Do you ever feel that way? Like there is some feeling or thought or message that you have inside you that just you just can’t seem to get out in a way that feels right or makes sense or that anyone cares to hear anyway? Like you are forever just screaming into this big empty void and it just goes nowhere? Lately I’ve been asking myself where this feeling comes from, at least for me, personally.
If you don’t know me personally, let me fill you in a little on my origins and where I come from. I’m the youngest of 5, born on the cusp of the Boomer generation and the Gen X crowd. My siblings are all between 10 and 19 years older than I am. They are all Boomers. My parents were children of the Great Depression. They embodied the sensibilities of that era along with many of the ideas of gender roles. Raised in a fairly conservative Christian home, those ideas were sort of doubly re-inforced.
I have never been an overly outspoken person, just by nature. I’ve always been a little more on the quiet side, so expressing myself has never come naturally to me. Combine that with the dynamic of being the youngest by far and being a girl, too, and you can see why this might be difficult for me. I never felt that anything I said or did was ever really taken seriously. I was just the little kid who didn’t know anything about anything, so I very often felt dismissed. I’m wondering if this taught me to just not bother to try and say anything, because no one really cared anyway. I definitely know that I carried this sense with me well into adulthood and, if I’m honest, I still carry it to a degree.
And yet….
I’ve always been a creative. I have done SO many things to many varying degrees of success and always with varying degrees of Imposter Syndrome. None of them seem to say what my soul longs to say. I’m not even sure what it is my soul wants to say, but whatever it is, it is trying to get out. Have you ever felt that?
It’s like, I know I’m here on this planet, in this time and in this place for some reason, but I have no clue what it is and I’ve been chasing it for over 50 years and it just continues to elude me. What is the purpose of my existence? I didn’t choose to exist. Whatever powers that be chose that for me and plopped me here on Planet Earth and said “figure it out”. 100 years from now, no one will remember me or know my name or who I was or what I did. So, did I do or say anything that mattered in the grand scheme of things? I’d like to hope so. But… I’m not sure.
So… I’ll continue to chase, and I’ll continue to do, and maybe someday it will finally find its way into the light.