by Madeline Greet

Created on: January 03, 2009   Last Updated: January 04, 2009

Always, I longed for the guidance of a passion, one into which I could pour the wholeness of my being - its sorrows, its pain and its remorse, and the curious joys and pure glimmers of hope that are inevitably, unpredictably, dusted over all our lives. I needed to feel as though I finally had a purpose and a direction in this life.

For a long time I had identified none. No medium through which to show the world my perception of its infinite complexity. No skill cultivated to externalize the day's frustrations or to appease the innermost torments brewing relentlessly beneath the abstract facade of a calm demeanor and smile. Those few people with whom I interacted - if successfully, to my very own sincere surprise; if not, without much more than habitual disappointment - those few scattered beings, immersed in their own frantic battle for identity or concealment or the subtle fragmentary line between, knew no more of my character than I was apt to comprehend of theirs. Who were these people beckoning me into their world? How much of my own blanketed soul could be pierced by their attention to it? I wandered lonely with these thoughts.

I was not, had never been, one to grasp eagerly at the feebly extended fibers of an invitation to friendship. Even had these welcoming calls been more forcefully expressed, I would have unwittingly allowed them to slip away, or be pushed away, through a combination of my own insecurities and the hermit-like behaviors that resulted from them.

No, though it caused me sorrow to wander the world so lonely, under the ever-darkening veil of solitude, I did not yet possess that uncanny ability to approach another human being openly and to consistently enjoy any further interactions with this person.

I was not, however, wholly unaware of the benefits that such camaraderie could afford me. There had been a time in my past when I had been so, but by the force of maturity and my expanding familiarity with the world, I instead lingered somewhere between blissful ignorance and the eventual fulfillment of my heart's quiet longing.

And so I longed for, and actively sought, the relieving expression of my soul's afflictions not through relationships with others, but by some other more reciprocal medium. And I lived more in my reflections on life than in my life itself.

Then, somewhere along the lonely way, I found a pen and a notebook and discovered the joy of pouring my soul onto a blank page. Was this a purpose? Perhaps. It was a passion. It gave me direction, gave meaning to my emotions and experiences. I realized then how important it is to feel as though you have a purpose in your life, however small, however unstable, however tentative that purpose may be. It carries us from word to word, from day to day. Into the next transition. On to the next page. And I felt relieved. And I began to grow into the person I am continuing to become.

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