Broken

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Author’s Note: I wrote this Tuesday, more or less because I couldn’t NOT write it. I had no plan to share it here really, it is very raw for me. But it seemed to resonate with my readers at WWL, and I have been asked to make our Radio Show about it Friday

The idea is, that as our Empire Collapses, we all are having personal, visceral fall-out, and maybe, just maybe people like you would want to call in and share where you’re heads are at. If it is all effecting you personally, not just financially.

So, here I am opening a vein, and tossing it out to see if it floats. Scary.

Love to you, Diane

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Something is broken.

I suppose this is how it begins, when even the spiritually strong begin to become unraveled by death of a thousand tiny cuts, you know? People of the Midwest, as John Mellencamp opined in his intro on Sundays thread, do have the advantage of living in silence. We know how to be by ourselves in the World and be okay with it, be okay with our own internal dialogue. I cannot for the life of me get how big city people do it, with the barrage of input and distraction. But I digress…

Its like all the little lines tying me to everything are being severed one by one, either of my own doing or by happenstance.

Perhaps running the waitress game again has brought out too much of the actor in me, the conformist, leaving the real me floating inside watching the game. Perhaps my childhood created this other actor/me in a self-preservation instinct, but I have become so consummately good at it, that the real me almost never dares to venture out.

I suppose this is how the threads unravel in society. Isolation and acting.

I look around in this home I have fought so hard for, and realize in many ways I detest it. Not that it would have been something out of Home Decorator, but I had such plans for it. Ten years later, everywhere I look is still the taste of some 80 year old woman who planned it, the horrifying nasty carpet she used throughout the entire place I despise. With an open floor plan, it would be a huge expense. In fact, I am actually embarrassed to let my son’s school friends have their Mothers bring their children here. It wouldn’t have been fancy, but little here is done in my taste, my nest, and is not me. It is not my reflection, and I would hate for them to think it is. Or perhaps it is my reflection: raveled, worn, dirty, mismatched, obsolete.

But its not only that, it has come to represent failure, and oppression, and pain, and struggle, and and and and…

I did finally tear out those ugly bushes that blocked any light at all from our Music room. I made the concession of replanting them for my husband, who was horrified at the idea of “killing them” for no reason. More than a few tap roots were broken. I planted them as a privacy screen out back. I really don’t care if they make it or not, yet, there I was, watering them and tamping down the earth around them as I replanted them. I couldn’t be mean to them, taking care of things is what I do, who I am. I think. But it was symbolic for me. One little thing I could change.

Who I am. Heh. Ed laughed the other night, not sure if it was on-air or not, that I can be one of the most nasty-mouthed women he knows. Am I? People who know my other incarnations would be shocked at that, I tell you. Again, the actor plays her audience. That sounds more insidious than it really is. I automatically use the vernacular of the people to whom I am speaking. That is how I have always made my living. No offense, Ed, that’s the part of me I show you. That IS what you would think.

Again, the anecdotal examples are missing the point I cannot seem to make.

Something is broken.

I find myself unable to make my normal daily connections this past week or so. The immediate pressure is off, but I feel like I am going through the motions of normalcy in an episode of Twilight Zone.

I find myself just wanting to be alone.

I almost wish I was wandering the streets with nothing, tied to no one and nothing, just to be free. Just to find out that I could live through it and be done with the fear. That real me could do it. That me could make a border crossing and survive. That me would beat the wolves trying to put me in FEMA camps.

I watched the Bar Show (link for DD users to freaking hilarous Bar Show description) last weekend like an alien. It was hilarious, but tragic too. I have absolutely no connection to those people.

I watch the news, and read the articles and feel isolated. Like a grain of sand under relentless Dust Bowl winds, the swirling of the other motes has no effect on my being. They aren’t reality, they are dust devils that are illusions, brief stories that reappear and disappear. The wind is the story and there is nothing I can do about that.

I listen to my friends and allies, and realize their viewpoints are really so alien to my own, and make the internal adjustments to relate. Its exhausting. Then I wonder if they are making the internal adjustments to communicate with the “me” I have presented them. A dear and beloved lately showed in a moment of her inebriated wall-less actions, such pure selfishness and greed I was floored. This after I fed her and gave her beverages out of my own empty coffers, as I often do. Who are people, really? All users, trading in human commodity.

Snip, snip, ties are cut. Oh, I will always be forgiving of others frailties, but the deeper connection dissolved. As so many are.

This is why real human change will never come. We really are isolated beings, and have not learned to communicate in any true or meaningful way. Life-burn after life-burn, we guard and bury that deeper self, death by a thousand tiny blades. There are tiers of value people give each other, there always has been always will. We marginalize. We marginalize by those internal tiers subconsciously, unaware that we even do so. We don’t listen. We carelessly speak, and take affront when others speak just as carelessly. We orate rather than converse. We are isolated and perverse things, really. Snip.

I feel like Evie, in that nothing matters and everything matters. None of this shit matters. I will breathe a while, then I won’t and the World will just be whatever it was going to be anyway.

I suppose I will accustom to the lines of my world not vibrating with the connections with others. Right now it feels lonely. It feels lonely, but it feels safer to keep cutting. Snip, snip.

This how it begins, the chaos. We are broken one by one.

This is why, without a strong government, people degrade into Cartels and violence. We are isolated, and dangerous people jump up to fill the void. Then survival instinct makes us comply however we must, be as actors, like survivors of childhood abuse do to live through it. Protect the inner being, and give the audience what they expect. We, like a  waitress, charm, take our money home, and compromise ourselves, all while trying to choke down the inner shame of lost dreams and lost selves.

Something is broken. Perhaps it always was.

This is how it begins, we lose our illusions, our imaginations, our muses.

Snip.

We lose our dreams.

All thats left is the acting and floating alone, untethered.

*******