My Manifesto

I don’t have enough ***** energy to do multiple things at once. I can’t stay there anymore. I know I’m being dramatic. I know it. But, sometimes life is dramatic. And maybe mine hasn’t been enough, so I’m going to create some.

I can do it. I can work for the rest of my life in that stinking job. But in order for that to work I have to kill some other part of myself. Shut the blinds and close the door and never look back. Take one for the team.

ONLY—pay attention—the only team I’m fighting for is my team. And taking one for the team is about to extinguish me. If that is what is necessary, then I can see that. But I don’t have kids or even a career at this point. I’m just working paycheck to paycheck. For a car, for a house, for my independence.

I don’t want to give up my independence. My car either. The job, and the house can go though for another job and another house.

I’ve got to support myself. I know that. What I also know is I can no longer stay in the place I’ve been in.

What am I going to do? I’m scared to leave but I’m scared to go. I’m scared to leave the security of everything I know. Scared to be here.

No one has been listening to me. Me, least of all. The voice I keep hearing inside my head says go, go, go, go, go.

Go far away. Leave this place. Leave these people. Leave these boxes with four walls that crouch, ready, hungry, waiting to consume you.

Leave now before you lose the courage to go. Leave now, before you quit trusting yourself totally. Leave now.

It’s time to go. It is past time to go. I’m leaving for my health. I’m leaving for me. I’m leaving because I need to leave.

I don’t want this life. I’ve been living it too long this wrong life.

YOU ARE WRONG. Every bit of you. You are wrong.

I don’t know that I have the courage to listen to what this voice keeps telling me and telling me. I’ve been living the wrong life and it is time to live another. I’m scared what taking this fork in the road will do to all my conventional, pre-conceived notions of life. But what I can tell you is I’m letting all the convention stifle me. Eat me. Kill me.

And I don’t know if I have the courage, fire, voice, or wherewithal to listen to the voice, hear it and act.

So, I’m doing. In the dark. Without a lead. All by myself. I’m doing.

I’m going to make mistakes and fall down and hurt and cry. I think I’m even scared of those steps. I feel timid and shy and unsure but I HAVE TO LISTEN TO THE VOICE THAT KEEPS whispering my name.

Go, go, go, go. Go far away.

Be in nature. Write your story. Live. Breathe. Be. Better than I am here. Better than I’ve ever been.


What I do know: Nature, green, write, help others too, hear their stories.

That is the clarity in my vision: no dead-end jobs or dead-end places. I need to hear people’s hearts every day. I need nature. I need to write.

Where can I do those things?


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The break must be clean, I fear, or I will sink back into my conventional life, my conventional job, my conventionality.

I need a convent, a solstice, a quiet place. Where thoughts are cool and deep and sunlight comes with gentle rays to dry out sadness.

Be my sunshine. Be my place. Be my brightness that excludes this darkness that threatens me.

I must have courage to walk to new places and higher roads and things that will take me to the place I know I must be. To meet the future with a leaping heart and singing a song I have yet to write.

I see you there, my friend, my new home. I’ve glimpsed you through long hallways with thick shadows where the echoes confuse and elude me.

I need you, quiet. To hear the words spoken with crisp stillness. So low, so still. It takes me many months to hear the words that you send to me. Many years for the ripples to reach the words on my tongue. Sometimes, many eons, I think.

My circle of knowledge is no longer enough. Into the vast darkness I must go, feeling my way. I reach out to touch you. Please, hold my hand.


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I haven't been to work in a week. Yes, avoiding. Yes.

I tried to wrap my escape as a blanket around me. And it welcomed me. The quiet and the dark. Mostly, when I thought, my thought was "leave me alone."

There is wisdom even in that. The quiet, the dark, the loss of contact. I needed to hear me. I needed to hear God. I need them to stay away. All of them with their voices and their help and their thoughts. STAY AWAY.

What came out of my thinking was this: I can’t do this any more. I can’t pick up this load. I can’t live in this place. I can’t be here. I don’t want this place or this job. I want my independence. I want my life. But I don’t want this. STAY AWAY.

I can’t answer a question or read a book or make a decision. I can’t re-engage until some work is done. Some long, dark work through echoing hallways with crashing thunder.

I see people making decisions and I think “When will I be able to do that again?” or “Will I be able to do that again?” I see people laughing and playing around and I think, “So much is going right in her life because she can do that.” I see someone pick up his or her load and start a new day and I think, “I want to pick up my day too.”

But then the stillness settles around me, the darkness closes in, and I sink for one more day in the dark oblivion that welcomes me.

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She’s punctuated—my stillness—by staccato words and voluble gestures at God. I curse him for cursing me with this thing that is in me. This thing I cannot silence or avoid. This thing that must be answered as it maws and tears deeply at my bowels. It stains my days and colors my dreams with its pulsing, screaming wildness. I cover myself in its blood.

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I have a pot of red geraniums that some one gave me. I place it outside my door where the sunlight engulfs it in dry June heat. Too much heat as I forget to water its thirsty roots and watch dispassionately as my red geraniums turn black from too much light.

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I cannot answer their questions. I cannot talk one more day of birthdays or dinners or food or friends. I cannot be there as my screaming silence engulfs me. I live so much in their world, talking their talk. I do not honor the truth I have been given. I do not honor the words that make my heart beat with red blood. My soul is thirsty too.

I am not like you. Your story is not mine. Your story may encompass mine or sing a melody too, but your story is NOT MINE. And for my heart to sing, I must tell you and tell me that YOU ARE NOT MY STORY. And I must live mine.

You do not have to listen or even hear it. You do not. But MY STORY will be told. I will not close this shop or shutter these windows. I AM NOT YOU. I do not have your talents or your encumberances. But I do have mine.

And beautiful or ugly, timid or ferocious, they are mine. I own them. And I must build a better life with them. I cannot build with tools that are yours.

So, clear out, back away, stand by. You may hold my hand, you may be my friend. But you are not to come within the walls of my silent place any longer. For I’ve tried to hear her voice through you and have you sing her song. But you sing badly or not at all and I sit hoping to hear truth in places I do not honor with ears that are not mine.

Stand back. For I have a story to tell.