Mad Max

I sometimes feel like I am sinking. Like everything I have worked on and built around myself is crumbling down around my elbows. I sometimes feel like I don't have the energy to care. That I just want to watch it crumble from a safe and comfortable distance, then maybe take a nap.

These desperate moments feel beautiful. They are a part of my physical experience, viscerally helpless and hopeless and utterly without direction, every cell of my body is in this. Like shivering against the cold; I hate it but I am perfectly aware of every inch of my skin. It is simultaneously horrible and lovely.

It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. It is an important part of my life. Why write about it? The most I can do is write about the human experience. This is my human experience. It is not thrilling, it is not an epic achievement in story tellling. But it is human. 

So, when I write about other aspects of my human experience, about loving, fucking, eating, being small, being insecure, or being confident, I know that these are all part of me, but still are not the sum of me. The sum will only be glimpsed when I am dead. I will keep moving and growing and fucking up and feeling everything that I can feel until my body dies.

I am still discovering myself. I am still finding me, and the sadness, the hopelessness, the despair is where I search. I wish this were not the way of it, but it is. I truly wish I could find my essence in joy, in bliss, in ass-kicking confidence, but those seem to be just a side effect of my ability to embrace the pain. Maybe not a side effect. Maybe a benefit, maybe a reward? I am not sure. The two are linked, I know. In accepting my desperation and sadness I very often find peace. Strange, but true. 

My point, and why this all ties to Mad Max, and, oh, yes, it does, is that people only see what I am strong enough to show them. I allow a certain amount of disclosure of my inner workings, but really, I show what I do in order to obtain specific results. I just read that there were 350 hours of filming in the making of the new Mad Max movie. I saw just two hours of it, every moment beautiful. There are 348 hours of that process that I will most likely never see, but they were all necessary in order to get to the end result. 

Just like life. There is so much pain, sadness, mundane hours of nothing, shit, arduous undertakings and huge victories that inform the final picture. There is so much below the surface that we think we should be ashamed of. So much below the surface of our skin that scares us, but it is all important. So much goes into the work that I produce, and I have never found a more profound or important topic than the experience of being human. I share it so that other humans might know that they are not alone. That this experience, while always unique, belongs to everyone. 

When someone shares something with me, a secret about themselves, or something they are unsure of, I support them. It is unimportant to me whether I agree with it or not. The bravest thing you can do in the world is be yourself, so whenever a person shares a bit of who they are with me, I thank them. I thank them to encourage them, to support them, and to let them know that it is okay to be who they are, and it frees them.

We all live epic adventures in one way or another. Choose wisely your edits. Support others of theirs. Frame your perspective with your experiences, both good and bad. The world expands or shrinks depending upon your participation in it. There really are no limits, except the ones you place upon your own head.

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