My Flickr images.... U2 — How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking, too. —Rilke You save yourself, or you remain unsaved. — Alice Sebold To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. — e.e. cummings I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here.	December 11, 2004 Disruptive energy My posts are growing more erratic. Perhaps infrequent journal updates are a symptom of what they refer to as the dark night of the soul. Last Wednesday I sat in a Thai restaurant downtown with my boss, choking on pad thai and tears. I told him that I was quitting my job. It has taken me a very long time to get to this point. He was very kind about it, very supportive. It all went much better than last time I quit my job. This time it'll stick. The restaurant piped in overloud,cheerful Christmas music while we spoke, and Bing Crosby pronounced a benediction over us: And may all your Christmases be white. The bill came, and I opened my fortune cookie: Your luck has been completely changed today. (The new plan is to go out and do freelance design work, shake things up, have a little more flexibility in my hours.) Despite the fortune cookie, everything seems to be coming apart. And yet I can't qualify that statement. Whatever is unfolding is taking its time. Whatever is unfolding is not really identifying itself. So I keep driving into this fear as the night falls earlier and darker. Do these windshield wipers go any faster? Posted earlier this week to my Flickr photostream: I took this picture in the front yard this morning. When we came home last month from Thanksgiving break I noticed this little green stalk in the front yard. It was the wild iris bulbs I took from my mother's garden. I planted those bulbs more than a year ago — and nothing ever happened to them. No blooms of any sort. Now at the beginning of winter they are starting to come alive. Feeling a rare surge of bravery last week, I called my mother and asked her over for dinner on Wednesday. I could sense the hesitation in her voice. We've been dancing around each other for the past few months. She knows something is happening with me, but she doesn't really know what it is, or how to behave around me. She's been particularly careful to give me lots of space, even substituting little pats on the shoulder for her usual warm hugs whenever I see her. So I asked her to come over for dinner, told her there were some things that we needed to talk about. (My eyes filled with tears as I stood there on the phone and told her that we needed to talk — can you imagine what shape I'll be in by the time we actually talk?...) With a start I remembered the summer of 1998, when my younger brother came home from Germany, where he had been on an extended summer visit with his girlfriend and her family. He got off the plane and came out of the gate and we saw that he had bleached his dark brown hair a sultry light blonde, pushed it into spiky points. He looked fantastic — like a European rock star coming home from tour. My mother, God bless her, burst into tears on the spot. I think she thought that her baby boy looked like a street kid. I keep thinking, if Scott's hair made her cry, I might be in real trouble here. There are few feelings in the world as terrible as being the cause of someone else's tears. Especially your mother's. These days, nothing is simple. What I seem to be doing is tearing down the building, then searching for the part of me that is still left after I've sifted through the rubble. I suppose this is what my therapist sagely refers to as disruptive energy. This is why I am taking pictures. That is why I am taking self-portraits. I am looking for my own image. On Sunday mornings I sit on the couch and write in my journal and daydream and draw. I plant bulbs and try to breathe and try to just sit in the pain. I keep practicing. So far it's not getting any easier.