I am experiencing a surfeit of inner turmoil. I feel like I'm living a double life. I am trying to be your average, middle-aged, female WASP in my public life. I spend as much time and energy as I can to build my real estate career, after all the personal life hurdles I had to overcome last year. I work on rebuilding my physical and emotional equilibrium daily, and in that effort, I focus on the joyful things in my life, on my animals and art and quiet time. But there is a growing unease, and I find it harder to hide from it as the days and even hours pass. I am well and truly freaked out. I can't stop scrolling through Twitter. I add new handles to the long list of those whom I follow almost every day now. I cross-check my sources. I put on my hip-waders and venture out to read the comments (and then feel like I need to bleach myself head to toe afterwards). My blood pressure is rising, and my ability to sleep fluctuates for reasons wholly unrelated to my autoimmunity and menopause. I can't quell the desperate need to Do Something, but I can't for the life of me figure out what is appropriate or even possible for me to do.
But when I open the laptop to write the blog before bed every night, I quash all of my political desperation, and I invariably retreat to safe subjects. The outside world is FUBAR, yet each night I am talking about charity events or gardening. It feels like a lie. I am not this calm person who only thinks about how funny her cats are. I find myself jarred, recoiling physically when other people post jokes or celebrity stories or cute baby animal videos. The world where that was possible seems too far away, more than just a few months in the past, but I'll be damned if I'm not still trying to produce that very same sort of content. I honestly do not know which direction I should go now. Do I talk about the things that scare the shit out of me every time I glance at the internet? Do I find out whether I have a voice and a platform to make a call to action? If so, exactly what action would I be calling? I can imagine that I'd be subversive, hiding messages in my flower stories. But that is probably purely arrogance speaking. I doubt I'm really that clever, for all that I am in possession of an above-average vocabulary. It's one thing to compose pretty paragraphs. It's another to rally the resistance.
Hell. I am no closer to a resolution than I was when I started this rant. Have some cute cat pictures. Athena and Jackie ran outside in the freezing temperatures while I soaked in the hot tub, and cried when I refused to brave the cold wind to let them back in until I was done warming myself. I think there is a metaphor there, and it doesn't reflect well on me.
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