Coming or Going

Have you ever felt lost or adrift? Feeling as though you don’t quite fit in anywhere? Do you find yourself vacillating? With this brief fictional snapshot, perhaps you will identify. Potentially the sensation of “Coming and Going” is what you are personally feeling right now. Maybe that’s why you’ve landed upon this abridged fiction today. That’s how our protagonist feels… like she is - simultaneously - coming and going. Caught between competing forces. Between schools of thought, differences of opinion, and counteracting people whose stylistic ways aren’t aligning smoothly enough with her own internal ones. More often than not, Daisy Smothers feels like that. In fact, if she’s honest with herself, she feels that she is, in some ironic twist, living up to her surname. She’s feeling smothered. She has the sense of being trapped; caught between the expectations she has held and the reality she presently inhabits. Daisy is stuck - it’s as if nature has caught her. Caught her in a sticky substance that wants to halt her progress, wants to prevent her from any forward life momentum. She feels suspended between coming back home (to the familiar, the comfortable, where our lead character thought she knew who she is/was) and having to - whether be choice or not - leave all of those aspirations behind because of life’s alternate plan. There are many dreams that Daisy has held over her forty-some years and, for a long while she thought of herself as ‘fulfilled,’ ‘accomplished,’ and pointed in an upward trajectory. In the last two years, though, she’s felt different. Restless. Uncertain. At odds with the notion of things she aspired to, because circumstances have thrown pebbles - large proverbial ones - into her path. Each of these varying stones have been small enough individually as to have been overlooked before, but in the past twenty-four months they feel, at least to Daisy, to be multiplying.

The first so-called pebble could actually be considered to be a moderately sized gray rock. This impediment was presented, unbidden, unexpected, and unwanted when Daisy was born. A premature baby, Daisy arrived long before she was finished developing. This, you might imagine, was the start of a cascading, never-ending source of potential pitfalls. Sometimes Daisy feels ensnared by her body’s physical impairments. Barriers that are, at least to some extent, caused by neurological deficits. At other intervals, far more frequently, Daisy feels restricted by anxiety. Not just the average, neurotypical person’s anxieties - though she experiences those as well - but the type of panicky, sudden, overwhelming angst that resembles a tsunami wave. These feelings cause Daisy rushing floods of emotion… Is she coming or going? Is she allowed? - Will she be allowed? - to advance, to more forward, or is she, involuntarily, relegated to living in a perpetual state of fight or flight? Daisy finds that her sense of self, her very identity gets altered, marred, morphed, depending on who she is around. It’s as if with some people she is able to live in a largely-carefree world where her wants, preferences, are taken into full consideration. By stark contrast, at other points, she feels like a small sailing vessel being harshly yanked from place to place. Preference and her own personal plans are dislodged, pushed aside, and she’s required to go along with the whims and constructs being imposed around her. In these ever-shifting and competing parts of her lived reality, Daisy feels angry, emotional, volatile… mostly because, at the base level, there is not very much she can say or do. She’s coming. And, in the same space, she’s also going. Tossed about as a byproduct of fate. The fate and circumstances afforded to her by life. Frequently, and certainly when Daisy feels as if things are running smoothly, with few hiccups shifting her pattern, she’d call herself an optimist. That is what she wants to be. For so many of her early years, Daisy recognized that that is how those she’s around perceive her. They’d remark about her positive attitude, about how she’s ‘always smiling’. Obviously though, this is not fully true. No one is able to maintain an upbeat manner 100% of the time. It’s not a fair or feasible expectation. Of late, however, Daisy Smothers is feeling stuck. Caught, this time in a different way. Neither able to move ahead nor to go backward. She’s present, but her agency is restricted, giving her an uncomfortable sense of being suspended. Suspended between the thought of activities she has wanted to pursue: Motherhood to humans, for instance - though she’ll proudly tell listeners about her sweet, caring, perceptive cat! - Independently buying a home of her own in a locale that is not determined by the societal ‘services’ available to her by state. There are two goals that Daisy pines for. Why do some states have an array of options and choices and resources? Why can’t smaller states in other sections of her vast country be afforded the same? Daisy is intelligent. Her physical limitations don’t impede her intellect. The internal chemistry inside her brain does, to be sure, have some affect on her capacity to perform certain life activities without assistance and/or involvement from folks around her. She’ll be the first to tell you that she has no reasonable shot at finding paid employment as a physicist (obviously!), and Daisy would also enlighten those she’s comfortable with when she’s had too large of a challenge before her - in hope of getting appropriate assistance. Navigating maps or activities involving more than a certain number of steps and/or ‘moving parts’ proves challenging for our main character. It has, she’s fairly certain, to do with the disability bestowed upon her by her premature arrival in this world. At times Daisy might open up and tell others in a frank way about how her bodily limits make her feel. She might, when emotions have been stirred enough, break down and shed tears. The tumble and turning of the waves of ordinary life have begun taking a greater toll on her than in prior seasons. The automatic sense that all will work out, that everything will have a smooth and comfortable resolution has eroded some - thanks to the coming and going. The friction of life’s mundane hurdles have begun to sting more. They have a poking, sticking quality these days. Decades of scrabbling and having to fight extra hard just to maintain her grip with added force has taken a toll. Daisy has things that she wants. She has unmet aspirations that, at some moments propel her onward and upward, but on other occasions, when her existence feels especially burdensome, those ideas and hopes feel to Daisy like an unkind friend. Almost like a person she’s known for years, someone she thought she knew, but who then reveals themselves to be entirely different - practically laughing at or taunting her - by keeping her hopes close enough to be nearly grasped before then yanking those goals backward and out of her reach with a cruel slap, as with an outstretched hand. At moments like these, dejection seeps into Daisy’s mind and she - in yet another form - feels like a worn down, threadbare tire swing being relentlessly shoved into a knotted, scarred tree trunk. Suddenly, Daisy Smothers is tapped on the shoulder by an as-yet-unseen realization. Her life, beautiful and filled with laughter in some distinct sections of time, is better explained with metaphors than actual direct phrases. Perhaps that is because, even if Daisy could bring herself to articulate each competing emotion and heart-hurting disappointment, she’d break down in tears. If that came to the forefront, Daisy fretted that her anguish might never stop… and what then? Would she survive? To be sure, everyone encounters some challenge, strife that put unfortunate disappointments down beside all of us, at various times. Daisy may be naive about some things, yet not to such an extreme as to assume she should be immune to such events. For Daisy there have been - in spite of so many well-meaning good, kindhearted people in her world - milestones that she has not met - ones she WANTS to reach - mothering children, being afforded (quite literally) the opportunity to work a job whose salary is not capped off for her - by virtue of her needing some governmental services - simply as an indirect outcome of her physical disability. Who else, Daisy wants to ask when her mental fatigue feels too overwhelming to be shoved aside yet again, is being limited by an outside agency? Who else, she wants to rail, other than folks like herself with disabilities, is preemptively told how much income they are not only allowed to earn - but also how much is permitted to be saved - even before beginning an employment position? Why is this? Why is it allowed, especially in this day in age? She’d tell you it’s both unfair and archaic - Did you know that the monetary figures used are from the early 1980s? No person without a disability would permit such conditions. (Oh, and - in advance? Please - Leave the notion of ideas like “but people without disabilities don’t receive ‘free money’ out. That argument has, Daisy’s long been acutely aware that small “benefits” can not - and do not - cancel out all that is often kept from being readily available to individuals with less common challenges and bodily restrictions.) With parameters such as these being held in place, where is the incentive? Where is the sense of positive momentum? Coming or going. Going and coming. Suddenly a realization comes into view - life, with its complexities - is perhaps best conveyed in metaphors. Life changes far too quickly and much too eagerly. Yet, even as change is pervasive, there is, in an ironic twist, much that remains the same. Picture this: The ocean is one vast expanse. Even so, that one body of water is made up of countless individual waves. Coming and going. Forever moving and therefore ever-changing, while also remaining the same… coming and going - in its endless pattern of constant change. How’s that for a contradiction?