The thing growing in the closet

So far, I've spent the first week of 2015 trying to clean out a giant mess of mold in my closet. I would like to think of this as a metaphor. I would like to, but, there is, or was, a giant mess of mold in my closet; the real deal stuff, that I am extremely allergic to. We sealed the windows to shut out the drafty cold in our old house, and in the process we gave the spores of decay a place to fester and thrive amongst the overflow of boxes of memories and junk we failed to unpack. We didn't notice right away until it was climbing the walls and carpeting the outsides of our boxes of memories, and the illness had already set in.

It's really the perfect metaphor, isn't it?

The truth is, I have a lot of mold in my metaphorical closet, as well, that I hope to finally clean out this year. I want to unpack those long forgotten boxes of memories, good and bad, toss out the ones that I don't want or need any longer, air the newly emptied space out until I feel healthy and whole again. I feel like I have become a hoarder of things that have been detrimental to my psyche, and I am ready to call in the cleaning crew. I don't want to be insulated from the rest of the life that I could be living.

I'm going to write one of my books this year, and find someone to publish it. That is the sum total, along with the above closet cleaning, of my new year resolution. It's a big one, but I believe I am going to do it.

Send in the clowns.

I feel like the blink-blink-blink of the cursor on a blank page; waiting to span the syllables of something; some something that I hope turns out to have a decent, meaningful conclusion. I am going to carpe the shit of some diem, and tapdance my black letters all over this barren white; fill it up as I empty out.

That's what I feel.

The reality of the situation is that I also feel stuck in that short pause from blink to blink - there is no cursor, only the most cursory of allusions to a page, and the words are caught in my throat. "I wish I had an actual keyboard to type on; this tablet bullshit has worn thin," I think for the hundredth time. As true as that is, it also feels like an excuse to recuse myself from the task of facing my thoughts as they spill across the page. I don't want to look. Gawking at the corpse of your past is never easy; clumsy fingers reaching out to snatch you back to some point in time reminding you of what you had, or what you lost, or where you're still too angry and sick to peel back the bandages and assess the damage.

I have begun the ritual of writing: jamming some music into my ears to drown out the distracting silence, hot mug of tea near to hand, horrible cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. I am too old to be a hipster, but all of the cliches are there, earned honestly through my time so far on this planet. And I guess that's part of the big problem. I'm going to open my own little mental jewelry box where I've stored all of my most sacred thoughts, and instead of the ballerina popping up in endless pirouette to the musical chime, it's going to be some clown holding a busker's sign that says every negative thing we always tell ourselves; the music will be to the tune of sad trombone fanfare. Or, you know, that's what I tell myself.

The precursor to the big monsters in the closet is this. The modern dance of artistry looks a lot like bleeding feet en pointe; years of tiptoed survival summed up with a tidy satin bow. When the clown car is unpacked and the bruises and scrapes and scars are on full, naked, display, your inner ring leader takes a bow and you're left in charge of the popcorn mess in the aisles. The freak show you carry around in your brain still isn't sure you're capable of displaying their horrors properly, but you're all they've got; and so goes the dance; the show and telling of the soul.

I need to get a life.

I am the proud new owner, for the second time in my life, of the phrase "my therapist told me...." Actually, it's kind of the reverse; I sit in the chair and tell her everything for an hour every week. On the mornings of "therapy day," I wake up with a giant knot in the center of my stomach and an overwhelming urge to have a panic attack - the symptoms of a hardcore, long-term "do-it-yourselfer" that is coming to grips with the fact that I can no longer do-it-myself at this time. Someone who has awoken in the cold sweat nightmare of discovering that, despite my insightful and honest approach, I have become a victim of aimless existence rather than kicking ass and taking names. I have become accustomed to allowing things to happen instead of making them happen.

How did that happen?