If I must live, let me live my own life

I had the urge this week to return to my hippy roots, to don patched jeans and tie-dyed shirts, cover my fingers with rings, grow my hair out into long tangly ropes, lose the bra. The desire comes with a realization that, whatever may be, I want to fight for my creative life and hold on to who I am with ferocity. The months and years of these down-in-the-dumps-days are a glaring signal that I have forgotten how to live my own life, how to obey the one slogan that I had always meant to live by:

All I can do is live my own life the way I believe it should be lived. I can do no more good than this, and without doing this, I harm not only myself, but deprive the world of my singularity, which after all, is the one gift I have to offer.

Yet I have not been doing this, or at least not been doing it enough to maintain my balance. Instead I have been doing that which needs to be done as it appears before me, without glancing aside, gathering in my bundle of needs, listening to the inner voice, living in a way that is pleasing to my soul, or even breathing regularly. Yes, I have not been breathing. My body does not feel like my own.

And along side of this non-breathing, non-body behaving, I have been fretting that my authentic self might jump out at any moment, scaring the shit out of whoever is present. Imagine that: I have been living in fear that I would frighten others! What irony there. What a loss of self there. What a pity there. I don't exactly want to be seventeen again, but I would like to have access to her fearlessness, her certainty that she is the only one in charge of her body and soul, her fierceness and determination to be free, authentic, and true to herself.

I would like to commit anew to a creative life, a life of memory and passion situated in a universe of intensity and surprise, willingness to change and be changed, a sense of that which I cannot imagine, but do not wish to deny.

I would like to return to that once-familiar place where I don't lose connection with my life, where I please my muse with the fruits of my heart and mind every day. Where I don't think: How could I possibly do that? or How unworthy I am to be saying this, wanting this, attempting this, this, this ... living.