Waiting

A lot of my life is waiting at the moment. In fact all my life has always been waiting all the time, it seems to me. But it used to have a goal. When I was a kid, I waited for the time when I’d be grown up, and I would do things according to ME, and make decisions for myself. While I was a teenager and a young woman, I waited until I would have financial independence. Because I was always too intensely preoccupied with relationships above any material concerns, of course, by the time I was in UNI I was still largely dependant and just as I was trying, with a job at H Samuels and selling my few remaining possessions, a sideways second-hand flute among them, to become independent I became pregnant. I was happy with the pregnancy as I felt so emotionally and psychologically exhausted with life, feeling I had done way too much already, that I felt I was happy to fully dedicate myself to a new, possibly much better being and also prove to the world I could produce a decent human being even being me.
So I waited some more. Waited for my child to grow, waited for my partner to decide whether he would carry on being a destructo-motored random alcoholic or the man I loved who used to be my friend. Then I waited for the second baby to grow, I waited for them to go to school. By then I had moved away from their father, and in with a friend in beautiful Tuscany, and then waited for my friend to join us so we could start my project which they loved. But after my friend arrived, I waited some more. I waited for them to get up before 4 pm, I waited for them to talk about the project. They had fallen in love you see and now only saw each other and their trips in their own heads. I kept moving, trying to improve my situation, finding steadier jobs, getting an au pair, finding out she needed more help than she could give, I kept changing home to make it cheaper, I kept waiting for my situation to become sort fo stable to sort of build towards my future, my plans. I remember even in the midst of all this trying to find out about European Community funding for projects.. I have had a project since I was 12 or earlier, I just wanted to make it happen. I just needed to wait for the right time, but nobody can accuse me of not clinging to every chance I got to make it happen whenever opportunity showed. I was always alone in it though, and, not being financially independent or even viable, it couldn’t work just on my impetus. I waited, a new husband, driving him to make a living out of his art, which he has, brilliantly, and waited for him to have less work so he could do more with kids and home and allow me to get my translation work done and then perhaps start planning and working on my project. But he worked a lot and when he didn’t work he needed his rest, and cooked a lot, and thought about food and shopping a lot, and he was fine the way he was. I am not fine. I am still waiting for my turn and it is to be mildly put very frustrating, because I know that it’s all only and solely my own fault, for not moving sooner, for not putting practicality above people, but I couldn’t help my emotional intensity, it just caused pain after pain after a little joy and merriment and then more pain but I couldn’t stop it, and god knows I really really tried.
So after this dump of feeling sorry for myself I now, once again, have another little opportunity. A glimmer of hope. Something beautiful, a start, something that makes sense to me, that i thought about all by my little old self. I don’t have the money to start it all off, it isn’t much but I just don’t have it. My husband says it sounds amazing just wait until… Wait. Always wait. Wait for the right time to spend my birthday in Rome. Wait for this, wait for that.
I need to get going, I need to do this. All I have ever done is do the best I could with what I had while I waited. Because when it’s others you have to rely on to fulfill your dreams, it just ain’t gonna happen. They’ll dictate their how-tos, their conditions, their manners of doing things. So it will.never.happen. I understand and a lot of people here understand that you do not have the choice to take matters in your hands and “FOLLOW YOUR DREAM”! Because you don’t have enough money, because you feel the drive one day and you feel under your shoesoles the next, and you feel worthless and stupid for even thinking you could do it, and if, as someone beautifully put it in a recently shared post, people start thinking that just the fact that you are alive and relatively functional is cause for cheering and means everything is fine, it is very very difficult to find that drive to persevere and overcome and believe in yourself that you need so much when trying to create your thing.
So, there. I need to just do it. I may look back on this tomorrow and just count it as one more of my many failed attempts to lift myself above the mediocrity that is safety, and once again be ashamed and delete all my profiles and go hide and lick my stupid self-inflicted wounds. But the moment I stop even trying, is the moment I know I am already dead.