It was as though the scene through which I had just lived had been a monstrous and comic miming for ends I could not conceive and for an audience I could not see but which I knew was leering from the shadow.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
How do you reintroduce yourself to yourself after losing her for some time? This is what I have been wondering nonstop for the past three days. I am using everything I have to get back to her. I will push and I will defy whatever stupid bad cognitive habits I have fallen into until I am done with this monstrous and comic miming of this girl who is unhappy, bitter, and mean.
This moment is my worst fear, I am this awful imposter who cannot possibly deserve happiness with the love of my life because I am a ruiner. I am a saboteur. I can’t feel my heartbeat any more and I think my lungs have dived into my colon. I deserve it, because I have wrecked it. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know how this happened. My throat is constricting in on itself like a boa, like a big fat snake, like me.
I have almost everything I could want, and I am on the path to attainment. I did not work this hard just to inflict misery on myself and others. I will not do it any longer. I regret every single time I was offended, offensive, obtuse. But I can’t go back, and I never will be able to.
I have made myself into a big fat crybaby, and now I am putting her on a diet and chucking her into the sun to hang up and dry. The amount of disgust I feel is immeasurable. But when we make a mess, we clean it up.
All I can do is be better today, and be better tomorrow, and put myself fully in this moment. I will not make problems for myself any longer. I am capable of deciding and choosing to be happy, and to make others happy, and to create a sunbeam where there was once a mold.
Why does it seem so easy to become a useless, cynical being? If the opposite is to be helpful and loving, then should it not take the same amount of effort to swing from one pendulum to the other? I have decided to make it easy. It is more natural to smile than to frown, it takes the same amount of effort to make yourself awful than to be magnificent. If I put all this wasted effort into only good, I know I can turn this ship around and set myself back on the path.
I felt the currents move. The grains of sand whispered against each other. His wings were lifting. The darkness around us shimmered with clouds of his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer.
Madeline Miller, Circe
Then, child, make another.
Prattle Peach 