List

1. I have all these big dreams. They look like:
   *Write a chapbook that becomes a hit underground success. It is on the discontentedness of youth, nay—the American experience. It should look like an experiential guide of how the artist blazes her own trail instead of “following” where society thinks she ought to go
   *Make great pieces of art with paints and papers, ribbons and the woods
   *Hold poetry/self-expression conventions
   *Bring people together for music, for good, fresh food and people/idea sharing and celebration and true real martyrdom of our each and every individual very good thing
   *Stop being so god-damned self-obsessed
   *Reiki circles of charm and healing the earth, starting here in our own little community under the stars
   *Live by the sea
   *Know mountains, and the herbs and brush that grow under and through them
   *Know the earth, and help others to know her and help sing her song
   start a foundation, for the young, the women, the people of great discontent. A foundation for all those of little means, harness all that, make something beautiful out of all our unfounded dreams
   *Do something with my life. Worthwhile. Be a good friend, be an honest woman. Be someone not afraid of following her own big dreams.
   *Set out to and travel about the world
2. I get caught in circles. I can’t avoid it. I get sad, angry, lazy, lethargic. I stop believing. I am dull inside. It is anger, anger aches in me. It runs so deep I secretly believe it is actually harmonic.
3. I wait tables, I hate it, it is a dream gone sour. I keeps me from gatherings at nighttime, from organizing, from living a life I thought I could imagine.
4. I make excuses.
5. I believe that if I have any other job there wont be enough creative time to do the things I say I should. I am good at waiting tables.
6. My time has come!
7. I hate Chestertown because there are no god jobs. I hate Chestertown because there is no way to employ myself other than waiting tables or working in a local non-profit or government run social service agency and that makes me hopeless and perpetuates my belief in the futility of the current system and all its fouls and no goods. I want to be someone strong enough powerful enough to believe in her own vision but I look around and see no out. I try to be grateful because that’s what they, people, my network, recovery, tells me I should be and I am grateful just look out the window on to my farm! But that doesn’t change the scope of things. That doesn’t help me to rest or feel settled or not come undone.
8. My man doesn’t understand but doesn’t judge. That makes it so hard to talk to him and even harder not to judge.
9. I love places other than here. Doesn’t matter where, a small shitty town dirty by the sea. A mountain organic land full of like minds and dreams. A Mexican village of poverty and no means.
10. I get angry at myself and feel like my problem is within, must change my perception, must be someplace inside me free of ego and of blame. Angry that I can’t just be grateful. Fearful that I will always be miserable and in some stage of trying desperately to get what I want. I see this aspect of myself and am instantly convinced that the real problem is my insatiable ego telling me I want what I want and have to have it now. So I work on taming the ego instead which how do you do that!!? Fix your own broke human head with your own broke human head!!? And before you know it I get consumed with all-knowing spiritual righteousness and self-criticism and damn it Kelly why can’t you just be well? Then I am immobilized, I take no action because all the great traditions tell me peace is in this moment. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? Right?
11. Fuck that.
12. “You just need a good job and some money to make you comfortable. To feel like you’re worth it.”
13. I am worth it.
14. I want to be great, to do great things, to share this knowledge inside and to not be so afraid of my extremes. I want the willingness to insist upon nothing but don’t believe in that in my own heart of things.
15. What if I’m crazy?
16. How can people not be voraciously hungry for what is deep down inside of them?
17. That is me. I am. I make no excuses for it.
18. Except for sometimes, when I do.
19. I am crazy, no? At the end of the day at least I got that, and that is nothing to blame or to try to be or figure out or to stop or to know. I am crazy, hungry. And thank god--grateful as hell.