Thoughts from November and January

I wrote this in my morning pages on 18 November 2008, after reading some Laura Ingalls Wilder and other historically-set books:

Choice is beautiful, but it can be stymieing, paralyzing even. There’s so much pressure to be all I can be, sometimes I feel like it’s not good enough to be just as I am. I ought to be better, more accomplished, more recognized, more experienced, more perfect in every way. This is silly because this pressure was surely worse in the days when I could only have distinguished myself through beauty or domestic skill. But I feel that — even though I’d hate that stifling gender role — at least there, I’d have known what was expected of me; there would have been limits. Now, just as there are no limits to my potential, there’s also an infinity of ways I can be a disappointment, a failure, a never-will-be.

Perhaps all it is, is that I long for clarity, and our world doesn’t provide it. But that, too, is an illusion, because when I think of our world I feel that some things are blindingly clear: an obligation to steward and save our environment, protect people around the world from suffering and injustice, and find and live my full potential. And these are definite modern imperatives, too, that would never have called so strongly to a farm girl of the late 1800s or an English lady of the early 1800s. I suppose these goals are as challenging to me as living up to societal expectations would have been for these others… so I should stop wishing and start taking action.

We’re back in LA after two weeks in San Jose, and I’ve already done a lot of organizing and stock-taking and planning. We also watched Volver tonight with Jason, and it’s beautiful. It’s good to be back, and good to be in this clean transitional place between my LA life and a new one soon to come in the Bay Area.