Gloriously f***ed up
16 May 2012 12:03 PM Categories: Quotidian existence | Writing prompts
In a long Facebook chat with an old friend last night, he said that life is ultimately fucked up. He then corrected himself: life is gloriously fucked up. Yes. There is a beauty to all of the complications of life, the ones I’ve been avoiding, the dusty corners with the cobwebs and behind the baseboards and wallboards there are circuitous electric lines and mouse dens, and pipes that climb to the second floor, the third floor, the attic with all of the things I’ve put away to make nice, the grumbling, growling boxes, the ones that deal with emotions and the complicated gains and losses of sex. The boxes contain parts of myself that have seemed inconvenient, perhaps dangerous, definitely put aside.
I’ve made some calculated leaps in my time. Transferring to a college in Washington, DC after a small town life, graduate school in Illinois, a job in Columbus, the rush back to Washington, DC, the short stint in cooking school. Now I’m taking another leap, another grad school leap, and I am excited and it’s a mystery what lies ahead except I think it will be good, a growth experience, an immersion in other people, a path to using my strengths to help others.
Gloriously fucked up. I’m thinking about it, about immersing myself in it again after hiding out for years. Hold it together, hold it together, and then BOOM, everything explodes, like one of those Christmas poppers with the confetti and the prize and the smell of gunpowder. There is no need to be afraid of the noise, to ask why I want it to break apart. I want to see the mystery inside.
***
I had a dream last night that I was sharing a single bed with a stranger. We had taken over an old dormitory, more like a mansion that had been converted into dorm rooms. I knew the place was haunted, wanted to cling to this man in fear under the false hope that he would protect me. Every time I shut a door – to our room, to the bathroom across the hall, to the rooms adjacent – the door would either resist my pushes or pop open again of its own volition. The man couldn't take my tossing and turning, my tugging and slamming. He threw off the covers and went to another bed in a different room. I pushed the door closed. It opened again. The doors in the hallway flapped open and shut, open and shut as I stood like a ghost in the hall.
Their eyes were upon me. They were watching me, not out of curiosity, but because they loved me and didn't want me to be alone. Show yourself, I thought. Stop playing games. But they could only do what they were capable of doing, pushing the breeze from window to door to hallway, reminding me that a shut door can open again, that it doesn't always take a tight hold to love.
It was close to morning when I finally gave up. I curled up on that single bed in an iron frame, shuddered slightly as the wind caressed my back, and fell into a dream within a dream of hands reaching out in the fog, always searching, never finding.
Props and love to rcb.
From the prompt "A big leap," barely edited. Dream added in an edit later in the day.
Image of me by me. No, I am not "gloriously fucked up." I just liked the ambiguity of the image.
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Linger
14 May 2012 12:26 PM Categories: The struggle redefined
I know what would release this taut feeling within me, what would make me melt and give in. It’s as simple as a hug, a lingering moment. I am grateful for this knowledge, for the final lesson of the value of touch, another one of those human needs I like to think don’t apply to me. I’m still grappling with the idea of needs as sickness or weakness, as the things that betray. I covered over that gravesite a long time ago, thought nothing would grow there again, and yet there are rosebushes popping out everywhere, heavy with bud, flower, and thorn, beautiful but protective.
There should be an emergency hug service, a sort of charity or pay-for-hug business. You call on them when no one else is around, when the tension inside is too much. The hugger comes to your house or your office or the bar where you spend much of your free time (babbling or silent, drunk or caffeinated; it depends on your mood). He greets you warmly. He holds out his arms and envelops you. And he doesn’t let go until you have wrung all the hug out of him.
It would be an exhausting, emotionally depleting business, going from place to place hugging the temporarily desperate. Ah, but I am treading on that graveyard again, snipping the rosebuds off before they have a chance to bloom, in a mental place where fulfilling my needs means taking away from the people around me, where I become a kind of emotional vampire, sucking the love and affection out until only the dried husks of my loved ones remain. In the consumptive afterglow, I am plump, ruddy, satiated. For the moment.
This isn’t how it works. I know it. Sometimes I take the feelings, the surprising images my mind creates and go with them. The underlying mechanism – which, it’s true, has been wary about my needs, ashamed of them and we don’t need to rehash my life to figure out why that would be, do we? – isn’t the absolute truth, but it has power and until I name it, describe it, give it life in metaphor, it controls me in more insidious ways.
Today I hold my tension close and set it free. I do what I can to relieve it on my own, to relax my ribcage, to let my shoulders sit normally, to stop clenching my teeth. I breathe deeply, reassure my heart until it slows to a normal beat. I tell myself it’s all right, not to worry too much about graduate school or prerequisites or the future, not to cling to outcomes but to grasp what I know is solid, in the here and now.
Still, this is what it boils down to: I need a hug, long and lingering, until I forget myself and the tension evaporates from my shoulders, my spine, my neck. This need isn't unusual or particularly revealing. It shouldn't require a treatise on need, an over-intellectualizing of want, for me to get to the normal everyday truth. I'm just performing my usual dance with danger and connection, with self and other. But where do I place the blame for my reluctance, for the hard shift, the turn away?
Just give in something inside me whispers, you won't regret it. If only tension were as easy to shed as a sweater in the warming midday sun. I will get there. One unraveled thread at a time.
Image: The "I Love You This Much" figurine my mother gave me when I was six or so that I put on my bedside table into adulthood (though it is now in the boy's possession). Used before in It's not easy being green, a post from the first year of the blog.
Soundtrack for this post: Start with Sly and the Family Stone's cover of "Que Sera Sera," followed by Elvis Costello singing "Beyond Belief," finishing up with "Linger" by the Cranberries (brought into my mind by the post title).
Even under darkened storm clouds
12 May 2012 03:39 PM Categories: The struggle redefined | Writing prompts
Yesterday I sat in a room in San Francisco with my future classmates, all of us succesfully through the apparently rigorous process of getting into the university's graduate counseling program. We were there for orientation. I am happy that when I applied – it was the only program I applied to – I didn’t know they only accept 1 or 2 people for every five who send in applications. I admit, this makes me feel good about myself, to see that I’ve gotten through a gauntlet without even being aware of it. The fact that I have absolutely zero experience in the field means that I probably got in on the strength of my five-page essay and through the generous recommendations of my colleagues from the librarian days.
I took a chance writing that essay. I got personal. I felt like I had no choice. It was a measured sort of personal. Over four years of blogging and writing about my past, I have gotten used to telling my story. I've created enough distance between me and my early life to describe it calmly. Still, it was unsettling to know that these professors, these professionals, knew about the stillborn baby, the Little House, the way I was left to handle the aftermath on my own. But they also knew I have dealt with that primary story by shaping it into a narrative (as well as by going to therapy).
A personal approach is appropriate for this sort of graduate program. What happened to me and how I’ve dealt with it shows my strength, and part of my strength is self-reflection. But in that room with my future classmates, the professors alternately inspiring us and scaring the shit out of us (how will I be a present parent and an attentive student simultaneously, even doing the program in three years instead of two? Will finding traineeships be impossible?) – I wondered if they made a mistake.
I can no longer afford to think this way. I will take their confidence in me and what I know of my talents and go with it, open up, be the person I know I am and quit hiding it. I am up to the challenge. The same goes with connection. Instead of guarding myself against loss by courting anxiety and worry, I have starting accepting and letting things be, knowing – knowing – I am worth loving just for being who I am, that there is no discarding those we love, that I can stop being vigilant.
Open. Like a flower in the rain, a shaggy peony, complicated, multilayered, all of me out there to see, to love, and to be loved, to live fully, knowing everything is change, temporary, with a beauty even under darkened storm clouds.
Expanded from the prompt "garbage."
Image by Julie Weatherbee.
The dissolving
10 May 2012 05:19 PM Categories: Quotidian existence
I once occupied a house full of fur, feathers, and frustration. We lived with my grandfather in the early 1980s, three adults, one kid, four cats, one miniature schnauzer, two parakeets, and two dwarf rabbits who lived in a hutch outside. At some point there was a gerbil in the mix. My mother worked in Wilmington, a forty-minute drive away and the menfolk, my grandfather and my mother's un(der)employed boyfriend, didn't do animal care, kid care, cooking, or much cleaning.
No wonder my mother was so cranky. As an adult with a kid, husband, and three animals, I can’t imagine taking care of so many creatures, even without a full-time job and a lousy commute. Sure, I see the appeal of doing the full Berkeley, with chickens and goats and maybe, like the quasi-commune we pass on the way home from school, a rhea. Bunnies are pretty darn cute. Guinea pigs are, too. But when we finally tried to hatch the triops eggs the boy got for his birthday, I knew I would be the only one to keep track. I let them die. I was – and am – at my caretaking limit.
The praying mantises, though currently foundering in their foam-topped plastic vials on the coffee table, are still alive. They came with a food supply, two vials of fruit flies that supposedly require no care at all. So it is a mystery why one fly vial has become an arid landscape dotted with the dried remains of its former inhabitants. The other has healthy larvae and pupae populations, but no flies have emerged. The mantises are famished.
Meanwhile, what about me? My appetite comes and goes. I’ve always prided myself on being a skinny person who actually eats, but lately I’ve become an even skinnier person who eats intermittently. Some weeks are better than others. I have gotten comfortable with being a little hungry and after a while, even that feeling fades. At mealtime, I fill up more quickly than I used to. Food just isn't important right now, which surely is tied to an internal state.
Perhaps I am waiting for the trays of sustenance to appear before me, to float through the air and touch down delicately on the table. All the things I want will be there, comfort food (homemade macaroni and cheese; mashed potatoes rich with butter; gnocchi; potato gratin; anything carby and luscious), sinful dark chocolate cake, salads and greens that keep me healthy. Champagne flows freely and without worry and the lightness in my head carries me to other places while the others around me take care of it all. It's deeper than that of course, than the desire to be totally taken care of, to have every need anticipated and fulfilled, to sink deeply into the duvet of comfort and decadence. It's about allowing the sensual in me to exist again, or at all, to indulge in the falling, the loss of self to sensation.
Instead of indulging, I write about destruction, about shattering glass, the splash of red wine against a silk blouse. I write words that crave messiness and the relief of drama, that pursue the fantastic explosion of stored-up emotion, the sweet relinquishing of control, of letting my guard down. I crave and fear the spaces in between where I allow myself to feel vulnerable. I long for and avoid the delicious moment when everything blurs together and yet every taste, sensation, and emotion is powerful and distinct.
I think of it as the dissolving, the sunlit moment of existing in full clarity outside myself and inside as well, the contradiction of allowing others in while remaining myself. I float above the world, gaze at the curve of the landscape, wait for the right moment to drop down. The beings I take care of stare at me from the ground, confused. They don't recognize me. They don't know who I am. But it's me up here, reveling in the freedom of floating, taking in the wide view before I swoop down and join them again.
A very small portion of this is based on the prompt "Fragmented."
Touched up on 5/11.
Image by Big Fat Rat.
Advice for the dewy-eyed
08 May 2012 01:27 PM Categories: The struggle redefined
When I come shambling into your office with my hair wired out, the white strands (mulitplying at an alarming rate lately) with a mind of their own, all helter-skelter and askew – what do you see? I know you check out my outfits, give me the once over, deduce my mental state depending on how put together I look. Your attentiveness to my dress makes me want to play with the theme. Someday I’ll come in wearing tight red leather pants with studded boots and a sleeveless t-shirt that does nothing for my cleavage, like some sort of gender-confused 80s hair band refugee. Or I’ll get all prim and proper and Peter Pan collar, dress like the librarian I never was. I want to play with it, but I also resent the observation, the professional glance, the quiet decision-making about my internal state and I find myself wondering if the very desire to play with my outfits, to confuse the conclusion, reveals something I didn't intend to.
Middle-aged housewife and stay-at-home mother. Very little social life. Tendency towards depression. Bored and needing something more. Self-sacrificing and effacing. This is the box I think I fit into, though in the year since I first saw you things have changed. It’s not my definition of myself. I can see how it looks from the outside and how it may appear that I’m living the cliché. I have not chosen original ways to play with the edge. So, ok, I read the description and reluctantly raise my hand, with the caveat that you not confuse me with the role I appear to play. Not an easy task from your side of the stage.
Your youth reminds me of the benefits of age, time, and experience. Although I am not exactly ancient, somehow you make me feel both hoary and wise, the slightly addled crone on the couch. Maybe it’s the way you continually reassure me (unprompted) that I will probably not be the oldest one in my graduate program. Thanks, young’un. Now could you give me a hand out of my seat? But mainly it’s your inattentiveness to almost everything but my clothing that bothers me. I can’t blame you for that, really. You work on the outer perimeter of my psyche. You are a prescriber of pills, my mental health safety check. I wish I could keep the monthly sessions even shorter than the twenty minutes they generally last, but often I can’t help but blab out what is on my mind, as though we have a true therapeutic relationship. It’s like telling too much to a stranger at a bar or on the airplane seat next to you. Yet I am compelled. Stories of my life spill out, messy and inconvenient, though lately it’s been mainly good and I’ve been good, too, enough so that we are lengthening the time between appointments.
In my first meeting with my regular therapist, after hearing me let go of two months worth of tears, the rambling about past and present, she noted that I needed a therapist who would be attentive. It sounds like a simple thing, but the fact that she recognized it, that she named it, opened my heart to her. Attentive. Yes.
Still. If it weren’t for you, fresh-faced psychiatrist, and your powers of prescription and broad observation, I would be in much worse shape. I'm grateful to you and to my access to good health insurance. And the truth is, even with the therapists I trust, I hold back. I retain facts. I do not mention all my bad habits.
The clues are there, of course, just waiting to be found by someone paying enough attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah – it’s up to me to bring them up, to reveal the things I cover over. It’s my responsibility. I know it. And I have to choose my audience, too, tell it to the ones who matter.
Anyway. See you in six weeks. Maybe I’ll have good news.
Sincerely,
Today's Ten O'Clock
Image by Alex Johnson.