For the most part, I give myself credit for being able to let go of what society or other people hold for me. I'm pretty good at abandoning the script and understanding that my energy flows from creating my own. Anytime I haven't done that, I feel put in a box and I stagnate.
But there are scripts I'm still struggling to abandon in spite of deliberate effort and awareness.
It's less that I'm stuck in a script. It's more like I'm stuck in the universe that the writer of the script put me in, and it's really hard to break out.
Pretend I'm in the Jane Austen universe. I might be writing my own lines, but I'm still in that universe. Like a fish in water, I don't always know I'm in water. My instinctual actions are so ingrained that I don't know I'm doing them until they're already done, and then I'm beating myself up. There wasn't a decision point. It was embodied before it was a choice.
Who the fuck wrote this for me? I would not have chosen it, and yet here I am.
My friend told me to stop aiming for main character energy and aim to be the author. head explodes. Damnnnnnnnnnn. She was right. As the main character I am strutting about in someone else's world.
boom, head has exploded
Okay let's claim that and sit with it. I am the MF author. So now what? How do I start writing when my only context is church gloves and a bonnet gossiping about Darcy?
Because here's what that universe actually says: your worth is contingent on who chooses you. Marriage is rescue. Desire is something that happens to you, not something you act on. I didn't sign up for this cosmology. It got handed to me, and I absorbed it before I had language for it.
It plays out the second I meet someone new or a new opportunity shows up. I get so caught up in the excitement and fantasy of what it could be that I lose myself in the process. Then I'm disappointed when nothing happens on my timeline or in that exact vision. That's not desire. That's fear dressed up as desire. The Jane Austen universe doesn't let you want things for yourself. It lets you hope someone else will want things for you.
But here's where I have to be careful, because two different things have been living in the same body and I keep treating them like one.
I have a badass fucking life I sustain on my own, and I'm happy in it. I'm not afraid of being alone. That part is actually true. But I also genuinely, fundamentally love doing life with someone. Not because I'm scared. Because it's better. That's not a wound. That's just me.
The script says: want partnership because you need saving. The nature says: I want partnership because I love collaboration and it makes everything richer. These behaviors can look identical from the outside. They feel different from the inside, but only once you've learned to tell them apart.
So maybe this is what it means to be the author in someone else's universe: not abandoning every desire that got tangled up in the old cosmology, but learning to tell the difference between what the fear wants and what you actually want. Some of it has to go. Some of it was always yours.
Stay unscripted my loves.
🖤 - EmmyLu