The Year of More and Less

Life continues apace.

I like being in my late thirties. I have my shit roughly together. I'm more secure and confident in who I am. The existential anxieties that haunted my twenties have quietly settled down. Instead of "Who am I?" and "What is my purpose?" I'm occupied with different questions: How do I increase my impact and expand my influence? What are my focus points for growth for this year? How am I going to make my life even better?

I never saw myself reaching this point. I don't mean this as a bitter indictment of my abusive upbringing in narcissism and fundamentalist religion (although it certainly doubles as that -- I will never stop indicting that shit); I mean it very literally. I never saw myself reaching this point because "this point" was beyond my ability to conceptualize. Up until two years ago, nothing about my life had ever trained me to envision a life in fullness. Fullness was so far be yond my capacity to comprehend that I had to live it before I could imagine it. I built up to it blindly, knowing that each step was toward something better, even though I had no idea what "something better" looked or felt like.

I have a better idea now. And like Conor Oberst writes (yes, I still love Conor -- even more now than when I was a wreck; I'm fairly certain that that man's voice could bring me back from the dead), "I'm not there yet, but I'm feeling confident to build something that's sacred till the end." Still en route; always will be. But I have an inkling of my destination.

Which brings me to this, the beginning of my 38th year on this planet. The questions that occupy my mental spaces get an annual refreshment around my personal New Year. As always, I find myself asking, What do I want from this next year? What do I want to accomplish?

Thinking about these things led me to The Year of More and Less.

See, I'm great at self-improvement, but, like most humans, I'm terrible at self-regulation. Especially with ADHD.  Like -- so, so bad at self-regulation. At least when it comes to meeting concrete, overly specific, disciplined goals. I mean, people aren't good at this in general. This is why diets fail, why New Year's resolutions are a cultural joke, why people are constantly doing shit we regret later, knowing full well we'll regret it. (There are a lot of neuroscientific reaons for this, including our brains' inability to identify our future selves as our actual selves; our brain classifies our future selves as a wholly distinct and other person.) As a species, we're just shit at responsibility -- it's a capacity that got cobbled onto other existing neural systems as we evolved, and we're no better at it than we are at logic.

So in the past, when I said, "I'm going to lose 40 pounds in 6 months," or, "I'm going to exercise 150 minutes per week," or, "I'm going to get 8 hours of sleep every night," I would get a strong start, lapse into my normal modes of existence, and give up on the goal altogether. I felt guilty. I felt like a failure. I felt powerless against my own desires.

Well, fuck guilt and powerlessness. That's all bullshit. The goals are arbitrary anyway; what's to feel guilty about? (It's actually kind of hilarious, and profoundly tragic, when you think about it -- we impose these meaningless, arbitrary, completely impossible rules on ourselves and then wallow around in self-flagellating worthlessness for not following them. I meannnnnnnnn who cares.) 

So there are things this year that I want to do. But I don't want rules. I want a solid life rhythm. So I came up with More and Less. I wrote down all the things that I want for my best life (there were a lot), and narrowed the list down to the four things that will add the most to my immediate wellbeing (success in which will build the foundation to tackle a few of the other things next year). For two of those things (exercise and sleep), I will do More. For the other two (alcohol consumption and skin picking), I will do Less.

So far it's pleasingly effective. For one thing, it's almost impossible to fail. I could exercise 10 times this whole year and that's still More than what I've been doing. So there's no fear of failure, no self-loathing lurking around the corner. The question instead focuses on what it means incorporate these things into my best life. Like okay, since I can't fail, what kind of More and Less am I aiming for? And really, what I want is to build better habits. And a habit is a frame of mind. An assumption that you'll do a thing more often than you won't (or that you won't do a thing more often than you will).

So I've been taking my mindset about these four habits, accepting what my mindsets are and historically have been, and simultaneously assuming that those mindsets are already different. Exercise, for example. I haven't exercised with any regularity in, oh, at least five years. So now I'm placing an overlay on my existing no-exercise mindset, and thinking like someone who exercises regularly. Which means that I'll miss some days here and there due to reasonable circumstances -- illness, or being out of town, or just being too fucking tired. But instead of going "oh no I fell off the wagon, now I'm fucked," I think, "well today wasn't good, so let's try again tomorrow or the day after or even next week, when I'm up for it again." This way a small break in continuity doesn't lead to the train totally jumping the tracks.

I mean, I think about the habits I already have, like eating dinner while watching TV. Most days I do this, and I enjoy the hell out of it. Some days, though, I don't, because I'm eating out, or I'm talking to a friend and wind up eating while I'm on the phone because I don't want to end the conversation. I don't get upset that I didn't watch more of a favorite show; that doesn't even occur to me. My brain is already thinking, We'll do it tomorrow. (Or the next day. Or the next.) No matter what, it's going to happen again, because it's just something that I do. If I approach exercise and sleep the same way, occasional or even regular interruptions aren't that big a deal, because I'll pick it back up as soon as I can, because it's just something I do more often than not. And conversely, with drinking alcohol and picking my skin, if I gradually reduce the regularity of both, I'll be at a point where I don't do those things more often than I do them.

Any increase in exercise and sleep is good; any decrease in alcohol consumption and skin picking is good. And that's ultimately what I'm seeking: Goodness. Not perfection. Where perfection is rigid, uncompromising, disapproving, harsh and judgmental, goodness is flexible, realistic, accepting and nurturing. Balanced.

So we'll see how this plays out -- a self-help approach that eschews discipline. I'm anticipating good things. 

gearing up

Another hot August day, sunny and humid, rasped by waves of cicada wings and the occasional gusty breeze. These are the sounds I notice, even in the heart of the city with the endless ocean roar of traffic, the punctuating barks of distant dogs, the pulse of bass and wail of car alarms. I'm a small-town girl. I hear the wind and the insects. Country sounds.

I'm sitting out on the balcony where a truly enterprising spider has constructed a web the size of a schooner sail. I used to be terrified of spiders. Through no particular design, I'm not anymore. Mostly I attribute this to science enthusiasm and being tired of fearing things I can't avoid. The web I'm looking at now is liberally sprinkled with insect corpses, and I'm raising my coffee mug in tribute to a master predator whose feeding habits benefit me.

Hopefully this is my last summer renting. Apartment life has been good to me but it's time to call the shots in my own living space. I'm sick of sharing walls with inconsiderate neighbors and putting up with laissez-faire landlords. So here I am, less than a year after declaring that I would rent until retirement, obsessively scanning listings and constructing castles in my head. My therapist says it means I'm in a healthy place: For the first time in my life, I'm putting down roots. I know he's right but mostly I'm just excited for an absence of pot smoke and dance music bleeding through my walls like the superbly shitty ectoplasm of the world's worst ghost.

When you don't have kids, I guess this is what drives the homeownership decision. Fuck everyone with their noise and their laziness. I'm buying a fort.

I'm planning on buying in Detroit. I love it here. I love watching, all around me, the neighborhoods begin to come back. It's only been two years since I moved into the city limits and the progress is astonishing. Four years ago, my realtor told me, you couldn't hire contractors in the city because no one would work here. Now you can't hire contractors because there are too many jobs. Just this summer, rehab work has begun on three derelict houses within eyeshot of my balcony.

Trauma and disaster don't last forever. Not on a wide scale. I'm lucky enough that they don't last forever on a personal scale either.

I shouldn't have survived what was done to me from birth. Certainly not with my personality intact. My therapist says there's no explanation for why I'm okay. Some deep, impossible wellspring of resilience brought me through.

I had to make hard choices to get to the other side of survival. I cut ties, cast off bonds, tore up roots, burned bridges. I obliterated my place in the world. You don't know what it is to be alone until you've cut yourself off from your family of origin. Even a shitty family is family. Even a shitty family gives you a place. I incinerated all that. With nothing to replace it. It took strength beyond strength.

And here I am, more than okay. I'm thriving. I'm free. I'm crafting my own place in the world. And one of the best things I discovered is that irrespective of trauma and depression, it is not in my nature to be miserable. My default state is happiness.

So I can sit here on the balcony of an apartment I'm tired of, enjoying a day moving toward thunderstorms, relishing the drop in temperature as I scrutinze the latest house listing to catch my eye, gearing up for the next phase in my evolution. I can savor the present even as I anticipate the future -- a balance that has heretofore eluded me. It's still a little wobbly some days, but I'm getting the hang of it. Because that's what I do.

It's starting to rain.

Life couldn't be better.

My kingdom for some ointment

Month 3 of new cat motherhood:

Thackeray jumped on my chest and promptly started licking his ass 2 inches from my face, then spent 5 minutes kneading my tits with his claws right over the nip.

I need a shower and bandages.

Also he is frighteningly cute.

l'hote

On an antiquing venture with my sister in PA this weekend I picked up what can best be described as a "framed owl thingie." Constructed of leaves, pine cones and papier mache, it is equal parts creepy and adorable, the kind of thing you hang in a guest room just to fuck with your guests. 

Which is precisely what I'll do when I buy a house. 

Sleep well, motherfuckers.

unbreaking

I

It's been a hot summer.

Too hot.  Irregularly, horribly hot.  All summer I have sat and sweltered in a brick oven of an apartment, choking on heat.  In the beginning I bought a freestanding air conditioner for the living room and hung heavy drapes across the scalloped edge of the wide arch into the dining room to contain the cooled air.  For the first few weeks I hid in the living room with the blinds and curtains drawn, sitting directly in the chilled current, feeling through the walls the heat pressing down on the building, pushing into the darkened room, crowding up around the mechanically moving air, sucking at my breath the moment I stood from the couch. Even working its hardest the air conditioner could never bring the room below eighty.  Eventually the dark tepidity depressed me and I dismantled the unit so that I could feel the sweat sheeting down my back in a space full of daylight and outside air.

Every summer gets hotter.  Rage, so easy to come by these days no matter how often I conclude that this cistern has been tapped, this keg has been kicked, that my body cannot possibly contain one more flash of anger, flickers up with exhausting resilience when I imagine the millions of people slowly waking to the awareness that this heat is not normal, that the nicely mild winters they've enjoyed in recent years harbor this increasingly deadly flipside of a sinister coin whose existence they've stubbornly denied, and by the time they reluctantly conclude that it's possibly our fault and that we might consider doing something, it will be too late.  It is already too late.

At least some days there's a breeze.

There's a breeze now, coming in from the balcony window, occasionally evaporating puffs of sweat from my soaked camisole, bringing a breath of relief.  By this point in the summer I'm mostly acclimated, and only notice discomfort when I'm hungover or have company, another human body radiating its energy burnoff into the room.  This, today, with open windows and a breeze stirring the thick air around the curtains with the scent of grilling meat and the chorus of cicadas rising and falling in waves, isn't too bad, if I don't think about the long-term implications of what it means.

II

My history of summer depression stretches further back than I can solidly place on a timeline.  From my childhood I remember mostly exhilarated freedom, spending my days tearing around the backyard with my sister, or staying out of our parents' way on the enclosed front porch, building worlds of my design in which we were explorers, heroes, warriors, leaping into new worlds through the jets of the oscillating sprinkler with stick swords drawn against the blaze of unexpected dragons, constructing elaborate societies with our vast collection of plastic animals who were constantly electing leaders, negotiating alliances and carrying out expansive wars with the aid of spies, heroism and magic.  (There was only one summer in which we played with dolls.  Neither of us got much out of it beyond the creative excitement of drawing and cutting from index cards the toy baby-care items we couldn't afford in three dimensions.  I have only just begun to realize the innate nonexistence of our maternal instincts, a nonexistence which we probably inherited from our parents; and to be, as I approach middle age, profoundly grateful for my unwitting escape from the culturally conditioned expectations of motherhood that I would have hated.)  Childhood summers, broadly executed apart from parental supervision, were, on the whole, fun.

Then somewhere in the mistily remembered traumas of my adolescence the summer depression began. It carried into adulthood, incubated every year by the swampy humidity and fetid heat into a miasma of mildewed listlessness.  In all my memories of the worst depressive phases of my life, it's summer.

This summer has been no exception.

It's different, though, this year.  Not in affect or duration or severity, but in context.  Possibly in purpose; I don't know.  Time, and my own interpretation of the outcome, will answer that.

Nine months ago I exited my family.  The break was instinctive, unplanned, a desperate, gasping retreat into solitude, a slamming shut on the airlock through which all my vitality was being sucked into space.  I needed rest.  I needed peace.

I had no thought of the split being anything but temporary.

III

There's always been a moment, with my abusers.  It's not always precipitated by the same event.  Sometimes the event is huge, extravagant, an emotional sonic boom.  Sometimes it's small, something incomprehensibly, absurdly mundane, a tiny violation repeated for the ten thousand and tenth time.  The day exactly six months after beginning to spend nearly every day with Andrew when, walking alone through the cavernous produce section of Meijer, I accepted that he was siphoning off my boundless emotional support with no intention of loving me.  The ordinary morning at the office three or four or five weeks into increasing stretches of silence punctuated by increasingly stilted conversations with Dustin.  The barely-dawn silence in Luke's shabby living room where I sat on the couch staring at the wall in the aftermath of the night I poured all the whiskey down the drain and he shouted at me and I threw a glass of water in his face and he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me but was too drunk to continue when I body-checked him backward with a snarled "get your FUCKING HANDS OFF ME."  The couples' therapy appointment with Chris where I listened to him explain to the therapist that he really did in fact want to buy a house with me; he was only going to look at places by himself without telling me in order to scope out the market, and he hadn't really meant it when he told me the day before that he wanted to buy a house by himself and fill it with roommates and that after two years of dating he didn't know where that left me.  The drive home to my new apartment where Steph was painting my living room, when Neil texted me "Glad you are good" after his carefully constructed cruelty of the afternoon.

It's not always the same event.  But it's always the same moment.  There's a click, somewhere deep in my being.  A sudden shift from chaos into quiet.  The emotional tumult shuts off like a radio.  Everything stills, comes into focus, instantly, without fuss or fanfare or struggle.  It's the internal experience of the eye doctor turning the phoropter in the cold silence of the exam room, and in that second the lines you've been straining to see snap into clarity.  Click.  And in that suddenly painless quiet there is only one thought, one feeling that contains everything I am:  No.

Click. 

No.

After that moment, nothing is ever the same.

IV

They never see it coming.

I do.  I see it spilling over the horizon, low and black, like a line of stormclouds building over the flat scrublands of eastern Colorado.  I deny it for as long as I can, then start to prepare as it sweeps toward me.  With varying degrees of desperation, depending on how much I've loved them, I try to warn them.  Try to impress upon them that they need to clean up their act if they want to keep me.  They never listen longer than a day or two before falling back upon my overabundant forebearance.  My skin prickles and my stomach churns in the relentlessly building pressure.  The precipitating event never fails to happen.  And from it, that breathless barometric hush.  Click.  No.  And then the break.

They never see it coming.

My parents didn't see it coming.  And this time, neither did I.  My mother had cancer, after all, from which she was successfully recovering, but still--it was cancer.  My father with his narcissistic uselessness was barely any help.  My trauma-immobilized, psychologically unavailable sister was little better.  My mother with her wide-eyed emotional greediness, even from three hundred miles away, depended heavily, daily, on me.  All that year, through a breakup and a move to a new apartment and a promotion to a far more intensive position, I mechanically pushed through my life to care constantly for my mother, and my father, and my sister in the midst of my mother's illness.  And all that year, a decade's worth of painfully constructed and ruthlessly maintained boundaries that minimized their abuse began to crumble under the strain of the old roles and the close contact.

The moment, when it happened, took me by surprise.  Its precipitating event was neither large nor small.  It was, more than anything, annoying.  A passive-aggressive punishment for failing to be adequately theatrically supportive.  A long text message from my mother containing the always unspoken expectation for me to fill my role in the family, to beg forgiveness for the sin of not sacrificing everything, and to give, give, give without reservation and without return.

It brought about the moment.  The click was less quiet, but the no was resounding.  Not fully comprehending what it was, I followed it anyway into a rest I badly needed.  I told my parents I needed some time to myself.  They ignored me.  My mother invaded my clearly stated boundaries with escalating frequency.  Gradually I snipped away at their avenues for contacting me.  Text messaging was the first to go, then phone calls, then email, then Facebook.  It took six months to recognize what had happened, to embrace the permanence of each instinctively and necessarily severed tie.  To start, with my therapist's help, to sort through the love, and the grief, and the trauma, and the guilt, and the deep, life-changing liberation.

Sometimes the liberation is the worst and hardest part.

V

This year the summer depression is a little different.  When it feels like anything, it feels like mourning, and it feels like rest.  It feels like a liminality on the verge of something new.  A convalescence.  A hibernation.

Slowly I'm emerging from the stupor.  Even in this horrible heat, I'm blinking my way into a space where I can breathe.  I can clean my house again.  I can sleep.  I can cook and play music.  I can enjoy things.  My nightmares are fewer, and characterized more and more by my dream-self's empowerment to lash out against the monsters that have always pursued me.  I'm even able to win some of the time.  My trauma is being incorporated into different kinds of spaces.  My brain is fighting back.

My emotional bandwidth is broadening.  I can care about some people again, and I can choose which people to care about, and when, and to what extent.  I can care for myself in ways I didn't know I knew.

The pain is still surprising, some days.  So is my new ability to sit with it for as long as it needs to stay.  Before, I had to muscle it back under to keep caring for the people who continued to hurt me.  Now, I can let it be, with no borders but my own wellbeing.  The freedom both grounds and dislocates me.

I'm too tired for joy yet.  More days are painful than aren't.  A lifetime of chronic trauma boils and bubbles up to the surface, as fresh as when I first sustained it.  I am overwhelmed by the simplicity of being able to accept that I am damaged, and that some of that damage will never heal; that there is neither shame nor failure in either of those things; and that I will still go on to live a good, rich, fulfilling life with wholesome, healthy, happy relationships.  None of those things cancel each other out.

I am profoundly lonely.  Old and new friendships take the edge off, but there is a yawning emptiness in my ribcage where my sense of belonging used to be.  Making a homespace inside myself for me and only me feels strange, alien, a little bit lacking.  Better, though, than what I had before.

VI

For the last ten years I have read almost entirely nonfiction.  It was a marked break from my childhood, from my adolescence and young adulthood, when story enveloped and sustained me, taught me, bolstered my resilience, and gave me friends.  I've spent ten years puzzling over why new stories no longer interested me.  The timeline of events had to be significant somehow: Ten years ago I collapsed into debilitating depression and moved back to my hometown and in with my parents; then gradually gained new mental health and lost my faith; then embarked on and ended a series of intimate relationships with terrible men, during the course of which I moved to Detroit to begin life on my own terms and changed careers several times before landing in my current (and increasingly amazing and self-determined) position.  At some point in that time span, I stopped reading fiction.  Unable to take in enough learning, I devoured books about science and history and reasoning, articles on neuroscience and psychology and politics, soaking up everything I had been forbidden to learn before at a terrifying rate, and to a terrifying depth.  It was intoxicating.  But I shied away from new encounters with fiction.  While I still enjoyed rereading favorite novels, like semiannual visits with old friends, I couldn't bring myself to broach unfamiliar stories.  Even new television shows and movies I could only approach occasionally, and with caution.

In ten years I have never been able to decide whether I've lost something, or gained something, or simply evolved into something new.  I've felt sad, but resigned.  I've thought of myself as a nonfiction person.

And then a week ago I didn't feel like picking up the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that I'm halfway through, or the survey of human history that I started, or the new speculation about the extinction of the dinosaurs that came out last year, or the critical evaluation of sexism within science that had just arrived in the mail.  Nor did I want to keep rereading Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, beloved as it is.  I felt restless, lonely.  Hungry.

It's been ten years of evolution.  Ten years of cataclysmic internal change, ten years of seismic upheaval to the core of my sense of self.

And now something new is happening.  I don't know where it's leading or what its outcome will be.  But I do know that it's happening, and it's new, and I will go along with it because painful as my many transitions have been, they have brought me farther than I had ever conceived toward something like wholeness.

So last week as I stared at Wilder's biography lying unopened in my hands, bewildered by my sudden and utter disinterest in opening to the place marked by its dust cover, acutely aware of the intensity of my loneliness, of my revulsion toward this internal barenness--even in that moment, after all the change of the last year, of the last decade, I was still surprised as I felt something shift in my stomach.  A quiet click.  

Was this no? or yes?  Maybe it was both.

I put down the biography.  I spoke aloud to no one, with a passion I haven't heard in years: I want stories. I want friends. 

In the baking heat of a fevered planet's northern summer, in a loneliness both very old and entirely new, for the first time in ten years I went and found a novel I'd never read before.

Something broke inside me, or broke open.

I started reading fiction.

and all manner of thing shall be well

Very packed couple of months.

I'm still slogging through the worst depressive spell I've experienced in about eight years.  Getting up on weekday mornings is fucking hard.  Life has practically zero savor.  Everything feels generally sort of gray and dull and meh.  Not sad or painful, just void.

Even so, I'm doing the best I've ever done while doing this badly.  Which is pretty incredible, and pretty empowering.  (That's my theme of 2018.  Empowerment.  Because fuck powerlessness.)  While I don't fool myself that I'll conquer depression once and for all, I am highly pleased with how well I've learned to manage it.  I'm still making it to work, still kicking ass at my job.  I'm still paying my bills.  And I'm facing a whole shitload of what my therapist terms "pathologic guilt" (which is most likely the source of this depressive spell) and learning to tell it to fuck right off.

Something happened last spring, when I decided to buy in to my own life.  Something happened last summer, when I got rid of the last asshole I will ever date.  A sea change.  It spread out, crept over every single one of my relationships.  Some of those relationships were restored; others strengthened; others extinguished.

It's been hella weird.

I'm still riding out the aftermath; some of the people from whom I needed to estrange myself have made up a fundamental component of my self-conception.  (Enacting strict limits on the "daughter" and "sister" portions of my identity, when "family caretaker" has been my most basic role since my birth, is really goddamn traumatizing.  I'm still not sure how I found the strength to do it at all, much less maintain the separation; but I guess at this point I shouldn't be all that surprised at my own strength; it's a fairly defining feature of my character.)  The underlying peace, even as I've floundered in the guilt-wake of the separation, has been totally worth it.  Still, it's weird and difficult and uncomfortable, and I'm already tired.  (Of course, it seems to be these low points, when you lack resources, that drive necessary changes, because the former coping mechanisms have failed and there's nothing to do but forge new ones.)

The human brain resists change.  Even painful, self-destructive habits are comfortable because they create predictability.  It's not the first time I've taken a gamble with the unfamiliar, so at least I know that this sort of psychologically itchy discomfort, this unease with uncertainty, this faint feeling of impending badness, will ultimately pass as the new way of doing things becomes the familiar, the safe, the predictable.  I just have to give it time.

And I'm better at self-care and self-advocacy now.  I've learned a lot in the past eight years.  I've been through enough to know that I'll get through this too.  The meh factor will fade.  Life will be satisfying and good again.  It's surprisingly satisfying and good now, even in the midst of the Void of Blah.

So I'm okay in the not-okayness.

Plus too I have the darlingest kitty of all the kitties that ever kittied.  Simon is currently curled up on the ottoman next to my writing desk; never a lap cat, he still likes to keep close.

He's sixteen now.  We've been together fourteen years.  He's looking scruffier and skinnier, but he's still in excellent health, and still the sweetest little shithead in the entire world. (There's nothing more heart-warming than a generally grouchy cat that gives exactly zero fucks about anything at all except for his boundless devotion to you.)

On a side note (HAR, you'll see in a second) I am loving my new digital piano.  I went high-end for this one, because I was sick to death of shitty-sounding keyboards and craving music like oxygen or water.  It sounds breathtaking.  And it's so good to play and sing again.  That's probably about half of what's getting me through this latest slump.

So, things kinda suck a lot, but also are really great, and will eventually get even better.  I just need to self-care my way through this, which I know I'll be able to do.

I'm gonna pull through.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

where your treasure is

When I was a little girl we spent a lot of time at the library.

I grew up in a small town, within walking distance of McCord Memorial (a bit of a longish walk for kiddie legs, but walking distance nonetheless).  About once a week or so Mom would take my sister and me by the hand and trek over with us to that grand, quiet repository of human thought and imagination to let us peruse the shelves and check out a few new books. 

I always loved pushing open the heavy glass doors and inhaling deeply the gorgeous library smell of endless catalogued books: dust and silence and binding glue and vast masses of paper, carrying within their pages all the secrets of the universe, gateways to new worlds: the keys to all kingdoms.  McCord was a split level at the side entrance: The wide carpeted stairs led up to the grownup sections and down to the children's library.  I liked to gaze longingly up the stairs for a few seconds before sprinting excitedly down to find a new printed friend.

As I grew from childhood to adolescence, gradually trading Come Again, Pelican and Lonesome Lester for every single Wizard of Oz book and Nancy Drew, I relied increasingly on fiction as my atlas of a difficult world.  

The moment when I found And Both Were Young was life-altering.

I only know this in retrospect; memory is a funny, patchy thing.  This profoundly influential book left surprisingly little record in my brain of its first appearance in my life.  It's like there was never a time when I wasn't intimately familiar with the forest green book tape that bound the battered spine, or the hand-written title tracking down the edge in white letters (the words uncapitalized, the title ending in a period). 

I think I had been eyeing it for a long time before I finally slipped a finger into the valley of pages between the heavy cardboard covers and tipped it backwards off the shelf.  Even then it was an old, old book, a first edition 1949 printing, the cover a dingy faded yellow, deeply worn at the edges, marked here and there in pencil, the pages darkened and brittled by the years.  It always seemed to lie quietly between my hands, self-contained and expectant.

As with most things about which I am intensely curious, and about which I have an intuition of marrow-deep change, I approached it shyly.  The handwritten spine only included the first three letters of the author's last name.  The sleeveless covers bore no synopsis on the back or in the front flap; the front cover was plain and unadorned. This scarred old book, so misfitted among the newer, tightly bound trade paperbacks that surrounded it, gave no hint of its contents beyond its title: And Both Were Young.

A pair of youth.  Lots of books were about a pair of youth.  Most of them were sad (Bridge to Terabithia, I have never recovered from you). 

Books change you.  Sometimes they heal you.  Sometimes they wreck you.  They almost always stamp you indelibly.  I must have opened it to really read it for the first time with great apprehension.

It was fucking magical.

That was the first book I read where I felt truly understood.  The main character, awkward, gangly, lonely, angry, sensitive, passionate and artistic, felt like a kindred spirit in a way no other character of the hundreds I'd met ever had before.  And the relationship she stumbled onto and then built was marked by the trust and understanding that I had always wanted.  The loveliness of this book still makes me cry -- still gives me strength and hope -- still fills me with joy.

I checked it out again and again throughout my adolescence.  That green book tape always greeted my eyes like the smile of an old friend.

Eventually it was replaced with a newer copy; the glossier, less distinctive later printing contained a few authorial revisions that I liked; but I missed the original.

Eventually I outgrew the library and moved away altogether.

Moving back home in 2008 was hard.  I was tired and broken, no longer able to withstand the weight of trauma and depression.  Returning to the place where I'd been systematically destroyed felt a little like failure, and a little like taking a deep breath and turning to face the thing that makes you afraid, when you're so tired you just want to give up and let it consume you.

I faced the things that had broken me, and I learned how to cope. 

Somewhere in the midst of all the transformations catalyzed by my act of resigned, desperate courage, I started going to the library again.  Less to check out books this time than to peruse the shelves of donated and discarded items for purchase; I had discovered, by then, the joys of book ownership, the anchors provided by favorite friends that always sit at the ready on my shelves. 

I'm not sure how long I'd been revisiting the library (still filling my lungs with the old, sweet smell that made me feel five years old and intrepid again) when I saw it.  Green book tape.  White letters.

My heart stopped, then swelled.  Tears flooded my eyes.

I bought it for a dollar.

The librarian made a face when she rang me up; I think she muttered something about its deplorable condition.  I told her, in the soft throat-swollen voice of a person trying not to weep, that it was my all-time favorite book.  I didn't tell her that it saved me through my adolescence.  I was glowing.

Last night in my new place, hundreds of miles from where I grew up, I unpacked my young adult and children's books from the boxes that have housed them in storage for two years to finally give them a home on new bookcases.  When my eyes landed on that forest green spine, my fingers slipped lovingly down its edges as I placed it carefully on the shelf. 

As I changed the sheets before bedtime, the story kept drifting through my thoughts.  Scenes that I can recall word for word, even down to the visualization of the letters' placement on the page.  Words of affection and love.  Moments of courage and sacrifice.  Before I crawled into bed to settle in for my nightly reading, I went back to the hall and drew And Both Were Young from the shelf.

Lying in bed, gently cradling one of my oldest friends, I fell half into the story, half into a reflection on the beauty of the way this humble-looking book came to lie between my hands -- hands that are older now, a bit larger and stronger, a little more scarred, a little more experienced, but still courageous, still cautiously adventurous, and always, always hungry.

 

I love that this book still saves me, still touches the deepest places of my being.  I love that it still leaves me happier, more hopeful, strengthened and whole than before I read it, every time.  I love that this old, battered copy, the same one that my adolescent fingers carefully paged through in a quiet library over twenty years ago, is mine.

remedy of the quotidian

Man, I could use more weekends like that.

I did not leave the house.  I LOVE weekends where I don't leave the house.  The door closes behind me on Friday night and doesn't open again until I leave for work on Monday morning.  I slept for eleven hours every night.  I stayed in my pajamas all day.

It was WONDERFUL.

And, happily, I did, as I'd planned, get lots of writing done (10 more pages of my new work of fiction; if I can average 10 pages a week, I can produce a 400-page novel in under a year, which would be spectacular).  Normally with fiction I have a difficult time sticking to the linear unfolding of a plot; my brain keeps skipping to the more exciting scenes I'd rather write, and the narrative gets bogged down and peters out altogether.  This time, though, I'm finding that I prefer the unfolding, because I adore my characters.  They are SO MUCH FUN to write, and so much fun to get to know, which I can really only do by following them through the story and seeing how they develop (there's a life lesson in here somewhere, harumph).  And I love how a little incidental detail that pops out in the tale-telling winds up bearing enormous character-defining significance later on.

Writing fiction is discovery as much as creativity.  I've always known that, of course; it's just been so long since I've experienced it that it's practically a fresh and new lesson.

And this is the first time I've written something that I really enjoy.  I've taken a lot of pride in past fictive ventures, but this is the first time I've had fun with it.  (What is even happening to me.)

And I did, as I'd planned, get started on the library.  Part of what has held me back, in addition to sheer existential exhaustion, is a space problem that has persistently defied resolution.  The dimensions of the room present something of a challenge to accommodating a number of bookshelves, a pair of overstuffed chairs, and a writing table.  So I've let the problem sit for several months -- another lesson I'm learning in my thirties: Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to sit with it for awhile and let it solve itself -- and when I stepped into the room on Saturday to survey the space, threading my precarious way through haphazard towers of boxes in various stages of collapse, and trying on several different visualizations, the solution suddenly came clear.  Yesterday I performed the necessary rearrangements, with the result that I managed to fit two more bookcases into the room and still make it look more open and inviting.  (Ah, the blissful buzz of the successfully problem-solving brain.) 

The unpacking of the books will take some time yet, but I put all the shelves in place, and I can SEE what it will look like when I've finished, which provides just enough motivation to keep me going for the "sooner" rather than the "later." 

So in short, a quiet, productive weekend. 

I need a few more like it.

I love how the ordinary takes on an almost spiritual quality when all is well with the world.  The bane of existence in depression becomes the balm of existence in health.  With a demanding job, an outside world gone to chaos and a lot of recuperation ahead of me yet from the last three years, taking refuge in the quiet of the mundane at home restores a lot of peace. 

I just wish the weekends were half again as long.  I never feel quite ready for Monday.  

Dispensary of Wisdom from a Thirty-Something, #1

Two very important lessons I have learned in adulthood:

1. Don't kill a centipede with a flyswatter.
2. Don't put your travel mug half-full of coffee and milk into your rain boot and forget about it for a week. 




(There are explosions.)

flotsam and jetsam

Thank god for Friday, and a weekend at home with no external plans.  I'm hoping to get lots and lots of writing done, and maybe start to unpack the library. 

This last move in particular drove home (quite literally) how much STUFF I have.  For the last decade, while I've moved around a lot (seven times in ten years, holy shit), I have never been in an adequate position to go through all of my belongings and discard the detritus.  (Anyone who says that moving is the perfect time to do so has clearly never had a lot of stuff, moved in a hurry, moved alone, moved with crippling depression, or had to reason their way through their own pack rat tendencies.)  Most of the time I have had just enough energy to desperately shove things into boxes and load them on a truck, with no resources to perform the executive decision-making required of a sentimental person who grew up poor to part with beloved or potentially useful possessions.

I think I have finally reached a good time to do some sorting, however.  Life has stabilized, and I really don't want my next move to be as strenuous as my last one (Steph laughed at me for planning for my next move while I was still executing my current one, but an apartment-dwelling pioneer with an eye for adventure knows that she'll never be in one place for all that long).  I have an approximate metric fuck-ton of boxes sitting up in the attic of my building waiting for me to go through them one at a time on rainy days; they can sit there for awhile yet.  I'm going to start with my books.  I have accumulated around 2,000 of them, and while that number fills my bibliophilic heart with wild elation, it's a damn lot of books to transport every time I move, and a bunch of them I know I will never read, or read again (Disputing Evolution and The Discipline of Grace, I'm looking at you).  So...time to slim down.

And I can't wait to have my library all set up and decorated, so that I can read books, listen to jazz, and write of an evening in a room filled with big overstuffed chairs and my grandmother's drop-leaf cherry table and my colorful mismatched lamps and best of all my books, my dearest friends, my wayfaring companions, my portals to every part of every real and imagined world, filling my shelves with their neat straight lines and lovely colors, artfully situated among my favorite travel mementos and collected flotsam and jetsam -- a room of stillness that testifies to a life of motion.

Oh, it's going to be glorious.

a life of one's own

This isn't the life I was supposed to have.

My life was mapped out in pretty clear lines from the moment of my birth: a very simple and straightforward template that fell instantly into place because I was born a girl into an evangelical Christian family.  My upbringing trained me to meekness, compliance, modesty and submission to male authority.  I was expected to go to college, find a nice Christian man to be my spiritual leader, marry young and produce children (the number was up to me but it was understood that I was supposed to have more than one) that I would raise as evangelical Christians to be warriors in God's army against the gathering darkness of liberalism and secularism.  I would stay at home with my kids and devote my life to wifely submission, motherhood, and the church family.  That was my life's purpose: to be a woman in all the ways that white Christianity defines womanhood.

None of this was ever explicitly stated, that I can recall.  My parents never told me that I had to get married and have lots of babies, or that I shouldn't have a career.  It was all indirect, cultural, and constant -- particularly the emphasis on gender roles, packaged up as God's Will.  Men are leaders.  Men are providers.  Men are protectors.  Women are followers.  Women are nurturers.  Women are not aggressive.  Women need to be protected and guided. 

And I embraced these roles wholeheartedly.  I never wanted a career.  I wanted a husband who would lead our family, I wanted to stay home with my children and maybe even homeschool them, I wanted all the security that came with upholding the godly status quo. 

The trouble is, I'm smart.  It wasn't that being smart itself was frowned upon; quite the contrary.  In the evangelical church a smart woman is seen as a tremendous asset as long as she directs her intellect along prescripted lines and uses it to support the church's agenda and her husband's opinions.  And for awhile I did what I was supposed to do with my intellect, memorizing Scripture and skillfully twisting logic to argue against evolution in biology class and against feminism in social studies.  (Blessed is the evangelical woman who declaims feminism, for she enforces her own subjugation.)  But I'm also a thinker.  I ask questions.  I follow the truth wherever it leads.  And my questions became dangerous.

The other trouble is, I'm imaginative and strong-willed and have a mind of my own.  I grew tired of men far less intelligent than I insisting that they held authority over me because they had a dick.  (In college one douche informed me that I had to submit to his authority in some time-wasting "ministry group" because he was a man, and I retorted, "I'm smarter than you."  His mouth fell open speechlessly, reinforcing my point.  I quit the group on the spot.)  I grew tired of others telling me what I should think and do and be and want.  I could not continue in meekness and live with myself, so I shed it like old skin and started scaring people with my intensity and my questions and my vehemence and my opinions.

I'm trying to pinpoint where exactly I went wrong in terms of the destiny I was born to.  (When did I start disappointing my parents?)  These kinds of deviations from cultural expectation never boil down to one moment, however; rather, thousands of little moments gradually coalesce into a sea change.
 

So here I am approaching the middle way (twenty years not even a little bit wasted, thank god), and my life couldn't be more opposite from my youthful expectations.  I have never been married.  I have never given birth.  I am decidedly unvirginal.  I have built a rising career.  I possess not even the tiniest spark of religious faith.  I am not meek.  I am not compliant.  I lead, protect, and provide for myself.

Even by secular standards I am terrifyingly independent.  If I was expecting greater empowerment outside the church, I was sharply disappointed.  Sure, no one bitches about me having *a job* but my ambitions to increase my own power and leadership aren't exactly lauded by the general public.  And I'm still supposed to get married and have children (or at least be really really sad if I don't).  I'm still supposed to be "nice."  I'm still assumed to be an object of men's pleasure, and an object of men's will.  Turns out that systemic misogyny is all-pervasive.  Evangelical Christianity is a bastion of some of the Western tradition's worst and oldest traits, but those traits have not yet faded from the more progressive culture that evolved from it. 

It sucks when you realize that even if you get out of the maximum security prison, your only option is the minimum security one. 

Fortunately (?) I was a transgressive woman in the far more restrictive subculture for long enough, and, thanks to knowing my own mind, I've been single for long enough, that I can transgress against mainstream expectations with fewer cataclysms.  But it's taxing.  It took awhile to realize what was happening, because it IS less restrictive out here, and because the misogyny in mainstream culture is much more subtle and therefore exponentially harder to combat.  Everything is a power struggle as a woman.  Everything.  The clothes you put on.  The state of your body under your clothes.  The food you eat.  Walking down the fucking street.  Your interactions with literally everyone you encounter.  Being powerful is exhausting when you're up against the entire social infrastructure.  (And I'm white, and cisgender, and mostly heterosexual; I have it comparatively easy.  And it's still fucking exhausting.)  At the end of every day I feel so drained I can barely drag my ass into my apartment and make myself a meal.  Especially now, in the Age of Trump, being a woman is hard.   

And it's got me thinking.  In a society where all women labor under strict expectations regarding their role and their worth, irrespective of worldview, how does a woman determine herself?  How does she live and move and have her being without reference to anyone else?

I belong to a group of secular women who supported Hillary Clinton from the start of the 2016 campaign, and who still support her now.  On a "self-care thread" the other day most of these strong, amazing, powerful, wonderful women were expressing exhaustion and despair.  They're barely keeping their heads above water.  And I felt both deeply grateful and profoundly guilty because in spite of the exhaustion and anger in which I live daily, I am quietly thriving in a time when thriving is extremely difficult.  (Again. I am white, and cis, and mostly heterosexual, and am by these traits, for which I can take no credit, shielded from the worst of what is happening in our country.  I am lucky that thriving is remotely possible for me.)  The main difference between me and most of the depleted, despondent women in the group?  They have families to tend.

The title of this post is, of course, a reference to Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own," wherein she asserts that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a space, an actual room, that she can call her own, on which no obligation can encroach.  Being female, she said, one hundred goddamn years ago, eats up all a woman's time and attention by virtue of her duties to marriage and childrearing.  In order to make something more of yourself, you have to seize a physical space in which to do it.  Now that women are expected to be fully engaged in the workforce in addition to continuing to perform all the physical, mental and emotional labor of maintaining the home, we have less time and space than ever.  And it's astronomically difficult to correct the inherent power imbalances in nearly all heterosexual relationships because even if you're living with a good "woke" man, he still operates under the blindness and naivete of his own privilege, and it's so much goddamn work to shift it.

For most of my adult life I have grieved my single status.  I want love, I want companionship, I want a partner in this crazy thing called life.  (That grief, in combination with the horrible model I grew up with in which the woman does ALL OF THE WORK and celebrates as a victory every minor reduction in the man's narcissistic behavior, led me to try really hard to make it work with some really unsuitable men.)  But lately, realizing the kind of relationship that I want, and watching the struggles of my good friends and acquaintances to empower themselves as women in their committed long-term relationships, I have begun to realize how much more self-determined I am able to be, simply because I have no one to care for but myself. 

Naturally the instinctive reaction to even saying that is to feel that celebrating my freedom amounts to selfishness.  Women are supposed to sacrifice their ambitions and their needs for their mates and children.  Women are supposed to find time to be themselves on top of that sacrifice.  That is a woman's job.  That is noble.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I call bullshit.

Not that kids aren't worth it.  If I'd gotten married and had kids in the evangelical church when I was supposed to, I'd probably have worked my way to this point eventually (I've always known my own mind), and I would, like the other amazing women I know, find ways to empower myself even with family responsibilities.  But it's no accident that I didn't get married or have kids.  I've had opportunities.  I rejected them all (with varying degrees of sorrow and disappointment -- and, lately, sheer glee) because they didn't fit what I wanted.  (Also, in the interest of technical clarity, one opportunity rejected me, and at this point I have to feel grateful that at least I didn't come to liberal secularism while ensconced in a Christian marriage and family, which would in all likelihood have devastated both.)  Part of why I don't have to make any difficult choices between family and freedom, or between family and fulfillment, or between fulfillment in social roles and fulfillment in myself, is because I already made them. 

It's kind of weird, considering myself lucky that I have not yet gotten what I always dreamed of.  But my liberation and agency have become my highest priorities, and I am profoundly grateful that they currently have no obstacle at home.  Also that, going forward, any relationship on which I embark will start off where I am now, empowered, self-valuing, self-determining, aware, and with non-negotiable expectations for a fully equal partnership in which I am fully my own person (in short, what everyone should have, regardless of gender). 

I have a life of my own.  I would never have considered this in political terms before, but when you're a woman, every aspect of your life is political, not because you choose it to be, but because the entire culture has politicized it before you were born.  There are laws about what I can and can't do with my body.  There are laws that protect, and/or do not prosecute, those who do things to my body and my psyche without my consent.  I still do not have equal protection under the law in any state in this nation.  I am told what is acceptable for my appearance, for my personality, for my career choices.  I am told how I am permitted to behave in relationships.  It's all political.  Every last part of my life.  So yes, having a life of my own is an inherently political position.  It's transgressive.  It's not what I thought I was choosing, but it's the culmination of my choices.  It's caused me a lot of heartache over the years -- but far less heartache than participating in my own powerlessness.  And now it's bringing me unexpected joy and strength right alongside its unexpected freedom and power, in a time when it's nearly impossible for women to find any of those things.

Liberation.  Agency.  Independence.  The ability to choose exactly how I spend all of my time and where I invest all of my mental, physical and emotional resources.  That's a motherfucking gift.  And I unwittingly gave it to myself, when I extricated myself from unsatisfactory relationships and learned how to navigate the world on my own terms.

A life of my own.  I found it by accident, and I'm keeping it on purpose.  I hope more women do too.

nostalgia

For the last several days I have been listening obsessively to Josh Ritter's "Homecoming."

The album that contains it (Sermon on the Rocks) came out just before Meg and I went to see him in concert in Detroit in 2016 (omg like a year and a half ago already, damn has a lot happened since then), but for various reasons I didn't get around to listening to it until this past weekend, when the album arrived on my doorstep (yes, I still listen to CDs) just in time for my road trip to go camping with Meg and Phillip (road trips are my favorite time to listen to new music, for the full-surround effect and uninterrupted listening time).

I was not prepared for "Homecoming."

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.  Listening to the vitality and joy in memory that pounds through the piece stirred the wellspring of nostalgia in my own breast.  Five days later I'm still dancing in the car to it, wrapped in that beautiful sense of longing.

The funny part is, I'm not sure what I'm nostalgic for.  I like my hometown, but I don't feel any sense of belonging to it.  I left it as soon as I could upon graduating college, and only returned to it reluctantly years later, feeling like an alien but disciplining myself to settling there for five years before striking out excitedly for Detroit.  I have stronger home-ties to South Bend, the place where I first began to come into my own, and now to Detroit, where I am finally thriving, than I do to the place where I was born.  I left my heart in New Mexico a few years ago, and every once in awhile a longing for the desert mountains and lush river valley of Taos pierces me with breathlessness -- I want to retire there.  But mostly my nostalgia isn't tied to a sense of place.  I don't think it ever will be.  I love Detroit, love my sketchy city neighborhood, love the skyscrapers and the architecture and the history and the people.  Will I be here forever?  Probably not.  For the time being I'm happy to stay here long term, but you never know what life is going to bring you, and there's a lot of world to see, and a lot of places to live.  "Home" to me is the whole damn planet.  "Home" is something I carry inside myself wherever I go. I will love living in Detroit for as long as I'm here; but if and when I leave it, I won't wish I could come back, because I'll love the next place just as much.  (Probably.  Unless it's Kansas or southern Illinois or something.)

So nostalgia for me doesn't connect to a sense of place; and it also doesn't really connect to a sense of time.  Or at least, not a past time.  High school?  Nooooope.  College?  Sometimes.  I do feel a certain fondness for that first taste of freedom, for afternoons sprawled under trees poring over the tissue-thin pages of a new semester's tomish Norton anthology, for the pocket of idyllic quiet that was the little town of Grove City.  But I don't want to go back.  My twenties?  Oh hell no.  (I've been consoling mid-twenty-somethings lately with the simple reassurance that the twenties suck.  They all look at me with huge eyes and breathe a sigh of relief.  Yeah, kid, it's going to be okay.  The twenties are the worst.  They'll pass.)  No time that came before is better than where I am now.  I love where I am now. 

I have habitually shaken the dust from my sandals every time I leave one phase of life and embark on another.  Not just because most of my phases of life, exclusive of the present, have been marked by suffering -- I don't think of things in mournful terms anymore, for the most part, and those times of suffering precipitated enormous growth, so I made them count.  I think it's more that I've always longed for what's to come far more than for what came before.  I'm always looking to the next adventure.  The nostalgia I feel is for all that I haven't experienced yet. 

Which isn't to say that I don't love the adventures I've already had.  I've done some really cool shit, and had some really cool experiences.  Even the shitty experiences aren't so shitty because of my resilience and strength, and I can smile like hell about everything I've overcome.  I keep those memories in a jar in my mind and periodically pour them out and turn them over in my hands, smiling.  I suppose that's technically nostalgia, although it doesn't fill me with longing so much as satisfaction and gladness and excitement for whatever's to come next.

There's no time or place in my past that I'd return to.  There's a person or two I would love to be able to reconnect with, but I wouldn't want to reconnect with them as I was when I knew them last; I'd want to reconnect with them as we are now.  The past can't be changed; the present is better; I'm better, so much more myself; and everything really does tend to work out for the best, so there's nothing I wish I could go back and fix so much as there are things that I wish I could do going forward.  Always forward.

Life always and only gets better.  Every year is better than the year that preceded it.  Even when tragedy strikes, even when shit is really hard, I'm always in a state of becoming, and as the arrow of time moves forward, I move and grow and change with it.  The future is full of new adventures, better relationships, a more evolved self, all building on one another until at the end of my (hopefully very long) life I will have amassed a treasure-trove of experiences that have shaped me, and add up to a human being who has crafted a profound fulfillment through a life of liberated self-determination.   Living well is an art.  I hope to master it.

So when I hear songs of nostalgia, I don't think back to happier times.  I think forward to them.  (With, these days, a healthy sense of joy in the immediate present.  My sense of homecoming is everywhere I go.)  I've led a really cool life so far, and always, the best is yet to come.

My homecoming is now, and my homecoming ever shall be.  (World without end. Amen.) 

And I still can't stop listening to that song, and smiling. 

placeholder

Okay okay I'm still here! I'm still here.

My blogging (for all of my reader out there who have been worried, and no, I did not forget a pluralization) has stalled out the last week and a half for two reasons: 1.) Holy shit that three-week cold kicked my ass and drained my will to live (but not my sinuses), and 2.) Since I started feeling better over the weekend I have focused feverishly on my fiction. 

Oh my god it feels amazing to write again.  I find myself living in this story I'm crafting any time my mind has a free moment.  I love my characters.  (Meg would say it's because I love myself lol. She's not wrong.)  I can't stop writing.  And I have finally figured out how to work with my quick-shifting attention span as a writer and adapt it into a narrative style that allows me to keep writing without getting bored. 

Meg and I were talking earlier today about writing and creativity.  I told her some of what my therapist Frank and I have been talking about, regarding writing (I'll come back to Frank in a minute, he's seriously the best): How timing is everything, how this is the first time in my life I've been in a position to write something that could turn into a finished product (I'm actually writing this for publication -- first time I've ever written anything with a publication goal beyond hitting the "publish" button on a blog post): I have a stable life and career; I have finally started to write from healthiness and not from trauma; at thirty-six I now have a tiny bit more life experience than I did in my 20s so I have a little more that is worthwhile to say, at least in terms of resilience and thriving; and now that life has evened out and I'm a fully-fledged adult, I'm also realizing that this is life, and it will never get any less busy or any less complex, and if I'm ever going to do what I've always wanted to do, I have to figure out ways to work it in, right fucking now, because life is really, really short, and if I don't do this now, it might never happen.  This is -- maturity, maybe?  (Perish the thought.)  Also, alongside the idea of having more life experience is having more self-knowledge, and figuring out how to write what I LIKE, not just what I know. 

In short, it's all starting to come together, and I think I have a staying power now that I lacked when I was struggling under the crushing ocean-depth of depression.  (Fuck you, depression.  I don't live in you anymore.)  I think this newest project can actually go somewhere.

All of which is en-joy-ing.  (Enjoy. Literally, to fill with joy.)

Last night at therapy I was telling Frank how fucking heartbreaking and how fucking enraging and how fucking exhausting sexism is.  Like many Hillary supporters, I hit a point after the very personal slap in the face that was the 2016 election where I was just fucking done.  Just done.  Sexism can kiss my ass.  I have no time or patience for it when it rears its stupid misogynistic head, and I have stopped being nice about it. 

But it's exhausting.  Humans weren't built to be angry all the time.  And I have been angry so much of the time.

So after I run out of rant and just sit on the couch looking tiredly at Frank, he asks, very simply, "When was the last time you went shooting?"

"Oh fuck, it's been years," I said.

"That's your assignment," he said.

And I perked up like a Sarah who has just smelled coffee in the morning.  I asked him some questions about good ranges to visit around here, and where to buy ammo, and then said, "Awesome. I'll have to teach myself how to clean my gun" (thinking of YouTube, that bastion of self-help), when Frank said, "Bring it next week and I'll teach you."

So my therapy next week will consist of learning how to clean my gun.  That's some pretty badass therapy.

Writing and shooting (I'm a pretty textbook liberal in so many respects, and I fervently support stringent gun control, but baby, I do like target shooting, and my girl Dirty Harriet is a bad. ass. bitch).  Not a bad week so far.

To California

To everyone in California as it burns: I'm thinking about you. I hope you are safe.

Please be safe.

the personal is political

Some day, somewhere, somehow, I will live in a world where I don't wake up hacking up a lung every morning, and where I don't continue to hack up a lung throughout the day.  It'll happen.  I have faith like that.

In the meantime, aside from growing increasingly grumpier, life progresses at a happy pace.  Work has entered a slow patch, which means I fill my days with catching up on all the shit I had to throw to the side in the breakneck race of summer, to try to at least come up even when the next frenzy hits.  Coming up even is an impossible dream in the legal field, but everyone needs their castle in the air to keep them going, and catching up at work is mine.

Something lovely, something incredible and fierce, is happening, these days, a phoenix from the ashes of the hopes that died when a minority of Americans elected a lunatic head of a lunatic party and started to dismantle our democracy.  Women are done.  We are done with being assaulted.  We are done with being disbelieved.  We are done with being belittled, discriminated against and talked down to.  We are done with being silenced.  We are done with being boxed in.  We are done with being powerless.  I am watching a transformation happening in which I take a sort of exhausted, enraged pride.  It would have been so much better under Hillary.  But we're still making it happen.  Even under these increasingly inauspicious circumstances.

The personal empowerment is exhilarating.  I am seizing everything I can, without compromise.  For the first time in my life, I would rather be single than give up one modicum of my agency and personal power.

The personal is political.

Sunday mornings

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? 
What is divinity if it can come 
Only in silent shadows and in dreams? 
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, 
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else 
In any balm or beauty of the earth, 
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? 
Divinity must live within herself: 
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; 
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued 
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty 
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; 
All pleasures and all pains, remembering 
The bough of summer and the winter branch. 
These are the measures destined for her soul. 

~Wallace Stevens, from "Sunday Morning"

I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.

I never particularly enjoyed church.  As a kid I got some fun out of it, since the '80s evangelical Baptist church in which I spent my childhood Sundays met in the local YMCA, and the small lawless horde of us roamed freely throughout the fitness club climbing on forbidden equipment and belly-flopping onto the small square heavy equipment dollies to see how far we could roll across the basketball court, racing the stumping feet and yelling voice of Martie, self-appointed behavioral enforcer who charged around the "Y" trying to corral us.  (Whenever I imagine her purposeful stocky figure and short, severely parted steel-gray hair and face twisted into a permanent "I'm going to get you kids" scowl, forever in my memory looming over me like a heavy-breasted giant, my adult self still feels a thrill of childlike daring: RUN.)  But as the church relocated, and I grew out of my scampering and scraped-knee days, and we changed churches altogether to find one both closer to home and (as it turned out) less plagued by adultery, I stopped enjoying anything about the Sunday morning ritual.  The frenetic rush to arrive on time.  Boring, predictable sermons.  Troweled-on guilt.  Also -- as the grandiose, orchestrally synthesized, heavy-drummed '80s worship music petered into the two-chord, endlessly repetitious, ham-fistedly emotional love whining of the '90s and early 2000s -- murderously dull music.  And forced association with people I couldn't stand.

Still, as I embarked on my learning career at the tiny, conservative Christian Grove City College, I thought that would all change.  So many Christians in one place!  Surely there would be some amazing church out there.

Nope.

The megachurches with their seas of identical, vapid people and identical, vapid worship services and identical, vapid sermons.  The tiny small-town chapels with their intense participation pressure and strong smells of mildew and varnish, trying to keep up with the times through loud faulty sound systems and electric guitars.  Everyone smiling and grasping, trying to pull you in.

I resisted.  I hate volunteering.  The people were weird.  The songs lost all grammatical, musical and theological integrity, gradually collapsing into tacky pornographic husks of self-indulgence.  The sermons pissed me off, with their rising anti-multicultural, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-liberal hysteria.  I've never been a morning person, so the early services were sheer torture, and the later services ate up too much of the afternoon.  I didn't fit in -- everyone at these churches effortlessly curled themselves into a bland, safe, prescripted white Christian mold, lots of long skirts and khaki pants and bake sales and saccharine smiles and pearl-clutching and unquestioning obedience to the subcultural dictates, with the absolute assumption that I wanted that mold too.  Sundays began to feel like a whole day spent crammed into the itchy, tiny, short-waisted, uncomfortably hot sweater that the women's honorary society I was inducted into my sophomore year forced me to wear for volunteering events which I detested nearly as much as I detested church.  A whole day wasted.

For awhile I continued to attend church solely for the opportunity to brunch afterward with my churchgoing friends, but as I remained relentlessly single while most of them paired off into careful, restrained, joyless Stepford couples, I began opting to sleep in.  The guilt was worth it, to wake up at 10:00 on a Sunday morning, drink my coffee in a blissfully deserted cafeteria, and stroll the loveliness of the autumnal campus alone soaking in the vibrant hues and the wet-leaf, dry-leaf smells and the creeksong while everyone else shifted uncomfortably on hard pews and dutifully sang their colorless worship to a God I no longer found in a building, a steeple, a sepulchre -- or a people.  I waved off my friends' urgent concerns for my spiritual health.  This was better.  This gave me a deeper communion than any wafer chips and thimblefuls of juice.  This restored my soul.

With my post-graduate relocation to South Bend, however, I heaved a sigh and renewed the search for a "church home."  As I launched a new chapter of my life in a new place far from home, my upbringing told me that finding a good church ensured my social belonging and shored up my faithful lifestyle.

I did try.  I tried a variety of denominations, from Baptist to non-denominational to Unitarian to Methodist to Presbyterian; I tried a variety of sizes, from megachurches whose stadium domes stretched over multitudes to microchurches whose twenty aging congregants flecked the sparse pews like scattered breadcrumbs.  I picked one or two churches and gamely attempted regular attendance.  I went to 20-something Sunday school classes.  I participated in discussions.  I went to brunches and Bible studies.

I hated all of them.  Everything felt as shallow and glassy as a reflecting pool.  Nothing fit, nothing stuck.  I had no shared sympathy with any of the people.  As my theology expanded beyond the confines of evangelicalism, and then Protestantism, the old stuffed-sweater feeling intensified.  It itched, it cut off my circulation, it bulged in weird places.  Finally I went full Catholic, in part because for a time I sincerely believed in the catechism, but also because Catholicism held room within its vastness for the odd liberal, heterodox, academically inclined philosopher, and because in a Catholic church nobody gives a shit about trying to get you to fit in.  They don't assault you every week with creepy welcomes and brightly intrusive personal questions and perky invitations to gatherings that broaden a network but never flower into real friendships.  You go in, sit down, participate in the liturgy, and leave.  I joined the list of cantors, which was perfect because there was never any practice and all the singing was solo.  Best of all, I could go to church on Saturday afternoons and have Sunday mornings to myself.

By the time I realized that I really just hate organized gatherings and regular time commitments beyond work, I no longer had to give any further thought to practicing religion.  Relinquishing an already-dead faith came as both a joy and a profound relief for a number of reasons, not least of which being that I could finally give up church without regret.  While my parents grieved (I was living with them when they found out; it was not our best moment), I moved forward into faithlessness with a quiet exultation.  For the first time in my life, I was totally free, and absolutely everything was unwritten, including how I passed my weekends.

I haven't been a believer in anything supernatural for over six years.  And even now, every week I wake to Sunday with the gladness I never knew in faith.  This day is mine.  This time is mine.  I can spend it as I choose, and I mostly spend it in simple, quiet rest, sleeping in as late as I please, performing mundane tasks around the house, enjoying my solitude and my Simon.  Instead of washing a conscience that is now always clean, I wash my clothes and dishes.  Instead of the Bible I read science books and light fiction.  Science podcasts and jazz albums have layered over the places where I once listened to sermons and worship music, and the spaces previously occupied by crackers and juice have expanded to accommodate homemade bread and a wide variety of wine.  My day.  My body.  My blood.  My time, my mind, my memories: The divinity that lives within myself, the better measures destined for my soul, the bounty I bestow upon this life. This life, this self, and no other.

I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.

finitus

Well I had planned to write a nice reflective post about autumnal nostalgia for the days of reading poetry under trees in my college Octobers, but everything about today pissed me off.  I think I'm mostly just really really tired of being sick and it's making me cranky as hell.  Every driver on the road did something stupid or rude.  Work presented giant irritations that to be fair probably would irk me on even a good day, but today was not a good day so I quietly clamped down on my temper and fumed to myself (another benefit of long-term singleness and living-aloneness is getting really good at all forms of self-care, including being that person for yourself who says, reasonably, "I know it's a shit day, and you're also not feeling well, and things are bothering you more than they ordinarily would, so take a few deep breaths, keep your temper, keep your head, keep your cool, you got this").  My doctor proved he has gone full woo when he told me that diet soda causes cancer (I mean, after his "wine is more natural" and "join my wife's JuicePlus group" shit earlier this year I really didn't have that many doubts left, but this takes the fucking cake.  Forty years of insanely robust research that says absolutely otherwise, and "artificial sweeteners are the most dangerous thing you can put in your body."  Oh please.  Next it'll be GMOs and organic and oh my god I just fucking can't.  Time to find a new doctor).  And then yet another seemingly intelligent white male left a series of unbelievably sexist comments on a social media post of mine which skyrocketed my general annoyance to stratospheric rage (I. am. done. with. sexism) and the only good moment of my day, though it accompanied great disappointment in yet another dude, was absolutely shutting him down. (I shut him down so hard he deleted all his comments and blocked me. Yessss.  I'm sad that my comments in reply to his got deleted too though.  That was an epic takedown.)

Like, I'm not even having these arguments anymore.  I'm not playing along.  I'm not making nice.  I'm not performing the myriad acts of emotional labor expected of women even when they're being talked down to by an intellectual inferior.  Fuck your privilege, dude.  Fuck your feelings.  Fuck your sense of self-worth that is rooted in the simultaneous invalidation of and validation by women.  Not this woman.  Not today.

I've been a scary feminist for a long time.  I was the ONLY feminist on my college campus (which is where my feminism was born), and I've only gotten more and more aware as time has gone on.  But since the election, I am fucking done with sexism.  I am angry.  I have no time or patience for taking it, tolerating it, or supporting it.

God it feels good to just unleash.  To call out bullshit in a matter-of-fact tone that doesn't even need to go ad hominem to trigger a narcissistic injury in these fragile bros.  And not to worry even a little bit if I hurt their feelings because for once their feelings aren't the point and don't matter.

But can I not be sick anymore?  I just really want to not be sick anymore.

reservoir

I'm not gonna lie, it's a little discouraging how quickly my reserves run out these days.  One malingering cold is enough to deflate all my buoyant spirits and soaring optimism into a flaccid, rubbery lump of exhaustion and mundanity.  

I'm just so tired.  The last few days in particular have taken all my glazed-eyed, zombified will just to get through until I can drag myself home and into bed.  

On the drive home from work this afternoon (I really love not having to be a Woman In Public on the bus anymore) I realized that most of the reason I don't want friends right now is that I don't have the energy to make them.  I can muster enough to hang out with people who've known me forever (namely Steph and Meg), but that's it.  Making new friends?  Forget it.  That costs more than I have in the bank right now.

Gradually the reservoir will fill up again.  My spring is coming.  Everything keeps going so well that I know the overall trend inclines upward.  But like any convalescent, I have to remember to take it easy.  Getting exercise and writing back set me aglow; I forgot how fragile so precious a newly resurrected thing can be.  It doesn't take much to tap out my enthusiasm (I would say "my strength" instead of "my enthusiasm," but I've never yet come to the end of my strength, which after this summer honestly frightens me a little.  Like what the hell am I.  How do I still manage to find the wherewithal not only to keep going but to thrive?  Alone?  Because make no mistake, I am very much alone right now.  My support system contains a few people at the periphery, and my therapist, and me.  Mostly me.  And I have never yet reached the end of my strength.  Just the end of my enthusiasm), so it's important to remember to go slowly, ease up, savor each moment of delight as it comes (such as realizing that the return of my writing skills seems to have reanimated in kind my quick, intuitive ear for harmony even with unfamiliar songs; ye gods, I have missed that) and rest, rest, rest.

So, I'll counsel myself to patience.  And of course it's a little lonely.  But I've felt much, much worse, and since I have little to bring to the social table right now, I might as well relax into the solitude and enjoy my own company (and that of an owl-eyed, whiskery inky black kittyboy).  

And get lots and lots and lots of sleep.

these are a few of my

Almost every day I gloat about something in my new apartment.  (I still haven't decided on its name.  So far it's just The Homestead.)  This cold is still kicking my ass, so rather than compose something thoughtful and deep I'll just list off the things that make me feel smug and happy AF about living here.

1. My snaketongue (the succulent, you perv. No, the PLANT.  The DESERT PLANT. Arrrgh forget it).  That thing has decided it loves life in its new location high up on the bathroom shelf.  I was worried that the lack of direct sunlight would hurt it, but evidently shade is its thang, because it's put out like ten new blades in the last two months, and the old raggedy shriveled blades that droop over the mirror are beginning to fill out.

2.  My bathroom window.  Ooooo it's so pretty.  The shower stall is done all in big desert-colored tiles, and the window, comprised of cubes of wavy glass, is set in the middle of the shower stall, with a broad tiled ledge at about (my) waist height where I arranged two potted succulents (hilariously, the tiny little fingerling plants I bought for two bucks a pop at Aldi are thriving far more luxuriantly than anything I bought at far higher prices at The Home Depot) on either end, with a carved stone lizard, a stained-glass piece, two huge hunks of glass (one in bottle green, one in pale beach blue), and a bright blue glass vase of bath salts (the legal kind).  Once the shower curtain has aired out, I pull it off to the side so the light from the window can light up the glass pieces; the effect is glorious.

3.  My dishwasher.  Is. So. Quiet.

4.  My mantel.  The huge fireplace isn't functional, but I have an electric heater that looks like a cast-iron stove that fits perfectly in the grate.  When I moved in the fireplace bricks were painted this hideous glossy maroon; the walls were a shiny industrial gray that always just looked...sweaty.  Steph came to visit the day after I moved in and we spent a week painting the walls throughout the apartment varying shades of green.  We turned the living room this amazing dark Victorian arsenic green; I painted the fireplace white.  It looks perfect.  Just before I moved out of the old shithole, someone at that complex had thrown away an enormous bedroom suite, and I salvaged the mammoth dresser mirror from the dumpster, painted it the same white as the fireplace, and installed it above the mantel.  It's stunning.  On either end of the mantel (seriously this fireplace is fucking gargantuan) I perched my mismatched pair of favorite lamps, one a tall tapering ridged ceramic in avocado green with a drum shade wrapped in strips of burlap; the other a squat glass in rich deep orange -- they look strangely good together.  In between the lamps range my favorite cobalt blue vases, interspersed with slender green daffodil-stemmed vases, and the Depression-era ruby wine glasses that my grandmother gave me.  The whole thing is finished off by a riot of pothos vines that start behind the lamps and twine throughout the glass pieces and over the lamps and mirror.  I just like staring at it.

5.  My I CAN'T SEE ANYTHING AT ALL darkened bedroom.  Back when I lived in The Eyrie I became obsessed with the idea of sleeping in pitch darkness and embarked on a quest to kill all light entering the room (I am become Satan, destroyer of light.  Shit we might experience nuclear war soon.  That reference wasn't funny.  Dammit).  Not content with the blackout curtains one can buy at Wal-Mart, I purchased real blackout fabric and sewed it to the backs of the curtains, then hung additional blackout curtains over the door (impermeable to light; permeable to Simon).  It was the best sleep I've ever had.  I never cared about the Placeholder (that's what I'm calling my previous dwelling, I think -- a shitty senselessly split-level condo built in the 60s with absolutely no soundproofing between the first and second floors), so it wasn't worth my time to try to light-proof that bedroom, but once I moved into the Homestead and realized the landlord wasn't kidding when he said his security lights illuminate the building like a miniature sun, I tunneled through my piles of boxes until I found the blackout curtains.

I love it.  When you turn out the lights you can't even see your hand in front of your face.  Once again I sleep the beautiful deep uninterrupted sleep of the entombed, and it's amazing.

6.  My galley kitchen with oodles of counterspace.  So easy to cook in.

7.  My microwave that doesn't require you to press a button before you set the cook time.  (I HATE having to press "cook time" before punching in the cook time.)

8.  My neighbors. Are so quiet.

9.  I HAVE A BALCONY.

10.  The size and the silence.

Still gonna take me awhile to settle in -- probably most of the winter.  I'm still tired and taking it easy.  But I already love living here.  One day soon I'll write about the story of finding this place.  It's not a bad tale.  In the meantime, I wake up every morning happy and grateful for where I live.

in the darkness

As he bent his head toward the neck of the guitar, the audience fell appreciatively silent, vibrant with anticipation.  I sat four rows back in the intimate little Ann Arbor theater, so close to him I could read his facial expressions, holding my breath.  The last time I'd seen Josh Ritter in concert, Meg and I had crowded close to each other in the Royal Oak Music Theater in Detroit, watching him perform with the Royal City Band.  That concert was amazing, not least because of the absolute joy that Josh radiates as he plays.  This one was a solo show -- just Josh and his upright bass player.

I had seen it on Facebook several weeks prior and bought a ticket without a second's hesitation.  (Josh playing solo?  Fuck yes I'm there.)  N. had seen that I was going and jealously bought himself a ticket, insisting on accompanying me, although I had planned to ask Meg.  Fortunately the relationship fell apart before the concert (I was sad about it, but more tired than anything else), and Meg had bought his ticket; but then car troubles prevented her from going, so I went by myself.  It was the second concert I'd attended alone in a month, and I found myself strangely liberated by the experience.  The opening numbers were great.  Josh Ritter is a joy to watch, a joy to hear, and so delighted by the audience's delight, as if he can't believe that other people like listening to him.

And then his fingers began picking out the chords to "Thunderbolt's Goodnight," the song I'd longed with all my being to hear that night, and I clapped my hands to my mouth while the tears started pouring silently down my face.

I didn't know the name of the song at that point; the album on which he finally included it wouldn't be released for another three months.  All I knew was the debt I owed him for that song.  The first time I'd heard it, packed into the Royal Oak Music Theater next to Meg, I was exhausted and sad.  Things with Chris weren't going well -- hadn't been for the bulk of the relationship.  He kept insisting he wanted the relationship to work.  I was trying so hard.  But I felt lonely, all the time, especially when we were together; his thoughts were always anywhere but with me.  There was no intimacy.  We never talked.  About anything, ever.  I still thought we could make it work -- I thought I had to try.

Until I heard that song.  When I heard Josh Ritter sing "Thunderbolt's Goodnight" for the first time, I knew that I would break up with Chris.  Because I knew that I would never have with him the things I needed.  I knew that he had never felt that way about me, and never would.  And I knew that in the art of losing, what seemed like disaster would turn out to be something else.  

And all my life

Before I met you

When I was trying hard in love

I thought the sun

Was going down

But the sun was coming up

My relationship with Chris ended a few weeks after I heard that song.  Now, having just ended my relationship with N., I listened to it for the second time, and, weeping, knew that I'd done the right thing.  (I'm sure the poor people on either side of me thought I was a lunatic; I was crying so hard I couldn't keep the gulpy hitches in my breath altogether quiet.)  It was the kind of weeping that heals -- an outpouring of grief that resolves into hope.  In that dark, exquisitely intimate little theater, I fixed my swollen eyes on Josh and let the chords wash over me.  The sun was coming up.  I didn't know how or when, but I knew it would.

For all my rage over the ways in which systemic sexism impedes women in relationships, for all my disappointments over past relationship failures, for all my determination to do things differently going forward, and for all my fierce delight in my current single state, I have never given up hope.  I know exactly what I'm looking for -- I always have; that hasn't changed -- and now I think I finally have a clear understanding of what it looks like, and an even clearer resolve to settle for nothing less.  Every relationship that I have voluntarily shed, I have shed because the relationship could go no further -- and because of my hope for the better things to come.  

I'm not trying so hard, now.  I'm okay on my own.  I'm still resting.  But the life I have founded here in Detroit, once I've emerged from hibernation, is the life in which I'll finally be in a good place to have the relationship I've always wanted.  Maybe I won't find it; I want what I had the only time I ever really deeply connected with someone, and I don't know how likely it is that I'll find that again.  It's so rare, and so precious.  And if I don't find it a second time, that's okay; I will always make the best life possible for myself, and I enjoy my own company.  And if I do -- well.  That will be amazing.  

It's likely that I would still be sitting here writing about this if I hadn't attended those concerts and heard Josh sing that simple, aching song.  But in his hands and from his mouth that longing, that hope, that profound gratitude crystallized into a sense of purpose for me, both times, and drove me forward, so that after the solo concert, I drove back to Detroit in the late-night darkness with the fragrance of June pouring through the windows, and I felt light, and free, and washed clean.