"Kathy, I'm lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."
-"America", Simon and Garfunkel
I'm making a mixed CD for the 4th of July. They were playing progressively patriotic songs on the radio on Friday, and it caught my attention. I'm opening it with the song quoted above, which is my favorite Simon and Garfunkel song and one of my favorite songs, period.
But I hear myself in it, and I hear current politics in it, and given that it's over 30 years old now, that makes me really sad. While I am not quite naive enough to believe in linear progress, either personally or nationally, I'd still like to see at least a few steps forward with my steps back, you know? And hard as I look, I'm not seeing much progress lately.
I know it's there--both in my own life and in the life of the nation and the world in which I live--but there is so much bullshit clouding my vision. So much terror. So much disappointment.
A bit ago, a friend of mine identified something in me that I've been aware of for awhile, but haven't had the energy or the guts to say aloud to myself. She said that I cling desperately to one thing, thinking that if I could just fix or figure out that one aspect of my life, everything else would fall into place. This is absolutely true. For awhile, it was "what do I want to do with my life?" More recently, it's been alternating between some sort of acceptance and embracing of my sexuality and finding God or faith or whatever you'd like to call it. I always feel as if I could just figure out that one thing, everything else would suddenly make sense. And frankly, it is so frightening as to be nearly incomprehensible for me to think that isn't the case. That I may find a faith community and still not fit everywhere else, for example, or that I could learn to accept and understand my own sexuality and that wouldn't magically fix any relationship problems I have. That I could ostensibly learn how to love without stings, like I wrote about yesterday, and still not everyone would love me back.
It's not something I even want to think about. I am lost without a goal. More accurately, I guess, I am lost without an obsession. I need to focus on something, to put all of my insecurities about everything else into that one thing. This probably isn't a healthy way to be.
But I'm so tired of trying to change.