In the end, no real surprise: a groggy morning finds me admitting to the silence that I'm not made of iron or anything so tough, for how could I be when all week, all month, I've felt like a pile of leaves or ancient tome, something that would fly apart if even the breeze were too strong. Oh I wanted to do more, sure. I've wanted to have a different relationship with words since I started using them with such deliberateness, around the age of 12. But words require that I be tough, or at least, in how I want to use them they do because I want them to bite, have edge, form sharp meanings that they simply cannot without truth. And admitting to truth is hard. Perhaps that's a weakness I inherited, I don't know. In the end, I thought November would be the perfect time for some careful peacemaking with truth, what with it's cloudy, moody propensity to compel introspection, but it turns out too many other forces were eroding my not-all-too-thick-to-start skin.
The reality of it probably isn't of interest to anyone beyond me, how I spent the month sick, or have become the nail that will get hammered down as a reward for sticking out. Well all have our moments where it's exactly our heart that falls between the rock and the hard place, and tectonics seem to insist on holding mine, grinding it as a test: whether I'll be able to stay standing in spite of it. I might be a wimp sometimes, might trade the truth for something shinier or softer, but I am one of those principled types. I will stand up and speak up when something isn't right. In the school I work in, that has made me target one for the new administration, who every day seem to undertake the task of finding new thorns, sharper ways of shifting the score. It's not even my fight. It's not personal. I'm just in the right position at the right time. After the daily assault, is it any wonder I failed to seek yet more sharpness, didn't keep carving truth from context?
I'd had plans, nodeshells I meant to fill, facts, situations, events to launch into text. I had so much more to write. It reminds me of my grandma's words; with warmth and acceptance, she'd say, "Life is what happens while you're busy making plans." Que sera sera. And it was still something, even if just for me. I realized I'd spent five years on E2 without getting past level 1. It takes me, statistically, some 78 days per node on average, and this month, I wrote 9. I might not have solved the world's problems, let alone my own, but I did write something. Back on day 1, that alone was my goal.