As I'm not a chaser of internet luminaries, I'd missed knowing Molly Holzschlag and her work until pretty recently. But today it's not her web-y skillz that make me pay attention to her. She posted a couple of days ago about Owning Her Bitter and it arrived in the midst of my ruminations on what it means to be successful, happy, rich. Molly's looking at her life and feeling financial and emotional poverty inspite of a damn fine set of gifts to work with. Her career feels stalled, her personal desires for family and children aren't coming to fruition. She's starved at the root, and is staring down the barrel of not just the dark night of the soul which theoretically ends every 12 hours with a new sun, but the dark night of fearing her incipient bag-lady-hood as her life rots instead of ripens into what should have been a fruitful middleage.
Yah. I feel that. Ok, I don't live it, but I live at all times at essentially two disasters worth of remove from it. One good trainwreck taking the family, one good business tidal wave taking the job. Or maybe a physical disability. Point being, the full cup that runs over for me is shatterable. So's yours, probably, whether you notice it or not. You can't look over your shoulder all the time in fear, it aint healthy, but then there's Molly sitting right there struggling with the ultimately ineffable, the how do you go on, the need for something to get up in the morning for. Hell, Molly's hardly the only one.
My personal answer to the fear of living old, alone and unspeakable is simple, maybe simple minded. Don't look. That sort of future is one that is called into being by thinking about it. Feel it creeping at your spine and breathing in your ear, but you never turn round. You walk like Perseus out of Hades, towards the light. Find things to love, even if they're not what you wanted to love in the beginning. And walk on.
Of course, I've acreted quite a pile of people and things to love. Easy for me to say that. And Perseus failed, so who the hell do you have to be to never look round? You'll note, if you followed the link to Molly's post I haven't said a damn thing about her professional sense of despond. She's multipublished, brilliant and broke. I'm middle of the road competent, no luminary and not broke. My recipe is somehow the same. Don't look round. Take new contracts, write new books. Earn, earn, earn. Do everything new today so the might have beens don't eat you.
Good luck, Molly, be strong. We're rooting for you.
Posted by karen at March 27, 2006 03:03 PM