Hi all!
This post won’t be about poetry, but about something more personal: YOUR WORLD.
It’s a post inspired by a comment I left under a post here a week or so ago.
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The pain of wondering what the hell is going on with yourself, your life, your immediate surroundings, everything.
The dreaded feeling that we’ve all had: something’s not right, and I can’t help in any way to make it right. Your energy is lower than usual; you’re just not feeling it. Maybe you’re feeling like you’re not living up to someone’s (your own?) expectations. Now that one’s a doozy.
You’ve always wanted to make an impact of the world, you know, so your name is revered and mentioned for generations to come as posterity revels in their essays what kind of person you must have been. But now you’re feeling like you’re about to fail miserably because of so many things around you?
I understand this pain all too well.
I, too, once wanted to make an impact to the world, you know, a grand discovery, a selfless gesture, anything of the sort - to start changing the world.
What I didn’t notice at the time was that my efforts to make an impact actually made an impact on me: I started fitting in more and more. This sounds ridiculous, you’d say. To that, I say: in order to understand what you’re dealing with, you must learn its ways, become it, and then work your way around it or through it in order to change it.
It also was, if anything, a selfish – not the desired ‘selfless’ – gesture, aimed at making me feel better while doing nothing else on another level whatsoever. It felt like the world and I simply were out of tune. Feeling defeated that my efforts went unnoticed, I’d become sullen and throw tantrums in various ways.
Hence, naturally, I’d try again, and again, and so on, and it just became a kind of vicious circle.
I guess I had no idea what the word ' world ' meant to me at the time.
‘The World’ is a scary thought. It starts from you, true, but that doesn’t make it any less scary. Because it’s ‘THE’ world, it should encompass everything and everyone, but does it really?
Does everyone come running when you snap your fingers, ask you what’s wrong and how they can help? Not really, no. only the ones closest to you would, eventually, do that. But not when you want it, that’s just childish.
That ‘The World’ is not really the world, it’s just what you’ve always feared it was – a world, one of many, one of a multitude of worlds that somehow, in some places work in concert, but not all places together and not all with the same tune.
Sure, you think, I’d be more than able to handle a multitude of worlds, as long as I do something that would impact all of them, a grand selfless gesture, a discovery of some kind, a…
Let’s just leave that kind of seeing things behind.
Once I redefined ' world ' not as ' the world ', but as something more intimate - a sphere encompassing myself, my family, my friends, the people I care for - that's when I started feeling better. In other words, that ‘a world’ I mentioned before transitioned into ‘my world’.
It was a grape that had been separated from the bunch, knowing full well it’s still a grape, and will behave as such. But the difference was that this particular grape of a world was no longer affixed – it could roll around and have experiences of its own.
Everyone was welcome in my world, to stay as they please, to trade thoughts and ideas, and to leave if it came to that. I dunno, this just felt more mature, felt like I’ve begun to ripen.
I guess this all happened (or had to happen) because I could affect more people in this world of mine, and forge a path to each and every one of them, and with them, forge other ones so that we can change one another, and our surroundings.
And then, you begin to notice that your world – your grape – has a lot under its peel: it has layers, world within worlds, sets best represented in Venn diagrams, concentric circles full of people’s faces, circles that intersect one another, what have you. However you may visualize your world, know this: it’s YOUR world, you get to organize it the way you want to.
You can (or may have to) also redefine your intimate world, your personal world, your job-related world, your friend-circle world, etc, but one step at a time. Don’t tackle everything at once, it’s too big a task. After all, it’s just you in your world.
Once you put the structure in place, things will sort themselves out, with a nudge in the desired direction, of course.
This is how I started to identify a self that had a place in 'a world', but not 'the world': I set up a structure of things I wanted in my world. It wasn’t easy, nor am I suggesting that it would be. Depending on your situation, you’ll probably have to work more/less harder to reconstruct this clutter-free world of yours.
I guess this is also the time when I stopped having favorites, as in favorite singers, movies, etc., but that's another topic.
In short, if you feel like you're failing to live up to a nickname you've given yourself a decade or so ago, there are two things, IMHO, that you can do - either change that term, or redefine what it means. You’ve changed since you’ve started calling yourself this or that, and it should reflect in how you deal with other worlds.
Or, redefine your world. Not everything you do needs to be significant in the eyes of onlookers. I bet that you are super significant to your loved ones, friends and family alike, you probably just need to pick and choose who to keep in your world.
Not everyone is needed in there, you know.
What I speak of may not be totally in line with your problems lined out in this post, but it has helped me get rid of emotional messes before, and a keep a lid on that depression that is always lurking.
Anyway, stay well, reader, and big hugs to you.
