Lying in bed, just like Brian Wilson did
Well, I’m lying in bed just like Brian Wilson did . . .
So, I’m lying here, just staring at the ceiling tiles
And I’m thinking about what to think about.
-Barenaked Ladies, “Brian Wilson”
I shared a duet of that song with the wife a few weeks back. Given everything I have been working through and contemplating of late, it stirs up thoughts about isolation and becoming invisible within one’s own life.
A couple nights ago I was clearing out my old Yahoo e-mail account as a final exercise to completely commit to the far superior Gmail. As pointless an exercise as it might seem to some, I wrapped up my general deletions and forwards process with the extended task of unsubscribing myself from all of the newsletters I was receiving.
Until I went through message-by-message I didn’t realize how many I’d joined and let pile up. Doing so gave me this strange satisfaction. In fact I peculiarly felt weight pulled from my shoulders. In some way I see all of those newsletters I was un-tethering myself from as a means to reconfigure my identity. Interests, causes, hobbies, and such do seem to be part of the recipe of self. It connects in my mind.
Now let me backtrack for a moment here. For the past several months I have given myself the opportunity to disconnect while remaining vaguely connected, hiding under the safe little bubble of “invisible” in gchat and on Facebook, leaving my phone on vibrate or silent, and on and on.
These were the concrete actions of someone who was holding in emotional pain, evidence of tectonic shifts of personal change, and damming up cathartic geysers. I found different versions of self-prescribed desert island isolation. Perhaps driven by survival instinct, or more plainly just hunting for whatever chance I could to quiet down the bevy of voices and the general cacophony of life to try and hear my own.
But as I write I recognize an excess of past tense, as I crane my neck to see the distant wreckage disappearing behind me. I can feel myself stretching in positive ways, pulling my theoretical bear out of its wintery hibernation, or as Gloria Estefan offered: I feel I’m coming out of the dark. It’s all future from here on out.
And I think about the thought of being an empty shell. This is no doubt an exaggeration, but it does evoke a lot of the true feeling. Maybe life just reached an inadvertent dead end or a chance roadblock. An empty canvas, a clean slate, or whatever you might want to call it is a wonderful opportunity. Having a fresh start opens up endless possibility and I intend to take it!
