Some examples:
In college I invented Lifegame, a social-group game where players asked in other players who asked in other players, and you had to make up a secret symbol for yourself and then make a life-long commitment to contribute annually to a group mailing. (This was obviously pre-Internet.) I became passionately involved in this idea and recruited all my closest friends, and I did keep it up for a couple of years, gathering people's annual narratives and sending them back out again. Then it began to feel like a chore, and after a few more years Lifegame petered out.
In my early twenties I test-played a custom-made bodiless electric standup bass and fell in love with it. I didn't feel I could afford it, though, so I promised myself that at some future date I would get one, learn to play it really well, and then find personal fulfillment as a jazzy funky bass player. I held onto that dream for twenty years. Two years ago, as a present to myself on the occasion of surviving divorce, I bought the bass - I even splurged on the five-string - and there it stands in the corner, silently rebuking me every day for never playing it.
In my late twenties I fell in love and got married and begat babies, and deep down inside, in my fierce secret girl-heart (wait, can I say that and still make the point I think I'm trying to make here? Well, keep typing and let's see...) I really felt that I had succeeded at last in my greatest life-project, manhood. My love was real...I know because when it was no longer wanted and I had to kill it I felt like I was going to die...but I couldn't make manhood last either.
OK, um...so I was going to say, what if this idea that I'm actually a woman is another temporary enthusiasm...but then I had to go and write that last paragraph. Well, I can still say it, and should, because of the devious cleverness of the zealous mind. I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into the idea of my femininity, and my zealous mind does pounce on each new bit of evidence which favors the precipitous drive into womanhood, at the same time discrediting any doubts or lingering mannish impulses. I am biased, headstrong, quite possibly self-blinded. I must strive to doubt, even as I inevitably spin every new datum and compulsively seek to subvert the process of doubting itself.
On the other hand, it does needs to be noted that I have not always been wrong about my enthusiasms. I was right about wanting to be a parent. I am right about being a writer. Despite how hard they sometimes are I have embraced these passions for life, and they have become much of who I am.
[long pondering silence]
Once again I feel my way back to the insight that the best real-world answer is that I must trust the process. Be in each moment, and allow myself, if I can, to act on every healthy-seeming impulse, either to move ahead or hold back...while always thinking of those I love. Unclench. That has been a crucial mantra since the beginning, and here it is again. Unclench. Unclench.
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