Wednesday, June 30, 2004

i'm thinking about giving my inner child up for adoption...

recently, it has come to my attention that i am thinner-skinned than i would like...that certain things embarrass me or hurt my feelings more than they should...

that i'm, gulp, sensitive...

i know what you're thinking, this comes as no surprise to some of you...

but when you're me, well i'd like to think that i'm past all that...that i came out of the nineties with a smidge of wisdom and the heart of a riot grrl...

not so much...what i thought was *wisdom* was really just the act of growing up and moving forward...and the riot grrl?...i think she left a long time ago and may have even stolen from me...she was never to be trusted...

so i am left fallible and human...shit...

i don't like it, i don't like it one bit...

i don't like the idea that i can be open to the world at large...that the mistakes of others can also cost me in emotion and personal loss...in disappointment...

i'd like to think that the road that led me here was leveling out...that with the passage of time, life was becoming, well if not *easier* at least more simple...that every day was indeed just that...a new day...not a new day possibly containing eminent emotional peril...

but lately it is...and it seems the older i get the more crap comes down the pike...crap i choose to absorb when i should be choosing to let it float by...

i was talking to the lord of the ring and he was telling me about one of the last times he spent with his grandfather before he died...his grandfather was old, in a wheelchair, his body broken by disease and life choices...and yet his grandfather told him he still felt like he was in his twenties...even though the body he was in suggested differently, he did not feel like he was that old...

i think about that and i suppose i too feel that way...even though i am getting older, i still feel young...some days younger than others...

and in that comes the sensitivity...that perhaps the wise-ass woman i have grown into is still, in the grand scheme of things, no older than that inner child i can not seem to shake...that sensitive eight year old...the one who didn't have a clue, and yet felt the world so heavily on her shoulders it was hard to not try to figure it out...and try and try and try...

and now, today, i sit here in this body that has borne so much...here in this chair, in front of this computer, and you...and i feel my skinny eight year old arms hugging my legs, the warm summer sidewalk of my childhood beneath me, wondering when am i going to stop feeling so sad and when am i going to stop taking it so personally...

sad about so many things i can't control, deeply affected by so many life choices that are not my own...disappointed that i don't know a less sensitive way to be, a better way to deal with what does come down the pike...

but i don't...at least not yet...

and to be honest, i don't think i could even for one moment consider giving up my inner child anymore than she could think of leaving...

because i'm waiting for the day she doesn't feel the world so heavily on her shoulders, and she's waiting for me to figure it all out...

x.

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