For those of you who don't track every damned thing I do, I've been a little busy lately addressing some...issues.
Or perhaps I should say, readdressing some issues, because two of these are whoppers that have been ongoing science projects: changing my relationship with money and getting down with my Actual Desires.
And readdressing these issues has brought back an old visitor 'round these parts, a little fella I like to call the Resistor, a shape-shifting, merciless motherf*cker whose sole purpose is to push back. Lovely, right?
I named him after a force Steven Pressfield describes in his battle guide for artists, The War of Art. Steven and his book have been much on my mind lately as I push back against the pushing back, or rather, he and it popped back into my brain when I sat down to write about the damned difficulty I've been having with writing lately. Because hey, the one thing I generally have little to no problem with is writing, so when that goes down, I know something's up.
I reasonably sure that the last thing Mr. Pressfield would want is for me to turn him into a patron saint of anything, much less Procrastination (or would it be anti-procrastination?), but hey, he wrote the book on it, and then showed me the fateful kindness of stepping out of the mists to say hello, so tough. Tough. We're at DEFCON 3, here, and as far as I'm concerned, that means I have license to do whatever it takes to beat the wave back. (Don't worry, Steven, I'm not actually going to bother you; I'll just, you know, light a candle and pray a little and stuff. From a respectful distance.)
So. Two things.
#1: Money is ass. I mean, it's great, what it can do, but it's ass, the way it gets abused. And my family graveyard is littered with the bodies of the Lousy with Money, in both senses of the phrase: they were either unbelievably good at acquiring it or terrible at disbursing it or both. A surprising number were both, which is doubly-super-awesome because then there is so much residual collateral damage after their deaths. Huzzah!
You grow up watching people who are either afraid of money or afraid of not having it and the chances that you'll magically have a healthy relationship to the stuff are sucker's odds. I've been outrageously fortunate in that, even without a lot of working at it, I've managed to have enough of the stuff to live comfortably my entire life. As my first shrink-slash-astrologer told me as part of a chart reading that I won on a bet*, while I have issues aplenty to keep me busy this planetary go-'round, money is not one of them.
Why, then, am I bothering to waste precious time, energy and (haha, irony pop-up!) money on correcting how I look at money? I don't even have a next generation to fret about passing this along to; the buck** stops with me.
Plain and simply, I think it's my job. I know it's not anywhere in the "hire me" section, but the more I do all this personal excavating-type stuff, the more it feels like that's what I'm here to do: excavate and illuminate. There will be no 1.34 children to benefit from my presto-change-o, but out of the few thousand people I reach via my various nefarious online activities, there may be one or two who will be spared some of the agony my family (most of whom I am estranged from because of money) and I have been through.
#2: 99% of the other shit I have left to deal with ties into #1. Those Actual Desires I mentioned above are so closely tied in with money, I feel very comfortable smooshing them together in one post and giving my Actual Desires short shrift here at the end. (Pause once more for the Irony Train to pass through.) After all, you can look over the whole almost-five years of this blog and find out-loud examples aplenty of me showing you my ghosties about being out there in a bigger arena. For Mistah Resistah, I'll be explicit: it is my full intention to remove every goddamned obstacle between me and getting what is is I'm supposed to be doing, which I have identified in this here article as the twin tasks of EXACAVATING and ILLUMINATING, out to the widest right audience.
You're already here; you know what it is that I do, and presumably, you're getting something out of it or you'd just, you know, hightail it out of here to one of the million-billion other places available to go and do one of the million-billion other things you could do with your own precious, precious time.
And so, to you, fellow traveler, I ask the following: take in what you feel it is useful to take in, and spread what you feel needs spreading. As you most likely are, but all the same, this is the place where it serves to be explicit. Forward this piece, or the website address (that's http://communicatrix.com), or re-post a chunk of it, or whatever. I've got 50 breathing down my neck and this Resistor cocksucker throwing up roadblocks and while I will do my best to grapple elegantly with both of them, I'm not too proud to ask for help.
You hear that, Resistor?
xxx
c
*Someday I will have to tell this full story, if I haven't already. It may have violated every ethical shrink code in the book, but boy, was it effective.
**Again with the irony! Although admittedly, this is more of a pun. Shudder.
Image by oswaldo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.