A Reprise

I have come more to believe that all write a letter to the world. Our own individual letter. Maybe not everyone is driven by the need for personal expression, and the need to perfect that expression, but many are. In the quiet snowed-in days I have experienced I have been alone with my own need often. Given these days, and my mind's rested state allowing me to work through my need, I have been able to think through my expressions and where I am. I have a need to create. It is as strong as it ever has been, but because I have not had a specific vision, I have not created anything. I have been waiting and listening, every hour of every day, for a clue to my inner self. Since I reconnected with that self a year ago, I have written very little. I am growing to realize more recently that this is because previously I was writing from my surface. I was writing reactively. My characters and stories were rising like dreamscape parades of the trials and torments of daily life, and of m...

I haven't done a Jane update in a while. I keep itching to but I feel like I have to step back and tell you the whole thing. These half-truths corrode me. First of all, I made the big mistake of telling my therapist about Jane. When you put something like that into words, you lose it. You not only lose it but throw it down onto concrete and jump on it several times when you tell this to someone who does not get it at all. There is an art to being a therapist, surely, but there is also got to be an art to going to a therapist and seeking healing without misrepresenting the deep and important concepts within and feeling all unclean afterward. Despite the disappointment I had over telling him about Jane and him not getting it and putting me cringing in my seat for forty five minutes over his total ignorance of women's studies, Jane will not be put down. Jane holds up to this, and still needs to be discussed. So that was one thing I needed to tell you. The other thing is that...

  Jane Morris. Jane Eyre. Jane Austen. Jane Morris was the wife of William Morris and model/muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Jane Eyre is the character of writer Charlotte Bronte; Jane Austen was a writer whose popularity has not ceased since her publication in the early 1800's, as far as I know. I really don't know what more to say except that I have been thinking about these women a lot. They are all pretty different from each other and lived in different eras(and one of them is not a real person, unless you mingle her with Charlotte Bronte, which I do). One was a prodigious beauty, one a writer of genius, one a sufferer triumphant. But they blend together in this entity which is my ideal.

I think who you want to be is already a part of who you are. I think when I emerge from a trial that the person I've been inventing secretly for months is ready to emerge. This happens every few years. Anyway, this new person is Plain Jane. Sort of like Jane Eyre, but Gen-Y. Because I really am right on the border of X and Y, and right now I am definitely more Y. So nice to meet you. Basically I'm more laid back, less critical, selfish and demanding of life, less inhibited in my personal expression, less afraid to try new things. Don't believe me? Wait and see. I can feel it happened in the last 24 hours. I am this Plain Jane now.

On occasion I like to sit outside at Starbucks and breathe the cigarette smoke because it makes me feel that I am at a fair. So much has changed for me lately inwardly and outwardly. I want to pause to take it in, but there doesn't seem to be time. All the things I want to try dart to the front and back of my mind on occasion and only their frequency gives me any clarity as to whether I should pursue that idea. I try to start with a blank slate each day, not wanting to carry over the previous day's ideas, which so quickly become baggage. So despite my endless searching I can't really say anything for sure until it is soundly felt. Today I have felt like Jane Eyre. A little older than the crowd, or perhaps born old. Desperately in need of a wardrobe update and a trip to the salon. This morning I looked at my black stockings and found them covered with cat hair. A dead giveaway of any introvert, not that I have anything to hide anymore.