elan vital

Last night at 3am, a realization wrenched me from sleep that encapsulates much of my recent existential unease...

Life-force (or "elan vital" in French) is what pushes people to strive for exemplarity, to make contributions beyond our immediate spheres of influence. Everyone is born with it as a natural mode-of-being.

I was conditioned while growing up to mold this elan vital into a buffer zone against my dad, who constantly provokes until he gets a reaction that keeps him at the center of attention. As a result, I never truly developed the ability to invoke it as necessary, and not just in response to negative pressure. Even though I excelled at school and threw myself into the creative outlets of music and writing, my drive was motored by the anxiety of needing to transcend my domestic condition. Once I left home for the first time to attend graduate school in Los Angeles, the game continued to play itself out, provoked only by phantom presuppositions.

So here I am...six years and counting, feet sinking in the mud. My most recent ex left me awe-stricken and envious with his ability to exactly realize his visions (in writing, in his case) time and again, undeterred by contraindications. Another close friend of mine is similarly situated; I think such people get so used to the seas parting for their every assertion that, after a time, tit becomes difficult for them to walk in other peoples' shoes. But, despite my frustration whenever empathy eludes them, one delectable fact remains: when we communicate, my response is to enact the truths I hold as self-evident. I am a moth at their searchlights, aglow with the ideals that we share.

Now I face a crossroads -- a fledgling teacher in the dissertation phase -- where I have to derive warmth from my own incandescence. Full-time spiritual work beckons me. Without the ability to express our elans vitales openly and to their fullest, we remain prisoners of others' agendas at the expense of dream fulfillment, lulled into half-hearted efforts by that familiar refrain echoing past dampening childhoods as a regular sounding of our public environs: that our quotidian possibilities are limited.