Should I stay or should I go

Too full, too full to ink to capture anything I really want to capture. My writing is broken, except for scholarly papers that I am tired of writing...

I just watched a documentary, two actually, that woke me up, and worked me up.

What do we become when we lose ourselves? Where do the lost pieces of us go to die?

Here I am - I am supposed to be doing work of some kind, housework, homework, work-work and alI want to do is write, but my muscle, developed from years of grief and loss is weak. This f-ing computer conspires against me, because the keyboard won't respond to my typing. Yet here I am trying.

I watched a documentary about Joan Didion, one of the great writers of her generation. Her generation that was not MY generation but from which my sensibilities sprang; the not a hippie/am a hippie mind set because it was my compass point; what I was spoon-fed from my elders, my cousins, those who shaped my outer sense of the world, my inner landscape, my rebellion against everything our parents stood for. Our parents who sought to protect us from the darkness lest we become contaminated. My mother trying to censor my world and hoping against hope that the last things I would be drawn to were the very things she never wanted me to see.

I watched a documentary about women, about how the media shaped us, much like our parents, in an image palatable. I knew growing up, I would never be Barbie, or Twiggy or any super-model. I knew I could use my voice for other necessities - pay no attention to the girl with bucked teeth and glasses, she may have tits, but who knew she had a brain - the necessities of rebellion, of  social justice, of claiming something I could not really reach, trying nonetheless.

And so, here I am again, writing, but not really writing, I am faced with so many decisions - whether to keep writing, whether to keep this blog, whether to see a family that is somehow insulted by my political views, by my voice, by my unwillingness to sugar coat my words, by my stance, by my brashness and my unapologetic crassness when they decide to chime in because me calling them out on their useless 'thoughts and prayers' is somehow anathema to who THEY are - or pretend to be. Whether to go on to a higher degree of learning, even though it won't pay, even though money does not matter, but I need money to survive, and I want to be a partner to my husband and participate, and help provide our sustenance. How to reconcile the part of me that wants to leave society, leave this fucking white-trash-uneducated-misogynistic-xenophobic country and go live in another place where living is cheaper - to the part of me that longs for comfort and familiarity and fears the edge of the unknown. How can I fear something I've never been? How can I give up what is in my nature? How do we find out voices when they are drowned out by the sheer ordinariness and complacency of the world?

Off to think (or torture myself) some more - for what good it does...