Two Things at Once...

Today is the day I send my manuscript to my editor.  No one has read this version of my book.  I have, for the most part, kept this version of my book under wraps.  Not that I let a great number of people read any other version of it either...

I am both excited and terrified.  What if she hates it? What if she tells me it will never sell?  What if she loves it and thinks it will?

I am walking that fine line between two things at once.  Abject emotional terror and beatific hope.  Hope that I will finally be able to release this thing that I have held onto forever.  I will be able to release it in the hopes that it helps others.  Release it so I can be someone else on the other side of this release.

It strikes me just now that I am always two things at once...I am productive and not.  I am happy and also a bit melancholy.  I am scared but hopeful.  I am always two things at once, so I am not sure why it feels so weird this morning.  I mean it is the human experience to have contradictory feelings at the same time.  To be in fear but also be excited.  To be engaged but also distant.  To be dying while also living...

Life is full of many paradoxes.  So very many.  Sobriety brings even more into full view:  surrender to win, you must give it all away to keep it...I am sure there are more but they escape me now.

I have held the contents of this book for 52 years.  I have not been public about the past, except in very intimate friendships and very few relationships.  It has driven me, altered me, warped me and almost killed me.  But today begins the march towards complete release with intrepid fear and hopeful dread.  I don’t know what happens next, I just know that my job is to let it go and then let the powers that be take it forward...

Sometimes it feels acutely painful to be two things at once...but I know, with all that I am, that I could not be anything else...life is supposed to always be a forever mixing of emotions, feelings and experiences.  Nothing is always all good or all bad.  And it has taken my lifetime to see that and experience the great paradox of living and dying as the way of life.  Everything is always coming together and falling apart, not as discrete, individual pieces in time, but always at the same time.

I shall forever be experiencing both things at once, there shall always be a dynamic flow to my life and all the things I endeavor to accomplish in it.  Sobriety shall always be wonderful and hard.  Writing a book and releasing it into the ether shall always be thrilling and terrifying.  Living shall always be an acute blend of ecstasy and pain.  The opposites shall not cease until we do.  And then who knows what the fuck happens...perhaps it just continues in some other form, perhaps we finally get to have the joy without the pain on the other side.  None of us knows, until we leave this plane.

So for today and all my days, I will do my best to embrace the two things at once.  To trust that all is progressing how it should be and how life just flows in the direction of our next lesson.  And that next lesson shall be wonderfully hard and beautifully broken...because that is just life doing its thing.  And if we are lucky, it is just us doing our thing too...

Again, still...