a time of fullness

IT'S FINALLY COOL ENOUGH TO WEAR PANTS. (Not that I ever wear pants at work; I'm solidly a skirt person.  But at home I like my schluffy exercise pants and it's been too fucking hot to wear much of anything at all.  I hate you, human-caused global climate change.  I weep for you, planet dying of fever.  I welcome you, fall temperatures.)  Glory hallelujah.  Amen and amen.

Also holy shit this Sudafed is no joke.  (I generally keep myself well stocked with various medicines, Gatorades, ginger ales and chicken soups, because having lived half my entire life alone, I know how to prepare to care for myself during illness.  Side bar: I don't even feel sad right now that there's no one to take care of me while I'm sick, which has always been the hallmark of my I-hate-being-single mourning/whining.  Now I'm like "aw fuck yeah I can sleep in a quiet house without anyone bothering me."  I think I was so seriously miserable in my last burning circus of a relationship that I broke through the other side of even giving a shit.)  I bought the really good stuff -- the kind you have to show like four different forms of ID to even look at.  The kind you have to sign in blood for.  The kind you only have to take once a day.  Thanks to this marvel of modern medicine I have spent the last two days blazing through my work hours in a giddy spaciness that sort of vibrates at the edges.  I looked it up today to figure out why the fuck I've been so over-the-moon happy (I mean, I'm in a pretty good mood generally, especially now that I'm in a voluntary seclusion and better rested, but this soaring glee is a bit unusual), and it looks like pseudoephedrine has an impact on norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake, which is what my antidepressant does, so I guess I'm like double the happy.  Don't get me wrong, it's awesome; it's just gotta be weird for the people who have to work with a giggly, beaming goofball when they're used to professional and no-nonsense.  This is all-nonsense.

Oh well.  I am a many-faceted being.  They might as well see the sillier side of Sarah now as later.

So having got that amphetamine-addled preamble off my chest, here's the post I have intended to write since this morning.
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This is a time of fullness.

As with most metamorphoses, it took profound upheaval to reach it.  I don't subscribe to the philosophy that growth must come from pain; but growth certainly comes from change, and change, to the human brain, however ultimately good, is nonetheless tumultuous and stressful.  In the last four months, I:

1. Learned that my mother has ovarian cancer and went through a summer of travel across states to help where I could (Note: I will not be writing much about this topic for the foreseeable future.  At the moment Mom's treatment is going great, and I am unspeakably grateful, and that is all I can say about it);
2. Ended another terrible relationship;
3. Moved to a new apartment; and
4. Moved office locations and accepted a promotion.

The changes encompassed every facet of my life: family, personal life, home, work.  All in flux at once.  It was the most exhausted I've ever been.

But again, the changes themselves, with the exception of my mother's illness, weren't painful so much as stressful.  The breakup was both brilliantly done on my part, and deeply liberating (I really have broken through some ceiling that I've never been able to breach before; this level of satisfaction and happiness with my own life, on its own terms, is something I never dreamed I could achieve); the move was holy-shit-so-exhausting but I love my new habitat as dearly as I hated my old one, and the closer location to work cuts my daily commute from 2.5 hours to less than one; and the promotion has catapulted me along my chosen trajectory of enacting much-needed reforms in my office.  Undertaking all these changes at once definitely tapped out my reserves (I've been a pretty dry cistern for the last three years, so I didn't have much to draw on to begin with), but even in the middle of the irruption I knew I just had to get through a few months of insanity before everything evened out and coalesced into a beautiful sea change.

Which it has.  I can say without hesitation or qualification that this is the happiest I have ever been.  Which happened when I finished all the change-events, and allowed myself over the last couple of months to do nothing but rest.  And suddenly: joy.  So much joy.  My apartment is still a hectic jumble of boxes; there's still so much to do at work; but everything feels peaceful and unhurried.  And I love my quiet, solitary hours at home.

It is from this joy and fulfillment and happiness that I am starting to write again.  It's been a long, long time since I've considered myself a writer.  You can basically track my writing by my blog posting, which has been essentially defunct since 2009.  Eight years in the desert.

I thought I lost it.  I would sit and try to write something, but it was all stilted, forced, shriveled.  I thought that was it, for me.  It hurt me, but I couldn't fix it.  It just wasn't there.

Undoubtedly there are many reasons for all of it.  I lost my favorite blog reader and blogging after that felt weird; my first Great Change launched around that time as well and my internal perspective was shifting so fucking rapidly that I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone process it, let alone write about it; and then I didn't know how to write about it, because I found myself in a new emotional landscape that I wasn't equipped to describe; and then I embarked on a series of shitty relationships (my taste in romantic partners, with two exceptions, has trended toward the abysmal, although, I think, for no longer) and stretches of in-between recovery time that took over my life and left no room for writing.  Those were all factors.  But primarily, I think, now that the words keep welling up within my metaphorical soul and spilling out and I can't stop writing (yesterday I blogged, and worked on my new piece of fiction (!), and journalled): I had only known how to write from a place of pain, and not a place of wholeness, and it's taken this long, and this much rest and repletion and joy and fulfillment, to arrive in a space where I can be creative again.

It's a really good lesson to absorb.  I need to protect my peace and my wholeness, so that I can write.

This feeling -- this feeling of being myself -- this is amazing.  I am almost wholly Sarah.

And from this place of fullness, I can create.  I can turn my hands and my brain and my entire sense of being to my best-loved, and best-suited, craft.

It is so, so good.

a teeny bit about my job

I can't believe how much I love my job.

It's been a combination of luck and the force of my personality, to be honest.  Luck that the job opened up just when I gave up on teaching and started casting around for something new, and luck that the attorneys I was initially assigned to assist are all fantastic people to work for; then luck that I got to know people who are, or who became, people of influence in the firm.  The rest is personality and will.

Part of what I love about my job is finally working in a place that's big enough for my ambitions.  I've taken my initial position of "legal secretary" and added management and policy development, with an eye far up the ladder over time.  I am well respected in an environment that does not yield itself to a great deal of respect.  I am well respected because I do good work, I am friendly and outgoing, I am smart and competent, I am firm and decisive, I speak my mind, and I don't tolerate bullshit.  It's a role I've grown into, and quickly.  I've only been at the firm a year and half and I've already earned a promotion and started a policy-making focus group within my department.

It's weird, realizing that I'm good at politics.  (I've come a long, long way since my rawboned fledgling days at the homeless center all those years ago.)  I do politics my own way (that is to say, with sincerity and openness), but I know how to make and leverage connections, I know the right things to say, the right arguments to make.  I know how to set a goal and gather support for it.  I know how to get what I want.  I know how not to give a shit when people don't like me.  I know how to use all that for good.

It's pretty fucking great.

I could rave all day about how much I love my attorneys.  I assist three at present; there have been some secretarial reassignments since I came on board, so of the three I initially started with, I've retained two, S. and B. (one of which I kept because I went to my supervisors and demanded to keep him--sometimes when I think about all the brassy, ballsy things I've done at this job I just sit and giggle, I can't believe they've all worked, and also, since that appears to be all it takes to make shit happen, why haven't I thought to just make demands all along); the third (D.) I knew I wanted to assist from my first week on the job, and about six months ago he went to my supervisor and told her he wanted to be assigned to me, and it was done (M.'s recounting to me later made my heart swell with pride, because the people at the top know who I am).  My attorneys are all vastly different personalities, with vastly different positions in the firm hierarchy, and I get along with all of them splendidly, and have really solid working relationships with them.  B. and I are work-spouses who are mostly incredibly nice to each other, occasionally grump each other out, and frequently spend long minutes on the phone together muttering absently to ourselves before realizing we don't need to be talking to each other.  S. and I are old-school-style boss-and-secretary (except that he thinks me a magical computer wizard), with a lot of benevolent cordiality and occasional political commiserations.  D. and I are still figuring each other out, but there's a lot of mutual liking and respect there, and working with him is teaching me to be even more assertive and personally powerful, which I appreciate the hell out of.

And that's not even bringing the management and policy-making aspects into it.

I fucking love my job.  For the first time ever.  I've turned it into a career, and I have a clear vision of where I want to take it.  And I can get there.

The last eight years have seen a few distinctive shifts in my personal development.  2009-2010 saw me burst out of a chrysalis of trauma and depression into healing and coping and joy and freedom.  2017 has been the year of real blooming.  (So I'm a butterfly and a flower.  A butterflower.  Don't mind me, I have a cold right now and this is the Sudafed talking.)  It's been a damn hard year, in places -- completely exhausting.  But this is the most, and most marked and permanent-feeling, growth that I've undergone in a long time.

I've always learned and grown in my own time.  Often that's been later than I would have expected, or than others have expected.  But it's better and deeper for taking so long.

I still have a long way to go, with a lot of things.  But I'm getting there; and even better, I love where I am right now -- not just where I plan to be.

Also?  I love writing again.

he says it perfectly

Ahead of the Curve

'Nother perfect day
They keep pilin' up
I got happiness
That I can maintain, some beginner's luck
I had shoes to fill
Walkin' barefoot now
Can't tell North from South
But no split hair's gonna get me down

I'm stayin' above the flat-line
I'm ahead of the curve
Take a piece of the sunshine with me
on a red-eye flight to another world
It isn't any trouble
If you wanna come with me
I know it's out of the question, honey,
But I sure could use the company
And a place to be

Now the sky is pink
Rooftop swimming pool
I'm not carefree, no,
I'm free to care, I just never do
All the bags are checked
And the reasons why
Yesterday lingers on
That's the piece you keep when you say goodbye

You can get what you want now
Knock it out of the park
Bury it by the river, easy,
There's a search party but it's getting dark
I won't hold you to nothin'
I want to make that plain
Probably end up a stranger and crazy
But I'm still hoping there's another way
And a place to stay

What a scene that's got you sentimental
When the night comes
When the knot comes loose
All the things you put up on your mantle
What a shame
What a shame
It's old news

I'm stayin' above the flat-line
I'm ahead of the curve
Take a piece of the sunshine with me
on an all-night drive to another world
You can get what you want now
Knock it out of the park
Probably end up a drifter and lonely
But I'm still hoping for a change of heart
And a place to start

~Conor Oberst, et al., "Ahead of the Curve," from Monsters of Folk

happy

Wonderful weekend. Dustin and I lounged around watching Amadeus (excellent film -- if you haven't seen it, I recommend that you remedy that immediately), eating boeuf en daube and These Mashed Potatoes are So Creamy, hanging out, bebopping around and generally having a fantastic time.

And this week I have roses to savor (when I'm not home I have to lock them away from Simon, who has decided that his duty toward them is to eat them), a really wonderful card to read, and a mouthwatering cookbook to drool and dream and scheme over. It's the last cookbook I needed to complete my collection of most desired cuisines: Lebanese. And the recipes look so. good.

Sometime this week I must away 'ere close of day to find a pair of shoes and jewelry for the Symphonic excursion on Saturday. I can't wait. (For the excursion, that is. I don't mind shopping as much as I used to, but it's never been on my top 10 list of Things I'd Love to Do All Day.)

In other, slightly more erratic news, I keep getting sharp things under my fingernails that slice the nerve-ending-packed skin and hurt like the dickens. (What are the dickens? Why do they hurt?) Last night it was the edge of a toothbrush box that jammed itself under my middle fingernail like that was its purpose for being.

Currently I'm reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series for the first time and adoring it. I keep laughing aloud while reading. Pure quirky joy.

I have also discovered that I love the music of Death Cab for Cutie. While, sadly, I do not own any of their albums, I have the loveliness of Pandora to feed my new obsession.

Tonight is pizza at the parents', a young and rather irreverent church-related meeting, and clean sweaters.

Life is good.

clean streak

I don't know what came over me yesterday, but I went on a crazy cleaning spree that lasted for hours. I did laundry, cleaned out and wiped down the fridge, vacuumed, mopped, reorganized closets and generally restored the first two rooms of the trailer to a shining orderliness.

And it felt good. Probably part of it stems from the fewer hours I'm working at my second job, since it's the slow season there, and I've grown accustomed to fifteen hours of constant motion. Yesterday when I arrived home, I made dinner (yummy leftovers of this Mexican-style dish I threw together from my steady old starter of a diced onion, cubed beef/chicken, a can of cream of mushroom soup and a can of French onion soup -- with those four ingredients as a baseline, anything is possible) and then found myself sitting on the couch staring at my cell phone and thinking, "It's only 6:30? I'm bored."

So I popped in a couple of feel-good movies (Hairspray and The Mask of Zorro) and went about in a whirlwind of delighted domesticity.

The reward? A sparkling living space, an absurdly happy cat, satisfaction with my mental health (since I can't remember the last time I actually wanted to clean, and took joy from the cleaning -- I think it was sometime back in '05), good smells in the home, and the rediscovery of my long-lost cheesecloth which I've been wanting in order to strain my homemade yogurt to thicken it properly, India-style. (Yes, I've once again begun making my own yogurt. I also have a recipe in my newest Indian cookbook for a simple homemade cheese that I'm itching to try. If I had my way in life, I would do very few things but write and stay in the house all day making weird food from scratch. My dream house is mostly a kitchen with slate floors and a state-of-the-art stereo system and many different kinds of ovens and a vast fireplace and lots and lots of windows and high ceilings and bare rafters from which to hang dried herbs and peppers and garlic and pots and pans and meat and hanging plants, and a huge basement/cellar with separate rooms for the aging cheese and the home-canned goods and the preserved lemons and the homemade sauerkraut, and a garden just outside on one side of the back lawn and an enormous bricked and walled patio on the other with the kinds of ovens and grills a person can't keep indoors -- a clay oven, a tandoor, a large brick oven, an industrial-style grill. And then of course there's all the traveling I'd have to do both as fuel for writing and to eat new foods to come back and learn how to make. Cue If I Had a Million Dollars.)

After an evening of busy be-bopping around the house, I couldn't get tired, and finally closed my eyes on midnight smiling.

Tonight I can't wait to tackle the national disaster commonly known as my car, and then roll up my sleeves to go after the bathroom and bedroom.

See, and even that was a little melodramatic for how I'm actually feeling. What I'm actually feeling is more like this: - .

All I want to do is go home and sew my curtains (MP and I are on a quest to further our psychotic domesticity together). My sewing machine was giving me fits last night, as I was trying to figure out how to use it, but a brief discussion with my boss's wife had her a.) laughing at me for trying to seam the fabric in the wrong direction and b.) giving me tips for how to fix the problem. So now that's all I want to do.

And the only story I really feel like telling is this one.

When I was a senior in high school, I started dating this guy from my Calculus and Spanish classes. He was very short, very cute, very shy, and very sweet. We used to do our calc homework together as a way of getting around my parents' -- and my -- anti-dating policy. He made me laugh. Holding hands with him was lovely. We went to Prom.

I broke up with him (or stopped talking to him) the summer before college, telling myself that long-distance relationships don't work and unable to get past his nonparticipation in the Christian faith. I think that mercenary decision is one of my only regrets.

But when I think about him, aside from all the passing notes in Spanish class and watching movies at Hillori's and scrambling around in the woods building rock formations with our other dorky and funny friends, I think about how I would get up for school at 4:45 a.m. to use the shower ahead of the rest of my family, and how when I got home from school I was so tired I would fall dead asleep on my bed, and how he would call while I was sleeping, and how Mom would wake me up to give me the phone, and how I would be groggy and stupid and take twelve seconds to mumble a response to anything he said, and how he would laugh and ask, "Did your Mom wake you up again? ... She really shouldn't do that," and how his voice was so warm and affectionate it was like he was sitting next to me, and how talking to him on the phone, even with a sleep-reduced IQ, made me wonderfully happy, and how I would look out the window next to my bed and feel the almost-summer breeze blow over the sheets, and think about how happy I was, because of him.