Joy

The band is playing soul burners and a small crowd is dancing, growing though, ever more people. Some are dancing clumsily and some well, but most are dancing with pure joy.

The band is playing the Four Tops, I can't help myself, and I am not feeling joy, but I'm crying for love because the Four Tops specialised in simple truths and I am simple in matters of the heart at least.

At least I feel like I am.

So I do not dance, although I'd like to, because I am someone who cannot find joy within themselves, but I need to be led by the hand and I don't have anyone who does that in my life. I would not even know where to look for them.

That does not mean no one ever does bring me joy. They do, of course they do.

***

Sometimes you are just sick of never being right and I am sick of it. I am sick of not being right in myself, constantly feeling as though I am someone I am not, yet if I'm not me, who am I? It's a problem because I fear I may have been deluding myself into thinking I am someone else inside when the outside is not deceptive at all; I just am this person.

But why then do some people love me? What do they see that is loveable but I don't see? What do they know that I don't know? I feel sorry that S is clever enough to help me by showing me ways I am wrong with her, but has, and had, nothing at all to say about why I was right. She earned it though, and I am sick of not being right with other people, not being able to give them what they need, sometimes not caring, sometimes not understanding.

I am sick of feeling I could be what people need but powerless to move them and have them believe it. Or sick of being unable just to see what it is, so it's just another way of not being right for them.

I am thinking this as we are walking along Byron beach, and I think that I have been what M needs because I have worked hard at it, but it's not something I could keep on doing.

***

Other people at the pub talk to strangers easily and I'm envious because I cannot overcome myself enough to be able to do it and I never will be able to. So I will not make a great life out of where I am now. I need help and no one wants to help me, or if they do, they don't know how.

And why should they? I am not right with anyone. I am not good for anyone. I don't know how to be. Sometimes I do try but it's easy to be discouraged. I have a long list of people I've tried to be good for, sometimes against what I felt were my own interests, or my needs at least, and I feel like the rewards were slim, that where I could have expected some increase in the good they did for me, I just got kicked in the nuts.

Am I just wrong about that though?

***

And M is saying, as we're trying to keep out of the gale, you are obliged to Mrs Zen because you married her, and I say no, you become obliged to someone because of how they are to you, not because of the name you put on your relationship. Yes, you make allowances when someone is something to you, but that has its limits. They do not just receive your respect because at some point you signed some piece of paper that says they are whatever, nor even because you swore to your god that you'd respect them, nor for any other reason but that they earned it by being the thing that has that name.

I didn't earn it either though but it's not a oneway street, after all.

***

There are lots of people dancing by the end of the night, although the band has gone off some and now is more cabaret than it began, which is not good.

I feel huddled within myself, unable to show anything to the world that is good, unable to believe that there even is anything within me that they would want to see.

I do not even know how I could know I was wrong though if I am wrong.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:51 pm