Dead Headed

My life feels deadheaded.

Deadheading (not the fans of the Grateful Dead, of course) is the activity whereby one removes old and withered flower blossoms to allow the new blossoms to take all the energy.  It also creates a more pleasing appearance to the plant:  instead of being littered with a combination of dead and living flowers, one sees only the living ones.

My life now feels covered with dead and living flowers.

Most poignant to me at this moment is writing.  I have had (in my more fantastic moments) the dream of being an author, of making part of or all of my living writing.  I love to do it.  Occasionally I like to believe myself talented at it.  And then I look at what the sales are for the book I recently wrote and finally published - indeed, for all of the books I have written, and realize that truly I am no author.  I might like to write, but am not an author. 

And then I go through the list of things in my life - the activities, the relationships, the dreams and the realities - and suddenly realize that I am not really anything that I would believe myself to be or even wanted to be.  The reality is that - like it or not - I am pretty much a mid-grade paper pusher with many hobbies that will lead me nowhere.  And, given circumstances, all I will ever be is precisely this.

I would love to say that the solution is simply to focus on what I actually do and become really skilled at it.  And maybe I should - certainly everything else I am doing seems to be leading nowhere.  But to do this almost smells of defeat and has no more guarantee than anything else of fulfillment or joy or even just a certain sense of satisfaction of living.

The frightening thing, then, is that I find myself in the position of possibly needing to deadhead my life - and the fear that, if I do this, there will be almost no blooms left.

And the ones that will be left are  the ones I do not want to have.