The Hunt for My Heart

I haven't really done much planning for this post. It doesn't really have a point; not at the moment, anyway. Perhaps during composition a point will creep into it. It wouldn't be the first time.


I should've written it yesterday afternoon, when I felt strangely, peacefully empty, when I was full to brimming with the thoughts I'll be writing in this post, and when I felt like I was tottering on the brink of some vast emotional abyss that the vaguest breath of sadness could send me plummeting into. I'll bet that yesterday afternoon I could've written something incredible. Instead I waited, and now these thoughts aren't commanding my headspace anymore. I waited, and the peace is gone and I can't get it back, and this post is no longer something that I need to write, and I hate that. But I don't like to leave things unfinished, so I'm going to attempt to get this written.


Yesterday morning was a bad morning. A really bad morning. I won't go into details. Suffice to say there was an external storm resulting in heated words which in turn resulted in tears (a rare occurrence for me), and that when that had blown over I had my own internal storm which blew my mind to some of the darkest places it's ever been. And when that, too, had blown over, leaving behind the deathly, glorious calm of yesterday afternoon, I sat and talked with my mom, who has had to endure many storms and many post-storm talks with her moody and melancholy daughter, and has done so with an admirable patience for which I fear I don't express as much gratitude as I should.


I told her that I feel like my heart's not really in anything these days.


My heart's not in my writing. We're almost two-thirds of the way through November and my NaNo book is stuck under 10,000 words, its icon sitting dormant on my computer screen and not even having the courtesy to mock me. I feel almost no shame. I feel no sense of urgency or burning desire to get it written. I don't hate the book or love it. I dislike it passively. It's not its fault that it's not being written; it's mine. It's my writer's block and my low self-esteem and I don't hate either of those things either. My writing is still a part of me, but there's no longer any passion behind it.


My heart's not in my schoolwork, but then again it almost never has been. I go to my homeschool group and get my assignments, and take weeks to complete them because without deadlines I have no reason to hurry. I'm not doing any independent studying because there's nothing I care to learn about. I don't care if I never learn anything ever again. During the external storm, at the horrid crescendo when the climaxing external storm clashed with the rising internal one, when my thoughts were muddy with anger and depression and self-hatred and a great rush of antisocial feeling, I said I never wanted to go to school again (more specifically, I said I never wanted to go anywhere ever again; bad days tend to have the effect of dragging my emotional age down to about five years old). As the final project in one of my classes, I have to do a research paper (one that'll actually have a deadline) and I'm dreading it. I hate research papers. A few days ago when I was complaining about it to my mother (who is, once again, wonderfully patient) she theorized that I only hate writing about things that don't interest me and that I should pick a topic that does interest me. But there's the problem. I can't think of anything that interests me enough to make it worth researching.


I told my mother all of this. Like any good mother would, she asked, "So where is your heart?" 


After some deliberation, I replied, "In my chest," partly because I didn't particularly want to say something like "I don't know" or, worse yet, "It isn't anywhere", and partly because I like to cope with things that upset me by turning them into lame jokes.


In that moment's deliberation, I briefly considered saying something like "In my future", as that's where I spend an embarrassingly large percentage of my time: off wandering through a childlike daydream where I have legions of fans who hail the books and movies I make as masterpieces, where the petty grievances and conflicts and miseries currently plaguing my mind have become laughable memories which I dismissively share with my many admirers (still earning their commiseration in spite of my nonchalance, of course). I waste hours meandering through this shadowy land, where I'm multitalented and stylish and pretty and all sorts of people wish they could be as amazing as I am. I think I could safely say my heart's in it.


But while my various friends whose hearts are in their futures plan, getting jobs and driver's licenses, thinking about colleges and degrees, fixing up the old cars bequeathed to them and writing brilliant, publishable stories, all I do is idly dream. The dreams never have mention of how I got to that place before my adoring public; I'm simply miraculously there. The thing is, lurking behind every dream is a dark gray pessimism that likes to creep in and tell me that they're all far-fetched and silly and selfish and vain, one that says I'm not good enough to get published and I'd be incapable of making movies and that even if I succeeded nobody would like them. I felt it would be wrong to say my heart's in my future, because I fear that if I actually put my heart into my future, if I sent things I'd written to publishers and started looking for a college with a really great liberal arts program and forced myself to turn some more of my many ideas into manuscripts thousands of words long, I would only succeed in getting my heart broken.


Moreover, my heart wasn't in my future yesterday afternoon. In the calm after the morning's double storm, when I could feel the tearstains on my face and the fragility of my emotions, I thought nothing of my own merit. For a few hours, those futuristic dreams were utterly forsaken. I didn't compose dialogues or envision movie scenes. I never once paused in what I was doing to share my supposedly brilliant thoughts on a subject with a nonexistent audience. For a few hours, I had no self-confidence and no ambition.


And it felt wonderful.


But as good as it felt to be temporarily free of the deafening sound of my own voice in my ears, there was still the looming and dreadful possibility of having to admit that I lead a passionless life. I didn't want that. So after Mom had left to pick up my sister from school, I wandered around the house in an almost unreal silence and hunted for my heart.


And in that eerie, peaceful hush, the only place I could manage to find it was in books.


I found it in the book I'm currently reading, a homey, familial tale that's reminding me a lot of To Kill a Mockingbird (one of my favorite books).


I found it in the eager anticipation of some of the books I got from the library on Sunday, like the first two books of a trilogy that's a retelling of the Robin Hood legends, set in Wales and incorporating elements of Celtic mythology (you can understand why I'm excited to read these, I'm sure); and like the second book in a series in a started recently, a series designed for booklovers whose first book surprised me and delighted me, made me laugh and quickened my pulse by turns.  


It felt good, finding my heart.


That's all changed a bit now, though. The hush has ended and my voice has reentered my head. When a new idea for a TV show sidled its way into my head a few hours ago, I tried to shove it away, and when I caught myself composing some gushing message board discussion of me I felt completely awful. But it's all slipping back into the way it was, like yesterday never happened. Back come the empty, obsessive daydreams; away goes the raw, quiet excitement about all I'm going to read next.


Don't get me wrong, I'm still enjoying the book I'm reading, and I'm still expecting to enjoy the books I'll read next. But I can tell there's been a change, and it's not a change I'm pleased with.


And even in the contented, vulnerable, muted afternoon, I couldn't shake the feeling that my heart was poorly bestowed. If my only real passion in life is reading books, not in analyzing them or reviewing them or writing them, just reading them, what on earth will I do with my life?


Sometimes, even when I'm not recovering from a bad day (it just happens to be much worse on bad days, like yesterday) I half-envision a future quite different from the one that generally appears. In it, the years pass by and I grow older. My sole talent is writing, but any publisher I apply to rejects me because the story's too predictable or because it feels incomplete, because my characters are inconsistent and underdeveloped, because the story won't appeal to enough people, because of any number of reasons related to the seemingly numerous faults I find in my stories. So I underperform in a job that my heart isn't in, as my perfectionism objects feebly to my bare-minimum effort but I can't find it in myself to care enough to do more, meaning that I never rise in the ranks to bigger and better things. Meanwhile, my friends start going off and getting married and having kids, so I start seeing them less and less (if at all), as first my grandparents and then my aunts and uncles and parents and teachers grow older and less like themselves, changing and sickening, until...... Until my human interaction is practically nonexistent, and I watch the world continue to modernize and change and shift alarmingly from the cold comfort of my empty apartment and the discomfort of my horrible job. And I try to stop the memories of my old daydreams from crowding in and telling me how different my life is from what I wanted it to be, but I fail, and I stoop under their weight as my life rapidly drains away. Things get worse as all my favorite actors, the ones I'd hoped to work with or at the very least meet, start dying. And time marches on until I'm alone, until I'm drowning in my own selfish misery, until not even books interest me, until I have nothing left. And thus I finally reach my pathetically attended funeral and afterwards am quickly forgotten by the world at large.


(And in case anyone is now massively concerned about my mental health and overall happiness, I promise I'm okay; this is not an everyday thing or a constant preoccupation, and as I'm sure many of you have seen I'm in general plenty happy and easily amused and prone to laughter and all that good stuff. I just occasionally have days of what my mother and I call shlumpiness. We all do.)


So now we come to the point (see, I told you I might find one): I want a passion, or at the very least a more clearly defined passion. I want a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I want a reason to want to leave my room. Some days I have them. On November 27th, there'll be family and friends and really good food. On December 17th (or somewhere thereabouts) there'll be The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and a day spent fangirling and gasping for breath and maybe crying with my best friend. On December 25th, there'll be Christmas breakfast casserole and a stocking and a tree skirt full of surprises because I don't have a wish list.


I have bad days, but I also have good days. But sometimes I feel like, more than anything, I have days that are neither, empty days of going through the motions of life without much investment in it. I don't want to just live and persevere in an effort to get to the next good day or the next good book. I want my heart to be in something other than my chest or my list of favorite books. I want there to be something, something that I'm good at, something that I love doing, something that can bring me a sense of purpose and, later, accomplishment. I want there to be something I can live for.


And so the hunt for my heart must continue.


~Pearl Clayton