There’ll be this brief internal argument about which is worse: the sound of the alarm clock screaming or the prospect of leaving a comfortable space
(in my half-awake state, I never remember about the nightmares)
but the screaming wins.
this is what’s going to happen.
I will sit up and get to my feet and move across the room, and I’ll fumble in the dark until I manage to get the clock to stop screaming.
I will seriously consider going back to bed. In thousands of parallel universes, that is exactly what happens.
And in most of those universes, the nightmares are sure to follow. Dreams so vivid I’ll forget that they’re not real. I’ll wake up at eleven with a bad taste in my mouth, a fuzzy feeling in my head, a “you’re-pathetic-and-nobody-likes-you” feeling in my belly.
But when I get out of bed before the sun tomorrow and I feel cold and my stomach hurts a little and I’m groggy and I only want to rest, I’m not going to go back.
I’ll take a gulp of a tall glass of water. I’ll curl up in a chair, with my arms around my knees. I’ll turn on the candles or the Christmas lights, because they’re comforting and I like them. The sun will come up, and the cat will curl up in the crook of an elbow somewhere and purr loudly.
And I’ll reach for a book, and I’ll read and get lost in a world that isn’t real. But I’ll know it isn’t real, and that’s the difference.
And though it’s raining on the roof, I’ll put on jackets and old shoes, and I’ll sneak out of the back door and I’ll walk down to the woods
and though it’s freezing cold and raining I’ll be glowing on the inside
It’s not because I don’t think I can take a photograph that does the subject of the picture justice. I’m damn near positive that I can’t. But that doesn’t usually stop me trying.
I sometimes feel hesitant to take pictures, because there are some moments, some places, that are too sacred for that.
When I stumble on things that feel unreasonably lovely, I feel like I’ve been let in on a secret. Like I’ve been trusted. And I don’t want to share that, not at first.
It’s the same reason you don’t kiss people before you get to know them. If I took a picture of a place like this, before I knew my way around – it might be an aesthetically pleasing picture, but it’d be an empty picture. I’d have an image of a collection generic trees and earth and sky, but they wouldn’t be those trees, that earth, this sky.
The first few times I went to the swamp, I didn’t take any pictures. Now…
I’d found three or four different pathways from the field edge to the water, through a tangle of dense brambles and slick mud and fallen logs. I’ve noticed twisted vines that look suspiciously like poison ivy, and I’m careful not to touch, but I’ve scored myself some raspberry-cane scratches that are still healing. And I’ve left a mess of footprints.
I know which mushrooms grow on what trees, even if I couldn’t tell you what they’re called. I’ve counted shades of moss and lichen, I’ve noticed bones that are picked clean. I’ve heard the birds singing and sung back to them. I’ve scared a group of deer and they’ve scared me.
I’d stood and leaned against a tree trunk as it started hailing, and I’ve rolled up sleeves and pant legs against the heat on Easter Day.
It hasn’t been an especially long time, but it’s been an exceptionally good time, and for right now I feel okay about taking pictures. I feel like that’d be alright with this place, if I there was some way for me to ask.
I was out of the woods at exactly 8:59 this morning, which was cutting it close. But I did manage to take this back with me:
I’ve started to lose track of which days are which.
Was it last Sunday that I went west instead of east and found a swamp and a creek and tiny bones? Which afternoon was it warm enough to tie a rain coat around my waist?
When did I march into Evie’s room and announce that we were going on an adventure? The day we got caught in the rain, and our mother picked us up in the car and brought us home, and we made cocoa…
When did I walk six miles in the rain? Wednesday, I think. I remember that I listened to Bruce Springsteen and saw little white flowers and snail shells by the creek bed.
When did I find the pickup truck in the woods on the other side of the field? Was that the same day that I lay flat on my back and looked up through the tree branches and then tried to climb a maple tree and fell and sprained my dignity when nobody was watching? I can’t remember.
I know for certain that it was Friday when I got up at sunrise and went trespassing. In the snow. And it was beautiful. I agree with Aldo Leopold about the posted signs.
Clarification: I have a problem because there is a deep, dark chasm where my confidence should be. I have a lack-of-confidence, and that is a problem because it creates unnecessary stress in my life. One of the manifestations of that stress was the accidental gap year.
I have a lack-of-confidence problem, and I am mostly not sure what to do about it.
This evening, I curled up at the foot of my sister’s bed and asked if she could be a support and she sighed and asked me what was up and I said “I have a lack-of-confidence problem” and she said “SAME” which surprised me because she is the strongest, sassiest, most passionate and comfortable-in-her-own-skin woman that I have ever met in my life. She told me to put on an exterior persona that makes me seem more confident than I actually am, and I laughed because I’m so utterly helpless at pretending to be something I’m not. I am almost sure that the most effective mask I wear is my quiet social-awkwardness.
When I told my sister that I was worried about acting too confident, coming across as too sure of myself, too secure… it was her turn to laugh at me.
“I think you’re safe,” she tells me.
Between the two of us, the best coping mechanism we could come up with in a fifteen minute conversation was essentially “shout positive-sounding things into the void where the confidence should be and listen to the echos and pretend.”
I wonder what it feels like, pretending…
If I had a confident voice, what would I say?
“I have a void where my confidence should be. You know what else I have?
I have a math degree.
I have a math degree because I really, really wanted a math degree.
I have a math degree because working through an algebra problem is one of life’s simple pleasures, for me. It has been for a long time.
I have a math degree because I wanted to push myself outside of my comfort zone in my first two years of college. I wanted to take on something challenging so that I would be pushed into learning new coping skills, discovering new limits inside of myself. I want to be learning and growing, always.
I have a math degree because I went to what seems like hundreds of hours of math lecture. I showed up and took notes and asked questions – lots of questions – and I put in the time outside of class to try to make sense of what was going on. I focused my energy on something and made progress.
I have a math degree because I was curious, and interested, and I wanted to truly understand.
I have a math degree because I wanted to have enough understanding to support students who needed help, because I have empathy and compassion for feeling full of math anxiety and stressed and I have empathy and compassion for folks who are not sure what to do.
I have a math degree because I got an A in every math class that I took in college except for discrete and that was an A- and that’s because I did not do my homework all semester because it seemed easy and I needed to focus on other things that were also important
I have a math degree because I was able to admit that I needed help. I have a math degree because I swallowed a lot of pride.
I have a math degree because I learned how to make mistakes, and not understand, and still not understand, and be some kind of comfortable with that lack of understanding until I had enough understanding to feel competent.
I have a math degree because I am exceptionally stubborn. I was stubborn enough to find endurance, and perseverance, and strength in moments when I was at my most confused and vulnerable. I have a math degree because I was committed to getting through to the end of those two years.
I have a math degree because I have integrity. I asked for help, but I also tried very hard to honor the expectation that the work that I did, and completed, and handed in, was my own work and a fair representation of my own level of understanding.
I have a math degree because I can recognize patterns, and apply abstract concepts to different situations, and ask questions and think through the best thing to try next, and because I …”
Fuck, this is hard.
“I’m smart. I’m not-not intelligent. I am intelligent. I have a good brain.
I have a math degree because I am intelligent.”
Right now –
I am having a confidence problem.
There’s something that I’m not completely understanding, about – me. About my strengths and weaknesses, about where I belong, and what to do and how to foster the skills that I do have. About what I know, and how best to share it. About the kind of person that I want to be.
Not completely understanding is making me extremely uncomfortable.
And yet somehow – I have been uncomfortable with not understanding so many times before that I – at the very least, I understand.
Someday, sometime, I hope that I have grown enough that I know how to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable – comfortable with not understanding.
It was raining, but it wasn’t cold. The ground was soaked, but not too muddy for waking in old shoes.
I can’t tell you exactly where I was, this afternoon, before dinner. I wasn’t lost – the backwoods are small, and I usually have a halfway decent sense of direction. But if I told you where I’d been, then I’d be admitting to breaking the law. Technically. There may or may not have been posted signs that clearly read “NO TRESPASSING- Violators Will Be Prosecuted,” and I may or may not have seen them. So I think it’s better if I don’t tell you.
It’s probably in my best interest to tell you that I definitely did not go exploring in the woods beyond the fields, on the hill at the end of our own little lane.
Because it isn’t our lane. It doesn’t belong to us. We just walk there, like the people who lived in our big drafty farmhouse before us. We’ve walked there almost every day for twenty years, and nobody else ever does. But it isn’t our lane, and the fields aren’t our fields, and the woods are not our woods.
So unfortunately, I can’t describe to you the lovely place that I didn’t discover today because I wasn’t there.
Or anywhere.
but just say for a moment that I *had* stumbled across something
in the woods beyond the fields
in the rain, as I was
slipping down a gentle slope
with a blanket of dead leaves and tangled undergrowth
picking my way carefully between young saplings and rotting stumps and fallen trees
What if there had been something. A greener patch of ground off in the distance; pools of still water between patches of just slightly higher ground. It wasn’t, of course, but if it had been, it would have been almost like a maze. An overgrown, tricky, unpredictable labyrinth – tread carefully. Mind your step, and don’t get lost. If you can see reflections of the sky in the path ahead, jump across them.
but if you slip, it’s only water, after all
If I’d been there, in such a place, I’m sure I would have heard the peepers singing, and the low, insistent humming of the wind, the clattering of branches blown together high above.
But I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t have heard them.
I couldn’t have.
Which won’t help you to understand why my old shoes are soaked through, or why my coat and hat needed hanging up to dry, or why there are mysterious splattering of mud around the ankles of the leggings I’d pulled on that morning
An uneventful hour of walking down the lane and back again, alone, can’t quite explain the fae behind her eyes
I suppose if it was there all the time, it wouldn’t be half as special.
