Surreality

The last week or so has been surreal. I've worked even more than usual. I have laughed, cried, and decided that the winter of my discontent may be ebbing to a close.

However, I am concerned about friends of mine. My daughter just broke up with her boyfriend and it's the first one she's professed to care about. Other friends' business is not doing well, and will close within the month. It's a time of sadness and endings.

Almost as if in sympathy, the weather in my fair state has mirrored this upheaval. Wednesday and Friday tornadoes pummeled Kentucky and some surrounding states. Photos and images on the news and Internet look like war zones. Many people have lost everything they own. One story, a young woman who graduated from a local high school used her own body to shield her children from the storm and is now in critical condition in an Indiana hospital, suffering life-altering injuries.

Over a month has elapsed since I have written. Oh, I write. Care plans, Systems theory, counseling and case notes, and the usual stuff I need to produce to run my agency. But I itch, literally thirst to do something more.

In a small room in the back of the house sits a writing desk from my grandmother's house. I vowed that when I brought it in that I would sit and write once again, like I did at the kitchen table of my youth. Or the legal pads, notebooks, looseleaf binders upon my knees, formed lap desk. When each word was like tear of blood eked out against the fabric of my imagined future.

It's kind of funny. The past is so important to me, yet I failed my youth by not achieving the future I envisioned so long ago. And only recently did I learn that I do not know my own true past. Strange. By realizing that my hold on self-knowledge is so tenuous, I am freed to create my own.

And so it goes...