All Fire And Brimstone

I’m sitting up late, waiting for Youtube to pick up the clips of a sparkling Tuesday evening in Thane where I performed my best so far. I went browsing through the ‘Performance Poetry’ tag on my blog while I waited.

Amidst the records of my performances, I’ve recapped so many ups and downs. I will live in interesting times all my life. It’s not so much what happens to me as what I make of it. Manisha says I’m vulnerable, a fact she points out as logical deduction from my hair-trigger temper, my dramatic dissatisfaction with the world. I don’t know if she’s right (I’d prefer if I weren’t so transparent).

The last month was one of goodbyes and heaves and crashes. Of course, there will probably only be more and more of that as I get older. It has allowed me to let go and give up. I mean, I didn’t really have a choice but I did. It’s been a long, very long time since I had a vacation. Downtime at work doesn’t count as a vacation the same way agonizing over dying alone or pining about somebody doesn’t count as enjoying your singledom.

I don’t really know where I’m going professionally or personally. Really, other than not knowing, I’m feeling quite okay. If I allow myself room to feel answerless, to drift in grey, then I’m able to see it’s not sadness, not pain, not ill health, not confusion. It’s just that transition, empty time between one dramatic event and the next. I know now there will be something else around the corner.

I felt something for somebody. Perhaps I still do but it has ebbed as his presence waned. It still flutters and fluctuates but only in surges inside my dreams and my mind. He knows nothing of it and nor do most people around. It’s okay. I’m hoping it’ll carry me through till the next thing comes along that my heart can play with.

Alphabet Sambar has moved beyond my tightly held reins too. It was getting too big for me to manage anyway. Other people are driving it forward, not always in ways I would like it to go. But I suppose this is an essential part of being a community manager – letting it mutate and grow as it will. Who said I needed to birth a baby to learn about growing pains and the empty nest syndrome?

I ached and raged over JUST TOO MANY THINGS crashing down on me on Monday. A webinar that crossed 100 participants when I only expected about 30, resulting in chaos that I saved. Drive-by retweets and Facebook notifications. Yes, I know all of that seems like adolescent melodrama and so what? They’re my feelings and I know just how deeply they shake me.

But a friend said something in her maddeningly sane and sage way. And she said,

“You cannot be a Leo Rising with style & flamboyance when things are going okay & forget to roar through situations that have so much attached baggage”.

Yes, I’ve been plunged so deep within my own inky wells of Cancer Sun and Pisces Moon that I’ve forgotten I’m also the goddamn Golden Girl up above. Time to bring the fire back. Or really, well, look that way.

What else can I say? Well, I really hope I can find something or somewhere or someone to fall in love with. This will always be important to me. I’ve always known that and I feel able to admit it now. I don’t feel truly alive unless I’m at least a little in love. And I feel, a helluva lot. I don’t have to be ashamed of it. And I don’t have to fear it. I break, yes I do. And people hurt me because they are uncomfortable around emotion (their own and hence, other people’s). But that’s not me. I am perfectly at home within my torrential, mercurial, mad emotions. I am the opposite of the calm at the center of the storm. Or rather I’m the silent pinpoint within the a raging tornado within a bewildered Earth.

Yeah.