Inverted Commas

I have been terrible about writing lately. These past few months I’ve barely picked up a pen and paper or placed my fingers on the keyboard, and when you compare the frequency of my posts now to this time last year there is a stark difference. Of course, a year ago I was new to recovery, each day a fresh hell, and writing helped ease the burden of that struggle, somewhat.  Now that I’ve been weathering the fight for this long, that ‘fresh hell’ has become a quieter sort of subdued one that I doesn't usually require writing work through and process. That’s one reason for my absent posting, a valid one I’d say. The other - that I just feel too busy – is not. I know my schedule is not so full it prevents me from scribbling a mere few sentences, at least not if I want to become serious about writing.

So I have set myself a requirement. Not a goal, not a challenge, but an absolute, must do, no excuses requirement that I will write and share on this blog at least once a week. It could be about something I’ve done in the past seven days, an observation, a realization, a super spectacular (or fantastically horrible) moment, what I’m currently reading, an answer to a question, etc.… It might be pages long or only a paragraph, and perhaps, on rare occasions, a few scribbled sentences. I will do my utmost best to adhere to this, but I do ask for reminders should I start to slip.

So starting off this new venture I have kind of a conglomeration of the examples above. My book of choice this week is “The Gathering” by Irish author Anne Enright. I am just a little past halfway through and at this point my enthusiasm for the story is only slightly higher than lackluster. Her writing however is exquisite, and it does feel that the story’s gotten a little better as I've delved further into its' pages so I will read it through to the end. (Just FYI; this book was the 2007 Winner of the Man Booker Prize and has glowing reviews on the cover by the Los Angeles Times and New York Times Book Review so don’t let my comments dissuade you from picking it up). Anyways, last night just before the lights went off, I read one last chapter that ended with these words:

“I thought about this, as I sat in the Shelbourne bar – that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.”

When death takes someone we love from us almost without fail at least one person will talk about how that loss has made them realize or remember just how fragile life is, that we should never take it for granted. It’s not uncommon for us to then re-evaluate our place in the world and possibly grab hold of that moment to chase dreams and opportunities that, for whatever reason, had been left untouched. I think this passage has that same message, only it didn’t so much make me question the dreams I was not aspiring towards or my complacency with the areas of my life I already knew were unsatisfactory. Instead, it made me start to wonder about what I’ve taken for granted as the ‘good’ and ‘happy’ and ‘complete’ parts of my life and whether or not they were in fact good, happy and complete. These words and the ideas they invoke have been hovering in my mind all day, and I have a feeling they won’t be leaving anytime soon.

 So I leave you with that exact question; do you have ‘inverted commas’ in your life? If so, what are they? And what should you do, what can you do, to change 'life'  into a life you are fully living?