The Many Faces of Death

My grandpa died on Friday night after a year-long battle with lung cancer. He wasn't ready to die - he constantly talked about how he felt it wasn't his time, that he had more things he wanted to do, more life still beating in his chest, waiting to be lived. It was heartbreaking to hear that, and hard to watch his gradual downfall. His situation has made me think about my own life. There are so many things I want to accomplish, yet I always find excuses for not doing them. One of the biggest reasons I don't do things is because I fear my own failure. I don't make decisions, or take risks...because I am so terrified that it will be the wrong decision. I also have an intense fear of failure. I am scared to stretch myself, to test my limits...because if I put myself out there and fail, then I will have made a fool of myself. I also fear what others will think of me...of how they will judge me. It's silly, I know, yet it profoundly impacts what I do, how I operate. I am hoping to take my grandpa's death as a wake-up call, that I need to stop "re-acting" in my life, which is such a passive, wimpy existence...and start "pro-acting," or making active decisions to help create my own happiness. More on that later...

I watched The Hours tonight, a movie about Virginia Woolf, the famous English novelist whose own mental madness and depression drove her to suicide. A lot of great writers produce their best work of literary art during their darkest times. Likewise, I find my best poetry to be written in times of depression, in times of sadness over unrequited love, or betrayed love. The sadness, the madness, the darkness...serves as a catalyst to my writing. Happiness breeds a certain amount of complacency. I often say that those who are happy are living in a state of denial...they are living in their bubble. People with depression often have eerily accurate viewpoints in life...a psychology professor of mine even said that mental health and happiness do require a certain amount of deception...or at least, looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses, instead of clear ones that give you a true picture of it all.

Anyways, I am babbling...I'm just going to present you with my most recent poem that I spewed out in merely 20 minutes tonight (a compulsion, really)...so, here it goes:

My room is a mess.
A microcosm of my mentality.
There are papers, packets, books,
scattered in wild abandon.
I wake up and they stare at me,
Staring, watching,
Judging…
These papers will not leave me alone.
The great irony of it all
Is that I mourn
My dwindling freetime,
Yet when a quiet moment
Rests upon my back,
When a free shadow of a
second
Casts on my bedroom wall,
I run,
I hide…
A sign of my cowardice,
With no courage to measure?
Or perhaps just a masochist,
Whose pain is her pleasure,
If I truly detest my
emotional fragility
Why then do I lack motivation
To rise to stability
Do I enjoy this rocky and tattered terrain
That maps across my anxious brain?
Would finding peace
murder
my gift to compose
a symphony of painted prose?
If I lived with happiness
And slept in its bed
Would I bury
The creativity that
Throbs in my head?
Have not all great writers
Gone a little mad,
Whose words were most brilliant
When at their most sad?
If I were to let go of the darkness
Live simple, and free
Would I be escaping,
Or creating
My own captivity.