N.K. Murray

Fire that’s kept closest burns most of all.

Shakespeare – The Two Gentlemen of Verona

(Nikki note – I’m starting a series of posts by choosing one letter of the alphabet, and a word beginning with that letter. They won’t be in order, because I clearly prefer chaos, but it’s a great way for me to self-cattle prod to write more.)

Today’s post will be about the letter ‘F’. For those of you who know me, you know I love the letter ‘F’, and words beginning with it. I’m going to go ahead and blame that on my dad – who liberally peppered his speech with derivatives of the F-word from the time I was a wee little one, till he wasn’t here any longer. While I would like to tell you that this blog post is going to be about that F-word, it’s actually another one that I want to talk about.

Fire.

I have always had a bit of a fascination with fire. I think it started with this memory of sitting in the back seat of our family car as my father helped put out a house fire when he was a volunteer with Live Hose. I very distinctly remember the firefighters pulling hose, and their silhouettes in the foreground of this burning home. I remember the smell – not wholly unpleasant, if I’m being honest, but also, filled with a sense of loss.

But the thing about fire is that it needs fuel to burn. It needs something to make it be fire. Any number of things burn. Some things alight easier than others, but are consumed quickly, and the fire ceases to be. Others, like plastic and wet wood, take forever to catch flame, but then have a tendency to stay lit longer than dry kindling.

So why am I mansplaining fire to you?

I’ve spent the last 23 years knowing/believing that I am a highly-educated, intelligent, strongly independent woman who can do any goddamn thing she wants. For the last 22, much of my motivation, my drive, my persistence to do some of the more ambitious things outside of work and school has been fueled by my anger and grief. My raison d’être, as you will. I haven’t had any short supply of anger or grief, as anyone who’s read this site before knows. And, I mostly still believe that I can do anything I want to.

But lately, I am tired. I am fatigued. Fires which burn for long periods of time have moments where they seem to be all but out, and then go on to rage again. Something small fuels them, and they are back to consuming everything. I don’t know if what I’m feeling right now is that latency period, where I’m just looking for something for these hot embers to feed off of, or if my fire has reached the point where it’s destroyed every vestige of fuel it had, and it’s now extinguished.

I don’t know. I don’t know about a lot of things right now, and the one thing I struggle with is a lack of control. I struggle with a lack of a schedule, and even building an artificial one right now that will disappear once I find another job, isn’t feeding my fire. House projects and writing and creative things that used to excite me, are just things I am doing to fill up the vast expanses of time I have on my hands right now. My anger and grief aren’t fueling my fire the way they used to, and I have found myself disillusioned with things that I looked forward to in the past.

Shakespeare wrote in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, that fire that’s closest kept burns most of all. For those who aren’t familiar, two of the main characters, Lucetta and Julia were discussing who is most worthy of the Lucetta’s love. With Lucetta’s reply sparking surprise in Julia, she relays the quote about fire, and sets forth to the reader that secret loves are the most passionate.

And perhaps that’s my problem.

I am nothing if not blunt. I am nothing if not open about my excitements and effusive about the things that I love. In some respects, that’s absolutely a detriment. While I do have a resting bitch face, my poker face isn’t as easily kept when I feel strongly one way or another about something. I don’t know that I have many, if any secret loves. Usually, if I am excited about something, if I love something, those around me know about it. (Both a blessing and a curse of having ADHD I suppose, haha.) I don’t know what FUELS me anymore. It’s not my writing, or you’d all have another book of mine to read/not read, as it were. It’s not cycling, because I just don’t want to spend the requisite time to be excellent at it. It’s not gardening, because once the stuff is planted and mulched, the only thing to do is weed it/water it, until you pull it out in the fall. It’s not reading, because that just feeds my inadequacy demon about why I am not writing and/or can’t write as well as (insert author here). It’s not any number of things. I’m still curious. I still seek out the things that interest me. But none of them hold that interest for very long.

So how do you fuel a fire when it’s consumed everything within you and there’s nothing left? How do I fuel not just the fire that I have to do the daily things that make up a life, but find that secret love, that secret passion that feeds my soul? I’ve done all of the volunteering, I’ve done all of the giving of myself and of my skills and talent, and while I wish that would fill up my emotional well, and feed my desire to keep doing it, instead, it just feels like another person who wants something from me and isn’t happy with what I was able to give. There are times I feel like an addict who still craves the rush of the drug, without wanting or needing the drug anymore.

And that’s the crux of the start of this alphabet series. My F-word right now is Fire. Finding out how to refuel it, without burning everything down around me and inside of me. Finding out how to find something that I love, without putting everything that I am into it, so that when it’s gone (because it’s a when, not an if), it doesn’t leave me with the smoking remnants of what it once was.

I will leave you with this – for every one of these blog posts that you read, that you comment on, that you tell me that you understand, that you sign up to get even before I post it to one of the socials, consider those matches to the ashes you see before you. One might not do much, but if you toss a box of them on a fire that appears to be out, sometimes it’s just the thing that was needed to start it back up.