If Woman Can Survive

From my horoscope: "Now would be an excellent time to brainstorm about the life you want to be living in 2020 and 2025. It's also a perfect moment to outline a master plan for the next ten years, and commit to it."

It reminded me mostly that, 9 years ago, I have no idea what I was doing.  I also know exactly what I was doing.  I was planning a wedding and trying to convince my husband to decide on graduate school, or not, or to find a job, or not.  In many ways, it was the worst year of my life.  I was incredibly unhappy; I hated wedding planning, I hated the stress of having to plan an event to meet the demands of people who weren't me.  I didn't have the balls to say no.  I hated arguing constantly with the guy I loved over stuff that, in the long run, didn't matter, except from the perspective where it wasn't what I wanted to do, and he didn't have an opinion because he had whatever opinion he was told to have.

I won't do that again.

It was a time in my life where nothing I wanted to do or thought about doing was as important as what someone else wanted, which was a convenient excuse to avoid thinking about what I did want to do.  Or, rather, the only thing I wanted to do was be married, and if I wanted to do that, it meant changing the plan.

So maybe I should ask myself, what life do I want to be living?

For the longest time, since some time after high school, when I think of the future, the picture in my head (it's odd, I process thought in words, but they're punctuated with images I don't create like the narration) is of me sitting in a room on the 3rd or 4th floor looking out a white painted open window on to a blue afternoon sky.  I get the impression there's a city out there.  Maybe the ocean.

It used to be standing at the bottom of a bluff looking up a rocky cliff covered in trees and greenery.  It was night time, and at the top of the cliff was a low, brown house with the lights burning yellow inside.  You could see through the huge picture windows.

I don't know what either of them mean.  I don't know why they changed.

I suspect the first is possibilities; all I have to do is look out the window and see what's out there.  The second one is probably maturity, looking up towards home and responsibility and the night is dark and there are obstacles.  In the first one, the only obstacle is me.

I thought of Siddhartha today for the first time in a long time.  This probably means I should read it again.

And what do I want?  Not love this time.  Knowledge I'll get whether I want it or not.  Wealth?  Unlikely.  Power?  Not really.  The only useful thing to do with power is to relinquish it.  Respect.  I think that's the one.

And where do I want to be in 6 years?  I'll be 36.  I want to be able to travel if I want to.  In 10 years, I will be 40.  I want to be asked to make art; I don't want to struggle to convince people I should be allowed an opportunity.

Of course, I've said I want to be Dave Sim.  To be Dave, I have to be crazier, and I have to do it on my own.  I'm not sure if that's a viable 6 year plan.  Of course, Dave started on his path to crazy much younger.  He was 21 when he started writing Cerebus, but he was 35 when he leapt from the sane train and started Mothers & Daughters.  So.

30.  Neil Gaiman was writing Dream Country.  John Lennon was in post-Beatles primal therapy.  Tina Fey was head writer for SNL.  Lucy Maud Montgomery was caring for her grandmother in Cavendish, writing short stories and beginning work on Anne of Green Gables.  There are worse options, I suppose.