My sister’s house is only 15 minutes away from mine. When it is dark, it’s only 10 minutes. Her neighborhood is perfect in every way except that it lacks sidewalks.

The houses look blue in the twilight. It reminds me of the moment when an audience abruptly finishes their conversations as the lights dim in a theater. I pass by a group of teenagers taking a walk, and through my open car window I know they can hear my music. 

Their heads turn to me as through my speakers Don Henley sings  “…I have to find the passage back to the place I was before.” I wonder if their generation knows this song.

When I am at work my brain feels fuzzy, like when a radio signal gets weak. Sometimes glimmers of the transmission bleed through, and sometimes it’s quietly audible over a thick blanket of static. 

On the planet Krypton Superman has no powers. It’s our sun that releases the forces suppressing his abilities and allows him to truly be super. 

I work in a windowless office. 

We are all just prisoners here of our own device.

Sometimes I wonder what stops me, or what stops anyone. I wonder why life is so debilitatingly difficult despite experiencing an abundance of privileges. I consider myself to be a positive person yet it is hard to thrive in a place a plant can’t even grow. 

I had a nice day with my sister and good friend, and considered my time while driving home into the blue. We saw a collection of impressionist paintings today. My favorite thing to do was get as close as possible to each piece and find all the places where the canvas showed through the paint. Some things that looked intensely complicated from a distance were strangely simple and unpolished up close. 

I noticed when I looked at Monet’s paintings that he would paint anything that is a dark brown, black or grey as a luminous blue instead.

Monet wouldn’t have had to change any of the colors if he painted my sister’s neighborhood right now. My sister drove us to the museum today and I noticed some beautiful things on the drive home. I saw a chipmunk, I saw a family of deer, I saw luscious green trees swaying over a crystal blue sky. 

I wonder if one day we’ll have killed all exotic animals to the point where we’ll go to the Zoo to see chipmunks and deer. 

Last thing I remember, I was running for the door.

I want more than a 30 minute lunch break. I want to be enjoying life more often than I am not enjoying it. I am getting scared that this isn’t one of those you hold the key to your own cage type deals. I am sick of being served platitudes, I want to be given a map. Thousands before me explored life to every corner, yet I am having to start from scratch, no one seems to know what is going on, or has the energy to tell me.

I see myself the same way the impressionists see the world around them; that is, ephemeral. Physically I am a location like Notre Dame, a pond of water lilies, or a path in a rose garden, but spiritually I am the light and weather that dances effervescent over the subject itself. 

In the car ride to the museum my sister and friend had me take the enneagram test, and twice my results were inconclusive. The site encouraged me to read different results and find which one best suited me. Some I didn’t identify with at all, and some seemed just like me, but not all of me. I find researching astrology to be very fun, but I often feel a similar discontentment with it that I do with personality tests. 

I think things like personality tests and astrology can be useful tools when trying to understand yourself and others, but can be dangerous by crafting biased opinions through unfounded or misinterpreted opinions. Similar to my Christian upbringing, each Christian is encouraged to craft a testimony, which is essentially describing how God saved you from your life of sin. When I went to church with my parents the pastor spoke about his wife who suffered multiple traumatic miscarriages, and projected pictures of her in the hospital onto the silver screen; her wan face smiling into the camera. 

I think it’s odd because Jesus is supposed to save you from your sins and trauma and wash you clean, but it is the Christian’s I know who constantly define themselves by their sin as some kind of marketing strategy to present a compelling narrative of their life in order to convert others. When I lived as a Protestant I was encouraged to analyze every action I made as good or bad, no matter how small it was, every action held weight, every action could be indicative of moral failing. 

As a Christian you are called to make it your life goal to be as Christ-like as possible, while simultaneously understanding that you will never achieve this goal because Christ is perfect. If you can’t see anything in your life you need to work on, then you are basically saying you are perfect which makes you prideful, which is a sin. It felt sacrilegious to think of myself as a good person, because I was so far from being like Jesus. Once internalizing the Christian mindset, constant guilt from sinning guarantees that being happy in life is impossible. You become the one to police your own thoughts and punish yourself for every sin. Now I have deconstructed, I realize that this was brainwashing. 

I find it weird when older Christian’s bring up their behavior as a young person constantly with such reverence, regurgitating talking points and performing their rehearsed story of who they are over, and over, and over. I thought the whole point of being Christian is giving your sin to God and no longer being defined by it? So why aren’t they moving on? Why Keep defining yourself by it?

I don’t think Astrology and enneagram stuff is too different, although it is much better. 

Instead of diminishing your identity as a flat character like the Christians do (i.e former drug addict, deadbeat father, infertile woman, prodigal son, sexually promiscuous person, etc.) and have that big “sin” or trauma remain as your story hook and narrative through-line to your life, or as Christians like to put it, your “struggle,” astrology and personality tests gauge in more generalized and ambiguous terms. 

This, too, has its own faults.

I am not my past, I am not my future. I do not have to be the same person I have always been and can, in fact, change at any time. First through behavior, and then with mindset. 

I have to find the passage back to the place I was before

I think the reason why humans grapple with philosophy, religion, and psychology is simply because we need to stay tethered in some type of pattern despite the universe being random–we have to have a sense of self. It is always very personal. 

What I am confused about personally, though, is whether or not this tethering is good or bad. What my heart has told me is that some behaviors & identifications are comfort zones that hold me back, and some are callings that feel natural and inherent to me. It is deeper than just liking something or not liking something, I think it is about following what resonates with your soul and letting go of what doesn’t, even if it did once resonate, even if it works as a harmful coping mechanism, I think this is a natural way to embrace the chaos of the universe.

One behavior I know for a fact to be good for me is seeking to understand the things in me that make me cry or laugh. I know I am a system I can rely on and undoubtedly believe to be true.  

Like an impressionist piece, I am the subject, anchored in my identity, and my emotions represent the light over the piece. Monet painted the same subject many times with different light. There is no one Haystack, there are the Haystacks. I don’t want to be a finished painting right now and stay that way until the day I die. I want to be me again, and again, and again, and again, all in a different light. No version better than another.

There is a saying that a piece of art is never finished, and that is a platitude I feel like I explained pretty well. 

I haven’t posted in awhile because I have been writing so much but not having energy to edit. I think I will allow myself to be imperfect now and post this.

I feel bad when I abandon the things that make me who I am to the point I forget them, which is why I love the “the place I was before” line in Hotel California. It follows the same sentiment of the ballroom & subsequent junkyard scene in my favorite movie Labyrinth.

I only noticed this was important to me by writing on my blog–I would be drawn to writing about losing myself in the broken blue glass, as if I am trying to find my lost self in the broken pieces of my favorite Marc Chagall stained glass window, or the pieces themselves before the piece was assembled. I guess, like literally everything else in life, it is all about my perspective. 

It isn’t about literally being a past version of myself, because everyone knows you can never go home again. I want to change, I am excited to move on, but sometimes I lose the greater sense of me: the place I was before, the middle of the Labyrinth, or, is it exit?  

Two years ago at a family dinner I likened myself to the myth of Icarus, a story about a young boy who was trapped in a labyrinth created by his father. His father crafted wings made of wax for them to escape the labyrinth, but when escaping, Icarus flew too close to the sun and his wax wings melted, plunging him to his death. My sister pointed out that Icarus’s death is tragic and he is a sympathetic character. She points out that he was a young boy of 15 who has been trapped in a dark labyrinth for so long that it makes sense that he would naively fly too close to the sun, excited to finally feel warmth for the first time in ages, and perhaps he couldn’t hear his father warning him not to go too close; even if he died by his own follies one can still sympathize with his plight. Our father had another opinion, though, that Icarus willfully ignored his father’s warnings and was considered to be a man by ancient Greek standards, therefore he deserved his fate. 

I can’t change the way I am perceived, I can’t influence anyone to think any sort of way about me. I appreciate when people want to understand me earnestly, but I am too exhausted to maintain an image, to paint myself in a specific light to be appealing to others, being just one haystack instead of a multitude. I can relate and learn from Icarus, but I am not him or doomed to follow his fate. 

Just because I was once something does not mean I will always be that thing. 

I don’t want to pretend I am a place I’m not anymore, but I do need to find the pieces of me I have dropped along the way, guiding me like twine in a labyrinth.

Up ahead in the distance I saw a shimmering light

The first time I took the test the enneagram I got was 3w4, which dubbed me The Chameleon, The Performer. An example in pop culture of a character that fits this archetype is none other than Jay Gatsby. 

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about how I have resonated with the ending line of The Great Gatsby. 

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I don’t think that I have a delusional way of seeing the world, I don’t think I shift and break myself down to fit in the world. I will not chip myself down to fit anymore, I will chip the world down to fit me. 

I just wonder if finding my place in the world is my green light. Is the place I’m at the place I’m supposed to be? In that case anywhere I go will be right for me. Will I ever be happy where I’m at or will I always be searching for something better? I don’t think so. My goals are realistic and achievable: Live a happy life I am proud of. I just need to get out of The Labyrinth, the Hotel California, but in doing so I need to realize what it is that tethers me to who I am. 

The shimmering light in the distance is not representative towards my limerence like Gatsby,  but my bright future. The same way Icarus, or a plant crawls through a maze to reach the sun, tomorrow I will run faster, stretch out my arms farther.. I will beat on, boat against the current, this time not borne back, but upwards towards the sun.