I feel like I have been absent. Not just from the blog, but yeah. I have definitely been absent from the blog. And I MISS it. I miss sitting down with a mug of tea and music playing in the background and hammering out a post. I miss talking about the post on Facebook with you all, and occasionally in the comments.

I feel like I have been a more insidious kind of absent. The checked-out, moving in a dream, half-engaged most of the time kind of absent.

It’s the kind of thing that starts as a slow leak… say, with a job you hate, that sucks your life force one day at a time. Then maybe it’s followed by a friend dying. And perhaps, somewhere in the middle, you might have started taking one or more medications that started muting you toward gray. Before you know it, it’s almost 2 years later and you’re flat.

Completely, rims on the asphalt, not going any-damn-where tonight, flat.

It finally hit me last night, the full weight of it. The lack of growth in my life. The trapped feeling that makes me twitchy for change or crave emotional explosions. I cried last night for the first time in quite some time, and I was crying for myself. For my fear, and my exhaustion, and my hopelessness.

I am not this person. I am not afraid. I am not trapped.

But I imagined that I was. Somehow over the past couple of years I stopped monitoring The Dark Voice. You know. We all have this, at least I think we do. It is that voice that says you are not enough. It is the voice that says you don’t want to, nor should you. It’s the voice that says you’re not loved, not wanted, not welcome.

It is the voice that says you can’t.

So for the last year or so, that’s where I have been. Trapped under the weight of can’t. Wait – let me amend that. Trapped under the IMAGINARY weight of can’t. Stranded behind roadblocks, watching traffic move to here, from here, past here, around here. But I’m waiting, because The Dark Voice tricked me into thinking I can’t.

But it’s not real. It’s all imagined. It’s made up. It’s based on thoughts.

I think I can’t do what I want to do, I think I can’t get where I want to be, achieve what I want to be, because I got tired. And I stopped telling The Dark Voice to Go Fuck Itself, which is something I had to learn how to do at a very young age. And so The Dark Voice managed to sneak in and set up its filthy hobo camp in my brain and start running the show.

What drove this home for me was my dog. This morning, he was flopping around on the bed and pouting. Eric said, “Wow, Ace. You have such a tough life. You just wait around for us to play with you and let you outside.” And I said, “Isn’t that funny. He just waits around for humans all day because we have what he needs to be happy in life. But oh my God. We! We already have what we need to do what we need to do! But we’re waiting around like we need someone else to open the door! We don’t need anything! What is wrong with us?”

Yes, my husband is used to me going off on some philosophical rant triggered by a mundane observation. That’s just me.

Anyway. Imagination. It can really mess with you if you’re not actively using it for good.