“I will be myself as a grown-up. I wouldn’t be anything else.”
–Taiga Endo, age 5, answering the question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
I want to be a knitter. I want to play the taiko drums. I want to paint miniatures. I want to be a sumo wrestler. I want to breed and show cats. I want to read some of the books that have sat untouched on the shelf for years – there must be at least a hundred of them by now – not to mention my list of requests at the library, all on hold indefinitely. I want to play Roller Derby. I want to make and sell bead jewelry. I want to be a writer.
And that’s just for starters.
I so want to be and do anything other than what I am doing now, which is struggling painfully at a job which up until now, I have loved. There is too much to do and learn and apply, nowhere near enough time to do and learn and apply it all. The harder I work, the further I fall behind. The darker side of myself, the critical voice in my head which tries its damndest to sabotage all that I do, for the sheer pleasure of saying, “See? I knew you were a failure. I told you so,” is running absolute riot. Sometimes I feel like I’m holding on to my sanity by a thread which is fraying even as I watch.
Today it seems like the best I can do is roll with the punches and tell myself the same thing I do when the political situation gets me down (been telling myself this a lot, since November of 2000):
“The wheel will turn. It always does.”
So here I am, myself as a grown-up. And that’s all that I am.
I guess it could be worse, eh?