the word, the pebble rolling in the dark

One of those epiphanic moments this morning.

The past year has given rise to a continual paradigm shift - slower than my usual, haha.  A year ago the realization that I hated the life I was living crystallized into a hard, clear purpose.  A year ago I glared at the cracked and peeling walls of the derelict classroom that choked my days with stress and marker dust and suffocated my nights with dread, and began, quietly, to pack my things, to take down a poster here and there, to throw away unneeded papers, to fill the space underneath my desk with boxes for keeping and boxes for tossing.  A year ago I clamped my being around the hard little kernel at the center that said "I will not do this anymore" and started digging a tunnel out.  A year ago I said Fuck this, and started poring over my resume, picking and choosing the best words from which to forge a new life.  A real life. A life I chose freely and on my own terms. A year ago I walked through the old halls reeking of chalk and asbestos and pointlessness with a lighter step, bore up under the chaos in my classroom with a little smile, holding a warmth in the pit of my stomach that said, I am getting out. 

And I did.  Quickly.  It has gone extremely well.  I love my current job and am discovering a wealth of skills and talents I had never given myself the opportunity to know I possessed.  I have a more satisfying social network.  I am dusting off and resurrecting my hobbies.  I am free of the old, unfulfilling, hollow relationship that I was in at the time, and freeing myself from the neural pathways that built it.  I feel powerful.

And more neural pathways are changing.

A long time ago I wrote a sestina.  Sestinas are HELL to write - and I imposed even more structure on it than is mandated (iambic pentameter, three pairs of binaries to contrast at lines' ends).  I thought of that sestina this morning as the epiphany blew through me like a sudden cool breeze through an open window.
_____________________________

Monday, September 15, 2008

I hope this letter finds you well. Today
when I first woke, the morning still was dark
and as I held my breath I heard the water’s
clear monotone still covering the earth.
I wanted to cocoon myself in rest,
but then a black bewhiskered face yowled, "Work!"

So blearily I rose and went to work.
I had a lovely time, though, yesterday –
I shopped for things to complement my rest
and candles to illuminate the dark.
I like the autumn afternoons, when earth
contracts to just the self, the house, the water.

The softened candle glow winked on the water
as I rinsed off my hands and got to work
preparing dishes from across the earth
(Moroccan stew). The chilly, sodden day
felt warm and bright. I looked into the dark
outside the window, peaceful and at rest

while Simon cleaned his paws and, owl-eyed, rested
beside my feet. I put the kettled water
on high for jasmine tea and sipped the dark
and bitter brew, glad not to be at work
but home: on such a nearly perfect day
more than content to be upon this earth.

It seems, sometimes, my days upon this earth
are growing shorter. Sometimes, restlessly,
I want to stretch the miles beyond the day,
stare over new profundities of water
in windblown freedom. But, for now, my work
is waiting for the Word dropped in the dark.

The Word, the pebble rolling in the dark
is yet to come. I bent and wiped the earth
still wet between my toes and thought the work
of rendering a sabbath gives the rest
of life its still point. Turning like the water
that drained into the sink, I saw the day

lay down its head in darkness, while the rest
of sky and earth gave way to moving water.
It was no work to smile at close of day.

_______________________________

The word, the pebble rolling in the dark.  All my life I have been waiting for something.  Some sudden oracle, some clear bell tone to draw my attention to my purpose, some Road to Damascus moment that will finally show me where I belong.  Long after my faith evaporated and dissipated into the clear air of reality, the idea that I have some certain task to do persisted. 

It has kept me restless, on edge, always looking to the horizon, always holding loosely to whatever placeholder job and placeholder living space and placeholder life I seized in the moment, knowing that I needed something to pay the bills and pacify a need for present happiness while I kept my vigil.  Maybe it's the effect of giftedness; I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up; I only knew that I wanted to change the world; and since I was good at pretty much everything (except dancing and sports), I had no clearly defined career path to follow.  Maybe it's the effect of my place in the Millennial generation, having grown up hearing that I needed to do something amazing and transformative and I could be whatever I wanted someday.  Maybe it's the effect of a fundamentalist Christian upbringing that instilled in me the (harsh) promise that God had designed me with a purpose (but wouldn't tell me what it was).  Maybe it's the effect of growing up in a dysfunctional home, where my potential remained largely unfostered (Jeff once said, his voice unusually hoarse, "When I think of what you could have been, if you'd had a supportive environment..." and then trailed off into silence for a moment before blinking hard and shaking his head and saying, "Well. There's no use thinking like that").  Maybe it's all of those things, and something a little more.  Whatever the reason, I have spent my life with my hands absently on the present and my eyes fixed on the future, impatiently viewing the long distance between them and feeling the eternal restlessness moving under my skin.

But this morning, reflecting on my own line of poetry (omg such an egoist), it came like a bell: The word, the pebble rolling in the dark, will never come.  I have been waiting for an answer, but there is no answer.  There's just...me.

So I don't have to wait anymore for a direction.  I can strike out toward the horizon in any damn direction I choose.  And right now that means staying put, and finally fully investing in where and when I am. 

My long-term plans will always be open-ended.  The restlessness will never vanish -- I think it stems not from a desire for a prescribed purpose, but from a longing for adventure and muchness, a longing for growth and change, a desire to forge meaning and belong to something big --  the soul of a pioneer.  But I can embrace that aspect of my personality AND live fully in my own circumstances.  I can give myself adventure and muchness and remain open to new opportunities while also truly settling in to my job, my dwelling, my social surroundings, my coummunity. 

Like Alice in The Magicians, I have spent my life holding back; "even I don't know what I'm capable of."  And as with Alice, it's time for me to find out.

This is going to be fun.  And transformative.  And engaging.  I am finally going to live, as I choose to live.

And that's the word, the pebble rolling in the dark. This morning it finally bumped up against my toes, and I stooped to pick it up, and held it cupped in my palm to see that it's only, after all, a plain little stone. No grand edict, no manifest destiny. Just something small I can hold in my hand, or put in my pocket and take with me while I walk, or cast aside altogether and let it rest with the other stones while I make my way to wherever I want to go.

I am here, and I am now, and I don't want to be anywhere or anywhen else.

And this, maybe, is freedom. 

a face to meet the faces that you meet

Another Monday morning.

Just like any other Monday, I woke to the dark and cold and left in the dark and cold, and am now sitting blearily on the bus listening to human breath transformed into notes - the breathing of dead men. 

Rather atypically for a Monday, however, was a certain forgetfulness. I forgot to set my alarms last night. Fortunately my biorhythms prodded me up into consciousness only two minutes past when my alarm is supposed to go off. And I forgot my makeup bag.

Makeup has stood as a cornerstone of how I "prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet" since my adolescence, when my mother taught me its tasteful application and thus saved me from five or six years of garish cake layers of cheap foundation and spider lashes that seem typical of teenagers trying to teach themselves how to wear it.  I always prided myself in the subtlety of my art, the daily not-quite-blank canvas of my face awaiting my rendering.  Over the years I have gone through various phases or more and less dramatic in my overall approach, although which end of the binary is never clear unless in retrospect; right now I would say the focus is dramatic eyes, with less an emphasis on skin, which is spotted anyway from twenty-three years of picking.  The morning ritual frequently relaxes me - losing myself in the details, forgetting language and thought in a quiet rhythm of self care.

When I took this job at the beginning of March of last year, leaving so early for the bus presented me with three choices: get up insanely early to put on my makeup at home; put on my makeup on the bus; or put it on at work.  The first option sucked, the second was too bumpy, so, Goldilocks-style, I landed on the pleasing "just right" of the third.  I arrive at work half an hour early, put on my makeup, and acclimate myself to another day in the quiet of my little office. 

Ordinarily my makeup bag lives in my larger tote that accompanies me to work filled with other vital objects like books, journal and (now) my portable keyboard; but this weekend I actually wore makeup, and forgot to place the bag back in the tote, which I didn't realize until I was most of the way to the bus stop.  I briefly considered turning around, then realized I didn't care enough to risk running late.

Soooo now I get to spend the day reflecting on the effect of the beauty standards on women and analyzing my various responses to my own social transgression - the panic at remembering, the shame at showing up to work looking unprofessional, the quiet defiance at deciding makeup is technically unnecessary anyway and fuck anyone who thinks otherwise, the anxiety at looking less pretty than usual, the dread of all the comments about how tired I look.  For the most part I have worked hard to define myself as I see fit and worry less about the mainstream opinions of those around me (anyone who has seen my particular style of dress knows this), but makeup is a tough one.   I do love the way it makes me look.

Today will be interesting, in that respect, at least.  Bare faced and staring down the world. 

It's stupid, the little things that require courage of women.  I have ladders to climb, shit to get done, important things to do, and here I am worrying about a few layers of cream and powder on a tiny portion of my skin.  Fuck you, systemic sexism.  Thanks for exhausting my internal resources on either submitting to or rebelling against your exacting standards for my appearance, as if that is all I have to offer.

reach for the sun

Finally some goddamn sunshine.

Currently my office presents a beautiful 20th-floor vista of northeast Detroit.  Mostly the beauty comes from the sheer fact of the height; the landscape itself looks, to a girl born and raised in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, as flat and dull as the broad expanse of Ohio, with art deco skyscrapers, sprawling factories, belching smokestacks, and fields of concrete substituting for farmland.

From up here you can't tell that the city died forty years ago.  You can't tell that most of the neighborhoods visible from my window give off no light at night, that much of the once-packed residential land no longer has any neighborhood at all.  You can't see the burned out houses studding the blocks like rotten teeth, the production plants squatting hollow and cold amidst the derelict houses where the workers once lived.  You can't identify the places where the wilderness vines and creeps back over the concrete and the empty foundations, where the remnants of human habitation haunt the expanding forest.

From up here, in the shallow brightness of a winter sun, the city looks as it must always have done: sprawling, energetic, established. 

The long arm of history has not bent toward justice here.

The pioneer in me wants to help resettle this place, take the wreckage of industry and the fields and trees springing up in their ashes and turn them into something new - a strange frontier of a land wrested from the wilderness and forced into production, then abandoned back to nature.  A place where you can find the country in the middle of the city, and see the stars at night.

This romanticization overlooks, in typical white middle-class carpetbagger fashion, the many complex layers of race and class and cultural heritage that underlie all that makes up Detroit.  I can only be peripheral here, and try not to steamroll the intricate realities with my hipster starry-eyed visions of reclamation.  I am an invasive species, here.

I do confess though, that the concept of a bonfire in an urban backyard has appeal.  Living at the intersection of many different worlds.  Being a small, quiet, simple part of a much bigger ecosystem. 

With every day that passes I become increasingly excited for a new form of a self-determined life, one that I haven't dared to live yet.  The reality is still percolating, still dreamlike.  But when I consider that my next phase is arriving THIS SUMMER, I feel a warm glow to match even today's unseasonal sunshine rendering this apocalyptic city in a clear, unflinching light.

O the dark, dark, dark

Just received my Bluetooth keyboard, which I hope to utilize for blogging on the bus. 

Riding down Woodward Avenue right now - the main non-highway thoroughfare (is that the right word?) that cuts from the heart of downtown Detroit all the way to the upper northwest of the metro area.  In any season but winter it's a visually fascinating journey through a perfect cross-section of all that is Detroit; currently, however, it is a long dull trip through a mind-numbing darkness.  Which wouldn't be so bad if I didn't also ride home in the same darkness. 

My only real complaint about my life at the moment centers around the length of my commute.  I leave the house at 6:15 a.m. and return twelve hours later.  Dark to dark.  Waking weariness to sleeping weariness.  Short evenings at home; even shorter mornings.  Many, many personal goals and hobbies and activities for which I have neither time nor energy before or after the bookends of my days.

So as I look ahead to the expiration of my lease this summer I am considering my living options.  Two years is long enough to be living in an apartment that I have always considered a placeholder; it's time to find a place I can love.  My favorite dwellings have always been old, spacious, charming.  And I have grown weary of the suburbs with their soulless uniformity of sprawl; I want, for the time being, something a little more urban. This means something closer to the city (fortunately YB knows the neighborhoods and can tell me which ones I won't get mugged, robbed or murdered in), which also means, oh please dear god, a shorter commute. 

Currently my commute consumes two and a half hours of my day.  I can make use of the time (reading in the mornings, and, now that this Bluetooth keyboard is working so beautifully, writing in the evenings), but oh my fuck, I miss being able to work out in the mornings and actually have time and energy to DO SHIT at home in the evenings.  This present lifestyle is shitting all over my life satisfaction outside of work.

I want to love it here.  I've been holding back for two years, like I've held back my whole life, never quite allowing myself to grow attached to a geographical area.  And Detroit isn't that loveable.  It's worn down and tired and empty and sprawling and devastated and ugly and depressing.  But I have a knack for seeing the promise in difficult things (not for nothing did I take as my confirmation name, back when I became Catholic and before emerging out of faith altogether, the identity of my favorite patron saint, Jude: I passionately resist the concept of lost causes), and this city, this life of mine that I live around it, have a lot of promise. 

I still spend the bulk of my metacognition on a dissonance between the two things I want for myself: on the one hand, a deep involvement in something that brings change and meaning to the world around me; on the other, a quiet, peaceful, simple life.  I am arriving at the annoying conclusion that the two are not mutually exclusive.  I can have both - I just need to take the leap.

This is the year that I leap, I think.  This is my city, my life.  This is my time. 

Reclamation

Far, far to the south
south past south
a long expanse of ground grows slowly wild.
For twoscore and three years
the reaping blade pared it bare.
Public land, appointed to the enjoyment of passersby,
it knew the daily cutting of every blade and leaf,
knew the habitual cultivation of parkland
until its topsoil forgot how to send new shoots into the air,
forgot fecundity. But now, purchased
by a quiet agency, it lies fallow, allowed
to seed. Even in the cold of indifferent winter
the roots stir beneath the soil, remember
their purpose. Overexposed for so many years
it starts small, a patch of foliage, shy,
keeping close to the ground, and then
begins to spread, to flourish, to lengthen
like the daylight. It textures the ground,
casts shadows.
Some of its surfaces still lie smooth,
without memory, without awareness,
without forecast, sheer as rock.
Some of them have just begun to wake,
tiny spikes pushing through the soil
among the wild lengths of the already
vibrant growth. Running my fingers
up the softness of my shins, parting the
sparse beachgrass waves to see where the whorls
shade the newest shoots,
I see my body begin to remember itself,
to reforest. In the sunshine strength
of my skin, lush for its own sake,
the flush stirrings of life unfold
in what I have reappropriated.

We Carry Our Origins within Us

We are salt and water

stung by lightning into life

in the voiceless beginnings

of biological time

kindled nucleotide threads

replicating unthought, unthinking in our harsh salt bath

and when we had grown large

enough, bony enough, breathing

enough to creep from the ocean

we made of our bodies vessels to enclose it

and bring it with us

in the brine of our blood, the solutions of our

sweat and tears, of our urine and semen

and vaginal fluid,

the seawater of our spines.

From our brains swimming in salinity lightning

flashes down the forked tendrils of nerves

to sting our cells, and in this endless animation

of billions of years of algorithmically adapted tissue

we live

and move

and have our being,

awakened worlds of water and salt

surging electric within elastic casings of skin.

cramps

My cramps are better and worse now that I have the copper IUD.  Better in that I don't seem to need as much Ibuprofen as I did before.  Worse in that the pain is different, deeper, more cervical than uterine, a bruise held fast by a pin, a clamp on my Fallopian tubes, a nauseating ache that spreads to my ribs.  My new GYN suggested that I get the hormonal IUD instead but based on past experience I am terrified of progestin which sent my depression into a tailspin.

The insertion was terrible.  It went smoothly but the pain was bad.  They said it would be.  It's strange being a woman and realizing that half the population has no idea how it feels once a year or every other year to fit your heels into hard plastic stirrups and spread your legs awkwardly into the position you were trained never to assume since girlhood, hitch your pelvis to the farthest edge of the exam table and lie back on crinkly wax paper with a giant napkin draped over your lap and watch over the slope of white paper between your knees the foreheads and hairlines of strangers who are fishing around in your body.  The napkin makes all the difference.  You can crack jokes and they can laugh and banter back and it's all safe and removed because of the napkin, like they are in another room and it's not your genitals they're looking at, prodding, scraping, while they talk to you, like you are the woman sawn in half on a stage and your bottom half is entirely separate from your top.  In your head you're wondering who signs up for this as a career and hoping you washed well enough and worrying that your labia look weird but knowing you'll never have the courage to ask, while outside you're complaining about the weather.

Getting the IUD hurt.  Having never been pregnant I'd never had much of a reason to think about my cervix but forcing it open to get the little plastic T in was painful.  I felt like I'd been skewered with a hatpin and then punched with cramps.  I sipped air slowly while tears leaked out the corners of my eyes and my hands ached from clenching them hard against the wax paper and the GYN and her assistant told me how well I was doing.

A month later I went back.  Something was wrong.  I don't remember what it was -- some sign you were supposed to watch out for in the first six weeks after insertion.  What I remember is after the exam.  I had gotten dressed and was sitting in the chair next to the door waiting for the GYN to come back.  I was tired.  My relationship was falling apart.  My new job was stressful.  And then the office assistant came in to talk to me.

My white blood cell count was high. It was maybe an infection from the insertion but they wanted to run tests for chlamydia and gonorrhea.  I started to cry.  For a long time I had suspected that my boyfriend was cheating on me.

When the tests came back negative I was almost disappointed.  It would have been simpler if they hadn't.  I was miserable in the relationship but I didn't want that to be the reason I broke up with him.

In the end it was the reason I broke up with him.  Unhappiness is reason enough.  Now he and the infection are both gone, and my cramps are better and worse.

Dear Men on Online Dating Sites

In the course of the last few weeks trying to get to know some of you, I have come to realize that perhaps boys and girls attended different Dating 101 courses.  Either that or a bunch of you are mystifyingly stupid.  So I thought, for courtesy's sake, I would bring you up to speed on some misinformation you appear to labor under.  Because I am frustrated and annoyed, I am not bothering to be polite, because you should know better.  Like honestly.

How to Earn My Resounding Silence

1.  Comment on my physical appearance.

Please, go ahead.  Say anything about the one profile picture I posted.  Say "Hey beautiful" -- that'll hit me right in the naughty bits, because all I care about is how I look; it'll also hit me in the brain, because it's so winningly clever and definitely displays your interest in me as a person, with my own thoughts and feelings and agency, and not as an object you're trying to talk out of her pants.  Say "nice hot" because without your approval I am lost.  Say "cute pic!" because I am a child and you are a child and in a kingdom by the sea children who love with a love that is more than love say "cute."  Say "you make me wish I was 30 again" especially if you're in your fucking 60s because damn that makes me feel so valued and not at all grossed out.  Say "why don't you have more pictures posted?" because I am a couch that someone is attempting to sell on Craigslist.

By all means, continue to demonstrate that you don't see me as a human being, just a sex dispenser for you to stick your dick into if you do your coding right.  Show me that the most important facet of me, to you, is the package I come wrapped in.  That helps me immediately dismiss your value as a human being to me, and move on with my day.

2.  Make your first message a lengthy dating resume.

I don't give a shit that you like long walks on the beach, or that you say you're caring, supportive, and funny.  I could say that I poop in rainbow colors and can fly on the first night of the full moon and it doesn't mean jack shit if I can't back it up with evidence, which comes through knowing someone, which comes over time.  Also, you're not applying for a job.  And even if you were, only shitty resumes say "responsible forward-thinking self-starter" and just leave it at that.  "Oh, you say you're responsible?  YOU'RE HIRED."  No.  Prove it, asshole.

I dunno, maybe instead of throwing all your credentials at me you could try something crazy like just talking to me.  Feeling like an HR exec shuffling through a thousand shitty resumes does not put me in a lovin' mood.  Or even a chattin' mood.  Jesus.  Fuck off.

3.  Assume that because I responded to you once we are now boyfriend and girlfriend.

If mentioned that I made meatballs last week and your response is "ME TOO I LOVE MEATBALLS OMIGOD WE SHOULD DO A SPAGHETTI COOKOFF WE ARE CLEARLY MADE FOR EACH OTHER AND ALSO I HAVE FREQUENT FLYER MILES" I will quietly and casually run like fuck in the other direction.  Do I really need to explain this?  Dude.  Cool your fucking jets.  I think maybe you're planning our wedding and naming our children and we haven't even met face to face yet.  Has there been some dramatic gender role reversal in the last ten years?  I feel world-weary.  I also feel like setting my phone on fire.

4.  Push me to meet you in person immediately.

Because that always ends well and doesn't look in the least creepy, desperate or suspicious.  No, I'm not grabbing a coffee/sleeping with you.  If it isn't promising over online chat that we'll get along, rushing onto the IRL meeting isn't going to help.  Also makes me wonder what you're after.  Back off.

5.  If you don't hear from me for two days, send me whiny-ass messages about it.

This takes the cake.  From the age of about zero I have absorbed the cardinal first rule of dating: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES APPEAR NEEDY.  Like, that's pretty much it.  Don't look needy.  Now granted, this can be a misogynistic-as-fuck way to dick a woman over with impunity, but if you have no reason to expect anything from another human being, then, I dunno, don't expect anything from them.  You're on an online dating app.  We've never met.  We've had one mediocre conversation.  Maybe two.  A 48-hour window of silence on my part is not a reasonable time frame to start sending me messages that say "I don't get it. :( What did I do" or "Did you change your mind?" or "Why aren't you talking to me?" or "Don't you like me anymore?"  Well, I don't NOW.

God.  You would never survive as women.  How do you know why I haven't responded?  Maybe a parent died.  Maybe work has been crazy.  Maybe I'm just tired.  Maybe it's not *gasp* about you at all.  Although, now that you've insisted on making it about you...

...Consider that maybe, just a thought here, you might not want to appear really fucking self-absorbed and entitled.  "Hey, haven't heard from you for a couple of days, how's it going?  Here's a funny story from my day" is WAY more appealing than "wahhhhhh where did you gooooo I'm lonely and desperate please validate me I'm such a great guy."  (I have a great skeptical-disgusted face that goes really well here.)

I'm frankly just shocked that this isn't common sense.  I can't even tell you how many of these kinds of messages I get.  Oh, my god, I don't owe you anything at this point, and you don't owe me anything, and if you don't hear from me for an extended period of time, send a casual follow-up, and if there's nothing after that, cut your fucking losses (since they're not even losses, because, again, WE ARE STRANGERS) and move on.  Be a goddamn adult.

Or not.  I mean, if you want to show me your wet-diaper self, you go right ahead, that makes my choices narrower, but simple.


So, in short: Behave like the stereotype of every person another person wouldn't want to be with, and you will succeed excellently in never hearing back from me.  A lot of you are off to a great start so far.

God, dating is the worst.

Doing the (mm-mm) Pigeon

I used to hate pigeons. I thought they were ugly and stupid and shaped like footballs, which apparently made it okay to loathe them. (What the hell, younger me?)

I can't pinpoint an exact moment when that changed, although for some reason a reading of Zadie Smith's White Teeth factored in, which is odd because I recall pigeons or some other city fowl described as an object of intense hatred in that book, which I otherwise don't recall with much clarity. Maybe holding up a mirror of pointless pigeon hate was the point. At any rate, as with other paradigm shifts over the years, this little inconsequential evolution occurred slowly, subtly, and largely subconsciously so that I only noticed it six months ago upon disembarking from the bus for the first time to walk the few blocks to my new job in downtown Detroit, where, picking my way through the flow of pigeons moving in eddies and swirls around my feet, I regarded them with delight.

I read once that pigeons are among the only birds that can swallow (hold the dick jokes, please, god, what's wrong with you), an adaptation to city dwelling where the water sources consist mainly of puddles. Other birds have to capture water in their beaks and tilt their heads back. If it's true (yeah okay I'll look it up eventually), it's a surprisingly innovative attribute. Pigeons, stolid, quiet, slow, with their ungainly head-bobbing gait and such awkwardly large bright pink feet that you almost want to give them fashion advice (like seriously guys those don't go with ANYTHING), possess this unassuming, nearly unique, incredibly practical power that enables them to live their humble pigeon lives near people.

Once I realized my loathing had transmuted into respect, I began watching them as I walked among them in the mornings.  I found a calm dignity in their staring gold-ringed eyes to match the wild pride I see in seagulls. I noticed the multiplicitous diversity in their coloration -- no two alike -- delightful waddling snowflakes cast in all existing shades of gray and white and brown; I love the brown ones best. I enjoyed their unhurried wariness toward human passersby, liked seeing how closely I could approach before they edged away.  Doubtless I look a little unhinged, eyeing these flocks of winged city waste with a huge grin on my face, but god, they're so pretty.

Yesterday as I stepped off the bus and walked briskly toward the crosswalk, something in the sidewalk caught my eye.  A little self-consciously, because people in cities are supposed to be in a constant state of striding purposefully toward some important destination, not pausing to admire the scenery like tourists or weirdos, I stooped to see, impressed into the concrete, a line of pigeon tracks.

It made me unbelievably happy.  The impressions in the sidewalk there are reserved to the stamps of the manufacturers.  Handprints and initials (and faceprints, if you're Michael Scott) haven't touched them.  And yet some pigeon, at some point in the past, ignorant of the yellow tape and "sidewalk closed" signs, walked calmly across a freshly poured sidewalk and left, in a simple, humble monument to human progress, a human legacy.

In the pale light of an early autumn dawn over a city still coming back from the dead, that little line of accidental tracks was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

let me eat cake, dammit

So my birthday is Tuesday.

I realized last week that I'm almost in my mid-thirties which means I need to stop pretending and just admit that my birthday is a really big damn deal to me.  For years I've done the stiff-upper-lip I'm-so-low-maintenance-meh-to-birthdays schtick but last week I clued in to my own bullshit when I spent all of Wednesday a puddly mess of tears because my birthday is coming up and there's no one to celebrate with because I'm single and all my family and closest friends are far away.

But hey, at least this birthday won't be last year's.  Last year's pretty much has to take the cake (bwa. ha. hardy ha) because my then-boyfriend got me exactly zero presents, zero cards, zero flowers, zero balloons, zero cakes.  He did take me out to exactly one dinner at exactly one lame restaurant that he liked, wished me exactly one happy birthday, and was miffed when I expressed a wistful desire for something more, brushing off my request for even a belated present with "birthdays aren't a big deal in my family, we just go out to dinner."  The icing on the cake (HARHARHAR) came a month later when he bought his best (female) friend a birthday present and responded to my pointed "so you got her a present and not me?" with "that's just what we do."  (Never mind that the previous year for my birthday he had three dozen gorgeous roses delivered to me at work.)

So last week after mopping up my face and then dripping everywhere with tears all over again in a repeat cycle that lasted for hours, I set about determining what I could do to mitigate the harsh misery of a birthday alone (but slightly less harsh and miserable than a birthday spent alone while actually dating someone).  It's less that I'm having a birthday without a boyfriend -- after all, I've only had a handful of birthdays WITH a boyfriend, and they weren't that fabulous -- than that I'm having a birthday really really alone -- since in some ways I might as well have just moved here, and am still building a life and a social network, I don't have any close local friends yet who can participate truly naturally in a birthday bash.  But it doesn't have to be totally solitary for all that. So I'm having dinner with a couple of friends tonight, and going out to dinner with a friend on my actual birthday, and going out for lunch with some work friends on my birthday too; I just up and asked and told them why, and, people being nice, they were more than happy to accommodate me.

And today I made myself a cake.

That's the crux of birthdayness, in my mind.  Birthdays in my family constituted a Very Big Deal.  We didn't have much money, so no one received a shower of presents; but Mom hung a homemade banner on the outside of the house displaying the name and birth year of the celebrant, and on our birthdays we got to pick exactly what we wanted her to make for dinner, and exactly what kind of cake we wanted her to make (white cake with white frosting for me; spice cake with white frosting for Dad; yellow cake with chocolate frosting for my sister), and we got cards from everyone, and a few little presents, and a wonderful warm feeling that your birth and existence were meaningful and special and this was your day.  (Especially important in a household where kids typically didn't have much say in day to day life and preferences.)

In the short-hand forced on by the busy life of adulthood, birthdays boil down to cake.  I didn't get one last year, and I might be alone and putting together a makeshift birthday, and who knows, I might spend it partly in tears (although I'm feeling better today, so maybe not) but by god, I will eat some fucking cake, and it will be iced with my mother's homemade frosting that could bring kingdoms to their knees.  And since adulthood means I spend most of my waking weekday hours tired, that means I'm baking a cake today.

I am not a baker.  I'm not a butcher or candlestick maker either, but I'm especially not a baker of desserts.  Bread, yes.  I love baking bread.  (And I love eating bread so much that I don't bake it very often.)  I tend more toward the savory than the sweet, in my mouth palette as in other areas.  So baking a cake is sort of a dicey, slapdash prospect.  I bought a cake mix from Aldi; mostly cake is a vehicle for frosting, in my book, so I don't care if it's not the best cake in the world.

Which, judging by the appearance of the thing I just removed from the oven, is a good outlook.  I haven't baked much in this apartment because I've spent the year that I've lived here too harried and harrassed to undertake anything artisanal like my usual cooking, so I had no idea how very unlevel the oven is.  The cake looks like a topography map of the Appalachian foothills.  The slopes aren't even uniform.  If I had any hand at decorating I'd figure out a way to put Frodo and Sam and the rest of the Fellowship somewhere toiling up one of the ridges.

But instead I'll just slather the whole thing with Mom's divine frosting.  Maybe I'll even use the frosting to make it look level and feed the cake-ier portions to my roommate.

At least it all smells wonderful.

anxious

Finally, the outdoor temperature has dropped enough to render the open window in front of me an enjoyable experience, instead of a nasty sensation reminiscent of drilling a hole into a bowl of warm soup.  The vista never improves -- nothing poetic or restful to the eye about a parking lot and the neighboring apartment building -- but I'm choosing to focus on the strip of grass just below my window, and the tops of the trees standing in vibrant green and sunlit gold against a backdrop of pure September blue.  Fall is coming, and I couldn't be happier about it.

It's been a bad week fraught with pointless anxiety tightening all my blood vessels and gnawing on my stomach lining, as if I am constantly five minutes away from delivering the most important speech of my life to a crowd of millions.  I can't say for certain when the anxiety reentered the core fabric of my consciousness -- probably around the time of the start of my most recent relationship, just over two years ago -- but I've only really noticed it as a medical condition more than a product of circumstances since the breakup in early June, when the anxiety persisted with nothing specific to attach to.

The constant worryworryworry is annoying.  It keeps trying to fix on the usual sources, but those sources aren't legitimate sources anymore.  OH MY GOD MONEY YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY.  *Checks bank account balances*  Oh. We're totally fine.  Okay.  HOLY SHIT RELATIONSHIP YOUR RELATIONSHIP IS BAD.  *Blinks*  Oh we're not in one anymore and life is good again.  Um.  JOB! YOUR JOB IS STRESSFUL AND MISERABLE AND INSECURE PANIC PANIC PANIC!!!  *Pauses*  Oh.  We love our job and are kicking ass at it and our bosses appreciate the hell out of us.  Huh.  HEALTH HOLY CRAP OUR HEALTH COULD GO AT ANY MOMENT.  Well, maybe.  Blood pressure is high again and I haven't been exercising regularly for a really really long time.  So on Wednesday I put myself back on my old BP medication dosage (I'm so annoyed with my current general practitioner that I don't even want to write about it at the moment), and Friday night I started working out again, which felt fucking AMAZING, so much so that I did it again yesterday, with plans again for today, and a resolution to return to my hour-plus-long evening workouts, since I'm finally adjusted to my work schedule and need the extra time slots I have in the evenings to get the kind of workouts in that will get me back in shape.

Which, you know, is one of the purposes of anxiety, evolutionarily; I read somewhere that people with anxiety tend to notice and react to problems more quickly, and think more creatively under pressure to solve them -- probably at least in part because they have already considered the fifty different ways a situation can go wrong and planned out ahead of time what to do for each one.  So my busy brain's constant planning can come in extremely handy, and makes me more quick-footed and competent at work, and swift to notice and solve my own problems (like not exercising enough, which affects, among other things, my blood pressure and my anxiety levels).  And I do tend to respond cool-headedly in crisis.  Which is nice; it's preferable to freaking out and melting down when moments matter.  But anxiety running amok means a shit ton of wasted emotional energy and unnecessary bad feelings when everything is fine.  I'd like to strike some kind of reasonable balance so that I don't lose any of my preparedness while still feeling relaxed and peaceful and empowered on an average basis.

So I have an appointment to see about getting medicated, at least temporarily, for the anxiety.  Unlike the depression, for which I plan to remain medicated for the entirety of my life, the anxiety only requires medical attention periodically.  I waited a few months to see if it would pass, but it hasn't, and it's interfering with the quality of my daily life.  And fuck that.  I've spent enough time feeling helplessly miserable.  Life is GOOD, goddammit, and I've worked hard to make it so, and I refuse to let a chemical problem detract from my enjoyment of my achievements, or prevent me from achieving and enjoying further.

One of the best aspects of learning to cope with trauma, depression and anxiety over the years has been the acceptance that comes with growth and healing -- learning to look at these problems in less polarized terms.  In this instance, I could hate my anxiety and hate that I have it and think that I'm screwed up and need to get rid of it altogether; or I could view it as an occasionally useful product of human evolution (quick responses to potentially bad situations and rapid, creative solutions) and accept its purpose while finding ways not to let it steamroll me into the ground or immobilize me into a glassy-eyed bundle of twitching nerves.  Looking at it that way has the added benefit of moving me out of the "I'm a failure for not being perfect" paradigm and into a place where I can fully accept myself, and forge wholeness and health from that acceptance -- be my own best ally, recognize the ways my coping mechanisms and responses are intended to be helpful, set appropriate boundaries for them, and know exactly what goals I'm striving to reach in order to live a full, healthy, happy, satisfying, meaningful, purposeful life.

So anxiety, thank you for caring about my wellbeing, and thank you for your watchfulness.  Also, prepare to chill the fuck out.  I have shit to do and you're overstepping your bounds.

Surprised by

It hits me at odd moments.  Blinking my eyes slowly on a Saturday morning, savoring the recent darkness rendered by the blackout curtains I purchased earlier this month.  Glancing out my office's twentieth floor window over the Ford Field toward the horizon just beyond Detroit.  Inhaling the spice of a humid August morning waiting for the early bus into the city.  Surveying the electic, artfully arranged beauty of my living room.  Or just now, washing off my hands after scooping out Simon's litterbox, which I carved out by hand from a large plastic storage bin so he would have more headroom and higher sides to accommodate his aging and slightly arthritic hips.  Moments when my mind is idle, thinking of nothing in particular, at rest in the ease of a quiet moment.

Joy.

It happens more and more often, lately, especially in the last month.  Adjusting to life post-breakup takes a huge toll, mental, emotional and physical--a shift of identity, a drastic change to a long-envisioned future.  (Especially when you move across two states for the guy and undergo two huge career changes in less than a year.)  On the whole, exhaustion won out over even grief, bitterness and anger (although I had/have those in abundance).  But as I've rested, as I've started to mend, to think, to heal, to convalesce, a sweet, pure joy has begun to flash through me in the moments when I'm thinking of nothing.

My life now holds so many more and brighter prospects than it did a year ago, two years ago, three years ago.  I'm living in a bigger place, with more to do, more opportunities, more happening (I love Detroit).  I have a living space that's as beautiful and settled-in as I can make it.  I love my job, where I can keep busy and solve problems without feeling overwhelmed, where I am deeply appreciated by bosses and coworkers, where I know my own worth.  I have fallen in love with public transportation, where I can read for two hours a day instead of grinding my teeth through traffic.  I'm reading more than I've read in years.  I finally bought a new (used) car.  I am free and unfettered, both relationally and psychologically.  And I'm making friends.  I love that I'm finally starting to have friends.

I'm still tired, most days.  But it's the tiredness that feels like healing, not the tiredness that needs healing.  I'm still focusing on getting as much rest as I want, and hopefully before too many more months have passed I'll feel rested and alert.

And I take a quick, childlike pleasure in those flashes of joy.  It had been a long while since I felt them.  I'm glad to have them back.

A is for Asshole

So out of curiosity yesterday I found a site that offers the Big Five Personality Test for free.  Also called the OCEAN or CANOE test, the Big Five measures five attributes that seem to be universally applicable to humans: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  For each component, you fall somewhere on a spectrum between the poles of the attribute and its opposite.

In the past I self-diagnosed where I fall for each of the Big Five but had never actually taken the test, so yesterday I figured, what the hell.  Mostly my results didn't surprise me; I fall in the middle on the Extraversion scale (drives my therapists nuts when they can't determine whether I'm an introvert or extravert), and my Conscientiousness appears to have increased to being neither conscientious nor disorganized (depending, I guess, on whether or not I give a shit).  The big surprise came from my Agreeableness score: Among the other respondents, I landed in the 38th percentile, far, far closer to the harsh, abrasive, callous end of the spectrum than the nice, accommodating, cooperative end that I expected.

The test's impressively tactful diagnosis: "You find it easy to express irritation with others."

A quick life-montage of my interactions with others would show an overwhelming skew to the accommodating. From childhood on, I did what others asked, bent to others' needs, mostly in terror of disapproval or the resigned conviction that I had no choice.  Apparently agreeableness isn't quite in my nature, though -- I resent impositions like hell; I detest when people behave contrary to my wishes; I do not like to share; thoughtlessness and stupidity annoy the shit out of me.  I am, in short, a grumpy bitch.

I just don't often act like one.

Jeff used to describe me as compliant.  It's a key concept: I didn't accommodate others because I liked to; I complied for other reasons, largely having to do with a lack of boundaries.  I had to learn assertiveness and self-advocacy.  As a result of my early schooling in compliance and my late training in noncompliance, I'm better equipped to express my disagreeableness in healthy ways, while refraining from ripping people to shreds (unless they really, really have it coming).

So I guess it's to my credit that most people don't have any idea how easily irritated I get; I reign that shit in hard because social acceptance is, you know, important.

But my tending toward the disagreeable possibly explains why it feels so, so good to let loose on someone who is begging for a setdown.  And perhaps why, however politely I frame requests when I'm annoyed, the person I'm talking to usually gets the point.

Here's to being cranky.

Liberal White Male Syndrome

"So I met this guy at this atheist social group I started attending.  Not my type, but pretty smart, and really seems to appreciate how smart I am."  I recentered my Bluetooth collar to make sure Leigh Ann could hear me.  "Into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology and stuff.  And I was like, 'okay, awesome,' until this weekend.

"I just don't get how smart people can be so fucking stupid sometimes.  We're at this picnic for the group, and he starts complaining about political correctness."

Leigh Ann groaned, and I grinned while I continued, "He's liberal as shit, but he's complaining about how liberals are unfairly censoring comedy and policing jokes.  His example was this chalkboard sign outside a bar where a server wrote 'We like our beer like we like our violence: Domestic.' Once the Internet got hold of it, the server and the manager were both fired, and this guy thought that was ridiculous and unfair because the joke was 'objectively funny' and shouldn't have caused an outcry."

"So let me just ask something," Leigh Ann said.  "Was this guy, by any chance, white?"

"Boom," I said.  "Nailed it."

Because of course he was.

There's this pernicious disease rotting away at the heart of a certain sector of liberalism, where otherwise relatively enlightened people hold fast and firm to a really ugly sexism all the more damaging for its subtlety and for the denial in which its carriers live.  (Incidentally, it also makes dating really, really, REALLY hard, instead of just really, really hard.)

I call it Liberal White Male Syndrome (LWMS).  My last two exes had it.  These are the dudes who espouse the usual, good beliefs that racism and sexism are bad, that poverty is terrible, that government should intervene to promote equality, that higher taxes for the wealthy are imperative.  They call themselves feminists.  They support equal wages and reproductive rights, and oppose overt sexual violence.  They don't really think beyond that.  Because they're feminists, all right?  They've already thought it all through and they stand on the side of equality and women's rights, so there's no possible way that anything they think could be clouded by the systemic sexism that permeates absolutely everyone absolutely everywhere in our society.  They have magically transcended all sexism, and so every single one of their opinions is just fine the way it is, no further examination required.  To suggest otherwise is profoundly insulting, because they're feminists.

And they are giant, flaming dickholes.

Take this guy from the atheist picnic.  I'll call him B.  You can tell at a glance that he is sensitive, cripplingly insecure, and deeply resentful.  I'm not unsympathetic to this.  I listened to him ruminate angrily about his college students' complaints against him, especially how they didn't talk to him about the things they found offensive, but went right to the dean.  I didn't need to ask to determine that the complainants were women; I could tell by the tone and by the attack on their passivity.  (Never mind that woman are socialized never to be confrontational, and have only recently begun to be encouraged to report situations that make them uncomfortable -- report, not confront.)  But sure, okay, nobody likes being complained about to their boss, I would hate it too.  Guy's probably in the wrong profession for his temperament, which he seems to be realizing.

But then the diatribe on the damage that liberal censorship is inflicting on the comedy world.  The server and manager who wrote the "domestic beer and violence" joke shouldn't have suffered repercussions, because that joke was objectively funny and none of the bar patrons were offended by it.  B argued that it's a shame that people can't make jokes about whatever they want anymore; they have to be careful not to be offensive, and that's stupid.  After all, George Carlin said, probably shaking his head sadly while he did, that forty years ago the liberals were the ones decrying censorship, but now they're the ones enforcing it, and it's a tragedy, one that Carlin never thought he'd see.

Yeah, well, as Clint Eastwood recently reminded us, forty years ago nothing anyone said was racist.  Pretty sure forty years ago wasn't a good plumb line for what is or isn't sexist either.

I asked B to define "objective" humor.  He defined it as the unexpected association of two unrelated things.  Okay, I can buy that.

But what about objectively funny jokes that are mean? I asked.

Well, those aren't funny.  A joke has to come from a good place to be funny.

And a joke making light of domestic violence is coming from a good place?

Well it was a general joke, about a general topic, not directed at someone who had actually experienced it.  It wasn't intended to be harmful.

And -- the clincher of B's argument -- the server who wrote the joke on the chalkboard was a woman.

And there you have it, folks -- a perfect indicator of Liberal White Male Syndrome.  Textbook case.  You have special pleading (something is objectively funny when two unrelated things are brought into association.  But suddenly, when the joke is cruel, intent matters and it's only funny if it comes from a "good place," which has nothing to do with the previous definition, which contained no qualitative element).  You have privilege-blindness to a gender-specific subject (domestic violence is most frequently wrought against women, and therefore something that a male is unlikely to experience on the receiving end and so, from this position of privileged removal from the brutal reality, can look at the entire topic as something distant and "general" and academic).  You have privilege-generated defensiveness toward being called into question (the intent wasn't harmful so the effect shouldn't be; the offender's intent matters more than the victim's reaction or the reasons for it; the victim should merely stop being sensitive).  You have the instant dismissiveness of objecting opinions and the refusal to engage in self-scrutiny.  You have the reactionary blame-shifting so that the problem is the person who is offended, not the person who committed the offense.  And you have that mainstay defense of prejudiced opinions everywhere: The perpetrator of this particular example was a member of the group claiming offense (a woman made the joke, so it cannot be offensive to women -- which betrays a breathtaking ignorance of the internalized, systemic nature of bigotry, as only a LWM can pull off).

Fuck LWMS.

As B made his angry defense of his own sexism, the Avett Brothers' lines from "Ten Thousand Words" ran through my mind:

But their good times come with prices
and I can't believe it when I hear the jokes they make
at anyone's expense except their own--
would they laugh if they knew who paid?

Yeah, dude.  Intent doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  That joke comes at the expense of battered women, murdered women, brutalized girls.  It's not fucking funny.

And I lost all respect for your LWM ass as soon as those arguments came from your mouth.  I know exactly who you are now, and in some respects I'd prefer to deal with an overt woman-hating bigot because at least they're upfront about being total assholes.  You're in denial so deep you're lying about it without realizing it.  And sure, it's possible that you might learn, over time, to empathize, to think, to accept responsibility for your part in a sexist system from which you benefit daily.  But with defense reactions that strong, with that much anger and resentment, Imma kinda doubt it.

Also, I've dated your type before, and it never goes well.  Misogyny will out, and dealing with both the misogyny and the vehement denial of it is doubly taxing.

Jonah Day

Well, this wasn't going to be a good day from the beginning.

Last night, exhausted, I turned in at nine-thirty anticipating a much-needed eight hours' sleep, only to toss and turn for two hours before falling into a state of fitfulness that barely counts as rest.  Woke up shaky and weepy with tiredness, had to take a different route to work due to a traffic accident, took several wrong turns, ran over a curb because Detroit has a few stupid randomly placed parking lanes that are indistinguishable from turning lanes except for the curb itself rearing up just before the intersection which blends seamlessly into its environment especially with the morning sun screaming into your eyes and now I have a bulge in one of my tire sidewalls which I will need to fix tonight costing up to $250 and I just bought the car last week, and then a lady behind me lay on the horn for about ten years when I was driving too slowly trying to figure out how to get to the correct turn and worrying about the damage to my car (I was a giant dick about it and stuck my hand out the window to flutter my fingers at her in a really passive-aggressively nasty-polite wave because fuck her; the rage that contorted her features before she had to take her turn while I kept driving straight gave me an ugly satisfaction that I've felt bad about all morning), I'm so tired that I'm dropping everything that I touch and running into things and awkwardly slow on my feet in conversations and nothing that I say or do is coming out right, and I just want a hug from someone who loves me but I don't have one of those and I've been struggling with loneliness and old hurts the last few days and I just want to collapse into tears and hide from the world until this miserable day is over.

And I have to clean the house tonight because my childhood best friend is coming to visit tomorrow and all I want to do when I get home is stare at the TV for ten minutes and then go to bed.  And that's without taking into account the necessary visit to the tire shop.

I would say "someone shoot me," but this is Detroit, and I try to be careful what I wish for.

Sarah, Then and Now

It's been about seven years since I blogged regularly, I think. New posts aren't going to have a lot of context unless I fill in some of the gap between then and now.

Some things have changed, some of them drastically; some things have remained much the same.

I have gray hairs now, glistening at my temples, worked in shining threads throughout the many-shaded, gold-edged brown of my hair.  I let them be; I like them.  When I attended the First Baptist Church of North East as a teenager, I always admired the hair of a woman who sat with her husband several pews ahead of us -- she never dyed it, and the gray and silver mixed beautifully with the range of natural brown. I always hoped I would go gray that way, and I'm still waiting to see if I will.

I give less of a shit what strangers and bare acquaintances think of me.  That might not appear to diverge much from my younger self on the surface, but it feels more secure and less defiant than it used to; Meg and I agree that something magical happens after turning thirty, where you feel freer to shed all your fucks and do what you want.  So I dress as I please (having developed, since my last serious blogging days, a fairly fantastic sense of style all my own); I wear my hair in a ponytail and wash it once a week because I couldn't care less about fussing with it (and it's curlier now); I speak my mind frankly, with varying degrees of courtesy depending on the occasion; I stay home when I want to stay home; I go out when I want to go out; I don't apologize for feeling "peopled out" and wanting only the company of my beloved Simon (who is now fourteen and just as frisky and affectionate and grumpy as he ever was).

Where then I read entirely fiction and poetry, now I read almost entirely nonfiction, having developed a ravening hunger for the facts, the knowledge, the information denied me from my earliest childhood.  Where I then listened to indie folk and indie rock, I now mostly listen to instrumental jazz (heavy on bebop) -- an exploration completely my own.  In 2008 I moved from Michigan back to Pennsylvania; in 2015 I moved from Pennsylvania back to Michigan (full circle and a half).

I have better boundaries now, a stronger sense of self.  Often I have won them at great cost.

Back then I struggled under the weight of depression; I have since learned to manage it.  I walked through the valley of the shadow of death to get there, and feared, and faced, and relived much evil, and I learned to comfort me.  Now the occasional rough patch is milder, and I have learned to listen to what my condition is trying to tell me when the ground swells rise more than they ought.  The listening has led me out of some deep darknesses into light of my own making, and some of that very recently.

My life is quieter now, less ambitious.  I feel no burden to change the world, although I would like to make a meaningful contribution, to leave the world a little better than I found it--I still haven't determined how.  In the meantime I take pleasure in my work and leisure; I have a job that I like--I am still a legal secretary (after a brief and loathed recent stint teaching high school), much better paid now, and loving work at a large city firm which offers a brisker pace and greater challenges--and I satisfy my brain in other ways while I work out how to satisfy my soul...

...a word that I now use in metaphor.  Once I counted myself a Christian; now I don't.  My journey out of faith was long and strange and wonderful, and I have never encountered such fullness, such miraculous satisfaction, such shattering, transformative joy, as I have on the other side of belief.  My deconversion is a story of love and liberation that I am still learning to live in.

I am still profoundly lonely.  In the last seven years I have entered into two serious relationships; neither worked out.  I ended the last one two months ago.  It was necessary; it was wonderful, if sad, to break free; I have become again the self I recognize, happy, whole, complete and sure in myself, and, hopefully, a little surer, a little wiser, a little more shrewd for the latest experience.  I have deeply loved only once, a long time ago, before either of the last two relationships.  I never had the chance to tell him, and evidently not sharing my regard, he married someone else.  I have never met his equal since, and I'm not sure how likely it is that I will.  I hold out some hope, while resolving, without condition, to be fulfilled with my own company until such time, if ever, as I do.

So there you have it--the comparison in a nutshell.  I remain (as Lizzie Bennett might say) much the same in essentials, although some essential things have changed, and for the better.  Every year I find life a little richer; every failure, setback, disappointment, shows me my way a little more clearly.

I am, ever, Sarah.

Tenuous

Found myself on the verge of a panic attack this morning.

It was a weird feeling, only half familiar. The nausea. The almost atomic-level trembling, invisible to the naked eye but beginning to quiver through the particles of my body in subtle, seismic portent. The fluttering almost-hitch in my breath. The internal barometric pressure building to some black-clouded break. The ache tightening my tear ducts. The flash of adrenaline through my blood. The pinned wide eyes sweeping lightning glances around the room, the desperate urge to flight. I experienced it half-distantly, thinking, oh. I remember this.

The weirdest part was the emptiness behind it - not the emptiness of loss, but rather the emptiness of any real cause. I cast around in my mind for what might be causing stress, anxiety and panic, but couldn't locate anything.

Which, I think, is what triggered the panic.

My mind keeps racing, trying to latch onto one of the many anxieties that have consumed it for the last two years. It grabs at a shadow that looks like job worry, to fall back confused that job worry is gone. It scurries to relationship worry, but that has vanished too. There's some sadness and loneliness and exhaustion there instead, but those aren't sources of anxiety. In mounting consternation my mind leaps to money troubles, but those are well in hand, bills paid, bills scheduled, budget accounted for. Kerflummoxed, bewildered, it starts whirling in frantic circles, spinning up a dervish of emotional turmoil.

I keep thinking that there's something I'm forgetting to worry about.

But there's...nothing. And I have lived in stress and chaos for so long that I can't relax my CONSTANT VIGILANCE. (Pseudo-Mad-Eye-shout-out.) Non drama feels strange, and strangely threatening. Ominous.

We've been here before. Convalescence from trauma can be traumatic in itself. (Does the butterfly ever have a panic attack because it's not a caterpillar anymore?) It's taxing, changing your brain wiring to be adapted to happiness instead of misery. Happiness is unfamiliar, feels fragile, alien, suspicious.

It'll take some time to relax my rigid muscles, calm my racing brain. My working memory will be occupied for awhile, relearning what it means to operate from happiness as a baseline normalcy. I'll forget things. I'll feel scared and nervous, unaccustomed to a lack of reasons to worry.

But this is better. I just have to batten down the hatches when the panic brews, curl up with myself, and talk me gently down. It's okay, it's okay, you're okay.

And I will be.

I hate baseball.

Dissolving a long term relationship and starting over in your mid-thirties does weird shit to your psyche.

Today's bus commute home mostly involved sitting still in a glinting vehicular sea of day-game Tigers traffic - the American pastime apparently being to drive exhausted office workers longing for the quiet of home to the brink of suicide  for the sake of something to do while they wait for traffic to move forward another half-inch. Staring absently out the window - an occupation in which I decidedly revel as part of my public transportation commuter lifestyle - I caught my reflection in the window of a neighboring SUV. The convex pane of glass, presumably just to be cruel, gave my mouth the appearance of jowls.

And I panicked. Yanking out my phone I stared at my mouth in the reflection and started poking at my face thinking,

Shit I need to stop frowning so much.

Oh my god I'm turning into Jon Voight.

The person who someday falls in love with me will never know me looking young. No one will get to love me while I'm still pretty. Shit shit shit.

About half a minute later I was kindly telling myself that millions of women look gorgeous into their 90s and I have many years before I turn into Jon Voight.

But still. I'm smiling a lot just to ease my face muscles, knowing full well it won't do a goddamn thing.

Incidence

Saturday night as I waited to pull out of the condo complex where my friends K. & E. live, a cop car drove past me.

Shit.

I contemplated returning to my parking spot and waiting awhile, but figured that would look even more suspicious, and in a sleepy affluent small town where not much happens the cop might wait for me, so I carefully turned left, watching my rear view mirror. The marked SUV spun a U-turn.

Shit shit shit.

When the lights flashed I was already pulling over. I gathered all the necessary documents, rolled down the window, and waited.

A surprisingly pleasant voice said, "Hey."

I craned my neck around and smiled at her and said "Hey..."

She didn't waste time on condescension. "Where's your headlight?"

With cops I don't normally cry or waffle or make excuses. "Gone."

She took my license, registration and proof of insurance. As she glanced them over, I offered, "It's an expensive repair, and I'm going to be replacing the car soon."

"Oh? How soon?"

"Like two weeks?"

She nodded. The scant midnight traffic pulling past stared, offense on their faces, looking to see what kind of monster gets pulled over in their town.

"Where are you heading?" she asked. I named the town. "You heading there for the night?"

"Oh yeah, yeah, I live there, I'm just here visiting friends."

"So the headlight is completely gone?" Her tone was matter of fact but still pleasant, with a thread of humor tucked away in the back like a hidden seam, which made it easier to answer frankly.

"Oh yeah, the whole assembly, just gone. It's like a $200 repair and since I'm getting a new car soon, I haven't replaced it."

"How's your driving record?"

In my nervousness I blanked on a humble way to say it. "Perfect."

She nodded again. "I'll be right back."

While I waited I laughed sourly to myself. The last time I visited K. & E. I thought my chances of getting pulled over were significantly higher here, where probably the only crime was kids TP-ing the occasional house on Halloween. I've driven past so many cops all over the county since the headlight assembly fell out (due to a really stupid careless maneuver on my part, no further comment) and none of them had ever even blinked. Oh well...bound to catch up with me sometime. Fucking money.

I heard her coming back.

"Here's your paperwork," she said. "I completely sympathize. Just be careful."

"Thank you so much," I said fervently.

It's been a rough few weeks, and as I drove carefully home over the dark highways that hold the far flung neighborhoods of Detroit together like webbing, my heart felt a little warmer. A little humankindness from an unexpected source.

Good people are everywhere.

Well, I'm back.