Sometimes I have this paralyzing fear when I think about myself in the future. Fear that I won’t live up to my own standards, fear that I will have wasted time, fear that I will have missed out on opportunities. When I do this, my mind freezes, I can feel my heart beat in my throat, my knees tighten. It’s not that I don’t think I will be happy wherever I end up; it just freaks me out to imagine myself there.
Recently my family has been hinting at their age; a brother with a bruised knee, the oldest player on the alumni basketball team, my mum thinking she is losing her memory because she forgot an appointment and a sister gone, not around to fall asleep next to. I am reminiscing because it’s the New Year, 2012, it makes me remember where I was last year around this time. So sick and tired in Nepal that I wanted to quit, and might have. It was the only time in my life when I actually wanted to go through with it.
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| Permaculture farm i stayed on after New Years outside of Kathmandu |
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| Taken from the roof of my host families house, Kathmandu |
I think fear is a very raw emotion that drives people. I am happy to live with this kind of fear in my life so that I can overcome it. I listened to a TED talk about the emotion of regret and decided to take on the last message of the talk that, “regret doesn’t remind us of what we did badly, it reminds us what we can do better”. The processes of these emotions are valuable; so here’s to another year of fear and regrets, bring it on!!!
I have been reading about a Korean feminist poet in this article: http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/3358/williams_kim_1_1_12/ And loving everything that she says:
Kim Hyesoon "We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become “the paper made of human meat,” we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play. It is not possible to explain women’s poetry until you sympathize with how women painfully go through the experience of having these tattoos carved on their bodies. At this point, women’s language is the butcher’s language who sells his or her body. It is grotesque and miserable. Female poets can finally step into the world of language after crossing this river of the grotesque; the words cannot gush out of their mouths until they cross the river of screams where you witness death like everyday affairs.”
Moving onto another year in another country (Greece), a new diet (Paleo), and different classes (Native Americans of the NW + Advanced Poetry + Vagina Monologues).
