Just Me and My Belly Button

It's happened: I'm invoking the contents of a fortune cookie.

This blog was initially conceived with the rather vague intention of chronicling my experiences working on a goat farm. I realize as I look back on the last almost four months that I've devoted most of the ink (pixels? fonts? whatthefuckever) to the novelties and oddities of living in a remote and at times extreme environment. I suppose it's not quite what I envisioned, and has likely veered into navel gaze territory and thus become uninteresting to most people out there in the world. 

I've never been terribly disciplined at anything, and certainly not when it comes to writing. But that all changed when I arrived here. In those first weeks and months,  I found so much inspiration in everything around me, unencumbered by the usual distractions (TV, drinking, boys) that I found myself fairly bursting with things to write about. And I got so much positive feedback that it became a bit like an addiction. In the absence of all the usual ways of connecting with other humans, this blog has been my way of reminding people that I'm still alive. 


I'm sure that there must have been lots of discussions in the nascent years of so-called blogging about the line between writing personal stuff in an online space and writing things that are just for yourself, and how to separate that which is presented for consumption from what is expressed for the sole purpose of one's own sense-making process. I have, over the years, kept diaries and had started doing it more regularly in the months leading up to my move here. But once I started writing this blog I abandoned my own private writing, whether because I was lazy or too disorganized to keep separate documents or because the validation of having an audience for my thoughts trumped my need for my own quiet contemplations. It's a strange thing to negotiate. So I guess what I'm saying is: apologies for this diary entry.

I won't lie. This week has been hard. And fuck, it's only Tuesday. I knew in an abstract way that I would encounter hard things as a result of this move. I knew it would be difficult to adjust to the workload and the lifestyle. Thus far, any time I've felt overwhelmed to the point of crying, I've tried to remind myself that this is what I signed up for, this is IT being HARD (LOLOLOLOL). But srsly. 

I have no clear sense of where this decision is going to lead me. I can say for certain that in addition to the technical skills I am acquiring, I am Learning Things About Myself that I did not anticipate. It's necessary and it's difficult. For the first time in my life I'm beginning to feel like a grown up, and part of that has been confronting some realities that for whatever reason were not obvious to me when I was in the thick of my old life in New York. 

Of course no sooner have I made some sweeping pronouncement about Hating People and Being an Introvert than loneliness started to take hold of me in a real way. I can't remember the last time I hugged or was hugged by another human being, which is a strange thing. But in considering all of this, I've had to examine the truth, which is that I was just as alone and lonely in a city filled with people, some of which were and are friends. And that even when the possibility of seeing and being in the presence of someone was available, many of my relationships, both platonic and romantic, existed in a virtual, fantasy space. There was no there there. Sometimes the sheer concentration of humans and activity lulled me in to a false sense of my own solitude or lack thereof. It's almost worse to be surrounded by people and still feel that void. Now that I live here, at least it makes logical sense. 

I'm just at the beginning stages of making peace with being alone and self-reliant. On good days this sense of being totally free and solitary are empowering. On good days, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.  


But right now, THIS is IT being HARD.