The slow climb out
I have been thinking about anger, forgiveness, and compassion. Writer Jim Murdoch recently commented here on the idea that perhaps we have to forgive ourselves before we can forgive other people (while Grace discussed the pointlessness of the concept for her). There is some truth to the idea that self-forgiveness has to come first, though I also see the two working in parallel, each process supporting the other. I’m in the midst of forgiving myself, struggling with what forgiveness means for me and how I apply it to other people (while I talk a good talk, I certainly haven't forgiven all the people on my pain list). I've concluded that a huge part of forgiveness involves compassion, suffering together with others, a recognition of our shared humanity and pain even when our viewpoints differ, even when the other person's vision of us is clouded by their own aching pain.
My desire to be open to others’ misery, even those who have hurt me and are not capable of being open to mine, is strong. I am beginning to feel that being open emotionally does not put me at soul risk (though, of course, this is a very new feeling, an ideal that I have barely put into practice. I can't claim complete emotional openness and 24-hour selfless compassion.). What is so interesting about this feeling, new and delicate and soft, is how it fits together with my recent shifts, my solid acknowledgment of my strength and my desire -- and, hopefully, ability -- to become more connected. Compassion frees me from emotional selfishness and allows me to make myself vulnerable even in the face of rejection, though it doesn't require me to pursue bad situations or put myself in precarious emotional conditions. Being compassionate is not the same as being foolhardy.
Lest you think I really am a Pollyanna, I’ve been writing a lot of very angry personal stuff this week, things totally inappropriate for anyone’s consumption but mine. This writing serves a purpose. It acknowledges my feelings, that I deserve to be treated well, no matter if I am a tempestuous toddler, an angry teenager, or a struggling adult. It carries the conviction that I am capable of authenticity, that I am capable of holding and comforting myself when I am scared and lonely, but can also ask for help when I need it, and that my needs are legitimate and real. These feelings and changes were partially the result of my ability to finally give long-simmering anger a voice and shape. I am grateful to that anger for allowing me to be myself, for helping me recognize when I have been wronged, and for protecting me in difficult times.
But I don’t want to live in anger. I let it serve its purpose. I open my heart again, knowing that I am strong and all too human, that I make mistakes but that my mistakes are not what make me. We all suffer. We all cause pain. Sometimes we run away from suffering, we push it away or deny it, which only traps us in its snares, and in that escape we often hurt others.
It’s people stuck in this cycle for whom I have the most compassion right now, the blind and hurting, those who are scared but don’t know it, those who want closeness but dart away at intimacy. I am slowly climbing out of that dark and airless place, one foot on the fresh meadow grass, the other pushing out of the sludge. I hope that my burgeoning openness, my growing compassion, will help me see others clearly, or at the very least calm me in times of trouble, anxiety, and pain.
We are all interconnected despite our vast differences. The thought comforts me.
Image: Not my kind of compassion. Some positive thinker chalked this on the sidewalk on our route to and from the boy's school. The joke we made was that if you quickly hugged the next person you saw, probably a stranger, they would slug you ("Quick! Slug someone!"). And maybe you would deserve it. Compassion is not forcing your lovin' arms around someone who doesn't want them there.
The landscape of change
The air is cold with a hint of the warmth to come. My picnic basket is packed with healthy, delicious food that I’ve prepared myself, and in the grove of trees off in the distance, the rest of my life awaits. There are people I’ve never met, eagerly anticipating a new connection, and the people I’ve known for years, my close loved ones, the friends who are part of me, they are mingling with the new, happy to see me change and to be a part of it. There will be feasting and dancing and when the sun goes down we will gather by a bonfire fed by the things that didn't work in my life, irrational fear and muddy sadness and self-protective separation going up in flames. I will sit near the fire, my son tucked close to me, his father next to him, both a vital part of my transformation.
The rules I set for myself, the ones where I showed my goodness through self-sacrifice (a conscious choice, not a martyrdom) and removal from the world, do not apply to this new self. I can have an outside life and a happy child. I might even be capable of long-term connection, might allow this heart of mine to sink into true, unselfish love and support.
This shift is permanent, not that there won’t be trouble along the way. I know myself. I can be true to her, authentic, present. I don’t need anyone to show me the path, though I do need people to share the journey with me, to accept my weaknesses and share joy in my strengths, while I do the same for them.
This is a better representation than yesterday's (deleted) post about my inner state. More sleep and a conscious attempt to eat more help with my equilibrium.
Image of the shoes I'll wear on the journey, because I want to look natty along the way.
The sacred against the asphalt
It is easier with my eyes closed, with my mind only on sensation, on the thick succulents with their reservoirs of water at the center. Even the bees don’t mind my gentle touch, and the ladybugs tickle the back of my hand, while the praying mantises dart away. I can feel their presence, their fear, and so I hold my hand still until they take cover.
In the room there is nothing but a cool breeze, the sound of the neighbor talking in German on his cell phone. I hear the highway traffic, the soft thump of cat paw on roof shingle. You are silent, I feel the warmth of your breath, and if I pay enough attention, I hear the flow of blood, the heartbeat, my own life humming in my head against the rhythm of yours.
The garden, the room, the smooth coolness of the pillow, the heavy hot weight of a cat against my hip: I am not to open my eyes, I don’t want to, but one can’t stay closed forever. The challenge is to open up, to acknowledge the world, to take it in all forms, to let it enter you as you enter it.
Last night on the dog walk I looked across a quiet side street and saw a tree, its trunk like grey withered skin, its canopy high and round and dignified. I saw the tree, green and grey, with leaves like hands. It had being and separateness, its own life in the world. I remembered the closeness of childhood with nature, the way I befriended trees and said goodbye to them when my mother and I moved on. There was no barrier between me and them and I didn’t need to close my eyes against the world, to distract myself with chatter and the glowing screen, with a book cracked open at every opportunity.
This is what I want, no division between me and you and trees and plants. I want to take it in, to see it clearly, the sacred against the asphalt and cracked sidewalk. My hand reaches for yours in the evening fog, both of us aware of the music of blood flow, of life, separate, related, part of the world.
The photo above was the prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was lightly edited.
Image by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon Mistress.
The dazzling core
After it is all over and the body rots or is burned away or pumped full of chemicals and covered in makeup as a way to convince those who are left that the loved one still exists, light remains. The flash at death, the speed up to space, the dissipation of the distilled self: once freed, light moves at its own dazzling pace.
This is life, the essence, the sparkle, the dance. Contained in a body for ten years or 41 or 87, confined by contingent flesh, pulled along through various circumstances (happy childhoods, punch-drunk marriages, depressions of the emotional or monetary types), the light whips out of the withered husk, the self it used to be, at first opportunity.
Does light remember? Are we contained in hundreds of points of light in the night sky, stardust? Starlight? I’m still trying out this theory on myself, this idea that maybe there is an underlying spiritual layer, matterless, pure light, the mystery of life underneath the machines that are our bodies.
Light does not remember. Light exists, mysterious, animating, strong, the substrate, the core, but once it leaves a body, it breaks into a million different pieces. Or waves. Who we are scatters across the universe, to be gathered in a different configuration and shot into a body again. Maybe.
But it doesn’t end, light. It hurtles, it makes us who we are, it is the purest thing about us. Don’t cover the light. Try your best to see it, to acknowledge it through the worst of circumstances. Let it simultaneously ground you and lift you. And don’t get too attached. Light resists containment. It is not individual. We exist in a community of waves, of commonalities, sparks underneath the surface.
From a prompt: It never ends. I went with something positive and never-ending. A change of pace. Lightly edited from yesterday morning's original.
Image: Me, the mirror and the flash.
So real you can taste it
Let’s look at the facts as revealed here: I’m a stay-at-home mom with a preschool-aged son. A former librarian, I went to culinary school and from there decided to be a writer. My family is relatively new to Northern California, having moved from the East Coast almost two years ago. I’ve told you my name. Given my birthday (oh, those worries about aging, forcing me to seek comfort on the web).
And if you’ve been here for a while, you know about the defining story of my life, the lifeless premature baby I gave birth to at home when I was sixteen.
But what do you really know?
Jennifer recovering from a late night, 1988? Or another photo to continue the ruse?
How would you feel if I was actually a 25-year-old male advertising copywriter from Peoria? What if I really lived in Buffalo, NY? Or if I was pushing 70, mother to a multitude of now middle aged children, grandmother to teenagers, a Brit using the blog to flesh out a character? This "Jennifer" person you think you've been reading could be someone I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for years. writing to survive might be some kind of grand fictional experiment, an attempt to create a flesh and bones person out of ethereal imagination.
And my stories? What if these were figments, scraps from my mind, absolute fiction masquerading as angst-ridden past? It could be that you've been reading full-blown literary lies à la Margaret B. Jones, the wannabe memoirist who made up a gangland childhood. Turns out my parents have been married for forever, I waited until marriage (or at least love) to have sex, and I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol. Oh, and that isn’t my son, he’s a nephew (never mind that I have no nephew).
Would you feel betrayed?
Don't worry. I don’t have it in me to lie like that, though you'll mainly have to take my word for it and trust your gut. There were times in high school and college when I was a serial liar, self-serving and hidden. My mother believed the stories about my solo nights, even when my boyfriend's car was parked right outside the Little House ("Oh, the car? Dirk leaves it there when he goes to the Cassady's. Sometimes he's had too much to drink, so he stays at their place for the night." "That's exactly what I thought, Jenna.") Later, I hid my unfaithfulness from my college boyfriends, created a protective distance by pursuing empty hopes with relative strangers.
Living a life of lies is a dirty business. I was becoming unrecognizable, murky, untrustworthy, a bad friend. So I stopped lying and regained a hold on fidelity. And while those old kinds of lies are no longer tempting, I still struggle with my tendency to exaggerate minor facts or to deny my feelings. Attempting to be good is a life-long process.
There is a difference between making things up to avoid punishment and creating stories to entertain. Stories aren't lies (and sometimes the lies we tell in our life stories aren't fibs either). If the blog tale is well-told, the characters believable, the created world tangible, so real you can taste it, does it matter if it actually happened? How would you know if it did?
We’re taking it all on faith in this blogging world, want to believe that everyone is who they present themselves to be. For the most part, I think people are genuine. Yes, we have plenty of time to shape our online selves, but we’re generally real. Still …
There must be bloggers, perhaps ones you read every day, who have created fiction under the guise of truth. Their blogs are ostensibly about their day to day existence, may even include some pieces of fiction or poetry or personal essay, but some of the facts have been turned inside out.
Maybe the writer doesn’t want to be identified, or is playing, having fun being someone else. The character that demanded life is finally born in a blog, fully realized, solid, interactive (the fresh-eyed college graduate moving back to her hometown; the landlocked fly fisherman reminiscing about his days of streams and trout; the tech-savvy doting grandma with an herbal tea obsession, a minor character in a SAHM's life). Or they add a totally fictional detail, erase a husband, gain a Weimaraner, make a virtual move from Asheville to Albany.
And what of it? Readers are entertained, the writer has an enthusiastic, satisfied audience. These are tenuous connections we have, the lengths of spider's silk stretching across the ether from blogger to blogger. Many of us have never even spoken. In these circumstances, does the truth matter?
I'm still trying to figure that one out.
The end of anonymity
In the beginning, there was Anonmomous.
Then it was simply Jennifer. But there were slip-ups. The PublicLiterature.Org stories with my full name. The e-mails I sent to others from my personal gmail account. The few blogging awards that went to Jennifer Fullname instead of to just Jennifer.
My father found the blog. I accidentally sent an e-mail to my ex-husband from the writing to survive account and I'm pretty sure he's been here. I have a sneaking suspicion that my brother-in-law has visited at least once. A friend from elementary school found me here. For a while the first hit on a Google search of my name (yeah, I google my own name. I'm not the only one, right?) was the blog, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious. Until today, the two weren't directly connected.
It's one thing to write to complete strangers. It's quite another to realize that people who may be a part of my story are reading. Or that casual friends might come upon this and find out more than they ever wanted to know about me. But as I kept on leaving the door ajar, I realized that I want to be open, needed it. What's there to hide? Just me.
So.
Here I am.
Jennifer Trinkle.
All other names have been changed to protect the innocent. In most cases.