To Win(or not to lose?)

I don’t play to win. My only motivation seems to be to survive for another day. I don’t have a long view of what is possible anymore. Everything beyond the thing that I must do today feels out of reach.

I know this approach ultimately leads to loss. But maybe things won’t fall apart today. Maybe something big will happen in my favor. Maybe something will fall in my lap. Maybe my harvest will come in even though I planted nothing. Hope has been my strategy.

I’ve had a hand-to-mouth orientation that has been hard to break. Even if that orientation was inherited, I have reinforced it through a lifetime of weak decisions. I do just enough to get through the day. Then I feel exhausted, afraid, and unwilling to push forward. Shelter is the only reward I seek.

I know what it feels like to go months without shelter; to wander the streets of a dangerous city after every place you can be has closed its doors for the night. I know what it is like to ride buses and trains to the end of the line to get a little sleep and then wake up and have a normal day.

Now, once I have secured that precious gift for the day, I bask in the fleeting sense of relief that, for one more night, I can rest my head.

I am a prisoner of a destructive cycle. And as stressful as it is, I keep myself in precarious circumstances by whatever means of self-sabotage I can contrive. It is familiar. And while I am preoccupied with the business of basic survival, I squander my sense of aspiration and possibility.

I have been unwilling to admit that the things I was most afraid to lose, I have already lost. I have chased the ghosts of wasted time and wasted opportunity. And in my grief for all that I could have been, I am blind to what I still might be.

I am undeclared, halted by fear. Not the fear of finding myself on the streets, but the fear of the unspeakable exhaustion that accompanies being constantly exposed. I horde rest and solitude the way a hungry person hordes food, not knowing when and how the next meal will come. I am compelled to take shelter at every possible moment, even though I know that what I require to survive is outside.

I can’t “play to win” if I don’t even play. I have chosen to lose by forfeit. By not showing up I take the “L”, but at least I didn’t expose myself; exhaust myself with the effort. This way of thinking has made my life small. Fear has robbed me of the joy of being fully engaged and creating things.

Tomorrow is not promised, and neither is the remainder of today. I see the path I am currently on and I see where it is heading. So I have to choose, today, to face my fear.

The order to Shelter-in-Place has been lifted.