But I must stop living as if it is for other people.

I must stop doing things just because I think others would approve, and start doing things regardless of what people think. I must stop shifting my life around fear - fear of what people think, fear of failure, fear of being vulnerable. Because, true - while this is how you have lived your whole life - while you have been wired to drop your eyes and your gifts at the gaze of others... your tomorrows are wide open. They have not yet been written. And if you do not set yourself free, you will die in fear.

This fear has caused your life to be a trap. It has caused you to be lonely. It has caused you to be inefficient, unproductive. It has caused you to enter depraved, desperate relationships. It has caused you to be self-destructive. It has caused you to shift your feet, head hanging low, under the weight of a big black cloud. It has caused you to be silent when you should have been speaking out. It has caused you to tie your arms down when you were moved to act. It has caused you to be deeply, deeply unhappy. Deeply unsettled. It has caused you to engineer everything you've had the urge to attempt to stay small, to stay below the radar; it has caused you to crumble and bolt the moment the opportunity for greater things appeared.

If you keep shifting your life around these lines of fear, you will die unfulfilled.

Re-set yourself. SPEAK. SING. WRITE. DANCE.

DARE. Make DARE your motto, not 'what if''. DARE, and fail, maybe, but the DARING is success in itself. It is Courage itself. It is what 'DOING' is made of. the DARE to fail. the DARE to move inch by inch, the DARE to come within reach, and breathe, of making something happen.

But life is decidedly a charmed thing. Nothing is solid, nothing is one. Everything shifts and layers.  It is a mish mash of neat blocks of ambition scattered with messes of dreams and fears and failures. Because people are decidedly complex. We exist in shifting shapes. I am the calm exterior before 30 children. I am the crumbling mess that refuses to come out of bed, wanting to shut the world off.  I am the kind mother. I am the angry lover who would join a game of hurting each other. I am a pure soul who wants to do good. I am the jealous cheater who would in one swipe, live in destruction of everything I am trying to build. Grappling, grappling on the edges.

i remained silent
and waited for the weight of my unspoken words to
throw me off the edge and
drown me in a sea of noise
of people

meanwhile inspiration stopped knocking
offended by my lack of discipline
to throw everything out of my hands and
pick up a pen, it
went in search
for someone else
who would see it for what it was
create something of it

and so i feel like i have failed it
as i have
failed myself
in my search of doing
in my search of meaning i have
traded in
a little of my soul
a little of my poetry

it was because i thought no one was listening
it was because i thought i could not reveal these thoughts to anyone
in truth i was afraid
having built a fortress of
defenses
around my secret thoughts
penetrable only by death
only death, perhaps, will split me open

i revelled in the ordinary
the profane
and sold the sacred

i revelled in temporary connections
with the giddiness of a child
and sold my solid truths

i second guessed everything about myself
and came out in pieces

the gold that stitched my seams
turning into plastic
in my rushing, frail hands

i had nothing left.

You begin to feel less certain about yourself, where once you were surefooted and never second guessed, now you are uncertain about your steps and your choices.

While you have become more sure of the ways of the world, you become more uncertain about the fluid vastness of your soul - how its shape and structure shifts and layers.

You are less certain about who you are. You used to pin them down to characteristics - things you care about, things that make you special, in a world full of people; talents, skills, ideas. Younger women come by everyday, surer, louder, more confident and sure-footed. Girls who are smarter, more knowledgeable, who look, speak and write better. Girls who brashenly speak loudly and confidently about everything. Such certainty. But you have seen the world to be large, inexplicable, complex. There is nothing you can say for sure.

You only know of the complexity of things. You only have seen the clear lines between black and white fade to a fuzzy grey. This gives you understanding, but it also leaves you bitter. You wonder if this is where the slippery slope starts... if this is the point where you awake to find yourself too old, too weathered to care. And you can awake in one of two ways. or you could awake in an endless possibility of ways.

You feel like something has to change. You live in this uncertainty. You accept that life is uncertain.

There are times when you think - these kids are crazy!!
When fights break out here and there, boys hit each other, ties are pulled around necks, a random sharp mathematical tool is waved about,  hormonal boys go near girls and hormonal girls hang around outside the class talking to boys, boys randomly shout and say random things,  give you the eye and refuse to listen, things are pulled out from your bag and threaten to be taken. And you wonder, was I really this insane too??

Today was one of those days.

The day turns, sun rises as usual..world awakes to get to business as usual.

But 239 people are missing. Left the earth, started a journey, departed but never arrived. How did it happen? Why that plane? There is no rhyme or reason, no logical explanation that we can point to to make sense of it, no saying it is a consequence of any choices made. Because sometimes things just are.

Let there be no laughter today; no music, no talk. No quarrels and no ambitions. No teaching,  no singing. Let us hang our heads low, drag our feet with the weight of sorrows. Let's honour silence.

I miss believing in magic.

I miss the feeling of listening to a piece of music, and feeling complete - like we are understood, like we are in tune with the world, like we are infinite.

I miss looking out the windows at passing sceneries and feeling like the world belongs to us under our travelling feet, or sitting in a suspended moment staring at the waves, feeling alive.

I miss being in love, and feeling like nothing can go wrong to ruin my day, feeling like finally everything makes sense, I am accepted,  my life is set.

I miss believing that I can do anything I set my mind and heart to.

I miss believing in magic.



I am doing more real things than how I used to dream when I was younger,  but I still wish I had magic in me...I wish to be in love, that insanity that makes things more real than real, that reason that turns the improbable to be the most logical thing, that substance that would put things in order. I want that magic.