leap of faith

One of these days I'm going to do something creative and stick with it.

It doesn't help that I've been stressed and tired for awhile now, but all the various moving parts of my life seem to be coming together in some organized sense, so there's light ahead (shut up, I will mix whatever metaphors I please).  The greatest upheavals are yet to come - oh my god, so much to do in such a short span of time - but I'm as excited as I am daunted by them.

I'm going to be taking some significant risks - relocating to a different city with or without a job, taking a chance on a relationship, recrafting my life.  It's scary as hell.  I find myself sometimes (in metaphor) fearfully eyeing the life I've built for myself here and wondering if I'm insane or stupid to throw the match on it and set my face west.

The answer is...maybe.  Maybe I'm insane or stupid, in this economy, to cast my fate to the winds and move to a city that's possibly even more economically depressed than the one I'm living in now; to gamble on a relationship that's still relatively new; to give up a relative security for the completely unknown.

The corollary is, So what?

My life here is safe, but that's all it is, and it's not even that safe.  I don't have health insurance (don't even get me started on my non-options), I don't have a retirement plan, I don't have my own house, I don't have significant savings.  I have a steady job that pays a good wage, but it's not what I want to do any longer; I need work that matches my vision, something I'm passionate about, something that makes me feel good about my contributions to this planet that has given me my life.  I have a great apartment, but it's not quite big enough (and I want a dishwasher and a dryer and off-street parking and a backyard).  I have one friend.  My parents are closeby, but I rarely visit them.  My life here is small and comfortable and relatively secure...and that's it.

In the end, it's not just that I've done everything that I set out to do when I came back home six and a half years ago.  It's that I can't stay here anymore.  I'm not only done with this phase of my life; I have to move on, or lose something that I've worked hard to gain.  It's time to go, not just because it's time to move forward, but because not doing so is not a viable option.

This is me butchering Kierkegaard, but I'm reminded of the leap of faith.  The actual leap of faith, as (possibly) described by Kierkegaard.  The thought experiment is this:  You're traveling on foot and find yourself trapped at night in a blizzard, many many impossible miles from any shelter.  To turn back is certain death, so you keep moving forward, blindly feeling your way, unable to see even your hand in front of your face, while all around you the cold and the wind howl and tear at you.  Suddenly you find that you've come to the edge of a cliff.  You edge to the left for a long way, but the cliff extends unbroken; you edge back to the right, with the same result.  There is no shelter.  You cannot turn back.  You cannot stay put.

So you jump.

You jump, and you trust that a ledge will be there to catch you.

Given what you can know in that situation, it's not that stupid a decision.  And that's where I am now.  I can't stay here; the stagnation is killing me.  I'm scared to go, scared to fail, scared that everything will go spectacularly wrong; but it would be much, much worse not to try.  I know what waits for me here: more of the same.  And I can't do it.  Even though moving to a new city with no job and only a few months' savings is risky, I'm pretty confident that I'll be able to find something.  It might take awhile to achieve all the things I want to; I may not be able to teach right away.  But there will be other things to do.  There have to be.  I'm highly employable.  And when determined, once I have decided something, I am a force of nature.

So it's time to gather up my courage, and jump.

Count of three.

tired

All I want to do right now is go to bed but I feel a sense of moral outrage at falling asleep before nine, so I thought I might as well dash off a post since, characteristically, having determined to blog regularly again, I haven't.

Which isn't to say that I haven't been writing.  I have.  Pages and pages and pages of anguished journal entries, until the thoughts all tangle in an amazingly annoying snarled loop.  I'm so tired of my own thoughts.  So...bored.  After awhile, even anxiety and nervousness and fear lose their interest.

I miss New Mexico.  I really need to get back there - maybe next summer.  (This summer I'll be way too poor to afford a trip.)  I keep remembering how it felt to be there, how the landscape, spare and vast and harsh, brought me back to life.  I had felt...nothing...for over a year when I took the trip to Taos.  No connection to beauty, to other people, to myself.  I was the walking dead.  Some trauma requires a long recovery; I had forgotten what it felt like to belong in my own skin.  And there...there I remembered myself.  There, for the first time in a long, long time, I reawakened to joy.  Something about New Mexico will always feel like birth, and home.

I've been tired again, lately.  Drained.  Worried.  Self-alienated.  Nearly all of my life is in active upheaval or building up to active upheaval, and almost all of it is good, but...some of it is uncertain.  And I want rest, and peace.

So I'll go to bed at 9:30 in the meantime.  It's not desert mountains or the whisper of a green river valley or water scars in lifeless earth, but I can make the most of what I have.