Happy Birthday to Me

I'm really only writing this because I should be writing something... I mean it's my birthday and I should have some statement to make. But curiously, I don't.

This is mainly because of the glaring, gaping chasm between what I am feeling versus what I should be feeling or want to be feeling. The day of one's birth is a day of reflection, like New Year's. I don't like what I'm seeing in this annual mirror; I'd rather it be a day of fun instead. Self-reflection these days is nothing more than a curse of voices in my head. Someone cure me!

Instead of Maya Angelou, I am Edgar Allen Poe, dreary, dark, and sad. It's not how I want to be! It's just what is.

I find myself wondering if anything can pull me out of this funk; right now, if someone showed up to my door with a lottery check with my name on the payee line, would it make a difference? Not immediately (but I could buy some smiles within the hour I bet). This emotional problem has become deeper than circumstance. This is a bottomless pool of melancholy and nameless regrets. Not happy with where I am, not knowing who I am anymore. Fighting to hold on to the me that I want to be, trying not to despise the me that I am forced to be right now. Warring to implement biblical lessons of contentment and joy in reprehensible circumstances. Exorcising worry and fear every minute, bailing out buckets of dark emotion while trying to row against the current. Sinking fast.

It's because I feel completely ineffectual and powerless to effect change in my own life. Out of control, moving nowhere, achieving nothing. What have I done in the past year? Nothing worth writing about! Nothing worth remembering.

Strangely, I feel better now. At least I can pour my secret sadness somewhere.

Happy Birthday to me.

Post Theme: Private Party by India.arie

Notes from Katrinaville

As Gustave stares us down, memories from Katrinaville are inevitable. Today is the third year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and here in the Coastal South, you can cut the tension with a knife. The real question is less what's going to happen than is it going to happen again, and so soon. Can we handle being wiped out again, or will we become an American Pompeii after these storms are through?

What a way of life! We sit at the end of nature's natural lane in the sea; we wait like striped pins for God's bowling balls. Every generation of people who has built a life here has had one storm story, but global warming has given us the dark gift of two or three this generation. Older people from New Orleans will tell you about Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Gulf Coast residents will tell you about Hurricane Camille in 1969, but now those same people have more than one catastrophic storm in their lifetime. How are we to adjust?

As New Orleanians our families are already scattered, our recovery in its infancy. There is no end to the depth of emotional and psychosocial damage we've sustained. We are a resilient and strong people, but there is arduous and unexplored territory ahead. It's like hacking your way through a new jungle with an old machete.

Yesterday the displaced portion of my family was interviewed by a local news station in Atlanta. They spoke on memories of Katrina and the oncoming storm, and possible onslaught of evacuee relatives, of which I am one. I couldn't speak as I was seized with emotion. How strange to see relatives you know and love once in awhile, or on television, living in another place, when just three short years ago, they were seen so often we took it for granted, daily even, living around the corner. That is Katrina's greatest, most merciless theft, and Katrinaville's most haunting legacy: ghosts of memories.

Post Theme: Black Rain by Ben Harper