Your feet didn’t reach the pedals, in the driver’s seat. Your legs were too short, back then.
While you’re waiting in the car for your mother to get back from shopping for the groceries, you have a couple of options.
Stare out the window and look at the brands of the cars, the names of the stores around the plaza. Parking lot observations – report back on what you see.
Read a book – from the children’s section of your local library, from a bookstore.
Listen to music on the MP3 player, the collection of music that matches the collection of CD’s.
Write in a diary – a diary that has a combination lock, so that nobody else can read it. Ever. Years later you’ll still remember that combination because it was yours. Not for anyone else.
You’ll start writing in journals without locks, eventually.
Your acquaintances will become characters in a story – a mostly true story.
Make believe.
Sometimes small details change, for the sake of anonymity.
Reading though the pages, years later, you’re not sure if you should believe your own memories or the things you saw fit to write down at the time.
You can’t listen to the radio while you’re waiting in the car because mom took the car keys with her “so you couldn’t drive away and leave her there.”
This also means that there is no air conditioning, even in the summer.
Sometimes she drove home with the windows down.
Never on the expressway.
Wouldn’t want to lose those receipts, my guy. Proof of integrity, or some such thing.
We didn’t have a TV at home.
There was a radio.
You knew all of the the FM radio stations where you could tune in without static.
Amd then – when they took y’alls measurements, for the dresses you wore at her wedding.
If she loves you back, she may or may not eventually call you out of the blue and ask you for a cheeseburger with french fries and a ride home from the ER, sleep on your couch for a couple of nights, use your stove to make ramen noodles and quesedillas, borrow your car to go pick up a buffalo chicken pizza with country sweet sauce from main street in town, ask your roommate for a ride to the store and then turn up at your trailer park with comfortable new button down shirts, phone charging chords, mud boots in your exact size, a sketchbook decorated with paper flowers, eyeliner, nail polish, chocolate ice cream, easter eggs, clean towels, bandanas for your hair, some interesting new vocabulary words, a truly amazing amount of tolerance for the hillbillies with whom you currently reside, and a solemn promise to fight anyone who doesn’t appreciate you properly.
“No dead sisters.”
Pinky swear.
Echos of some things we used to say when we sat in a circle in the various classrooms at the Honors House, just across the street from community college.
“Curiosity killed the cat,
Satisfaction brought it back.”
“Cats have nine lives.”
“Stay curious.”
First read it in a book of Nursery Rhymes – Old Mother Goose, possibly? A copy of which is most likely still on the bookshelf, back at the house.
“You’re trying to kidnap what I’ve rightfully stolen”
&
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
At home – there was astrology, astronomy, tarot, there was the gem & mineral show, there was a renaissance festival (that was the summer I had a fever of 104° and a badly infected eye and I didn’t want to eat anything other than apples and cheese for weeks at a time, I was fifteen) there was a cottage by a lake, there were kayaks, there was Tolkien and Arthurian Legend and the Harry Potter books and movies, there was a trilogy called His Dark Materials, there was everything Marvel, there was A Series of Unfortunate Events and Anne of Green Gables, there was The Daring Book for Girls, there were markers and crayons and pencils and stacks of blank white 8.5″ x 11″ printer paper for doodling, there was a YouTuber called Vi Hart, there was a radio (100.5 FM, 101.3 FM, 93.3 FM), there was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle, there was a library and a playground, there were years of guitar lessons, there were walks by the Erie canal, there were visits to Lake Ontario and the yinyard at Seneca Lake, there was a map of the Finger Lakes on the wall in the kitchen, there were stacks of CDs (Alison Krauss) and later there was an MP3 player (John Hiatt, Mary Chapin Carpenter) there was a movie about geese called Fly Away Home, there was the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Shrek, It’s A Wonderful Life, Scrooge. There were library books by Stephen King, Dean Koontz. The Princess Bride. Bicycles. There were christmas trees. There was a music festival in Trumansburg.
There were pretty rocks in the dirt road across from the house, there was “You Look Like Your Mother” over and over again until I went to a salon for the first time and cut off all my hair so that everyone would stop saying that to me, there were grandparents in a nursing home that smelled like ammonia, there was a bird feeder and binoculars and there was a book about how to identify the birds, there was a park with magnolias and lilacs and steep hills and there was a reservoir.
There was a public market, and once a year there would be a free concert series – band on the bricks, I think it was called. Crowded.
This is the first day of spring, according to the calendars. I went outside to check and see if this seems right – it does.
Walked along the beach at Hemlock Lake & drank the closest thing I can find to Apfelschorle on this side of the Atlantic.
Appreciated the sound of waves crashing on the shore. Found a place to sit for a while and listen. Skipped rocks. Collected driftwood – as evidence for my future self that I was actually here and not dreaming.
In this weather, at this time of the day, at this time of year, I feel safe walking alone. This is a safe place to cry where nobody will hear me. There’s nothing to smoke to explain away the redness in my eyes. That’s okay.
I don’t want to try to explain why I’m crying. The easy thing, the half-honest thing, would be to blame it on whichever personality and their assorted bag of skin and bones happens to seem interesting at this time.
I think it’s something else.
Sitting in the car for a minute.
Will drive home soon, listen to the radio.
🍃
There’s this exchange between two characters that I’ve been thinking about a lot, recently. Can’t remember where it’s from –
I stand in front of the mirror on the rag rug in the room upstairs. I stand on the crumbled sidewalk with the daffodils and broken glass. I stand on a trail in the woods. I stand on a bridge. I stand at the window. I stand in the back yard and look up at the sky. I stand at the edge of the lake in the rain. I stand at the railing of the Gazebo and look downat the fish.
She’s not your dad, she just listens to you when you talk and still remembers the stories you told her about the books you checked out of the library in your parents’ hometown, the books you read cover to cover when you were *probably* old enough to be reading those.
And then she promptly went and read all the same books, because she wanted you to think she was cool.
Sushi for dinner, followed by chocolate ice cream.
Wearing a caribeaner on the belt loop of my blue jeans, so as not to lose my keys.
I need a haircut.
Went back to the old Waldorf homeschooling cooperative situation, to watch children performing in a talent show. A young girl plays guitar and sings into a microphone, on stage –
“where have all the flowers gone, flowers gone, flowers gone…“
Spaghetti with tomato sauce and parmesan, for dinner. Snacking on pretzels.
I am comforted by an unexpected phone call from a college friend.
We discuss recipes for various pasta dishes, we talk about spoilers for an anime we both enjoy (My Hero Academia), we remember some of the moments we shared with our philosophy professors that made us laugh – like that time she was camped out in the philosophy department playing a video game called Stardew Valley and the chairman walked in and immediately had so many questions, many of which he ultimately decided not to ask, I think.
It’s good to hear her voice.
At this point, I am mostly just checking in on people to make sure they’re still alive.
Yes I will be the strange little adopted stray cat nobody asked for – the quiet skittish one who doesn’t like strangers but eventually puts her trust in the ones who put in the most effort
Yes I will sneak into your house without knocking first and use the kitchen to make bread
Yes I’ll share my favorite shows
Yes I will sit beside you and play video games while you play an entirely different video game like two feet away from me and yes we can share a bag of candy and you can have the variety with coconuts and almonds and I’ll take the kind with chocolate and peanut butter and it works out
Yes I will go swimming in the nearest available body of water even when the water is freezing yes we can skip rocks
Yes I will lay outside on a blanket and look up at the stars, yes there will be campfire smoke
Yes we can do puzzles and play cards
Yes I will climb trees and walk the trails in the woods
Yes I will help you with your algebra homework, I am better at this than you are because you keep getting distracted by the shapes of the letters, you dumbass
Yes I will listen to a podcast or an audiobook or the same album over and over again until we know all the words and yes we can doodle in the margins of a notebook
Yes you can borrow my books and look at the pictures
Yes.
You are not the only person who has ever had a meltdown in a café when their dog diesand nobody is sure how to honor the dead and there are no words to talk about it.
You are not the only person who stopped speaking and slammed doorsand threw tantrums and pointed fingers when life got to be too much.
You are not the only person who needed to escape, when nothing felt safe.
when I’m upset, I probably need to take a shower, eat a snack, drink water, and step outside in the quiet and stillness for a moment to breathe. look up at the stars.
make soup, make bread.
I may also need a distraction – something to do with my hands. I crochet a ball of yarn into a flat square, then unravel again.
I need to walk in solitude several times a walk.
it’s helpful to leave home for long enough to drive into town – sing along to the radio, park behind the funeral home. I often pick up snacks at the convenience store.
when I can’t sleep, I turn on an audiobook or a podcast, light a candle, fold laundry, play a video game, read a book.
when I’m upset, I need to remember to do these things.
I am not afraid of dogs, though I have been bitten by dogs, in my lifetime. I still have the scars, although they are fading. No, I will not show you. No, I will not tell you which dogs.
I am not afraid of cold water. I’ll jump into cold water, feet first.
I’m a little afraid of being trapped under the ice.
I am not afraid of mononucleosis, nor am I afraid of lyme disease.
I am not afraid of being burned and stung by bleach, by poison ivy, by nettles, by hot wax, by mosquitoes. I am not afraid of smoke in my lungs. I’m not afraid of mice, or rats. I am not afraid of mud or ice between my toes.
I am not afraid of growth, or of fading away to nothing, of not quite fitting into my clothes.
I am not afraid of being hungry, or thirsty.
I am not afraid of pain.
I’m not afraid of blood. I have bled every month since I was eleven. Heavily. In the early years, there was no pain medication, because pain medication was Bad For You.
I am not afraid of being perceived, of being seen, of being known.
I am not afraid of men. Men are easy to tame.
I am not afraid of women. Women are brilliant.
I’m not afraid of children. Children are honest, even when they “don’t get it.”
I’m not afraid of anyone.
I’m not afraid to grow old, to lose my sight, my hearing, my teeth, or my bones. I am not afraid to wrinkle. I am not afraid to be buried. I am not afraid to burn.
I am not afraid of dying, of going to sleep for the last time.
I’ve been cleaning out my bedroom in the attic. I found a box filled with the journals and composition notebooks in which I have been writing since I was a kid.
There are enough notebooks here to fill several shelves on my bookshelf.
My handwriting has changed a few times over the years. I notice the influence from the handwriting of other people that I used to imitate, the way the shapes of the letters change when I’m distracted, tired, rushing, peaceful, upset.
I don’t always write to preserve memories. I nearly always write to escape.
A predictable side effect of writing to escape is a *mostly* accurate record of several years of my life, occasionally interrupted by notes from classes I’ve taken in high school and college.
I used to read the things that I wrote a long time ago and cringe, feel embarrassed.
I randomly select an old notebook, let the pages fall open.
Still the same voice.
I read letters from my past selves with much less unkind judgement than I used to.
Red – blood. poppies from The Wizard of Oz. small paper flowers, for some reason associated with veterans day.Ruby. Cranberries.Roses. Ginger hair. Courage. Red headed woodpecker. Christmas. Candy cane stripes. Hot sauce. Do not proceed. Pomegranate.Lipstick. Ripe apple skin.Tomato.
Yellow – olive oil. Sunlight in the evening. Melted cheese on a pizza. Spotlight on stage. Dim lamp light in the kitchen before the sunrise. Clouds at sunrise and sunset. Dandelions. Bananas. Bees. Hornets. Beeswax. Moon. Lemon – sour, brightens flavor of any dish. Popcorn butter.Sesame seeds.
Green – leaves on trees in the summer and spring. Grass. Emeralds. The Emerald city, also from The Wizard of Oz. Hazel eyes. Dandelion leaves. Ireland. Plantain. Ivy growing up the side of a brick wall. Snap peas. Peppermint. Unripe apples. Broccoli. Lettuce. Wasabi.Cucumber. Frogs. Mermaids.Nettle burns.
Blue – sky on a clear day in the summer. Lake water, from a distance. Pebbles. Forget me nots (flowers). Blue jays. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Bright blue eyes.” Fuzzy mold on dry bread. Dragonfly.
Grey – rocks! Storm clouds. Cold water. Ice. Blade of a sword. Silver.Fading light in winter. Cutlery. Stone statues.Mice. Cats.
Purple – blueberries. itchy wool scarf that belonged to my mother. Amethyst. Iris flowers. Purple deadnettle blossoms. Royalty. Expensive. Snails. Purple cabbage. Red onion.
Brown – chocolate. Dirt. Hair. Coffee. Polished wooden floor. Cats. Some mushrooms. Chocolate oatmeal cake – family specific recipe. Melanin. Dark skin. Dark eyes. Dark hair. Seed pods in winter. Steak seared in a pan. Chestnuts. Earth. Labrador. Pond water. Sourdough bread. Dominant. Knitting needles. Chickpeas.Cinnamon. Nutmeg. Chopped wood, for burning. Toads.
Black – chess pieces (plays second). King James Bible? Robes. Rock & roll music. Leather. Dark. Night, away from the city. Motorcycle.Campfire smoke. All my favorite shirts.Soy sauce.
White – Yarrow. Clean bones. Death. Blank page with blinking curser. Wedding dresses. Onions. Potatoes. Winter. Pearls. Cold. Florescent. Easily stained. “Wash separately from red.” Waterfall. White noise. Ripe apple flesh.Queen Elizabeth.
One way to cope with death is to pretend like the dead do not matter to you, have never mattered to you. One way to cope with the empty space the dead leave in your life is to make yourself believe that you’re relieved that they have gone.
“Ah yes, it’s so much nicer here without a dog who is dying.”
For a fraction of a second, this rings true. Then there is a white-hot flash of remorse.
Loss is part of living. Grief is part of loss. Sometimes grief involves kicking and screaming and hating the world, for a minute.
I suspect that I am thinking this way because the alternative hurts. The alternative is that she did matter, and sometimes things that matter don’t last.
She had the audacity to be born, to live for a while, and then stop being alive when she couldn’t go on living.
She brought you joy and also made you tired. She gave you strength and also demanded strength from you. She kept you company when you needed someone to keep you company and sometimes she also made you want to be alone. She was a source of comfort and also annoyance.
She didn’t need much, not really, but you were her whole entire world.
She could not have gone on existing without you. She was exactly what you needed, way back when. She was more than you could carry on your own. She was so much more than you bargained for, when you agreed to be her caretaker. She was a contract you could not break. She was one of a kind. She never did anything to hurt anyone, not on purpose. She was innocent. Her existence was easy, uncomplicated, straightforward. Hers was not the perfect life it could have been, maybe, but it was mostly a comfortable life, and that was enough.
Making people feel like there is something wrong with them and you are the only one who can make them feel whole and safe and comfortable again is far and away one of the easiest ways to make them do whatever you want.
This trick doesn’t work on people who have never in their whole lives felt like anyone else needed them to be anything other than exactly what they are, in order to belong, in order to be welcome, in order to be worth caring about.
Let’s call these people gods, because – even if they do exist, I’ve never met one before.
(Define your terms, as I think we used to say in mathematics.)
Gods are loved when they show up to help you. They are also frequently thrown out along with the trash when they are not on your side.
Who is on your side? Do there have to be sides?
If you’re not your own side, fucking reasses.
I learned this (about gods) from my interpretations of other peoples’ interpretations of stories about the mythologies of people from long ago, and far away. The original storytellers are safely located in space and time such that we can’t actually go and ask them what they think, because they no longer exist. They probably wouldn’t give me a straight answer anyway.
Once you have this kind of power over another living being – once you have pointed out some perceived flaw that needs correcting – you can probably use that power to help them.
You can also use that power to make them help you with the things that you want, which is useful when you’re the kind of person who needs help and can’t/won’t ask for it because needing help is a thing to be ashamed of.
What kinds of things do people want? What do they need help with?
The basics!
People want some combination of things like water, food, company, solitude, sex, drugs, rock & roll, somewhere to become clean, warmth, cold, relief, time alone, laughter, some god damn peace and quiet, to be able to think, to be able to stop thinking, conversations, distractions, focus, kisses, hugs, something to read, something to do with their hands (knitting), distance from things they find revolting, distraction from pain, something beautiful to admire and appreciate, something they don’t like so they can feel better about themselves when they think “ah yes at least I’m not in any way associated with This Kind Of Thing,” secrets exchanged and confided, secrets carried to the grave.
Noticing/remembering small details about people, guessing right and being lucky – that gives you an edge.
If you make a mistake with this power, or if you are careless, even if you are perfect given everything you happen to think you know but you’re wrong anyway because you are human and you can’t know everything
you can absolutely hurt them, and your connections to them, in ways that are beyond difficult or sometimes impossible to repair. And it will be as much your fault for abusing the power they trusted you with as it’ll be their fault for trusting you with that power.
So if we’re going to deal out blame, if that’s on the table now – maybe this is how it works. I don’t know. This is what seems true, to me, right now.
Don’t be careless, and don’t assume you are right, because you might not be.
Pull myself up by my bootstraps?
What bootstraps.
I would rather walk barefoot over the snow. I would rather nurse wounds from a thousand badly infected cuts. I would rather run up a mountain on a badly twisted ankle.
I quite literally did that, once. I was eighteen. Junior varsity track team. It hurt like hell and the pain made me want to explode and I’ve never recovered. Spirituality.
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
I do have boots! They’re several years old. A little worn out, but they’re comfortable and I love them dearly.
New boots are uncomfortable and stiff and also expensive.
If I’m going to wear any boots at all, you had better believe that I’m going to wear them with style.
Go to sleep, they tell me. You’re not doing well. You’re seeing things that aren’t there. You’re not acting like yourself. This is out of character for you. Just get some rest.You’re rambling. You’re not making any sense.
And the unspoken thing: shut up shut up shut UP...
I haven’t eaten enough food in days, because the shapes and colors and textures bother me. I’m not sleeping much – when I do sleep, I’m crashing sometime around dawn, sleeping until late afternoon.
I miss the sunlight. It’s so cold.
Somehow, today, there’s a burst of energy for cleaning. I’m giving away most of my favorite clothes because I don’t like the colors right now. They smell too much like dirty laundry, and it makes me nauseous, so I wash them in the sink with vinegar and soap. In something like a daze, I separate my clothes into two piles – one pile of clothes to keep, one pile to give away. Right now the pile of things to give away is bigger.
I create a new wardrobe from what’s left. Articles of clothing we’ve collected over time. Black and grey and white, mostly. Sometimes a little navy blue, or cranberry. I still haven’t decided about the dark greens or the dark purples.
This moment feels important. Identity formation situation going on.
There’s an closet in my sister’s room, which has been sitting there unused and empty since she left. I use this space to hang up shirts and jackets, sorted and arranged in order on a spectrum from light to dark.
Always used to share clothes with everyone we knew. Shared with the children of the friends of my parents. Worn in hand me downs. Soft and comfortable, falling apart a little.
My hands and feet are numb and cold. My skin feels dry. My joints feel stiff.
You thought you made a mistake, when you helped create a world for another human being.
Maybe you did, but that’s okay.
It’s alright here.
In a drawer in the vanity in the attic of the house there is an old cigar box. It was a gift from a friend of my dad’s, around the time my grandmother died.
In the cigar box, there’s a collection of small tangible items with sentimental value. Things that I borrowed, things that I took without asking, things that were given to me in exchange for something else, things that were lost.
These were the things that I held onto for twenty three and a half years of life on this earth because I couldn’t face the possibility of giving them up. I also couldn’t look and understand what I was seeing.
When you are ready, open the box and look inside and remember what was important.
I know how another person is going to respond to the things I do and say, before I do or say anything.
I know what other people are thinking and feeling, even if they never tell me… in body language or in stories or in words.
It feels so real, inside my head…
It seems so real that unless I am careful, I don’t even wonder if I might be wrong about things.
I am so sure of myself that I don’t even bother to ask you how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. I don’t give you a chance to speak for yourself, and so I never have a chance to hear what you would say.
And this would be fine if I actually knew what you were thinking, but I don’t.
Not everybody thinks in the same way that I do, and so unless I listen to the way that you think, I am always going to be missing something.
Since I already know what’s going to happen, and I know it isn’t going to end well, I’ll just… bend space and time and matter around me to make damn sure that a sad future never comes true.
And this would be fine, too, if I could actually see into the future. That would be fucking useful.
Except that I can’t. I can’t know what is going to happen before it does.
I am usually wrong about things, even and especially when they make perfect sense inside my head. The inside of my head is hilariously devoid of context. My perceptions are distorted, and they’re always going to be.
I can’t know what is going to happen before it does.
I know this. Because even when I put everything I have into the abortion of sad endings, they usually happen anyway… even if they don’t happen in the way I expect. Sometimes one sad ending happens precisely because I was trying to stop a different one from coming true.
And so… I cannot read your mind, I cannot predict the future and I cannot predict how you are going to respond to the things I do and say.
And so I missing something, I am always missing something, unless I am able to bring myself to talk to other people. And that’s hard for me to do.
I am learning that I’m not a telepathic precog, but I am learning that the hard way.
For fuck’s sake, stay true to yourself and don’t pretend to be somebody else, because otherwise what is the point.
For fuck’s sake, don’t lie and pretend like you don’t care for somebody when you do. If you lie well enough, there’s a chance they might actually believe you.
And for fuck’s sake, kid, give the people around you a little credit. Let them surprise you with their kindness, especially when you don’t see it coming.
Listen to that feeling, the one that isn’t sure that you’re right to be worried. Listen well. And then go looking for those answers, when you’re ready.
There is so much potential for joy, and laughter, and understanding, and love. And it’s worth the risk of a sad ending to imagine that they might be there, even when you can’t see them.
It’s a Tuesday in September and I hope it’s a good stretch of time.
My husband in Stardew Valley just went out of his way to rescue an injured frog on a rainy day. Now we have an injured frog haven terrarium situation on the floor in our living room.
I realize he isn’t real, he barely exists as a concept, but also – holy mother of god I love that man so much. Courting him was tricky because he rarely gets off his computer and leaves the cozy room in his mother’s basement, but it was worth the wait.
I did have a baby with the aforementioned husband, in the game. Impulsive decision, not a choice I would make in real life.
I then proceeded to run away to Ginger Island for several months – growing a whole field of ancient fruit seeds in the sand, to make into wine, to sell to make money to support my growing family, obviously, and this decision has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my house back in the valley was starting to feel too crowded and I wanted time to be alone.
Logged off for a while because real life got distracting. Upon logging back into that save, several months later, I discovered a small and helpless (pixelated) child sleeping in a crib in an upstairs room in my house that I’dcompletely forgotten about.
Nobody should let me anywhere near children. Apparently I’m liable to lose track of the fact that they exist, let alone probably need attention in order to thrive.
In Stardew Valley there is an option to change your mind about having a family. If you’re so inclined, you may visit a witch who lives in the mountains who can help you turn your children into doves and watch them fly away.
There’s a dark and twisted part of my brain that thinks this is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things I’ve ever heard.
–
Meanwhile, in real life, my parents’ dog is dying. Her body is shutting down.
She usually gets up and greets my dad at the door when he comes home. This evening she – well, she couldn’t, because her legs no longer work and she can’t move on her own. She was just laying there on her bed, crying until my dad came over to see her so she didn’t have to keep trying to get up.
She’s had a good life.
My younger sister moved away and took her cat, and now the cat that used to hide with me in my room is enjoying having the whole house to herself, which is lovely for her, but I’m sleeping alone without the familiar weight and warmth of a cat curled up beside my head.
I used to take that for granted, and now it is missing. I can’t remember the last time I felt this angry at the universe. I am bitter, irritable. My chest hurts. The house I’ve grown up in feels unnaturally quiet and still.
I’ve been escaping from conscious awareness of my surroundings, carefully avoiding the present moment. I know this isn’t especially healthy in principle but under the circumstances – maybe it doesn’t have to be. Not now.
Holding onto perspective is important and right now I’m having trouble finding a way.
Him: ahhh okay there’s this Very Cool Thing that I’ve been enjoying recently and it’s so fascinating and beautiful and neat and heartbreakingly sad and a little strange but like in the best way possible tbh and god I just need to talk to someone about this for like three hours
Her: hmm? Sorry I wasn’t listening, let’s talk about something else instead
–
Me: ahhh that is a Very Cool Thing! Tell me about it. It’s kind of like that other cool thing you talked about for three hours like, what, two years ago? that I still remember, in detail, because I was fucking paying attention
–
Her: you spend so much time online with The Boys and I just – well, sometimes feel like they’re more important to you than I am
Him: of course you’re important to me! I wish you would understand that
Her: but like I need to be the most important thing
Him: well – if that’s what it takes, then sure. okay. you are
Her: prove it, get offline and spend time with meee, I need you
Him: hey, guys, I’m so sorry, can’t be online tonight, she needs me
The Boys: what, again?! I mean yeah okay to be fair we totally get it but also every time? Smh. We miss you, bud.
Him: I miss you guys, too. I do.
–
Her: I love you for proving to me that I’m important to you
Him: I love you, too
Her: I know
she did not know. she had never known, not really, not with anyone. it was *extremely painful all the time,* the not knowing. it made her feel like her chest was going to explode. this didn’t have anything to do with him. old wound hadn’t healed properly. he did the best he could, but it hurt so much to keep telling her she was loved, and to know that deep down she didn’t believe that was real. like trying to carry water in a bucket with a crack in the side, until his joints ached and his head hurt and the inside of his mouth was dry for lack of anything to drink, until one day
–
Her: it’s me or the video games
Him: fine! I guess it’s the video games
Her: fine
–
[grief & separation]
–
Me: be online in five, see you then
Him: wait, really ?
–
Me: hey, so – you know if it ever comes down to a choice between them and me, I want you to pick them, right? Maybe not like every time, but you know what I mean. You need to have a life outside of any one person. That’s important. Otherwise – eventually, maybe not right away, but someday – you’d start to resent me, and that would make you unhappy, and I don’t want to see you unhappy, I don’t want you to resent me. That would be missing the point. I would so much rather have a good time whenever we have time together than be unhappy but with you all the time. I have my own life, my own world to keep me busy that – no offense – doesn’t have anything to do with you. It hasn’t always been that way, but – look, I’ve been trying to grow.
Him: you have no idea how much it means to me to hear you say that
–
The Boys: *making vaguely gross but satisfying homoerotic noises at one another over the line*
I will fight to the edge of the brink and back to protect you from the harshness that never stops whirling inside my head. I’m so frightened of losing this fight.
I’d much rather the harshness under my skin hurt me, instead, because I know exactly how it feels to stand there and take harshness that should not have been directed at me and I don’t want to do that to anyone else.
I don’t know if the harshness on the inside of my head is ever going to go away, not completely. I do my best to soften the blows whenever possible. I try to turn them inwards.
In the long run, I wonder if this might be a mistake.
I wish – not for harshness directed inwards as opposed to outwards, but for the perspective that allows me to call the harshness out on its bullshit when I’m tempted to believe in things that aren’t true.
When the harshness has something important to tell me, because part of me thinks it must be there for a reason – I wish for discernment, for the ability to hear to whatever it’s trying to say and then decide if I think it’s worth believing.
I don’t know if I can do anything at all to protect the versions of me that exist within the minds of other people from this harshness. Trusting that they’re safe is hard for me to do.
This is outside of my control, I think, and I think maybe I need to let that one go more often.
I walk alone over uneven ground, I drink water, I remember to make myself eat and sleep, I get my homework done, I listen to music, I read books, I write it out.
“Once I have a Bachelor’s degree, that means I’m free to go.This scares the everliving daylights out of me.”
I’ve been so overwhelmed about this chapter ending that I haven’t stopped to think about what happens next.
What does life look like, after I get through the end of this chapter? What do I want my life to look like?
I want time to write. I want time to write that doesn’t feel like stolen time, time that I *should* have been be spending on other things. I want to go out into the world and notice everything as hard as possible, remember everything I’ve ever noticed, remember every important thing that anyone has ever said to me, and everything they’ve ever written down. And then I want to go home and write about it.
I want time to read. I’ve been steadily collecting books and book recommendations for years. I want to wake up in the morning and drink water and sit by a window and escape into a book, to stare at small lines of text on a page and let that trick my imagination into half-believing in things that may or may not be real, let that make me feel something. Same could be said for games, and shows, and movies, and any other medium for exchanging stories.
I want to go for walks, long walks on the pavement in the city or down by the water or way back on a network of trails in the woods. Alone or with company.
I want to stay connected to people that I like; I want to spend time listening to them talk about the things they like to think about. I want to share food, exchange stories and music, lay on the floor and stare at the ceiling and talk about anything for hours. Forehead kisses, from a select few. Comfortably shared silence, collectively noticing other things that are cool. Company. Doesn’t even have to be the human kind. Sometimes I want to be held, for a moment.
I feel a nagging pressure to find a way to support myself, in case I ever need to be able to do that. I want to be able to afford to eat, to have somewhere safe to sleep, to have access to healthcare and to transportation, cell service… without worrying.
I want to rest when I’m tired, make neat things whenever I want to do that, work on the things that need doing whenever I have the energy to work.
Homemade bread. Privacy. A garden? Time spent in the woods, or swimming in the water. Art, games, books, stories. Soft clothes and comfy blankets. Hot showers. Music.
There are probably other things, but this’ll do for right now.
Not me sitting up in bed at 3:30 in the morning because a friend sent me an unsettlingly trippy/psychedelic video about consciousness of consciousness of consciousness etc., stretching on and on and on forever – as it relates to a theory from philosophy of mind, which made me think of a concept
from Terry Pratchett
in Witches Abroad
(paraphrased)
Never get between two mirrors, as you might lose track of what’s real and what’s reflection, and get lost trying to find yourself. The protagonist’s trick was knowing full well she didn’t need to go looking for herself because she was right fucking there. Always had been. The whole time.
this thing I’ve been doing, where I keep letting myself believe that I am hopelessly insecure and that makes me repulsive, and this is written in stone – this isn’t helpful.
the part of me that believes this story isn’t often welcome at the table, because the rest of me doesn’t like them. but also, “there’s some powerful medicine hidden in that pain.”
maybe it’s difficult for the people around me who (a) love me and want to see me feel safe on the inside of my own head and (b) sometimes look at me and wonder if they’re seeing me or if they’re seeing a reflection of themselves, because sometimes – not all the time, because that doesn’t make sense, but once in a while, yeah – they’re not sure if they can tell the difference.
so I don’t know if this story that I tell myself is ever going to go away, or if it’s real or not real, or if it has to be. stories persist in being loud.
but I do know I can write, and that’s something. I’ve been told my eyes are pretty.
Incidentally, this one particular infuriating mess of a human being keeps threatening not to come home for Christmas. She moved out again this October. She isn’t here to be pissed off at me for stealing her all her food and clothes like the careless self indulgent bastard that I am, and I’m upset about it.
Her life, her specific life, E’s life – is beautiful and chaotic and a little scary and it is also well and truly her own life, right now, for maybe the first time, and it’s good to watch her work through that. I’m proud of who she’s becoming.
Need to find some good instrumental study music. Song lyrics always make me think of other things, which is fun but distracting, and right now I’m working my way through a large pile of homework which is much too late already.
I was sitting in the airport, the day I got home from Europe. I looked up and saw my little sister for the first time in months. The last time I’d seen her, her hair had been bright red – now the color was fading. She walked towards me, and she was whole and alive and real and solid and she was happy that I was home. She gave me a hug and she just held me for a minute. I was so completely fucking spent.
She was the reason I came home. I ran away from home because I didn’t know what else to do.
She told me that she wanted me to come home by Thanksgiving. She knew I was struggling, she warned me not to spend too much time looking into the dark because – well, because “it can be damaging even to look.” She warned me and I didn’t listen. I went anyway, I was a long way from home and I didn’t take care of myself and I ended up lost, I was emotionally devastated, I was so sick.
I could do for her what I could not do for myself. She told me that she loved me and that she wanted me to come home and so I did. I found the strength. I bought a return ticket. I went home. It was fucking miserable the entire time, but I did it. I did it for her, I did it for everyone else that I loved.
There were no shortcuts on the way back. It was a long journey. It took a lot out of me. It will always take a lot out of me, I think. I was so tired.
But I got there, and she was there, and she just held me, and she said “welcome back,” and in that moment I felt like everything was going to be alright again. And I then tried to piece myself back together. One day at a time.
One foot in front of the other in front of the other.
Walking through the streets of Toronto’s financial district, in the chill of December, in the dark.
We remembered we had free will, in the middle of finals week, and ran away to Canada for the evening. It was just stupid and impulsive enough to be properly exciting. Saw the opportunity to make a memory to cherish, and went for it.
We’d gotten turned around – unreliable GPS signal on the wrong side of an imaginary line. This side of the imaginary line has public transportation, cold pavement, tall buildings with glass windows, and kilometers. It’s cold.
A group of big burly men with scraggly beards walk past us on the sidewalk, as we’re standing still, looking at the phone. I suspect that if we’d needed help we totally could have asked them. Also, the next time it happened I put myself between her and them without thinking about it. I knew it would help her feel safe.
“Rule number one of traveling alone?” I asked.
She blinked.
“Always look like you know what you’re doing.”
“Exactly.”
We got moving, even though we didn’t know which way was the right way to go.
I was wearing a black leather jacket and pants, plus a knit beanie and worn out flat-soled sneakers. This kept me warm and made me feel unusually confident. I borrowed the leather on a temporary basis, then gave it back at the end of the evening. In that moment, I felt like I could shapeshift.
She spent hours in front of a mirror, before it was time to go, experimenting with outfits – couldn’t decide, brought a large tote bag full of options. Eventually settled on a blue silk skirt, sheer sparkly top, blazer, necklace made from a pocketwatch.
We changed in a parking garage, running a little late. Hastily applied makeup. She knew what she was doing – I did not, but I made do, faking my way through it. Dark grey eyeshadow, dark purple lipstick, needed help with the countouring, careful self control around the sparkly highlighter. Accidentally smudged the eyeliner, decided that was fine.
The stadium smelled like cigarette smoke. The acoustics were good and the lighting was pretty. The music was loud and the band had solid rhythm and shamelessly problematic energy in the best way possible – the kind you can get away with when your actions speak louder than your words. Or so I’ve heard.
Beside me, the woman who grew up too fast got to relax into being a fangirl for the leader of the band, tall dark handsome british stringbean, greasy punk smoking a blunt and drinking directly from the bottle of wine on stage, making off color jokes like he’s trying to get himself canceled and knows that everyone in that room is already too charmed to care, making out with various members of the band – plus the occasional willing participant from the audience. Performance art as social commentary, an angst-fueled warning, like – holy shit, devil may actually care.
Personally, I could not stop staring at the bass player.
But mostly I was dancing, dancing alone in the middle of a crowd, sneakers sliding over the smooth cement floor at the edge of that stadium tier.
I needed that.
We talked about bribing the security guards with cookies, smuggling her into the front row – all for a chance to be kissed. It could have worked. She’s drop dead gorgeous, on the outside. Conventionally flawless. Always in vogue. Objectively a knockout.
It’s come at a steep price – I believe that the pressure to live up to a potential she did not ask for has nearly destroyed her, more than once. She’s not alone. Superficial beauty too often seems like an open invitation to take whatever we want, without asking. I think a further disadvantage of looking like this is that she’s never quite sure if anyone likes her for who she is, or if they’re using her for selfish reasons.
I did my best to create a safe space for her to shine, for her own sake. This is something I am capable of giving, freely, or at least for the low low price of truly excellent company and conversation on occasional adventures.
I watch her back, take some selfies, make sure she has enough water to drink, eat homemade chocolate chip cookies in the car on the way back, ask her to text me when she gets home safe.
Don’t ever settle, I tell her.
Thank you for going on an adventure with me.
“you are not a burden” always feels bullshitty to me.
how can anyone honestly mean that? they must be saying it just to be nice, not because it’s true.
in my experience, almost everything is a burden. all the time. I am so tired.
if other people’s experiences are like mine, then everything must be heavy for them too. saying someone isn’t a burden doesn’t make sense.
a little closer to true would be this: you /are/ a burden, because everything is a burden to me, because I am exhausted. but you are part of my everything. you are the burden I am strong enough to carry, right now, the one I decided to carry. you were willing/able to let me pick you up.
Frodo and Sam at the end of that one movie –
“I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.”
I am scared that one day I won’t be strong enough to carry anyone, or anything.
I’m scared of letting everyone down.
I am scared of being forced to choose what to let go, and what to grieve, because I can only carry so many things, because I am tired. because I live in a world where each of us is trying to carry everything alone, because we are told that not being able to carry everything alone is wrong and bad.
and the moment I try to carry too much, even just a little too much, everything falls apart.
of course we are tired.
we are so tired we don’t even have the energy to nurture the connections which would help us to not have to carry everything alone anymore.
🍂🥀
I am so used to believing that we have to carry everything alone, and that it’s somehow bad or wrong to live in any other way.
receiving support that I want, that maybe I need – it feels like that is somehow something to be ashamed of.
I don’t know exactly how to adjust to believing in anything different.
but I suspect there is another way, maybe, a way we can help each other with the carrying of the everything. not just two people, not just a family, but a vast network. mycelium. support passed from one person to another.
I do have one idea, which is to try.
to notice the places where there is already support, where there has always been support, even when I can’t see it. to notice the places where I am already there to take care of other people, even when I can’t see that either.
I’m nearly there. I’ve been running for a long time.
It’s like – ha, flashback to high school. Women’s junior varsity track team, lol. Distance running.
Not sportsball – no hand eye coordination required. Only competing against previous versions of me.
I made it to sectionals. Was expected to come in dead last, 16th out of 16.
It’s like the last steps of that last 800 meters, in the spring.
Spirted that first lap – gave it everything I had. Lead the pack of 15 other people who were all much faster than me. Nobody passed me for two hundred meters.
Like Gimli – “we dwarves are wasted on cross country. Very dangerous over short distances.”
Then people kept passing me, as my legs were burning and going numb. I felt sick. Dragged my cold dead corpse around the bend and around the track again and over the finish line.
I didn’t finish last. I just made it to the end, and I made it there more quickly than I’d ever previously managed.
In the future, maybe, I will slow down and find a more sustainable pace. Maybe if I hadn’t pushed so hard in the beginning I wouldn’t be falling apart a little, in this moment.
Maybe if I hadn’t pushed so hard in the beginning I wouldn’t be where I am now.
Michael told me not to compare the might have beens. He’s right.
Yes, love can be difficult. Connecting to other people is frequently difficult work.
Still, it shouldn’t feel like working a nine to five shift, eight days a week, coming home and collapsing into bed without brushing your teeth, scrolling through your phone until morning.
It’s more like braiding garlic. You have to be able to sit still, keep your hands steady, concentrate on the pattern, notice the details, keep going when a sharp edge knicks the corner of your thumb.
Making something beautiful takes effort and patience and time, and also – none of those things have to be unpleasant. If they are, it is okay to stop – maybe not even forever, either, just for a while. Setting things down for a minute when you’re tired doesn’t mean you’ll never come back.
It’s like knitting, or working through a difficult math problem, or learning the words to a song, or making hot cocoa, or writing a story.
Sometimes you drop a stitch off a needle, drop a negative sign somewhere as you’re solving for unknowns in an equation. Sometimes you get the words wrong or sing off key or don’t know what happens next, or you do know what happens next but you don’t know how to say it. Sometimes you burn the cocoa, or it boils over and spills out all over the stove.
But you practice, and you learn how, and eventually you don’t have to think about it as much as you used to.
Each song, each recipe, each piece, each problem, each story teaches you something, changes you a little, gives you something to think about.
And you end up with something pretty lovely to show for your troubles, in the end.
Wasn’t expecting that. I’ve been failing that class this whole semester, mostly because I’ve not been turning anything in.
Whole class just got our grades back. Pretty sure there was a steep curve.
I might just pass this class, after all.
Damn.
If I pass, that means I’ll finally have a Bachelors degree. This scares the everliving daylights out of me.
Once I have a Bachelors degree, that means I’m free to go.
(I’ve always been free to go, but getting to the end of this degree was a somewhat arbitrary promise I made to myself a long time ago, so I’ve tried to honor that promise. It’s a promise that has given me a reason to keep going, over and over again, when I didn’t want to. Also – staying in academia is a lovely way to meet devastatingly cool people to be around, and to justify not working in stupidly horrible environments that make my nervous system feel like it’s going to explode. Self preservation & the cautious pursuit of joy).
A chapter of my life will come to an end.
Again.
One after the other.
If I don’t want to have to do homework for the rest of my life, after this,
then technically – I don’t have to.
No papers to throw myself into writing perfectly, or to try to pull together from nothing at the last minute, no deadlines to run from but never truly escape from because I care too much, no classes where none of my classmates show up, or worse, they show up with nothing to say. None of that.
It’ll be just – me, the deep roots I keep sending down into the earth that keep me grounded, and the gypsie soul that wants to wander to the edges of the world. I am pulled in two opposite directions at the exact same time.
I could leave everything behind and go on an adventure.
I could run away.
I could go anywhere.
What else is out there?
I am curious.
At the exact same time, for the second or third time in a handful of years, I don’t want to leave this god damned little town in the middle of anywhere.
I’ve grown fond of this place. I didn’t mean for that to happen – last time leaving hurt like hell – but it did happen, and now I’m stuck with the consequences.
It’s not really the town, is it – places do have sentimental value, for me, but the people here are so much more important.
I don’t know why.
Most of them are the absolute worst.
Something T.R. said, earlier – it’s remarkable that one of the greatest triumphs of the human experience is our ability to change, and grow, and adapt to almost any set of surroundings, anywhere, and we’re so amazingly good at this, and also we hate change more than anything else in the world. We dig our heels in. We don’t want to go. We like things as they are.
Which is why – I have absolutely thought about failing this philosophy class on purpose, so that I don’t have to leave.
Maybe if life is a book, the next chapter can’t begin until the last one’s come to a close. Maybe there are other people, other places, other ideas, other experiences that I need to have before I run out of time. I can’t shake the feeling that this is true. It’s been true before.
Still – if my life is a book, then the people I’ve met in this place are some of my favorite characters. I’m not sure if I want to keep reading if they’re not going to be there in the pages that follow. And the thing about life is that I can’t go back and re-read the story, and even if we come together again, much later on – it’ll never be precisely the same.
I have to remember this part of the story for longer than I lived it, and that’s hard for me.
Maybe there’s nothing wrong with staying where I am. Because, when you get right down to it, I can probably find ways to be content anywhere.
Nothing ever stays the same, anyway.
When you stay in one place for a long time, you get to experience the way it changes. The people who come and go, or the way that the people who’ve stayed change and grow and become, and you can keep getting to know them as they’re changing, and continue to be amazed every day.
Maybe I’ve always thought of separation inside out and backwards.
There’s an old Jewish saying, for when somebody dies:
“May their memory be a blessing.”
Maybe everyone you’ve ever known, and everywhere you’ve ever been, and everything you’ve ever lived through becomes a part of who you are. It becomes the footprint you leave on the world. It’s the shape of your legacy, the shape of the time you spent living. Beads on a necklace.
Maybe when you leave you take them with you, in a way.
And maybe – god damn it, this is the hardest part.
Maybe it’s possible to leave somewhere, and to wander all the way to the ends of the earth, and to know that there’ll still be one or two people to come home to, over and over again. Even after all that time.
If you stay long enough to get to know people, then you have to love them even when they aren’t the perfect version of themselves they were in your head before you knew them.
If there’s hope that you aren’t going to lose everyone, hope that you’ll have the honor of creating a bond that isn’t as fleeting and superficial as some of the others…
that means there’s work to do, and it’s going to be difficult.
You have to show up for the people when they persist in being flawed. You have to watch them change, not be the same anymore, watch them make mistakes and look foolish and learn from that, watch them love people who aren’t you, watch them be there for you, watch them not be there for you when you need them, watch them have stupidly bad days when they can’t find the answer even when the answer is right fucking there, watch them fall apart and pull themselves together again.
(and feel so fucking proud, when they do. Every time.)
If there’s hope – there is also the unbearable knowledge that they’re watching you, too. You have to trust them not to let you down, and accept that they’re absolutely going to let you down, over and over again, and you still have to believe in them.
If there’s hope then it’s safe to say there will be joy, and laughter, and so many fucking lovely memories, and the more of those you allow yourself to have the worse it’s going to hurt in the end.
Because, one day, one of you is going to die first. And you might be the one standing over a grave saying the kind of goodbye that you can’t ever come back from. You might be the last one left to carry all the memories, alone, with nowhere to send all the love that you used to be able to send back to them.
And that’s a privilege
Because it means they won’t have to go on in a world without the both of you in it.
So I’m thinking there’s no way to win. Whether I stay home or leave and go exploring, things will still change. There’ll still be no way to go back to the ways things were.
Whether I pass this last class in philosophy or fail it on purpose, everything is still going to end.
And there’s no point in giving up now.
Went running after dark. No headlamp, just old shoes and a puffy jacket and wireless earbuds playing music by the 1975, over and over again.
Retraced the old route I used to follow every day when I was fifteen. The country road has since been paved, otherwise it’s the same.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done this.
I’m a little surprised at how easy it is to move quickly over the ground, without hurting my bones, without straining my lungs. Doesn’t hurt like it used to. The air is cold – easier to breathe. I suspect that all the walks up the hill to the cemetery in my college town are helping.
A friend started running again in the summer, in the woods near her family overseas. It’s the only time her thoughts arrive in the right order – when she’s running. Something about footsteps and bilateral stimulation and EMDR and the way our eyes have to track back and forth across uneven ground to make sure we don’t stumble and fall.
She told me that running earlier today may or may not have fixed her entire life, so I decided to follow her example.
For me it’s just good to be outside, moving, listening to music. The rumination spirals settle down, imagination shifts towards nicer things. Memories of good moments with people who matter to me.
In those moments I feel safe from the harshness which so often whirls inside my head. I find it easier to trust that the perceptions of me which exist within the minds of other people are safe, too, from that same variety of harshness.
“You are not broken. You are young and you are learning how to live.“
Lay down on the floor of the living room until I get my breath back – dog rests her head on my belly, like a pillow, parents are sitting on the couch watching TV – then afterwards there is a hot shower and a sandwich and a glass of water and a book to read, a comfortable bed, friends still exchanging thoughts, and a cat who wants attention. And there is writing.
Since it’s still November – I am greatful for all of those things.
Sending love to Colorado.
Am I loved?
This is all I ever think about.
I’m scared that the answer won’t always be “yes.”
I am also frightened that it will be.
If I am loved
there’s so much to be done
to live up to the honor of being considered good enough –
to treat the ones who love me properly, to not take them for granted, to tell them I am glad that they are here.
I’m afraid that I won’t get this right.
Im afraid that the answer to the question,
“Am I loved?”
was a resounding yes
until I fumbled, because I turned out not to be perfect
and the answer changed.
I want to stop thinking so much about that question:
“Am I loved?”
(stop dwelling on the awful possibility that I’m not – no, nevermind – because I am so, so far away from being perfect)
Walking to the coffee shop on main street for a small coffee, then over to the 7/11 on the corner for a cheese danish and taquitos.
Weather is cold today. The sky’s getting dark early – sun’s hanging low.
Within moments of walking between buildings on campus, my hands are painfully numb. Harsh air stings in my lungs. Glasses fog up when I go outside, then again when I get myself back inside out of the cold.
I’m surrounded by people, and I want to be alone. I retreat to the relative comfort of an empty room.
Being alone used to bother me, a little. Now it makes me feel better to get away.
I remember a book that I read a couple of years ago, a book about a girl who sends love out into the world without asking for anything back. She said,
“It’s a game I play. It’s a good game because I can’t lose.”
Worth a try, anyhow.
I send love to the married couple looking unhappy as they trudge inside from the harsh weather.
I send love to that one group of undergraduate stoners who always disagree with the professor in philosophy class, even when they haven’t done the reading.
I send love to the cashier a the 7/11, looking haggard but still trying to smile to every customer in the line as it grows.
I send love to the solitary gardener, always tending to the edges of the flower beds.
I send love to the boy who’s talking to somebody new and can’t help but be excited about it even though he knows that it’s an unrequited crush.
To the professor who has to drive home for two hours in a snow storm.
To whoever is making the sheet pizza for a tiny gathering of friends.
I hope there’s a hot shower at the end of your stupidly long shift at work. I hope your favorite song is playing on the radio on the way home.
Anxiety, depression, difficulty regulating attention and time, difficulty communicating – all these things get worse with the changing of the seasons.
Today the inside of my head feels life a hellscape.
The bleak stories that I tell myself feel unequivocally real. They might not be.
For better or worse, I’m somewhat intelligent. If I try to use reason to argue against my own rumination spirals, try to convince myself that they’re wrong… there’s a fair chance the rumination spirals are going to win, because the mind that creates them is mine, and my mind is good at arguing. Attempts to comfort myself by challenging the truth of my own perceptions often fail.
It is useful to remember that the stories that I tell myself are directly related to my physiological state.
I feel better equipped to do something about my own discomfort when I think about myself as a functional system exchanging materials with the environment.
I’m a beautifully sophisticated arrangement of ashes and dust, a finely tuned machine whose existence was contingent on billions of years of random happenstance. So are you, kid.
I will never be done appreciating how neat that is.
Maybe I’m remarkably small and insignificant, and none of the stories I tell myself matter.
Maybe I’m a feeling thing that thinks, not a thinking thing that feels. If I can care for whatever is wrong with my body, I can also start to unravel whatever is going on in my head.
I feel so much better when I wash my hair, drink water, take my meds, sleep, cuddle with my cat, go for a walk, eat good food, slow down enough to breathe.
This is complicated by executive dysfunction.
Often, I know exactly what I need to do to take care of myself and feel better. I want to do the necessary tasks, but I get stuck in a place where my nervous system is frozen and I can’t move.
No matter how many times I tell myself… hey, come on, you need to sleep… I still get stuck not sleeping.
So I find people who struggle with the same things that I do and tell them to get enough sleep instead.
The nights are getting long. The sunlight is fading.
If you are trying to show the world a version of you that is stronger than you feel right now, please know you’re not alone. I think you’d be surprised by how many of us are right there with you.
If you’re struggling to keep up, feeling numb and frozen and jittery and impossibly tired, you are not the only one. This time of year our bodies want to curl into a ball in the shelter of soft earth. This is the time for rest, for preparing to muddle through the winter.
The seasons of academia, for example, do not align with the rhythms of the weather. No wonder it’s harder than usual right now. Be patient with yourself. There will be lovely moments again soon.
If you’re pretending to be okay when you aren’t, not really – I’ve got you. I may not be able to give you the time and energy and space I would need in order to comfort you properly, but I can give you one thing –
Rest here for a minute. Stop scrolling through this hellscape, even just for long enough go take a deep breath – in through your nose, out through your mouth. Relax your shoulders.
This morning I put mason jars with my mother’s black raspberry jam and maple syrup and spaghetti sauce in my backpack. Then I biked down the hill and around the corner, ditched the bike at the bottom of the driveway, walked past the dogwood saplings, past the front garden overgrown with milkweed husks and fading wildflowers. Took a deep breath. Knocked on the red front door and sat on the steps for a minute.
An old friend opens the door. He’s just barely awake, even though it’s about five minutes to noon. Up all night gaming with The Boys, most likely. He’s smiling.
It’s more or less the same smile that it used to be. Almost nine years ago, now. In some ways he hasn’t changed much in the intervening decade. In other ways he has grown. He’s no longer the small and vulnerable child who used to fall asleep with his legs stretched across the center aisle at the back of the schoolbus, the child that a younger version of me instinctively needed to watch over and care for, the child who could make me laugh until I couldn’t breathe without thinking about it.
It’s the same smile that danced across the face of the old friend sitting across from me at the pizza place – the one across from the waterfall on main street in town. We used to go for months without talking to each other, then each remember the other existed for long enough to reach out and say hello, and then it was always a good time.
A little while ago I reached out a hand to steady him, or maybe I was the one who needed steadying, and he took it, and neither of us wanted to let go.
I’ve been knitting a sweater. Carefully. In the last four years he is one of the very few people worth thinking of knitting a sweater for.
This morning we sat side by side on the front porch, eating bread and jam and visiting with the bees, talking about nothing in particular, talking about bad movies and the gaps in the trees.
The air is cold. This is the last day on earth for a loved one, and some of the family has gone to say goodbye. He’s stayed home with the dogs, with The Boys at the other end of the line, and with me. The last time he saw her, they got their toenails painted. Shades of sparkly pink. For fun. As you do. A twentysomething year old man, and a woman much older than dirt.
He asks me if I’ll help him paint his nails in those same colors, again. In her honor.
When people are dying, the thing to do is cook. We made soup – garlic, onions, celery, carrots, potatoes, rice, sausage, parsley, sage, rosemary, not enough time, and too much salt. His brother stops at the store for some bread. We sat with the dogs on the back porch in the chilly air and ate large bowls of hot soup and torn off strips of ciabatta.
He learned that she’d passed on when he got back from driving me home, because his family wouldn’t let him let me ride my bike home alone in the dark.
The lady picked a good time to go – the veil is thin, and whatnot. But the reaper must have had his hands full, this time around, because by all accounts she was nothing if not stubborn.
I hope it was a smooth transition to whatever happens next.
A classmate (23) at school finds a bottle of salt in the tiny room in the back of the department, the one with no windows and a microwave.
She’s feeling lightheaded, as though she is going to faint. She makes a show out of slowly pouring a large pile of salt into her tiny palm, grinning, cackling maniacally, nibbling away at the stuff while staring directly into the eyes of whichever innocent bystander happens to be there in her vicinity. Apparently pink Himalayan salt is the best kind, but even the small white cardboard bottle of ionized stuff from the dollar store will do just fine.
She gets up to this kind of nonsense on a regular basis – she claims it’s to help with the low blood sugar but I think it’s also very much about receiving a specific kind of attention. Incredulous/confused/mildly disgusted looks, maybe, but it’s still a surefire way of being perceived.
Some of us have gotten used to her antics; it’s amusing to watch her perform in front of unsuspecting victims.
I’m getting exasperated because the amount of salt she has licked off her fingers in the last few days is becoming ridiculous and borderline unwholesome and I don’t think she actually knows when to stop.
I walk into philosophy of mind and there she is, the center of attention, munching on salt. Everyone is laughing. I look up at the ceiling for a second and request patience from anyone who’s available and willing to oblige.
Without pausing to think, without missing a beat – I snag the bottle of salt off her desk as I walk past on the way to my seat at the back of the room. It’s for her own fucking good, anyhow.
It takes her a second to notice. When she does, her eyes go wide in happy disbelief, her jaw drops, she clambers up out of her seat. Everyone around us is laughing. She lunges towards me and the bottle of salt in my hand. I hold it up out of reach – she is very small – then shove the salt behind my back, spinning around so she can’t snatch it out of my hand. Hasty shuffle backwards out of range, dodge a couple of surprisingly powerful blows, careful footwork so as not to tumble off balance. She tackles me with more force than I am ready for and I do not fall down but it’s a close one. Spin around with the full weight of her personage clinging to my back, trying to keep us from crashing into the rows of desks.
The class looks on, properly entertained. By this time the professor – who was an MMA fighter before switching to philosophy – has surreptitiously left the room, carefully suppressing a laugh for professional reasons. His eyes are smiling.
I let her down carefully and surrender the salt. Her eyes are practically glowing with mischievous glee.
I am exceedingly pleased with myself.
I settle into a seat at my desk in the back, a little out of breath, and class begins soon after.
Here’s an old picture of me crying at the Vincent van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. I’d just read the story about his brother’s unwavering love through his lifelong struggle with mental illness. Until the day he died.
Also, the sunflowers were fucking pretty.
This past weekend some activists in #juststopoil shirts threw tomato soup at one of the paintings from the sunflower series on display at the London National Gallery. This was meant to draw attention to the urgency of taking action to address the climate crisis.
This is a creative & strategic kind of protest, meant to command the focus of public attention. It’s the latest in a long series of similar events – i.e., the Mona Lisa, the man who set himself on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court of the United States, etc..
They asked, “which matters more, art or life?”
Without life, there is nobody left to appreciate art.
John Green wrote somewhere that every species has a temporal range, that out there in the future there will be a kind of headstone for the human race with two dates and a dash in between.
There will be a day when there won’t be anyone left to appreciate all of the things humans created and found lovely. (Including the sunflowers, safe behind glass and back on display.)
That day might come sooner or later. I think that’s going to continue to depend on what each of us is willing & able to do about the situation we face.
Think of the things y’all love that might could be lost. Let that become a reason to find ways to help, to continue to do all the things you may already be doing. Even when it’s hard.
This weekend I am watching over three cats. There is the cuddly one, the skittish one, and the grumpy one. Somewhere there is a to do list, dried swirls of ink on paper telling me that I need to keep working, diligently, or life will continue to spiral further out of control.
And also – my body is telling me that I need to rest. So I’m curled up with an excellent book. Playing music over the speakers in the kitchen. Taking long showers. Wearing warm & fuzzy socks.
Raided the spice cupboard & churched up an affordable frozen pizza with olive oil, paprika, onion powder, garlic salt, basel, thyme. So fucking good.
When I get home for a couple of days of Fall break, there will be a movie marathon of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with one of my oldest friends.
When I was eight years old, I used to think a lot about the U.S.S. Titanic. The ship was supposed to be unsinkable. That reputation gave the passengers and the crew a false sense of security, and they didn’t bring nearly enough lifeboats. The Titanic was damaged by collision with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic.
Because there weren’t enough lifeboats, a lot of people died. Families were separated as men stayed behind and sent the women and children first. Some of the women chose to stay and die with their husbands rather than leave them for a chance to live. Some chose a quick death and jumped overboard, to escape from the horrible prospect of waiting.
Most of the passengers in second and third class, lacking access to the upper decks, were trapped. The water was cold.
Even as the ship was going down, there was a band playing on the deck. As the situation around them got worse, the band might have stopped playing music, but they didn’t. They knew they were going to die, and they spent the last moments of their lives making music for the people who were most likely also in the last moments of their lives.
In the middle of profound injustice, horrible goodbyes and separation, denial of reality, courageous generosity of giving up one’s own life for somebody else, there was music. There was music for as long as the music could go on.
The earth’s biosphere is in the middle of a sixth mass extinction. Some people think we should abandon ship. I worry that there won’t be enough life boats, there is no sure promise of rescue in the cold and dark, and that the lifeboats will only be there for a select few.
The finest people I know are fighting to repair the damage that’s been done, conserve whatever we can, take care of one other as the water is rising. They’re working on this every day.
I guess what I’m trying to say is this. When the ship appears to be sinking, be like the band that stayed behind and never stopped playing music. When the people around you are scared, in denial, losing faith, or just grieving the loss of that feeling that tomorrow was a promise. Stay, and offer whatever comfort you can.
I’m walking back to my car in the commuter parking lot at the bottom of the hill, and there are these two frat bros walking a little ahead of me. I can tell from their clothes and the way that they’re walking that they’re not my kind of people. I’m having a tough day and a tough week and a tough semester and everything feels hopeless and bleak and heavy right now.
Then one of the frat bros takes out his phone and takes a picture of the sky over the soccer stadium. He just. He takes a second to notice how beautiful it is. Just a moment, just a photograph. I look over too and realize it really is beautiful.
I think about how it feels good to notice a stranger noticing something he thinks is pretty, and I feel a tiny bit connected to this person I don’t know. Gratitude that he drew my attention to a beautiful thing. I feel a little better. I tell him thank you, in my head, without words. Telepathic.
And then he turns around and smiles at me, for no reason, and I smile back.
Pretty sure the only way back to a place where I’m not carrying around so much grief and angry resentment is to nurture myself back to life.
Little by little.
How to correct for a dysregulated nervous system (mine, specifically):
Long walks. Preferably over uneven ground. Up the hill to the cemetery, through the weeds on the side of the road. Miles and miles of footsteps, one after the other, until the muscles in my legs are aching and my breath stings, shallow and sharp.
Showers. Waste as much steaming hot water as is necessary. Let the water wash all of the tremors away.
Music. Running Up That Hill, by Kate Bush. All the ’90s emo classics, all the pretty fiddle and banjo ballads with the lovely vocal harmony over the top.
Sweat pants, comfy sweaters, hot cocoa. Blankets. Cats. Tea.
Dressing like an androgynous badass. Unearth all of the best jackets for broader shoulders, pull on the old black boots. Too much highlighter, sparkly gold cheekbones. Altogether too much grease in my hair
Sit up straight. Stand tall. Chin up. Shoulders back. Walk with purpose, carry myself like a monarch even when it hurts
Talking shit about my enemies with some of my oldest friends, the ride-or-dies, getting pizza and chilling in the woods
Observing the extraordinary power of walking away
Reading books so good I can get lost in them
Doubling down on my studies until I understand everything perfectly
A troll showed up to phil club Thursday evening and brought with him an alarming level of intolerance, bigotry, misplaced self-righteousness, fascinating ignorance.
He kept doing that thing where he used big words in order to sound like an intellectual, but he used them incorrectly, and when somebody told him what the big words actually meant, he would just keep using them as though he hadn’t just learned what they meant a moment ago. Lost track of the number of times he said “but that wouldn’t be optimal” or “we have to maximize the utility…”
Somebody implied that we might, like, have obligations to take care of others, and he came out swinging with yes but you can’t force your value system on otherpeople, and I thought oh shit here we go again
I won’t repeat his comments, in part because they were so incoherent that I’m still reeling and partly because you don’t need that energy in your life.
I’ve run into people like him online. I didn’t know they were actually real.
We tried to engage with him respectfully, to a point. We really did. Ill-informed devil’s advocates will always exist in philosophy. I’ve been that person in the past (and felt like an idiot afterwards).
Part of my value system is honoring disagreement. I’m not here to be right, I’m here to understand. He was there for attention.
I don’t fuck around with overconfident bigots with delusions of cishet supremacy, and I’m not going to sit there and listen to a greasy puddle of slime talk shit about like two thirds of the people who matter to me.
He may have crossed a line.
Guest speaker politely told him she wasn’t there to discuss what he wanted to talk about, but he just. He just kept talking. Speaker was clearly upset. I was upset. Everyone was uncomfortable.
I remember realizing I could just leave. I walked out. I was worried that I was going to say or do something I’d regret later. Meeting ended soon after because we weren’t sure what else to do.
He approached me outside the building to try to continue his anti-queer soliloquy. I’m afraid I lost my shit and screamed at him to leave me alone, to get lost. I let him have it. But he kept talking over me, as though I hadn’t spoken. So I walked away for a second time.
As I was leaving I told him it would really maximize the utility of this situation if he would just fuck off.
That felt good. I will be cherishing that memory for a long time.
Friends walked each other home, to be safe.
And then, when I got home – I took a shower and time slipped away from me and I don’t know how long I stood shaking under the water but I remember when the water ran cold. I turned off the tap, wrapped myself in a towel, went into a freeze response.
I couldn’t speak or move or think. My mom found me. I communicated with her about how to help me without words, charades. I used what tools I have. When I thawed out enough to think, the panic set in, the big gasps and the ugly crying.
My nervous system is so badly out of whack.
It will take me so much time and energy to repair what he just did to my ability to focus and sleep peacefully and feel safe and comfortable in my own skin.
Don’t feed the trolls. They’ll only come back for more.
Currently working three days a week at the CIT Help Desk in the basement of one of the buildings on campus. It’s a tiny little concrete cell with a fake plastic plant, no windows, bright florescent lights that buzz all the time, a cheap desk and a chair on wheels that smells like one of my collegues who wears too much cologne.
Nobody ever uses the CIT Help Desk. I can just sit here with my boots on the desk in the first circle of sensory hell and, in theory, get seven consecutive hours worth of homework done.
I do appreciate that there is an all gender bathroom across the hall from me and that I don’t have to interact with anyone beyond v superficial niceties. I have worked in places that were much more demanding on my nervous system.
Still – would deadass give up my first born child for less aggressive lighting right now. I have not yet descended to the level of wearing sunglasses indoors, in the basement, with my boots up on the desk, but I’ve seriously considered it.
I also want to find whoever wears this much cologne and watch him drink it. Under duress.
The things we do for money. Smh.
Since I was about eighteen, I’ve wanted to grow old and settle down in a cabin in the woods and raise chickens. I’ve been thinking about planting a small vegetable garden, drying clothes on a laundry line. I’d like to grow sage. Maybe there’s a creek. There will definitely be stay cats. I want to be able to look up at the stars.
My little sister could have died in a car accident this year, but she didn’t, and now she lives her life in the knowledge that tomorrow is promised to nobody. The family dog occasionally experiences vertigo and can’t get up off the floor. I’ve started to get this dull ache in my joints when it rains. My mother’s hair is salt and pepper grey, and I remember a time when it wasn’t.
I don’t want to wait until I am old.
The plan is to start saving up for the cabin in the woods as soon as possible. I still need to decide where, and how. But I’m going to do it. I’m going to make it happen.
There’s a jar of cash in an undisclosed location, and that’ll do for a start.
I feel awful today.
I think I understand why I feel like this. It’s because I haven’t eaten enough, slept well, walked outside, looked at a tree, slowed down enough to notice that I’m breathing.
I did a couple of things right – meds and therapy – but those two pillars aren’t strong enough on their own to hold up the roof.
When I notice that the anxiety is beginning to spiral, I’ve been trying to respond in the same way I would respond to a child who is crying.
I don’t have to understand exactly why the child is crying, but it is my job to pay attention, be curious, and sit with that discomfort when it feels like the world has shrunk down to the size of one unsettled soul.
Have you eaten enough today? Do you need to sleep? Is somebody being unkind to you? Is that person me?
My sister begins her third decade as a living creature on a planet circling the sun. She rents a cabin in the woods, hangs up tapestries and fairy lights, decorates the place with interesting rocks, invites friends, brings food. She’s got class.
It’s my responsibility to pick up a cake from the bakery. Was only slightly damaged in the drive on the way down.
When I arrive, there is already a rusted Ford parked outside. This is the hippie redneck crowd.
Inside, two of the boys are in a wrestling match on the bottom bunk. One of them is quitting nicotine, and is constantly telling everyone about how smoking is unhealthy and his body is a temple. Moments before, his conviction faltered and he asked to hit his friend’s vape. The friend, who continues to vape all the time, is stalwartly refusing to let him at the damn thing and is currently giving him a lecture on hypocrisy. With his thighs. Physical altercation ensues.
It’s good to see them.
Soon there are more – the slightly feral parkour enthusiast sweetheart, the quiet photographer who likes to go on adventures.
Campfire out back, in the shadow of the trees. A walk – first a steep downhill, soft pine needles. Creeping upstream along the bed of the creek, past the waterfalls, uneven pebbly shore, cracked and moss covered shale, steep crumbling walls of the gorge. Bare feet, cold water, pools much deeper than expected. Silhouettes inside a tunnel. Then back downstream.
The constant and specific auditory impression of a camera taking pictures. Happy awkwardness at the experience of being perceived.
My sister’s hair is short and red. Smoke curls from between her fingers. Easy smile, unfocused gaze, laughter in her eyes. She makes her way back up the hill towards the cabin.
I linger with some of the boys at the bottom of a hill. I need more time among the trees.
They ask me questions about her, as if I would know anything they haven’t already deduced. I can’t unravel the mystery for them. All I can do is provide a hint in the direction of context.
Campfire, again. Some of us leave to pick up pizza. The ones who stay download psychedelic music visualizers, lay our phones side by side, and watch the colors dance.
Fleetwood Mac, Allman Brothers Band, Marc Cohen, Billy Joel.
Munching on pizza, raspberry chocolate birthday cake, leftover lo mein noodles, cookies, churro flavored chips, sour cream & onion flavor, salt & vinegar. Green grapes, cold (best kind). A single shot of halfway decent scotch, because I felt safe there.
Red-orange glow of campfire flames, smoke in the eyes, harvest moonlight behind the trees. Chill of nearly autumn.
Sleeping in a cabin, at the edge of the woods.
Last night was a lovely time.
~
All photo credits in this post go to Ian McNamara.
I’m torn between going into mourning for a true icon, thinking about the absurdity of the monarchy, and just – sitting back and enjoying all the memes.
Yesterday I began my formal training as a library intern with a high-speed orientation on everything and everyone in the library. My favorite moment was learning how to turn the pages of an antique book.
Yesterday I facilitated a discussion about altruism for future generations in philosophy club. A professor was meant to present that day, but he couldn’t be there, so he asked me to take over instead. Learned about the topic as well as I could at the last minute. Absent prof in question usually makes soup to share at the club, so
Yesterday, I made the soup! I know the recipe because I went to his house, once, and asked for it. I used the kitchen in one of the dorms. Brought ingredients and a soup pot and a wooden spoon, borrowed a knife from a friend. I have attempted that recipie about seven times with limited success, but this time I nailed it.
The discussion went exceptionally well. I tried to deflect the intellectual/emotional labor onto other people as much as possible. The art of asking strategic open ended questions will never cease to serve me well.
Yesterday I had like half of a pot of soup left over when the meeting ended after dark. I carried it back to my car and saw some classmates skateboarding, so I asked if they wanted some and they said yes, and then they taught me how to not fall off a skateboard, which was grand.
Yesterday I walked through the graveyard alone, and it was so dark and quiet and peaceful. Not spooky in the slightest. Just – decomposing people at rest.
Yesterday the Buffalo Bills won their first football game of the season. I don’t give a shit about sports, but I was walking through town after dark and the game was on in every bar, every restaurant, every shop window, it was on in the movie theater, it was on a big projected screen behind the climbing gym. When the Bills scored their first touchdown, the whole town cheered, and I could hear the sound of triumph around me in every direction. Driving in to school the next day, the last play of the game is playing on every local radio station.
I don’t give a shit about sports, not really. I have grown up surrounded by people who remained loyal to this tiny local team that was so completely horrible, so consistently lost almost every game for years, that being a Bills fan was synonymous with being a sucker for punishment or rooting for the underdog. It’s *almost* charming.
Today is a low day – emotionally, physically, mentally. Holding myself together with shoelaces. Finding that when I just tell people it’s a bad day and I’m not feeling good, they are sometimes understanding and kind.
Few things in this world can’t be made better by the healing powers of a grilled cheese sandwich on a cold & rainy day. I am convinced that if you add tomato, literally anything is possible.
Because here I am at her kitchen sink, washing plastic dishes in hot water because it’s something that she doesn’t like to do. I listen to her ramble on about a future with the love of her life. We laugh until we can’t breathe over things we won’t remember, later on.
And then I drive home through rainy darkness, listening to an Eric Clapton song on FM radio.
I remember something he said to me, once. We were at a party, and I was standing in the kitchen doing dishes. I told him that one day I would like to teach, and he said:
“I can see you doing that. You would be a good teacher. You know how I can tell you would make a good teacher? Because you’re at somebody else’s apartment, and it is 2 o’clock in the morning, and you are standing there doing the dishes. Nobody asked you to do that.”
Sitting next to him in class, months later, I hand him a fidget cube because I suspect that he might need one.
“Hatred is foolish.”
There’s so little time.
This dog and I are half-sleeping on the comfy bed in the guest bedroom. Nice cool breeze through an open window. For a while, we just sat and looked out at the quiet street and listened to the rain.
I have a fondness for pit bull mixes and their tendency to notice when I’m sad, climb into whatever semblance of lap is available, and politely crush my soul back into my body. It’s nice of them. Considerate.
Thinking about how absconding with other people’s dogs is generally frowned upon.
~
New development:
Have started doing algebra problems to interrupt the thought spirals.
Your mind is a forest, and your thoughts wander through it. If you spend enough time on the same thought, walking back and forth from one place to another, over and over again – your footsteps wear a path through the undergrowth. The more you use the path, the easier it becomes to follow it – for better or worse.
If a path tends to carry you off into places you don’t want to go – consider stepping off the road. Whenever you find your feet retracing the old familiar rut, stop walking. Take a smaller trail, it might not even be a trail proper, just a byway that meanders back into the woods and carries you far away from the highway your feet have worn into the ground.
Making new trails is hard work – you’ll most likely encounter resistance, brambles that snag at your clothes. You’ll want to give up and stay on the path that’s easy and familiar, even if it only ever leads you into haunted and treacherous places. Don’t give up, not yet. At least try.
Some of us have a particular disadvantage because we slept in late on the morning when they handed out the compasses and the maps and the right shoes and clothes for walking and the tools for making new trails. We’re stuck tangled in the raspberry canes, amid the poison ivy rashes and the bug bites and the mud. But hell, the breeze is fine, and the sunlight shining through the leaves above is pretty.
Our minds are like forests, and our thoughts wander through them – sometimes moving with purpose, trying to find some place we used to go back to often, trying to carve out a new trail. Sometimes we’re just walking for the sake of walking, keeping an eye out for neat looking mushrooms, listening to the birds.
Even when we have to crash, or stop and rest because we’re tired and it’s getting dark and the coyotes are singing in the distance, we go on. We get up, brush ourselves down, keep putting one foot in front of the other. One step at a time.
If I’m going to spend hours in the insomniac’s vicious cycle of staring at a screen because I can’t sleep and consequently can’t I sleep because I am staring at a screen, I might as well be writing as opposed to scrolling.
Had a picnic with my parents and my aunt & uncle in the shade under the trees. Goat cheese, crackers, liverwurst, sweet potato chips, cucumber tomato salad, apricot jam. We made a plate for the bees and set it a little distance away. A nice visit.
Kept seeing monarch butterflies. My mother left milkweed growing in the yard.
Old dog wandered off leash, rolled in the grass, sniffed around the edge of the garden, snapped at the bees
Saw what appeared to be a baby bird on the ground under the cherry tree. Seemed healthy, just – still learning to fly? Hope all is good.
Therapy.
Long drive north into the city. Didn’t need a GPS until I was a few blocks away from my destination. I am slowly overcoming my dislike for expressway driving.
Dogsitting for some folks who are out having what is hopefully a good time <3
Went to Schallers and got a garbage plate, since I’m staying in the city where the garbage plate was born. The sauce tasted like cinnamon and allspice. There was a bucket of free pickles for customers to sample, on the counter off to the side.
this might be a tricky one, because I don’t feel good today.
Woke up at six o’clock this morning, got out of bed, stopped to get breakfast on the way to school, took meds, did some reading in the morning. I sat under a tree and looked up at the branches. It was peaceful and it felt good.
The readings were well-written and accessible and I liked them
Ran out of social energy abruptly in the middle of the day and felt much better just sitting alone in the shade, doodling in a notebook. Tight swirls of purple ink.
Someone I don’t know well stood up for me when I wasn’t there in the room, because she correctly deduced that I wasn’t going to do that for myself. Found out about it later and guessed correctly about who it was. Told her thank you.
An awkward but I think sincere apology from a professor turned into a meandering conversation about analytic philosophy. I more than held my own in that conversation. I don’t know if I’ve made a friend, but I think I may have found an interlocutor.
This is a small thing, but today I remembered to eat. Twice.
Everyone who forgives me for the typos in the emails that I only ever find once I’ve hit send
At the end of the day, my cat is here. And the dog. My mom & dad, my little sister.
Once in a while I’ll slow down for long enough to make a list of things I appreciate. Falls under the category of Practices That Are Good For My Brain. Here’s the September 2022 edition:
Been a while since I’ve come back from summer vacation and said hello to folks I haven’t seen in months. There has been warmth, laughter, conversation, and good company. Standing in a circle and talking, smiling across a room when somebody walks in, stopping by to chat or catch up, carefully listening, exchanging inside jokes. Just in these last few days, I have felt so much wholesome love and a connection that feels comfortably solid. I know that it’s bound to be a temporary thing, but I’m so glad to be a part of it.
On a related note: I’ve been accumulating evidence to disprove all the theories my social anxiety brain has been obsessed with for several months, and it’s quieting the fears I’d forgotten might not be true
Laying on my back on the stone wall of the war memorial and looking up at the trees, listening to the wind rustle in the branches
Or looking up at a clear dark sky full of stars at new moon
Fresh sourdough bread, still warm, with olive oil and salt
Walks on the back roads in town, all the way up the hill to the cemetery and then back down again
The existence of a painted staircase, a mural of a waterfall beside a twisting rainbow tree, down in Eureka Falls, Arkansas.
A blue ceramic mug from Wegmans, and the $1 coffee from a gas station convenience store on main street when I need that
A concept called ‘the grammar of animacy’
The hard problem of consciousness & a possible solution called panpsychism which I am still trying to wrap my brain around
Zucchini
A bowl of pears
Bill from the CIT help desk in the basement, who was v understanding when I forgot my shift at work
Maniquins.
One day at a time.
I am halfway through the first page of the first reading for the first class I’ve ever taken in philosophy of mind, and I’m already getting fond.
A friend turned 21! To celebrate, there is party. Outside around the house in the woods.
After a couple months of solitude, that felt like a lot of people. I know most of them – old Waldorf homeschooling cooperative cronies. I still remember everyone as like – 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. It’s been a long time. So weird and lovely to see them grow up.
I helped get a fire going while I was there. Took a while. There is still wood ash in my hair.
There were body paint markers and everybody was doodling all over everybody else. I am doodled.
Some of the guys went out to catch frogs – they would catch them, weigh them, and release them back into the pond. At one point, after dark, the lads came back with a large bucket with several layers of frogs in the bottom. Some of them were bigger than my hands. That was something else.
Got overstimulated, which happens to me at parties even when it’s a good time. Paddled the raft out into the middle of the pond and looked up at the stars. Clear night, good dark sky area. So many suns. I could hear the laughter and the shouts and the Fleetwood Mac blasting out of the speakers, see the fire and the lights on the porch.
There was a frog on the raft with me. We were chillin’.
Went home to sleep because my sister has work tomorrow and I miss my cat but might go back for pancakes in the morning.
Today I finished the first draft of a short story. She’s clocking in at about 25,000 words at the moment. Needs polishing or rewriting in places. Must iron out some of the wrinkles, but this draft is done. I think. As Ray Bradbury put it, somewhere – the story has a skin around it.
Might expand and grow and ramble, might whittle down to a slimmer thing. Not sure.
I’ve never done this before.
I’ve tried writing fiction, have been trying since I was maybe five or six years old. It’s just that I don’t often get to find out how the story ends.
Intentionally keeping things minimalist and formulaic. Fewer characters means I have space to get to know each one of them properly. Playing with ancient and familiar patterns, leaning into the oldest tropes, the epitome of tried and true. Shamelessly borrowing things I like from other stories. Keeping the stakes low – no apocalypses – and the universe grounded in smallness. Details are predominantly implicit.
Then turning around and packing in as much spice, color, spirit, & strangeness as is possible for me. Just for fun.
I think I’m getting fond.
“Have I gone mad?”
“I’m afraid so. You’re entirely Bonkers. But I will tell you a secret: All the best people are.”
~ from Tim Burton’s film adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Last week there was a fancy dress tea party in the woods at a librarian’s farm. We played croquet. There were pastries and cucumber sandwiches. Good company.
Met the cats, goats, turkey boy, chickens, alpacas, carnivorous plants. Also bones, everywhere.
The homestead offered a hammock in the woods when I was tired. When everyone else was leaving I said the goodbyes and then went back to the clearing before leaving. Just to be still, to be alone for a while. It’s a long drive.
They told me to come out to the farm whenever I needed, crash in the woods for a few days. Not even to visit, just to be in the woods.
Which is why I am currently huddled in a tent in the middle of a thunderstorm. Alone. Perfectly content. I appreciate rain-on-tent sounds and cricket noises.
Fennel has been an excellent host while everyone else is away. There if I need anything. I’ve been mostly keeping to myself.
I have needed to escape to the woods for a long time. I hadn’t realized how badly. Being surrounded by trees and mushrooms and insects and dirt and bones and sometimes campfire smoke is fucking potent medicine.
I am still grieving the loss of the tree at home. This is happening on a physiological level that I only have a little experience with. There’s a physical ache in my chest whenever I think about it.
Nights are long. Emotions bubble and froth the way they usually do, except – louder, clearer, cleaner in the aftermath.
During the day, I have the time and attention span to get some writing done. Not the short story, the paper I’ve been putting off all summer. It flows off the keys and onto the page like it’s been waiting patiently this whole time. I needed that.
There is bread, cheese, peanut butter, honey, and bananas. I leave mugs of water in the sun until the water is warm and then add teabags. I am a genius.
Learn how to ground yourself when you’re upset. Breathe a little.
Go lay down in the shade under a tree. Take off your shoes and go barefoot.
Have yourself a good cry. Make tea.
Grilled cheese sandwich.
Hot soup.
Bread.
If it isn’t working, don’t force it. Let things be what they are.
Talk things out if you gotta, if you can.
Take time away. Take a break.
Listen to music. Stories.
Just listen.
Write.
I’m home.
Took most of the last few days to rest. I’ve been feeling under the weather. My brain is foggy and distracted. I’m so tired.
Bleak social anxiety rumination spirals are keeping me up at night. It’s mentally excruciating. Currently avoiding almost everyone. Feeling out of touch and sad.
I have tools to cope with this and I know it will pass, it’s just uncomfortable and gross right now.
I think there’s a gap in my mental health support system and it’s getting past time to work on repairing it again.
Otherwise – feeding my sourdough starter, baking bread, making soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I’m taking care of my mother’s garden. There is too much zucchini and I’ve started trying to give some away. Basil, swiss chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, pears, melons.
I’m trying to distract myself. Taking the dog for walks, cuddling with my cat, listening to music, working on some writing.
I sat down to write a story several weeks ago and now I have a little over 20,000 words. Still isn’t finished yet. I have no idea where it’s coming from or where it’s going, but I think I almost know what it’s trying to say.
I guess 20,000 words is a lot for someone who prefers to write in sporadic bursts of energy and then hit “publish” before I slow down enough to check for typos, or to think twice about whether I want the internet to read about what’s going on inside my head. Maybe it’s growth, or maybe I could have done this a long time ago and was too scared to try. It’s a work in progress but I’m still quietly proud of it, and it’s nice to have something to feel proud of. A friend told me not to give up and that I should keep writing.
We’ll see how it goes.
It is devastatingly human to make mistakes.
I am human, therefore _____.
What should I do when I make a mistake?
Learn what I can. Try not to do the same thing again. Explain why it happened. Make amends where I can. Apologize sincerely, without making it about me. Recognize that another person’s response to that apology is not up to me. And then let it go and move on, because this is all I can do, and ruminating over the past won’t help anybody.
It’s been good to stay somewhere on my own for a while, to cook all my own food and clean up afterwards, take care of the animals, and otherwise just get to read and write and watch the television series adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
My only complaint about the show is that the actor who plays Morpheus shamelessly ripped off the Robert Pattinson as Batman aesthetic. It’s very funny but also incredibly distracting, which detracts somewhat from my ability to suspend disbelief. Otherwise it’s a fun show.
The thing about being the only human in a house for several weeks is that I can talk to myself out loud without worrying about being overheard, sing whenever I feel like singing, make food at strange hours, and subsist almost entirely on peanut butter cookies for two days straight, and nobody is there to ask inconvenient questions.
Hasn’t just been peanut butter cookies. There was also chocolate zucchini cake.
This week I’ve been escaping into the woods in the nearby state parks as much as possible. There have been creeks and gorges and waterfalls. It’s lovely. Walking up and down hills in the woods is one of the best things I am capable of doing for my brain.
~
Here’s the recipe for the soup I made, twice, because the first batch turned out unexpectedly well:
Sauté a chopped onion, more sliced carrots than you think you need, and one chopped bell pepper in olive oil in the bottom of a pot. (Regret peppers later.)
Add two cloves of sliced garlic and cook until soft. Then add cubed potatoes, corn, canned chickpeas, green beans, tomato, and vegetable broth. These were just the vegetables I had on hand at the time.
Simmer until the potatoes are soft when poked with a fork. Add some spinach.
Season with rosemary, parsley – whatever you have that goes together. (You have to sing the Simon & Garfunkel song as you do this or it won’t turn out right.)
Add too much salt.
Serve hot with sourdough toast, if you have some. I feel like any bread would be fine.
Neurotransmitters are out of whack all over again. Thought spiral monsters are out in force. Health and energy levels are plummeting at an alarming rate. Sliding into a sluggish little brain fog freeze response. Feeling vaguely worried about how frozen I am in the face of all the Things that need doing, which doesn’t help.
I know how to get myself through this. I have all the tools. That doesn’t necessarily make me feel much better in this moment.
Acquired milk and peanut butter cookies to make myself feel better.
There’s a ceiling fan in the living room, which is pure sensory bliss when I can slow down enough to feel it.
Water pressure in the shower is awesome.
Made soup, and it’s nourishing.
Drinking tea.
Distracting myself with a good book. I am just settling into the second installment of a series – took me a minute to warm up to a slight change in writing style, but it’s a neat twist, so we’re just about there.
Picked some wildflowers and arranged them somewhat prettily in a glass. Pretty grand. This was the best thing that happened to me today.
I’m house sitting in yet another undisclosed location. This gig will last for several weeks. I feel so far away from home right now. I miss my cat.
Once again, I have the whole house to myself. I appreciate the quiet and the solitude.
There’s a dog here, too. She appreciates cuddles, and I also appreciate cuddles, so we’re totally set.
The cat will tell me when it needs something, and show me exactly what it needs if I follow it when it asks me to, so the cat is also totally set.
Staying far enough south of the city that I can see a whole bunch of stars, on clear nights. There are more of them up there than I’m used to being able to see. I can sit on and back porch and look up, and I just. I have no words.
Made a chocolate cake out of a suspiciously large zucchini that someone gave me at a music festival last week. Completely forgot that you’re not supposed to take food from strangers in case they turn out to be faeries with malicious intentions. To the best of my knowledge, no adverse side effects. Yet.
I’ve been doing my best with writing fiction again. For maybe the first time in my life, I have the whole shape of a story in my head – beginning, middle, and end. It’s not a story that wants to be told purely for its own sake, either – this one has more purpose or insight than I’m used to working with. It’s an awkward, bulky, badly tangled knot of a plotline at the moment but the overall shape seems straightforward enough. Which feels right.
Pretty sure this is all I want out of life. A quiet place to write, trees, a dog and a cat, and the stars.
It’s been a rough couple of days. Feeling tired and grumpy, overwhelmed easily. This would be so much worse if I was trying to work a real job.
I’ve been doing other things instead. Happier this way.
Tending to a sourdough starter – flour and water and yeast and bacteria that bubbles and grows and smells like the inside of a bakery. Got her from a friend. Her name is Henrietta. She lives in a mason jar on the kitchen counter. I feed her once a day. In return, she leavens crusty bread. Best served warm, dipped in olive oil with salt pepper and rosemary. Also good with pesto. Might try with hummus.
Weeding various gardens. Kneeling down in the dirt and uprooting unwanted plants. Sometimes I can bike to work. This is significantly cheaper than therapy and I am convinced that it’s helping to balance the neurotransmitters. I am still sailing through the same stormy mental health, but recently I’ve been sailing with a sturdier vessel.
Taking care of other people’s animals. I am getting to know people who live close by, helping them in this small way when then need it. I have never tried to get to know neighbors like this. We aren’t best buds, but it’s comforting to think there are decent people just around the corner. Even if I know absolutely nothing else about a person, if I can tell they’re good with dogs, that’s one reason to trust them.
Cooking food that’s mostly made of plants. Crowdsourcing recipes. Chili with corn and sweet potatoes was good. Making dinner for my family more than I usually do.
Teaching a kiddo how to play the acoustic guitar. Strings have been broken and hastily replaced. We’ve learned what a guitar is supposed to sound like when it’s in tune. I am trying to remember whatever music theory I tried to learn when I was approximately his age. I asked him what kind of music he likes, and he didn’t know, so for homework I told him to go find himself a taste in music 🎶
I’ve been listening to stories about various rock & roll bands. David Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Replacements, the Velvet Underground. There’s nothing like hearing about the adventures of a starving artist to help me remember that things could be worse. (If you like podcasts, try No Dogs In Space from the Last Podcast Network.)
Picking raspberries
Swimming after dark
I promised myself that I would not go back to food service. I also might be helping run a food truck this weekend. Mostly so that I can say I’ve worked in a food truck
To the old women in the bible belt who’ve known me all my life, I look like a boy. I have always looked like a boy. I do this without ever having to think about it.
I wear button downs and cargo shorts, and my hair is cut short for the summer. The legs are hairy and I don’t care. If I wear makeup, it’s to cover the acne when it gets so bad that I don’t want to see it in the mirror anymore.
This wasn’t a big deal when I was thirteen, but now I’m twenty-three. The Bible belt ladies are starting to make comments. They don’t ask. They just drop hints.
“What do you think about this they/them business? Don’t you think it’s going a bit far?”
Whenever I can, whenever I have energy, I try to plant seeds of understanding. I can’t shake the feeling that this should not be my job. But if I don’t do this, then I don’t know who else will.
I tell them that there have always been androgynous people. Always. They often grudgingly concede that this is true.
I tell them about the evolution of language, how words change and take on different meanings over time.
I talk about how our species uses books and poetry and theatre and art to describe what we experience. We use language to communicate about who we are, what we stand for. We have always done this. It’s one of the single most triumphant accomplishments of the human race. In our brief time on this spinning ball of rock and dust, we have made a lot of mistakes. We have also created fine characters with stories worth telling, stories that are worth telling with exactly the right words.
I talk about the disconnect between social norms in different generations – I compare this to traveling in a different part of the world with different customs. I talk about calculus, about rates of change in social norms over time. I talk about old traditions, buried by the church, I talk about new traditions, new entries in the dictionary, new ways of being polite.
I extend all the compassionate patience I can muster to the well-meaning folks who don’t understand because they’ve never had a reason to learn. My chest aches for all of the people who keep getting badly hurt by that misunderstanding.
The old bible belt ladies tell me it makes them uncomfortable to be in a room with someone who’s not quite like anything they’ve ever known. I ask them to imagine if almost every room was full of people who felt uncomfortable because you had the audacity to be comfortable in your own skin out in public.
All the years that will take off a life in one afternoon.
The old bible belt ladies don’t understand. But most of them are mothers who love their children with all the fierce love that it takes to never stop caring for someone they brought kicking and screaming into this world, no matter who they turn out to be.
Sometimes I catch them off guard in a moment of unexpected sympathy. And sometimes all the confusion and disgust comes flooding back in, and I feel like maybe it wasn’t worth it to try
but it was
and sometimes I don’t have the energy to say anything, and I just – make my cowardly excuses and leave, and feel nauseous all the way home.
I am learning to appreciate the company of people who don’t need to exchange words in order to understand.
I am so lucky to have a mother who will hug me and tell me that she loves me the way that I am. She doesn’t even completely know what that is, because I still don’t have exactly the right words to tell her. She just loves me, and she’s on my side no matter what that turns out to be. That’s a gift.
She is a lady who grew old in the bible belt, but she’s not an old bible belt lady.
Just learning now that I have developed a knack for talking people down off the roof.
I didn’t used to be able to do this. I used to be too small and powerless. I used to collapse into myself because I was nine and there was nothing I could do. Back then it never crossed my mind that I was nine and it should not have been my burden to carry.
I’ve grown up. I have tools that I didn’t used to have. I’ve learned a few tricks of the trade. I almost have what it takes to use them properly.
I can step directly into the path of the storm and calm the whirlwind. I know how.
It’s becoming important for me to learn when not to do this. When to let the whirlwind rage, even when I know exactly how much damage it will leave in its wake. Putting myself in the path of the storm takes so much out of me.
Somebody’s gotta do it.
I hope it’s a good night.
Part of growing up is departing from childhood tradition and creating tradition from scratch.
I measure the passage of time by the festivals, the holidays, the big milestones. Most of my traditions are inherited, passed down through some semblance of a culture, the amalgamation of generations of families coming together or drifting apart, sharing and cherishing what they remember fondly, neglecting and slowly forgetting what no longer works.
We used to gather by the water as the sun went down, watching creative displays of loud, colorful, and sometimes illegal pyrotechnics. I have fond memories. I miss being with family for a celebration.
One memory is so old that I’m not sure if it’s real – I’m barely old enough to be able to walk, and my parents and I are laying on a blanket in a field, close enough to see the magic, far enough away that it’s not too loud. “Look, it’s the grand finale,” they tell me, with great reverence, watching a fantastic explosion of light and sound at the end of the show.
In another memory, we are in a boat at the edge of the black water of the lake, in pitch darkness. The fireworks are exploding directly above us in the sky. I am crying because the explosions are too loud.
Another memory. There is a campfire in the stony pebbles at the edge of the lake at the cottage. We watch from the end of the dock as each house lights a fire or a flare at the edge of the water, so that the lake is wreathed in a ring of fire.
We walk out to the end of the driveway in the twilight. Our house stands at the top of a hill. We look around in a big circle, and for miles in every direction, as far as the eye can see, there is a sharp noise and bright color and there is smoke and ashes on the wind.
These days, I feel like my family tends to ends up scattered to the winds like the ashes after the finale is done. I often end up being alone.
I tend to stay in, make pizza, watch a movie, and shoot irritated glances at the windows, mumbling “fucking nationalism” under my breath as I cuddle the dog who is violently shaking because of the sound of the fireworks. Sometimes, after the noise dies down, I’ll step outside for a bit and look up at the stars.
I feel an odd mix of bittersweet nostalgia and tired resentment towards this celebration of the birth of a country which gets so many things wrong all the time.
I love that I have my own tiny tradition.
A long day.
Last night I shared a queen sized bed with four dogs. Two of them don’t understand the concept of personal space. We all woke up at dawn to run outside and play. With enthusiasm.
There was coffee. I needed coffee.
I love all of them dearly. One day I will also make a home for dogs that need one. For now, I’m glad to know that I’ll soon be able to return them safely to a significantly more capable guardian.
I drove on the back roads to do some weeding at one of the gardens I’m taking care of this summer. The matronly woman I’m working for surprised me with a large box of books about philosophy, as a gift. They’ve been sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, but they’re meant to be read.
Books are a love language. I don’t know how else to put that into words.
There’s a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m tremendously fond of his thoughts. I can’t get through anything he writes without feeling as though he’s managed to take something that’s always been just at the edge of my consciousness and put it into exactly the right words. I feel a connection to another human experience that transcends space and time and crosses the boundary between the dead and the living. The language has changed a little in the intervening time, but the way he writes – it doesn’t matter.
Took care of half a dozen other animals, and then came back to the house. Stood in the shower and washed off the dirt and sweat and sunscreen from pulling up weeds in the sun. Put on comfy pants and a fleece and curled up on the leather couch with some of the diet Dr. Pepper I found in the fridge. Kept on slowly chipping away at this macabre bibliography.
Someone local that I met online offered to trade sour dough bread for fresh chicken eggs, and I don’t have eggs, but I asked if I could have some of the starter, and she said I could. I told her that I’m brewing a batch of cherry wine, so not bread exactly but yeast is involved so it’s maybe bread adjacent? And she laughed
–
(Friend? asked the heart
Go carefully, said the old, old wound)
–
Found another dogsitting gig for next month. I could get used to this – staying in other people’s big empty houses, cuddling with cats and dogs who need company, getting away from home for a while. In an odd way, it reminds me of backpacking in youth hostels. Never quite knew where I was going to end up, but I learned to sleep anywhere.
Tonight the two dogs who don’t understand about personal space are sleeping comfortably downstairs. They will manage.
