I am stuck. I feel jealous and petty and ungrateful and small.  I see the success of others and rather than send love and admiration, I am seeing green.  It's making me angry. Angry at everyone.  Angry mostly at myself. I am too old to be jealous.  I am tired, as a clear eyed person observed recently (which also made me angry) of being stuck in misery.  I know that the anger is sourced somewhere.  It doesn't create itself.  It is created from disappointment, from inertia, from the feeling--however unjustified--of powerlessness.  And that is where it can turn. Because I am not powerless.  I am strong.  I am not young, but I am certainly not old  So, that green monster can become energy and I can put that energy towards what I want.  Just put all of that fucking energy into the WANT. And there I stop dead in my tracks.  Because in the middle of the night, when all of the demands and pressures of the day are distant and I ask myself what that deep desire that eats me up inside is, I come up empty. I have no idea. I see a black starless sky and it holds no answers.  I know what society says I want.  I know what my actions say I want.  I know what I am ostensibly working towards and that I should build upon the considerable success of the recent past.  I SHOULD want that but, what is it?  What is the actual thing or state of being or space that I yearn for....I cannot identify it. It remains this aching void that I keep trying to fill; with work, with movement, with the occasional purchase of a blouse or scarf or a fierce vegan leather jacket (an oxymoron if ever there was.....). And that makes me mad.  That constant attempt to fill enrages me. A circular rage that returns, because I don't deserve to be angry.  There is nothing to be angry at or about, which is infuriating.  The truth is that much of the time I do feel inspired in the moment of creation or while teaching or running or certainly while dancing. When I let that inspiration in, it feels great. It's later that there is that gnawing ache and vague sense that it is all worthless or hopeless and that sensation that pricks at my heart is accompanied by a whispering voice that says that I'm failing. That whatever it is that I am reaching for, it won't work. That no matter how fast I run, dance, teach, create....it will not be enough. That cannot be true. I must want something real.  There must be something or someone or someplace that I will get or meet or be and that THING will touch something deep inside my being and say yes.  Yes, this is it. That tiny whispering, taunting, insufferable voice cannot be the last word.  I am too angry for that.  I am determined to slow down and prove that fucker wrong.

This is not a flattering self portrait.  I understand that.  In rereading it I see pettiness and dissatisfaction, qualities that I might judge if I saw them in someone else, and certainly judge in seeing them here.  There is an honesty though in saying I don't know; I don't know what I want or who I am, but this, this person who runs so fast during the day and is sad and alone at night, this is not my core and I will change that. If anger is the source of that change, so be it.

My dear friend Jamie wrote a similarly themed, but much more eloquent piece on this subject which was published on one of my favorite blogs.  You can read it here: Like Mad