Читать книгу Tamed By a Bear - Priscilla Stuckey - Страница 9

3

As February slid into March and snow glistened outside the window, my inner crisis deepened. I felt stymied, all forward motion grinding to a halt. I might have been seventeen again, waiting for my real life to begin. Almost forty years later, with all those decades of living behind me, how could I possibly be staring again at the same impasse?

“I don’t know where I belong!” I wailed to Tim, my longtime love. The book had gathered up seemingly unrelated pieces of experience and fitted them into one place. Writing it had required all of me—a demand that was both joyous and satisfying to fulfill. At last I’d found my real work! And now I wanted more of it. Or at least more of what “being a writer” had to give. The fact that most of the time I didn’t actually feel like writing seemed beside the point; I barely registered it.

More troubling by far was what the plunging book numbers seemed to suggest about the future. What if the “something more” I wanted from writing never did materialize? What did that say about all the beliefs I held dear—of the Universe as a friendly, welcoming place, ready to make room for each person’s gifts? Ready to make room—more to the point—for mine?

A chasm was opening in front of me.

I sat around the house feeling unglued. Reading, my go-to solace, held no pleasure. For the first time in decades I found it difficult to concentrate on a book. I got hooked on phone games instead, losing hours at a time to Solitaire or Words with Friends. Desperate to fill more time, I downloaded Angry Birds and spent several days nonstop lobbing tiny bird bombs into impenetrable fortresses.

Finally I had to agree with the small part of me that whispered, “This is madness.” With Tim as my witness—so I’d be less tempted to change my mind—I deleted the app and all its data from my phone.

And then, in mid-March, I started my next four sessions with the shaman.