Sometimes I'm mortified by what I write here.
Mortification. Shame. Self-loathing.
Part of me tells me that's the lesson. Be you. Expose yourself. It's the only way to build armor against a world that is designed to dislike you. Or should I say a species built entirely different than you and designed to dislike you.
The snark is just armor too. Yeah it's learning to be funny and quick and highly intellectualized, but it's still fucking armor. I was beginning to fool myself that it was something else. And I'm scared and proud to have derailed that subterfuge.
So what interesting thing has derailed me this week? Jane fuckin' Austen. Last week I read a few chapters of Mansfield Park and the world was right again. Light, crisp snark. Every sentence a gem. As I read I let the precise perfection of her prose envelope me. Until it abruptly stopped and I was unwittingly unmoored (why is this not an antonym of moored?), untethered, disjointed, jarred.
"Admiral Crawford was a man of vicious conduct, who chose, instead of retaining his niece, to bring his mistress under his own roof; " ~ Chapter 4, Mansfield Park.
Out of nowhere, amidst the cynical, bright, bird's eye view of the human drama, Jane got personal, and she took me with her. And I have nowhere to turn with this information. I am alone again.
I've been here. Always. But it's when I have these ideas that I feel it and am disheartened. You can't have your cake and eat it too. I vow to prove that wrong.