My Mental Hermitage

I'm going to whine a little so just in case you'd rather not have to listen, I'll pause to give you a chance to grab your coat and slip out the back door. Still here? Okay. Well, I was sitting here this morning, staring at the screen, too blah to write anything productive, trying not to think too much about all the assorted pains throughout my body, trying not to wonder too much how badly life is going to hurt at seventy if it hurts this much at thirty-five (and if I'm even going to be able to muster up the energy to get to seventy). I was thinking about life, about my efforts to put myself out there, to toughen myself up to criticism so that I never, never go under again like I did this July. I'm trying to convince myself that I am just fine the way I am and to heck with anyone who thinks otherwise. The problem is that I'm not sure I believe it myself. And now that I've come out of my cabin in the rock face, I have gotten some "input" (directly and indirectly). Some of it has made me glad to be out in the sunshine, especially when people sidle up to me and tell me things they never would have told me before because I've risked showing them my heart. But other times (many times), I just feel thrashed. I feel like I want to go back in my little hermitage and close the door and write my poetry (which of course I would never send out! Far too revealing!) and just stay there, lonely perhaps but safe. But do I really want that? No. No, of course not. I have to believe that this is like athletic training, that the more I push myself, the stronger I will become. It's just that some days my muscles (the literal and the figurative) ache so much.