The last several chapters have been hard for me to write. It has taken me several sessions to get through them and I have even been tempted to erase them from this story entirely. For the most part of the last year I have been eager to put my memories to this electronic paper, and suddenly the well hasn't necessarily run dry, but it has been yielding less and less good water.
Whether I am good at it or not, I do love writing. The opportunity to share powerful thoughts and memories, even if only with myself, is something that I relish. Long gone are my dreams of being a song writer who could connect to the day's disaffected youth, as was the case for me when I was growing up. Now, all I have is my virtual pen and paper. What has soured it?
The date for this entry holds the answer. I am entering the twelfth month of my "Year to Life" and I am afraid that the ending is not going to be what I had hoped it would be. What have I really learned? How has my life changed? Has it changed at all, or have I just accessorized it enough to try to pass it off as something else?
Tick, tock, tick, tock, I am more aware than ever of the seconds, minutes, and hours of my life flying by. It is time that I will never get back and decisions that will get harder to make as the days pass me by. Sometimes I wish I knew when it would all end. If the world was going to end in ten years, I could just do what I wanted and not worry about what the future holds. I could disregard the need to be responsible and save for retirement. I guess this is what they call living for the day. I guess there are some situations where that works, but in mine, I think it would be borderline negligent, no matter how much the siren song of it all appeals to my core.
There have been a few times in this project when I wished it would have coincided with the end of the year. The Hoe Down story would have been a fitting culmination, a glorious moment at which to arrive. Even my tattoo and its symbolism would have been appropriately dramatic. An offer to join the Farm Sanctuary team would have been the penultimate, but this doesn't appear in either my tea leaves or my career crystal ball, at least not within the timeline of my book.
In my heart I really believed that there would be a grand finale. I expected something life changing, a new chapter which I could open and never look back on this old ones. I think that my writer's block is partially based on the reality that I don't want to feel like the last year has been for nothing, a year like every other that has passed before it which has brought me no closer to my dreams. In many ways, it has had the opposite effect since it has illuminated for me just how far of course I had drifted.
Well, I guess there is still another month for some magic to happen.
