cleaned house! www.calamityjane.org/