Known unknown

I am home, alone, slightly under the weather, sitting between two twitching dog dreamers, self-satisfied with myself and this solitary Sunday’s slightly melancholy pull. I don’t know when I crossed the line from youthful-ish to the August of middle age (the necessity of reading glasses, the shock at realizing my birth year is almost as long ago as the Summer of Love, and that the Summer of Love happened 51 years ago). The ride across the age meridian was turbulent, but I made it. Yes, I made it through the disbelief and discontent of the early and mid-forties and, with the support of my family, created a different professional persona.

I keep that persona and whoever it is I am in this space separate, for a variety of reasons, preferring to be a woman of mystery to the people in my professional life. There I am also someone of little to no past. I am an unlined page, a screen to be projected upon. And, to be honest, lately I have been feeling like my past has been well-digested and incorporated somehow into this person currently typing on the couch in this sunlit room, a dog to the left, a dog the right, three cats within eyeshot, and a husband and son currently slipping their paddles into the saline waters of Tomales Bay.

My job? I love it. My current setup, which allows for independence as well as research and writing (perhaps eventually of the paid variety) fits me well. I am, at the moment, a lucky person. After posting this I will return to reading the book about how to treat adolescents who self harm. I will fold the next load of laundry, water the plants in the backyard, start thinking about dinner. Most of it is mundane and kind of beautiful in its simplicity. I hope that recognizing it, making it solid in public words, doesn’t somehow cause the blocks to come tumbling around me. If that should happen, well, it would give me something else to write about, though I would probably write about it differently than I would have five years ago.

It’s still a bit unfamiliar, this sort of contentment, this emotional calm. Perhaps the persona and the person are joining forces, teaming up to be used as a space to be filled and refilled with the feelings and thoughts of other people, keeping my own thoughts and feelings quietly under the radar.

The internal litany

There are any number of things I should be doing right now. Closing out client files. Creating new paperwork. Scheduling doctors’ appointments. Writing goodbyes to folks I’ve worked with. Changing my way of being in the world. Working on my web page. Reducing my carbon footprint. Shedding my guilt. Improving my skills. Accepting who I am at this very moment, flaws and all. Updating my resume. Deciding whether I want that second job. Networking. Thinking about my dad, who is hovering around the edges of my consciousness. I wish I could talk to him about these shifts in my professional life.  I wish I could show him how far I’ve come in such a short period of time.

But I seem to have gotten stuck today. It could be the insomnia. I’ve routinely been waking up between 3:30 and 4:30 am, with the occasionally lucky sleep-in until 5:30. It could be that the stress of finding appropriate office space(s) with less than three weeks to go until I set up my own shop has finally pushed me over the edge. It could be the weird emotional math of saying goodbye to a few clients this week. I do not do well at goodbyes. I’ve also been nursing a bit of sadness over the recent death of the man who trained me on the crisis line. He was so kind and calm and, at 30, too young to die.

It could be all of it, every drop. Some days, you just need to step back, cry, and mourn. Tomorrow will come regardless. And one thing I must give myself credit for -- today marks four months without alcohol (even during our 15th anniversary dinner, quarter-full glasses of champagne plopped in front of us with no explanation. Dear reader, I did not even sip. This was not easy.). Despite it all, I'm keeping dry. Just not dry-eyed.

My strange summer

I was fired today. Well, really, I was let go, given my walking papers, politely told to hit the highway. It was a relief actually, though I couldn't say that in the moment. And it wasn't my regular job, which I am leaving in a few weeks anyway. It was an extremely part-time, somewhat nebulous gig where I spent time with a physically incapacitated person as a kind of friendly companion, someone to talk with and maybe browse the Internet and YouTube with for things of interest. 

This person lived in a facility where most of the other residents were mentally incapacitated, absented by dementias of various types. It was a sobering proposition to be there in the midst of human frailty, to see the unraveling that might well await me or the people I love. I was at a loss at this job. I was more like a stressful obligation than a friendly companion, someone for my client, my employer, to entertain or humor. As I attempted to fill the time in interesting, but not pushy, ways, I also did this distancing philosophical dance, an attempt to come to terms with the erosion of memory, skills, and self that happens with dementia, to accept how a body can turn on itself. It was in the air in this place, in the people and the smells and sounds and confusion of minds.

So the job is done. I do not have to think about these things any more. I can focus on the future, building a business, carrying the weight of people I can help and connect with, and tell myself I have years to go, years, before I am a lost soul unable to even sort through the crumbling bins in my head. 

I hope.

Hold this space

for some changes are afoot.

Hope to add the old stuff by the end of the summer, add links to other blogs, and generally get things organized.

Dry, clear-eyed, and all there

Two weeks ago I put down the bottle, got off the sauce, began a dry spell. I’m on a sparkling water-fueled trip to purer isles, where the cocktails are virgin and the beers near-. It’s not like I was slugging back Kahlúa with my morning coffee or slipping off to nip off a hidden bottle of Cognac. I never missed work because of booze binges. I maintained the proper ratio of loose to uptight between 5 and 9pm, generally remaining in a sometimes-hazy equilibrium on one to three glasses of wine a night. .

This was my way to relax and destress, but also to absent and anesthetize myself. Alcohol muddles the sharper feelings into indistinct, blameless aches. My sleep was crap and my mornings cranky. I started to wonder about the function of the evening ritual, how the warm blanket of cabernet sauvignon helped me to deny, ignore, or disregard my internal world. I also worried about the example I was setting for the boy about alcohol and routine, stress and substances — and what my nightly escape said about my desire to be present. I wanted to be a better example, clear-eyed and all there.

Adolescence can be a shifting, unstable place, where the temptation to disappear, to sink into something that softens and obscures, is strong and potentially dangerous. I’ve been drinking in one form or another, usually on the side of a bit too much, since I was fourteen. It started as a way to cope and quell anxiety, to not notice I wasn’t being noticed. It’s been decades since I was a messy drunk, a self-destructive youngster who craved the attention of another, whose dives into naked vulnerability generally ended in shame and the headache of morning. I’ve had fallow periods (pregnancy and the early days of motherhood), more intense spells (depressions; dissolutions), and now this, a break, perhaps something permanent. 

Or not. In theory I miss it, the blurring of the lines and deadening of sensibilities. Or I miss the anticipation of that first sip. Generally staying away from alcohol hasn’t been hard, which is confusing — if my consumption was ok-ish and taking a break not difficult, why stop forever? Why not allow bit of haziness on occasion? But it feels important to consider it, to imagine an alcohol-free future, facing the present as a full participant. 

One day at a time, as the saying goes.