Nov
01
October has come and gone and so have my dreams of winning the blog-off (Congrats Leslie!). Last night around 11 I was lying in my bathtub listening to sappy Jon Foreman music and here's what I was thinking... I hate my blog. It's okay if I lose. It's not that I really hate it, I just think it's a fraud. Well, mainly I'm a fraud. I started this blog with the idea of opening up myself to people, breaking the vault. And instead I write meaningless stories and post pointless pictures. I don't think it's bad necessarily, and I'm not going to promise there won't be anymore of them, it's just a cop out. And so admitting this means I have to change. It means I have to start being honest. And I don't want to.
A few weeks ago I read a book called Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity by Kerry Cohen. It wasn't the best book I've ever read, in fact there wasn't anything particularly outstanding about it, except for her brutal honesty. She leaves nothing out, which sometimes I could have done without, but the point is she didn't try to cover up anything, good, bad, or ugly. That's what made it appealing - her frankness. I long to be uninhibited like that. But I probably fear it more.
I read Life of Pi last year sometime and that was about the time I got really into using sticky tabs to mark things in books that I didn't want to forget. So today after church, and after some much needed journalling I got out my copy of Life of Pi and found the little green sticky tab on page 161...
"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know.... The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you." - Yann Martel
I wrote that passage in my journal last year because that's what I wanted to be about. Fighting to express fears, not just shutting it down and letting it be the destructive gangrene it is. And I failed. I got caught up in being comfortable.
November is a new month.
i love you a lot. i look forward to our chat :)
I like the tone of this entry. good things will come of this and i'm excited.
I enjoyed this post as well. You're not a loser or a fraud Syd, you're just a person. It takes us a long time to learn how to not hide. Love you!
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