Scenes from a Life: Potential {9/9}

If you ask what she fears most in this life, she'll answer without hesitation: Failing to fulfill her potential.

She is certain there is a capacity for more she is not living. It's not that she doesn't work hard or enjoy life. It's that she can feel from the centre of her being that there is purpose on this Earth she has not yet achieved.

She believes her calling is to write, that it is possible for her to reach people — move them, grow them, challenge them, change them — with her words. But she works in publishing and knows the odds. They're tough. She's already had two book proposals rejected. And yet the prospect of not writing is more frightening to her than trying and never succeeding. 

She also believes she was meant to love deeply and in a particular way, and have that rare love returned. Why else would her heart be so vast? Why else would it ache so profoundly with no outlet for what it has to give? She's not sure she can bear being rejected again. But neither can she believe that she is unworthy.

There seems only one thing to do: Keep writing and keep loving. There are days when doing either, or both, feels as if it will break her. But is there a choice?

Writing is a compulsion (loving, too, really). She couldn't contain it if she tried. Even if no one reads it. Even if it's never published. It's simply what she's built to do.

As for loving, well. That story's been told here. She forces herself to keep faith that her authentic match exists. Meanwhile, there are two sayings she wants to believe are true. The first: "You did not waste your love ever." She hopes not. She hopes anyone who has received her affection feels their life is better for it in some way.

The second: "If good things are not happening to you, perhaps it is because you are the good thing that had to happen to someone else." At a time when she was laid very low, a friend sent this to her. Reading it still chokes her up. He did not want her for himself. If the pain of that never goes away, she will dwell in the idea that she was a temporary light he needed in a darkness. 

So. Keep writing. Try to keep loving. And see what happens.

Soundtrack: M83, "Wait"