Miraculous Cure

I don’t go to doctors often, but there are days I would gladly ask a doctor to cut out my eyes, if it would keep me from ever looking to anyone else to tell me if what I what I’ve written was worth writing. I’m sure there’d be some residual pain from the surgery, but nothing compared to the death feeling of trying to live for other people’s approval. Unlike the current of creation I enjoy when I forget to listen to my inner critic or care about the world of acceptance and rejection, this swamp promises a journey where every step I take leads me further from the very peace I so crave. Fortunately, no scalpel can remove this cancer. In fact, the disease’s cause and the means of its cure are one and the same. When I am deep in the swamp, this truth feels like a fairytale fiction. Save me your platitudes and good intentions. I need results! I need to know if what I’ve done is any good. At the very least, show me a target that I might hit it.

When I am deep in the swamp, I am sure I see the very target – until I aim, and then it is gone. This is what failure feels like. This is precisely what failure feels like, and if I believe in it, if I believe in the swamp and the target, it is as if I lose the same game every moment of every day. It is unlivable.

But the gymnast’s success on the balance beam depends as much on the discomfort of imbalance as the comfort of balance. How else does she know where her attention should lie? To make a friend of my disease is to hear what it is telling me. Move my attention to balance, back into the current, and I am instantly cured. You could call it miraculous, for gone are all the symptoms, all the pain and uncertainty, having left no scar, only a brief exhalation of relief as I find myself again.