There's a scene in The Poseidon Adventure in which, to escape the oncoming onslaught of um... Atlantic Ocean, the remaining survivors have to swim underneath a staircase (or similar) to get to the other side where they can then battle *insert random plot device here, to further their escape. Anyway, in this group, there's a really fat woman and when you're watching the movie for the first time, you automatically think, 'she's next to die'. But no. In Poseidon, she turns out to have been a champion underwater swimmer or something when she was in high school and navigates the underwater labyrinth like a big blubbery seal. It's a great scene, but the crux of it is that her husband (I think) can't swim even in the bath, but he has to otherwise he will drown anyway.
This is kind of how I feel today. Like a mixture of these two characters. I know I used to be able to (metaphorically) swim for miles underwater, but something is making me stand still for far too long and though I don't think it's fear, I can certainly see the Atlantic bearing down on me and am not moving. It's an odd feeling, waiting to be swept away - hence total lack of posting this week. It won't last forever, it never does and when it blows away, expect to see something stupid like a million posts a day as the clouds blow away.
I think the answer lies in a big torch that got shone on me this week, though at the time it was more like a whole set of floodlights bearing down on me. It's hard being told your weaknesses and being grown-up enough to recognise them as real. Truth of the matter is I fucking hate being criticised - even constructively - and am just about grown-up enough to brush my own teeth, but I'm willing to go through this because for once - and it really is just once - I think I might be a better person on the other side. In this particular instance, the torch revealed that I am guilty - make that GUILTY - of sometimes not liking the things that the world throws at me but never doing anything about it to change those things. That's a really fucking hard thing to admit to yourself when you've always considered yourself a bit fearless.
It's even harder writing them down here.
It's a bit like walking into a room where there are a lot of people you know along with some you don't and announcing something you think is really awful and personal but the truth of the matter is, the people who know you are all thinking 'yeah, we could have told you that years ago' and the people who don't know you, don't actually care either way. They just came for the free biscuits and the chance of a few laughs because it was free to get in.
But you know what keeps me smiling and happy? The fact that you're all just as fucked up as me in different ways that you choose to display/not display as applicable. Which reminds me - I forgot to post up Communication Breakdown in The Wasteland. Will do that later today. Tut tut.
It's not all doom though. I'm about 500 words from finishing up The Tuba Farm short story for a big-ass competition. It's about time that got wrapped up once and for all but it took said conversation above to set some big and heavy wheels in motion in my head to get it moving again. There's a couple of other competitions lurking over the next couple of months too, so there will be a fair bit of offline writing going on - with a pen!
