Who Needs Inner Peace?: Once more unto the breach

I’m back. I think. (Yes, again.)

The beginning of this year started with such promise. I read. I wrote. The grand expectations of chewing bubble gum and kicking ass, sans bubble gum.

Obviously, if you’ve kept up with any of my new year whiny-ness, you’re aware that it all came to a screeching halt at the end of January. Life happened in spades. Nothing earthshattering. Nothing beyond the busyness of living and the irritation of an immune system that doesn’t like to cooperate in a traditional manner.

Wah wah wah!

I *think* I’m getting a hold on my immune system, or at least it’s so worn out that it’s becoming complacent. I may be exhausted, but I can still get shit done once my immune system goes into hibernation between flares.

And as for all the rest, the visiting family and local family mini-emergencies, I’m happy to have had the time logged with loved ones and to have been there to support the young ones in my life who needed it. I’m happy to have made new memories and to have found past experiences beneficial in improving the current lives and futures of family who needed it. There is a sense of continuity in using family history to pave a better road to prevent old crap from claiming a new generation. Considering how strongly family has come up in my life this month involving old family wounds and new generations, there’s a separate post in there somewhere. Hell, there’s at least a book or two in that as well.

I’ve slid into home in the most birthday-dense month of the year for my family. I’ve baked cakes, cooked favorite meals, wrapped presents and even managed to get a few balloons to the chagrin of the birthday adults. Did I pull it off with panache? Nah. And that’s becoming more and more okay. Acceptance is a beautiful thing.

I’ve had a few epiphanies this year already. One was very welcome: the only validation I need is from myself (relatively speaking). There’s plenty more that goes with that (yet another, other, post), but for someone who seeks approval in so many avenues, it’s an important idea to come to. At least this month. Who the hell knows what I’ll think about it in a few more months. The other epiphany, if it can be called that, has helped me understand even more why it’s best to let go of certain situations. Vague? Well, that’s as much energy as I feel it warranted.

I have not completely fallen off the reading wagon, watery eyes aside. I’m going between a Stephen King tome and what seems to be a lighthearted fantasy novel about a bookstore. But it’s been a nonfiction book I devoured that’s captured my thoughts of late. The daughter of an abuse survivor goes on a quest to find out what happened in her family’s past. This was my first foray into so-how-screwed-up-is-my-family-history-really. Geographical and personal differences aside, there were some uncanny similarities in my family’s story and this one. I was damn near giddy, compartmentalizing my horror, to see what was common. I was frustrated that the writer’s mother had found a way to thrive (seemingly at least) while my mother hit a brick wall during her ascent to putting her life together and never recovered. To clarify, I don’t begrudge the woman or her daughter a damn thing. Instead it makes the despair a little more tender at how my mom’s (and dad’s) life has turned out. Also, it gave me a baseline for how to approach telling a story of that nature. Someday, I will write a book about this area of my family’s history, about the rippling waves that still impact the generations further removed from it. I struggle with how in the hell to tackle such a project, knowing that this is a story I’ve been wanting, needing, to tell as long as I’ve been aware. I appreciated the author’s approach (Some reviewers didn’t, but I got it.), but there are completely different journeys. At least now I have some sense of one way it’s been handled.

And in the end, that’s kind of the point of these place holder blog posts. A personal Pensieve to unload extraneous bits of this and that to give my fictional muses and non-fiction family story more room to develop. A venue to ramble, to mold thoughts, to ponder in as much detail as I feel necessary while I continue working on the bigger picture. If a portion all have the same general content, then that’s the junk that needs to be jetisoned to get the cogs working again. Repeating myself here is at the very least cathartic ranging up to potentially helping me recognize what I need to work on for myself in the future. Then again, at the very, very least, it’s having written something. It doesn’t need to be eligible for an award or even interesting to other people as long as it helps keep me writing.