Giving it up

Twenty-five years ago, it was meat. A year and a half ago, alcohol. Television in various forms has come and gone, mostly replaced by mindless internet surfing and streaming with the occasional DVD tossed in the mix. My daily newspaper, the routine of unfolding and refolding, of following the lede, has been usurped by links, clicks, and refreshes. And two days ago, I deactivated Facebook with little fanfare. This break is unlikely to last, but I’ve been surprised at the ease of leaving, the statuses left unsaid, the photos not uploaded, the thumbs left in neutral position.

I didn’t post the Halloween pictures or compose an appropriate caption. I didn’t check in on the exes or follow the plight of the galgos or surround myself with news of fire and the death of democracy. I miss some folks, but I also don’t know what I am missing.

What would it be like, an unconnected life? This would be written by hand in a journal kept by my bedside. My calls would be touchtone, extra charge for long distance. Vines would overtake fields of screens, soon to be further obscured by fall’s shedding and turned to shards through the forces of ice and thaw. In this fantasy, the broken Earth calms her nerves and gets her groove back. The seasons return. The feeling of national and global doom fades away, and I take out a piece of paper and start a letter.

There is so much more to shed. Giving and taking advice. Life hacks. Tips for smarter living. Shortcuts to equilibrium. The idea that anything could or should be perfected. The delusion that all of this will last forever and that what crumbles will not emerge again in a different, glorious form.

Youth and the hopefulness of decay

It was autumn and the 80s hadn’t wrung themselves out yet. The tree branches, free of summer’s frivolities, crackled in the November breeze and pushed the funk of leaf rot, a foreshadowing of eventual growth, into my apartment. I sat on the scuffed linoleum kitchen floor, low-lit, filled with anticipation, alcohol, and a kind of hope.

With a shiver, I pulled a blanket around my shoulders, faced the empty room, and dialed information in Pittsburgh, where P had gone for graduate school. I’d slept with him once, had been obsessed with him before and after. It was his thrift store coat. It was his thick orange wool sweater and international acumen. It was my absolute need.

But now that I’ve built the scene up–have returned to that kitchen and that apartment, to that mostly fucked-up time—I don’t have any follow-through. P answered. We talked briefly, my diction blunted by booze. I never called him again and hold no torch for a three decades gone projection of need onto a stranger. But still that time, that phone call, did return to me recently one evening as October’s wavering and breezy twilight fell into darkness.

I’m on the eve of turning 50 and these kinds of scenes seem so far away and so achingly tender and lonely, a series of empty memories where salvation was just around the corner, one man away. It’s romantic in a way that I no longer am, along with desperate and so. . . young. My youth was made up of these obsessions, a focus on potential saviors, men to distract me from the ache (the basketball whiz; the older man; the dorm punk; the wounded WASPs; the artsy Mancunian; the bad idea.) Autumn was new hope and ache and alcohol, my mind fuzzy with loneliness.

I wouldn’t want to return to it, though a dash of naïveté sounds refreshing. I no longer blur the lines with drink. I am sensible in my expectations. I know that no person can complete me and am also grateful for my grounded and funny husband and my boy on the verge of independence. My obsessions were fires that kept me distracted and wishing, hoping, to be chosen. Those unwitting strangers were stand-ins for the undefined parts of me, projections of a need to be seen.

 Here I am. Visible to myself. And perhaps to you. Autumn stretches before us with its aches and pains, with its little declines and slow deaths, all in service to spring’s soft greenery, the future, fuel for the young fumblers who will figure it out eventually.

The metaphor is the message

I sometimes think I’m done. Eight years with the same individual therapist, hundreds of hours spent emoting and exculpating, and I am finished, polished, complete. After all, things are going pretty well compared to eight years ago. I’m a licensed therapist myself now, engaged in the world, professional and (generally) successful, so different from the isolated, depressed stay-at-home parent I was when I started. I am more self-accepting and grounded, able to ride out the occasional depressive patch.

But four a.m. wakeups eat away at me. Worries about inadequacy erode my self-respect. This job requires my absolute attention. Metabolizing and containing the emotions of others leaves little emotional space for socializing. Family time, already altered by the boy’s teen life, suffers. The responsibility of it all, keeping not only clients’ psyches in mind but often their families’ psyches as well, is an impossibly delicate business. Being a grounded psychotherapist means being comfortable with ambiguity and imperfection. That can be tough on this insecure perfectionist.

Therapy is an art informed by science. Most of the time, I feel good at it, both skilled and intuitive, and love the work, ambiguities and all. But things happen. A potential client declines to work with me, someone disappears, a complicated and murky situation becomes even more fraught. I become overwhelmed with responsibility. Sometimes I feel like an absolute fraud, a public, obvious failure. Combine this insecurity with episodic insomnia and an overscheduled professional life and, on occasion, thoughts of the sweet relief of non-existence emerge.

It is one of my strengths that I can tolerate these thoughts and the feelings around them. I am comfortable occupying this place, a stuffy, dimly lit room that smells of alcoholic sweat and unwanted tears. These thoughts and feelings do not require action. They are a shout out from a place without language, heat emanating from a furnace of uncontained, disavowed need. Still, giving these feelings a voice, indulging them in words, feels like a potentially dangerous business. Take this knotted mess inside of me, give a pull to one end of the tangle, and what will happen?

A stultifying room, a consumptive need, a knotted mess. . . all I have to make sense of these feelings are metaphors. Maybe that’s enough. Life is doubt and ache, surety and song. Nothing is absolute. I tread carefully along my mossy path, feeling my way through the gloaming, through the fog. I stumble and slip. Look lively! Be careful. Stumbling is to be expected. There will be blood and bruises. There will be discovery and joy. I get up. I fall down. I get up again. Today I write to you from the forest floor. But tomorrow? Who knows.

Invisible girl

If you weren’t there or if you didn’t read about it after the fact in the early days of the blog, let me tell you: those were desperate, terrifying, lonely times. They are long over now, as in the past as the past can be. Through writing, enlisting witnesses, and lots of (ongoing) therapy, I came to a kind of acceptance. These things happened. They marked, but did not destroy, me. This is my life and I am strong.

In a recent message exchange with someone who was there at the time, a direct witness, I alluded obliquely to my “difficult” adolescence. They questioned this understatement:  Difficult? You were the coolest person I knew.

Wait. What? Cue record scratch.

It took me a few moments to process my disbelief. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding, a confusion of what I experienced (the blood, the body, the neglect, the blame) with who I was then (admittedly “difficult,” which is not to say uncool). But what was the point of clarifying a now-stranger’s muddied memory? As we continued to send messages, parts of my history collapsed, crumbled like a California cliffside into the depths of unshared memory. I was left to carry it alone.

Later, during a visit with a kind, loving, and entertaining person who has some large blind spots, a person who has known me almost as long as my mother, I again felt the lonely pang of erasure, the void of not being seen. The spreading darkness impeded my ability to think and feel. Recognizing and containing that darkness and letting it dissipate took a toll. Thank goodness for my husband, who listened as I figured it out.

Why do I tell you this? I write it out because I have to. I am compelled. But I also want to mark the shifts in myself. Ten years ago, these experiences would have enraged me. Five years ago, they would still induce anger, perhaps some sadness and shame, a turn to a glass of wine or two for succor. Today, I just try to make sense of it and feel compassion for those who cannot, for whatever reason, see.

It’s progress, sometimes of a lonely kind. But even when I feel lonely, I know I am not alone.

The sum of all things?

Hollywood Beach, the summer of 1977. Window units filter air thick and cloying as honey into a thin and bracing breeze. A half mile down the street, the Elk River, its water the consistency and color of lukewarm coffee with cream, is dotted with children and well-oiled ladies on rafts. I am old enough now to walk down to the beach by myself. My family knows everyone, and everyone knows me. There are always watchful eyes.

Wafts of cigarette smoke and mildewed, asthmatic nights intersperse with the soothing grassiness of chamomile tea on ice and the warm burst of cherry tomatoes from the garden. My mother’s ‘70s health food staples of wheat germ and carob and my grandmother’s McDonald’s hamburgers chased with Coca-Cola both make me, flesh and bone. Dining table readings of Gertrude Stein at one house intermingle with The Price is Right and Abbot and Costello at another.

Very few of these associations have anything directly to do with the picture that inspired them. My grandfather was a ubiquitous presence. He allowed me to live with him when I was a teen, when it seemed no one else could tolerate me. My feelings about him are complicated and my grandmother has always been primary, even after her 1979 death. I could probably write more comfortably (and with more authority) about the paneling in this photo than about my grandfather. Guilt by association? Make of it what you will. I may never know the whole of it.

Sometimes I wonder how this early stew of my life, with its contradictions and mixed moods, fits into who I am now. Often it feels like there is no communication, no correspondence. What happened to those parts of me, the parts in which I am the only remaining witness?

This morning I woke up from a dream. I had never cleaned out my grad school apartment, the one from the in-between time of my early 20s, when I started to build the internal structures necessary to live in the world despite my history, my knowledge of who I really was. I went back to the building, where every unit was being renovated except for mine. Inside there were soaring ceilings, a gas fireplace fully lit. Stuff—clothes, trash, papers—was piled everywhere, my furniture was intact, and the walls were lined with artwork I had long forgotten about. It was a homecoming.

The time has come to integrate these disavowed parts of myself, to embody the contradictions and accept—and take—responsibility.