Marilyn Monroe

Life is lived in gulps when you’re creative, when you’re beautiful, when you’re smart, when you’re born very poor and a female. Those irreconcilable differences of who and why you even exist, much less the fabric of who you are become inconsolable when alone, so once famous enough you gulp at things in a curious mixture of compelling needs, desires and forbidden fruit.

Filling needs unfillable by your definition of life and understanding. Too little, too late, and unendurable doubt of what is real and true.

So more and more those gulps of life lived on the edge take over, extremes of danger, risk, passion. Either that or through oblivion’s eyes watch as night stretches endlessly out towards the unattainable, cleanly defined by who you are not.

Longing to be just who you are – not who you made yourself become – to be recognized.

*

not who I am

filling nights endless void

all I am not

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Marilyn Monroe (photo above “street art depiction”) is undoubtedly one of the most famous recognizable hollywood actresses in the world today although her stardom and death happened more than a half a century ago.

She is viewed as a major sex symbol and yet Norma Jeane Mortenson (her real name) poor, lonely and indifferently bandied about foster care homes for most of her youth understood, at a very young age, that her best chance at life was to become something other than what she was. The view from her talented and intelligent eyes being that what she was – wasn’t working very well as far as life’s conditions went.

Her last few years are indicative of the emotional trauma within her. Illness, drug problems, depression. And yet today she is a pop and cultural icon, due entirely to the fact of how well she recreated herself – sadly for the wrong reasons – Acceptance! She died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1962! Her legacy lives on.

Thank you for dropping by.

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~ Penny