Someone used the word at dinner: stunted. Blunt and harsh upon my ear hours later.
dis•courage
Insomniac laundry folding
I am a disappointment to my parents. In terms of worldly ambition and achievement, I’m a disappointment to myself, haunted by my own phantoms of expectation. So often anticipation of the thing so far outstrips the thing itself, I’m psychically waylaid. Hobgoblins in the night.
Why have I so undermined my own worldly ambitions, time and again? Poor resource management and frittering only explains so much. There’s something damnably determined in the whole thing.
Sitting there tonight in that gathering of bright-eyed and ambitious whippersnappers tweaked the hell out of me. I grew dreary as a Gorey character, and when my turn came to tout my own achievements from the past year and hopes for the next, I opened my mouth, and toads fell out. They plopped around the tastefully laid table for awhile, until I swallowed them again and beat a hasty retreat back to the hermitage.
I used to be unbearably bright-eyed myself. I was effin’ dewy with earnestness. But I failed to bring it. Because I chose time and again to fail to bring it. Self-saboteur. But for why?