Installment Twenty-One

During many of our recent sessions together, Dr. Larry has pointed out to me, and quite correctly too, that while my body may exist in the present he can always tell when my mind drifts away to the past.

I guess my face is pretty much an open book. It has been ever thus, which is probably the reason I have always had difficulty lying to customs officials at border crossings. A character flaw, eh?

When Dr. Larry tries to bring me back to the present I simply expand on whatever the hell we may have been talking about that tweaked a reaction that captured my mind (and not coincidentally, also carried it off.)

"Joelly, maybe you should re-consider taking the meds," he advised me recently when he raised my lack of focus.

I think not.

I find confusion so comforting lately. Indeed, I don't want clarity (not that drugs give you any, even if you think your thoughts under the influence are the most brilliant ones you have ever come up with). I enjoy embracing my inner muddle. In a perverse way, my lack of emotion allows me to feel comfortable with myself at this difficult crossroads in my life.

But Dr. Larry insists I will never move forward until I re-examine my past. The thought of that heavy emotional exercise exhausts me.

I'm sick of myself.

All the books I have tried to read on the subject of transition, mid-life, divorce, career shifts, or just finding happiness (there should be a manual just for reading self-help books) say I can't start a new life without thinking back and discarding baggage in order to move forward.

Getting lighter later in life is actually not a bad goal.

But where to begin? Do I just start working my way backward from today?

I could start with Edna deciding to cut her son out of her will and my waiting for that shit to hit the fan!

There's the very recent past to reconsider, in Beijing, as an expat wife with a philandering husband, barely over a serious heart attack, trying to recapture his youth with a lover younger than his own daughter.

I could go way back to the start of our marriage almost three decades ago. That would mean I would need to explain why I married Martin in the first place. Like myself, he is an only child. But he is seven years older than me, making us from different generations.

Maybe I should be re-examining my life as a diplomatic kid (five moves before I was in high school) or as an orphan after the tragic highway accident which ended that way of living with the death of my parents. Too blurry to remember the former, too depressing to think about the latter.

What stories should anyone tell, even to oneself, if any?

And in today's world of digital sound bites, is a life of over fifty years worth only a 500 word posting on a blog nobody but my daughter is even faithfully reading?