LaurieWrites

Ring

I signed up for Ali Edwards's 31 Things, and promptly began skipping all of the daily emails, reducing their loveliness to the guilt of that which I ignore in my inbox that I actually ask for (which is different than my disdain for the cascade of crap that I don't ever ask for, ever.) I have a sick cycle of obsession with daily prompts and online courses that I sign up for and perpetually forget about and run out of time for and blow off -- especially the ones I pay for. But I've been interested in Ali's work forever (although I honestly have zero interest in scrapbooking -- it's more the documentation aspect of her vibe that I like) so I thought I'd try it again. 

I'm going to start with Day One and make my way through as I can. I'm going to discard the ones I don't care about, too, which should make things easier and less stressful for me. But I hate to discard anything, so we'll see how that goes, too. Welcome to my latest exercise in working out my codependence AND weird combination of slacker-overachiever issues on the internet.

Day one asked us to write about jewelry that was important to us. That was pretty easy. 

*****************************************************************************

My grandmother was the opposite of a fancy or affected person, not in any way concerned with clothing beyond being more than presentable for church and social functions. At home, she wore ancient clothing and recycled in her own way before it was a community mandate, out of economic, rather than environmental necessity. She did not easily buy herself new things. She got her hair cut in a utilitarian manner, and did not dye it after she turned 50. As for jewelry, she wore a wedding band, and that was pretty much it, although she'd wear a necklace, from time to time, and a mother's ring that didn't quite fit over her large-ish knuckles. 

In her ancient armoire, a light blue plastic baby wipes box held several rings, from a time before she was a wife and mother, along with a cameo necklace. Her father gave them to her, she said, for various occasions. I remember taking them out often when I would nose around in her stuff as a child. 

Sometime in my early 20s, she decided to gift these pieces out to her four granddaughters. I received this one. 

It is the only important thing I own. 

I mean this sincerely. I care about other material things. My car, my computers (losing those would suck), my cameras (that would suck more), my tv and my clothing and all of the other stuff that I rely on to make my life go along. But this is the only irreplaceable thing I own. 

We could talk about the irony -- that I am the unmarried, oldest child, and it is a vintage engagement ring that people pay big bucks for now. That it's cracked in the back. That I never wear it, and yet still have carted it along with me through every move, every life transition, riding in my purse in the front seat of a Chevy Cavalier and a Honda Civic and a big old moving truck and Volkswagen Beetle, along with a battered knock-off first edition of Leaves of Grass, the only other thing that I will not trust to movers. I have taken it out from time to time and worn it to feel closer to her, to my life force, to something, flicking my thumb across its broken back in an odd, comforting gesture.

Mostly it lives in my bedside table drawer, in a ring box from Naples that held a long-lost cameo that I think ended up with my great-grandmother. If I lost it, I would die inside. I thought I did, once, ashamed to speak of it for months, carrying the tiny tragedy in the back of my mind, until my mother asked me one day if I wanted grandma's ring back in my own stuff, that she had moved it into her drawer for safekeeping when I moved, that we had forgotten to make the transaction at the end of the moving chaos.

I breathed. The world was put back solid. 

I have no idea how much it's worth. I've been asked a couple of times to check that out and I don't want to. I don't care. I don't want to know it's worth a lot in case that weighs it down, and to tell me it's worth nothing is pointless, because no dollars make a difference in that context. 

If I ever get married, in the the spiritual or legal sense or both, I know that I will adopt it as my outward symbol of that occasion and I will wear it. It will transfer all of its super powers to the hope of love and depth and longevity of that relationship, and it will absorb all of the momentum and meaning of that happening in my life, because I know it can do that now, like nothing I could buy in a store after all of this time.

And if I don't, I'm not sure what will happen, and I don't really feel compelled to blurt that out right now. I feel like it is somehow time to claim it, though. I need to trust myself, that I don't need to leave it in a drawer, and to trust it, that it doesn't have to stay there. The days of this life go by faster and faster, and leaving anything locked up until the next thing happens or doesn't seems to be the ultimate folly, the fear-based action, the delay of joy when I don't have any to spare.

The day she gave it to me, I was in shock. I didn't feel worthy. But she always wanted things out of their boxes. She wanted us to have what we needed and what she seemed to think we deserved, so it's way past high time to channel that energy and assign elsewhere.

It is the only important thing I own.  

Falls

I knew this weekend might be hard. I've been struggling with some anxiety-slash-existential crisising that tends to be worse around holidays that mean a lot of social and family stuff going on. So I did what I don't want to do at all when that's happening (because I never said I was normal, what?) and I started reaching out to make some plans to be with some, you know, other human beings.

My friend Jen likes to hike and look at leaves and climb things, and in fact works to teach little children to enjoy these things as well. These are things I'm not prone to doing at all usually when left to my own devices, but that means it's good for me to get off my ass and do it, I just need a little help figuring out where to go, apparently. Maryland, in spite of an unfair reputation as DC's phantom limb plus Baltimore (which I love, too) is really quite beautiful, and there are some mountainy places within an hour of my house. 

We went here: 

I sat on a rock at the bottom of a place near there, while she did that: 

There are days when I would be willing to push myself to go up there, too. Yesterday I felt kind of like a jerk that it was not one of those days, but I also knew that I wasn't feeling so strong. I hadn't slept much. I needed peace more than adrenaline right now, enjoyment rather than mastery of my surroundings (Fancy!), and plus I'd already walked a lot on the Cliffs Trail, so whatever.

I also got it that what I was thinking of mostly as I sat there at the bottom of those falls, rather than the accomplishment of scaling the rocks and seeing the little water pools and colorful, poorly-placed tattoos of those high-schoolers up there up close, was how many more calories I'd burn doing that rather than sitting right there on my rapidly-expanding ass. I've got some body image stuff going on right now, heyyyyyyy, and I really need to show it who's alpha or I'll end up 'round the mental bend and I do not need that right now for any other reason. 

Anyway, this day altogether at the end of it was a completely soul- and mind-clearing experience, all of those things you may like to think are dirty lies that people tell you about hiking and camping (which I have still never done) but they really aren't. The weather was perfect and I got time to spend with a friend and talk through the stuff going on in our lives, when I wasn't wheezing and leaning against a rock hoping I wouldn't die as she said "YOU wanted to take the CLIFFS TRAIL, LAURIE WHITE. When they FIND US just REMEMBER THAT."  

Plus I put my dirty, unpedicured feet into this, you guys: 

Look at this at your feet and tell me you don't see Nature Jesus. Go ahead. 

I also learned the origin of the phrase "blaze a trail," so, linguistics! Idiomatic studies!

Please don't tell me if this isn't true, because it would ruin me. 

Then I saw goats on the highway on the way back, and  I got to yell "GOATS!" because honestly, I pathetically love goats and if I had an animal farm it would be a goat farm, even though I know that making that crazy expensive cheese is a fat load of work that I don't really want to do, so I'd be, like, a social media writer person with goats, and I don't know if that would be the best idea.  

I was kind of done in emotionally at that point. How much can a nature-starved suburban person take in a day before leaves start to sprout from your brain? It was like that time I had an art hangover in Florence, except everything was mostly green and not Catholic and gilt and boobs. That is until we passed a huge spray-painted sign that said "BIKER BASH" in front of a highway bar called Fat Daddy's, because this weekend is Rolling Thunder in DC (I skipped going this year, but if you're ever in DC on Memorial Day Weekend, you should go. This is where I tell you why. It's pretty great.) And we joked about going in, but I was only half-joking, one because bikers are generally nice and fun guys who are way less creepy than your average guy in a bar, true story, and they will never, ever judge you for how much beer you drink (that is how you tell a fake biker from a real one: beer judgment.) And two because I was imagining somehow being a bit player or maybe the main girl (AU REVOIR SIMONE!) in a reenactment of the Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Tequila scene, which is some fine cinema with which I hope you are acquainted.

Afterwards, there was beer, and these perfect little bloody Mary oyster shooters, because the best kind of naturalist friend is the one who knows her not-quite-so-naturalist-friend quite well. 

I hate this picture of me, but I am happy in it, so there, so here it is, killing me softly, living on my internet website. 

After two of these I ended up reeling off all of the ways in which Jen needed a social media strategy and dammit, she was going to have a blog, because there had to be other people on the internet who were as interested in showing children and even people like me who really don't care about leaves and plants and general woodland life.  

I am just dim enough to need days like this to remind me that things in my life that are troubling me look different, and often not as overwhelming, when I change my scenery with some purpose. They were still there, they were still things that were concerning me or that I had framed as problems that I needed to solve with my imperfect little mind, but I was in motion. I was taking pictures because I like to, which is something I forget to do an awful lot for someone who loves to do it so much. I wasn't sitting still and fretting in my living room or in my car or wherever else I like to turn over to the bad neighborhoods in my mind. 

I wasn't panicking and missing the present. I was moving my body in a healthy way. I don't know when this became such a remarkable occurrence, honestly. 

I basically need to get outside more often. 

At what cost who knows?

Adrienne Rich died last month. Friends of mine talked and  wrote about it more eloquently than I could at the time, but for some reason I kept this little lady with the enormous brain and talent and reach (who knows where her words went, who they saved, what they do?) on my mind, remembered seeing her long ago when my sister shepherded her around a reading at Georgetown and I went down to hear. I remembered out of nowhere a long-buried sense of revelation then, of feeling like I was staring into a new mirror, a person who stood matter of factly at a podium and spoke, in what were, to me, deep, yet entirely accessible truths. 

I had buried it like I'd buried so much in these years so I could be what I thought I was supposed to be instead, shape-shifting to attempt to please an ultimately unpleasable person, in the blind act of crafting what I imagined as an acceptable life, until two years ago or so when everything on the surface started cracking for real and I began through pain and depression and necessity and night after dark night of the soul to come back to a self I knew deep down I'd never fully owned. (I don't think now that I knew how. I think I needed to work a little harder at it first, needed some help I hadn't found yet.) 

So after her death I started reading Adrienne Rich's words late at night through a brand new time of not entirely easy transition for me. She has a lot of words, thankfully, so I had that much to work with.

There is so much I could have latched onto, really, and I do not reject complexity out of hand, although I call bullshit on affectation pretty quickly. I can be bought for cheap, though, with lines like "language uncommon and agile as truth" and "her wounds came from the same source as her power."

But then she said it was only a door. Either you will go through it, or you won't. I read that at first, time and time again on Twitter because Twitterlandia loves its repetition, and thought "Duh, no shit it's a door. It's only a door." And then, this is a door, I'd read and think about how what I was crawling through (because poetry has to lodge somewhere personal, right? It's so...weird.) felt like so much broken glass and beg to differ with that blanket statement. But really, if I adjusted the aperture and fixed the focus, which are always wise things to do when the light and movement shift, she was right. I wasn't on my knees. I was luckier than that. This was just another room I was looking into in this personal fun house, a space beyond where I'd been. 

This was only a door. 

And if I didn't go through it, she said, this now dead person I believed for no reason other than it seemed like a good idea? If at the last I let myself be overcome by the fear I expected to set the terms? I'd be okay, really.

 But if you don't, much will blind you/much will evade you/at what cost who knows?

Dammit. 

Her wounds came from the same source as her power. 

What could blind and evade me was my greatest fear, beyond the short-term risk, I guess. I couldn't quantify the cost to counterpoint the monetary loss so far, and that was a huge problem, remains a problem. It's scary. I don't even know the extent of the credits and debits. I slipped some paperwork into an envelope and sent it off today, gagging on the decimal points and percentages, terrified of the consequences, understanding for the first time, really, what I was giving up in real life terms, as bad as a lot of it was, as pressing as the need to leave it. 

Back at home I try to knit together an inbox that doesn't make any sense yet, to craft something that will support me from nothing, to hope that my skills and will and connections and track record will lead to something more than me and a couch and columns of credits and debits. 

It's not even a week. It's still only a door, a large and an amorphous and a scary one, but a door all the same. It makes no promises. If you go through it, there is always, a gifted poet once wrote, the risk of remembering your name.

This post is because of and in large part is a reflection of the genius words of Adrienne Rich. Please go buy one of her books, or go read Amy Turn Sharp's Poem a day for a year, or buy somebody's chapbook, or do something nice for a scared person. I'll be giving back for my whole life all that has been sent my way, so it's nice to have some company.  

Birth

I've been following along with the story of a new person born last week. I know his grandmas, and I've been privileged to follow his story online, as he was born and lived his first days, and it touched me so much. He was so loved even before he got here, it was a nice touchstone amid some upheaval for me, and honestly, I'm not touched frequently with that kind of circle-of-life energy. All of mine in recent years has been watching elders pass, with no replacement of babies and new life to take their place, and as much as I loved those people (even my poor little old dog, because I did love him, so much) it's hard to have that kind of energy without a counterpoint. I also don't live among children now, or pregnant women, or that many people, honestly, so it was nice to even see it from a distance.

Tonight I saw a picture of this tiny person meeting one of his grandmas for the first time, and I broke down in a way that I'm glad no one saw besides me. I cried and cried and cried. I took a bath and then a shower to wash my hair, and then I cried again. It came up from somewhere deep inside of me when I saw an image of him meeting someone who I knew at first glance would catch a grenade for him, but more likely would just sit there holding him, providing for him, showing him what love was in eyes and song and hands. It ignited a conscious longing for deep connection, appreciation for the pure love I saw in what I was looking at, fear of never finding it, gratitude that a tiny human could experience that kind of devotion in a world where it's so needed.

It was a lot tonight. I have had several days of internal work and struggle, of letting go and rationalization, and it was a difficult, clearing, healing cry. I never turned the tv on again tonight. I sat here instead and wanted to talk about all of this to my little blank blog box, because it is in the face of the most fearful times in life that I know for sure that the good and deep things I'm seeing is the stuff that matters.

Photo by Schmutzie. Used with permission.

And even when I'm so afraid that feelings like I saw in images tonight won't touch me, personally, again or maybe ever, it was good to know today that they -- and my reaction -- existed. It was good to know I could take it all in, even partially, at a distance, when normally I am so busy talking myself out of needs and feelings and the right -- yes, the right, it appears -- to human connection.When so often I feel on the outside looking in, not really a part of any system or community, but an observer. A child and a sister and a friend, for sure, but on some primal level lacking, no one's mom, no one's partner, no one's provider, no one's end of the day.

These are the voids that frighten me, for whatever reason. These are the spaces of deepest longing for me now.

We function regardless, I know, because I do. I understand my value. I don't feel worthless, I'm not sorry I passed over options that could have led me to that and left me holding the tragically wrong cards, either. I'm just being honest about what hits me in the hardest places. Because I think it is that desire for better, that acknowledgement of where the wounds are inside of us, of what we desire and what keeps us from it, especially, that helps us be better, that helps me be better, anyway. And on days like today even more, I appreciate the people who have shared their stories with me online, even when I didn't like them, even when they have been uncomfortable for me, because it is this kind of access that so often instructs me, that gives me a view I'd never have otherwise. I see a brand new baby in the embrace of a grandmother in an airport and I say yes, this is it. This is one of the things that truly matter.

I hope I am a little bit different tomorrow. I hope I am a little bit better. I hope I can hold on with less denial and shame, with more courage and intention, to what I might want from this life I am not only crafting for myself, but that I am allowing others to participate in, too. Because I'm at a place where I am still so flawed and afraid and road-worn, but also ready, by necessity and desire, to be better at that part.

On Stilts and Fire and Walking Through It and On Them

Here I am with a man on stilts:

This is my last week at work forever, and I'm doing things like crying through a two-hour Glee doubleheader, so I've come to this as my visual touchstone.

(Thanks to Deb Rox for the photo of me and my pretend carny husband. All that background needs is a clown pushing a hoop with a stick and maybe a miserable elephant or two, to go with the seaside vehicle. Also, blown up bigger it looks like I'm in danger of snapping his stilts-twig leg, what with my stance there. Later on he made me almost eat fire in front of an entire beach lounge full of people, so maybe I did hurt him. CAH-RAFTY, CARNY MAN.

(Seriously? The guy on stilts was very nice. We were instant friends, in my mind, which is obvious because I look entirely comfortable with him, no?)

You know what, this story is freaking me out in the retelling. I am super not into being on fire and I was really close to his fire sticks and it appears almost happy about it from the pictures. (I go to Florida and lose my fool mind.)

Oh. My. God. I just said all of those things and they are true. HELLO NARNIA, I'M HOME.

Anyway, so yes, I quit my job in March, not with the stated goal of joining a resort carnival, but life is funny. Back then, it felt like May was forever away and would therefore never come, and I'd sit there in my sensible chair in my windowless office pondering the decision I'd made, lalala, I'm a decision maker, forever, looky here at me, but nothing will happen because la. 

Well, hello, calendar and reality-challenged people, i.e., me: May is here. Friday is almost here. Here is almost here. And I'm putting the talents I took to South Beach to use by posting photos of myself with stilts man, because how else would I remember that I almost ate fire unless I did this instead of other productive things?

I don't know what is going to happen, which in some ways I'm totally fine with and in others? Well, we do not want to talk to those others, because they are crazy banshees with snakes for hair who want my heart on a mismatched Pier One plate.

I'm ready to give something else to the space I occupy. I'm ready to let other, so much better, stuff in. If I could tell you, y'all, all that has happened to me within the past six months without boring you to tears and you charging me a co-pay? It's been a lot, inside and out. And it's weird and it's hard and it's making me cry what may seem to be an unhealthy amount at Glee because I think it's supposed to. Transformation that requires slashing through years of settling and rationalizing and denial with a cup of coffee and a keyboard and my own flawed interpersonal skills instead of with a sharp machete? Not easy.

 And yet I believe that all of it -- ALL OF THE ALL OF IT -- has happened in this way over the past two years to manifest what my meditation teacher used to say was the power I had that I refused to acknowledge, that I didn't know how to channel or let out of its size-14 cage. She used to make me put both my feet flat on the floor to try to feel it, not to fidget, to swing one leg up over the other and disconnect, which is my usual posture. She told me to feel it in a way that should have creeped me out but didn't. You are solid. You have to sit in it. You don't even know. Put your feet on the ground and feel it.

I couldn't manage it yet, because my brain is a complicated system of roadblocks and puffy clouds, so it had to show up in an ER this past December in the form of almost stroke-level scary vital signs, and a kind and directive nurse who along with an apparent solid grasp of needles and math told me that fear and stress that deep probably had come out in pressure that high. We can kill ourselves with our own minds, I believe this now.

It's not like I buy it all yet, or even most of it. Power looks very different to me than this way that I feel. I just finally came to a point where I knew I had to change, and so I've been putting one foot and one word in front of the other for six months like I have a plan, when really I'm just a walking, talking Mad Lib, with a sense of humor and a constant willingness to try new things as my fill-in-the-blanks.

This has been a particularly challenging week inside of my skull, as I let the ending of something big into my mind, as I go through the process of shutting it down (while trying not to starve the concurrent growing things, the good, the new.)

Old patterns, electrical currents in my emotional grid, are rising up from beneath my skin, and I'm pissed off about that. I haven't been my best self, at all, and I have felt badly about that in the way I always do when extra stressed, when instead of letting it just wash over me and out the door, as I'm learning, I've been gathering it in subconsciously, stoking it with worry, the ultimate waste of time.

But I can learn. I know what to do when I'm at the end of the particular rope. I had the good sense to talk through a lot of it with people I trust last night, and then I peeking at my shamrocks that I have somehow managed not to kill for more than a year now. Even when they're sleeping you can see a tiny one shooting up now that I've given them a much bigger pot and a space by the door with sun, and that thrilled me more than anything in recent memory. It's always a mystery, what you find to keep you going, what makes you feel competent, after years of telling yourself you kill every green thing you touch so don't bother.

I hate when metaphors happen accidentally. Like hammers to the head, they are.

 I still wonder who in the hell I think I am, walking into an unknown with a questionable net. But what I do know is that I have lived for three years in a state of constant panic, low-grade mostly, but still. I have spent days convinced that this was all there is, my performance declining, my attitude getting ever worse. 

It just  didn't work for me anymore, so it had to change. I wouldn't be sitting here without the patience of friends who have helped me see the other, less self-loathing side, that said maybe the space I was in wasn't working for me as much as I wasn't working for it. It's a lot simpler when you stop insisting it's so complicated.

And what's the worry? That I'll starve now? I have been starving for a long, long time. There are other ways to be broke. There are other ways to die. I didn't want the way it was happening to me to be the final story, for me. And I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't made that decision way back in March, and had what even I'll acknowledge took enormous courage to follow through on? I wouldn't have answered the query that took me on the trip to a place with a blazing sun and a super moon, where I totally almost ate fire.

I'm kind of glad I didn't miss this. I'm looking forward to the rest.

 

*Sarah or Deb took this picture on my camera. I don't remember which. Thanks for catching it, and me.

**Also! I don't want to forget to thank Honda for bringing the amazing -- and for me, life-changing, because this picture will hang on my office wall forever as a symbol of when everything changed for me -- white party to life.  I am a very happy CRV owner with a beloved Civic in my past. I really appreciate it when cool brands I can support without reservation support what we're doing as writers and photographers online to change our own worlds, and hopefully our larger one.

Laugh at the Trouble of Parting

This Mother's Day, I'm working with Clever Girls in support of Macy's Heart of Haiti to shine a light on the "trade, not aid" program, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans struggling to rebuild their lives and support their families after the 2010 earthquake.

A few days before my grandmother died, I saw her for what I'm pretty sure now I knew would be the last time.  It was late in the evening, in the last days of December. My own mother drove us to the nursing home on the way home from a family reunion, where I sat by her bed under the flourescent bulbs and wept and couldn't stop. She stroked my hand with her one good one, bewildered. 

"Whatsa mattah? Whatsa mattah? Don't cry. It's okay. Don't cry. Why you cryin'?" 

"Because you're so sick," I said. "And I can't help you. I don't know what to do."

More to the point, I told her the truth, finally: that I did not know what I would do when she left me. I told her there weren't enough tears for her. At 38, with a mother there to support me and the wherewithal to do whatever I needed to, really, to get by, I just did not know what I would do without her 85 pounds of awesome and her overall input in my physical world. I did not know how to live without her, because I'd never had to. She existed in my life from infancy as an ally and an advocate, for various reasons and in various ways. They never tell you at the beginning about this part at the end. 

I wasn't supposed to tell her these things. She was frail and sick and often confused, her body and her spirit finally caving in to rest after more than a decade of recovery and relapse from a massive stroke and God knows how many mini-strokes in the daily mix. She had never gotten over her anger at losing her physical abilities or her independence, but she showed remarkable flexibility in moving around and adapting to what were sometimes really hard transitions.

I showed up for visits to the various facilities she needed to adjust to as her care needs changed with snacks she didn't want, clothing she wouldn't wear, and an obsessive desire to fix her television that she brushed off in favor of the crappy local news channel. We talked surface stuff, mostly, things she wanted to hear about and know, a work schedule that she said was too grueling even if I told her it was no big deal, and how could I even explain the internet to her as a time-waster? (When I started working in senior services, she'd concluded that I was a doctor for old people. She bragged to the unimpressed residents at her dining table that I was a doctor. I corrected her a couple of times and then I gave up.) I'd sat with her in ERs a couple of times, done some bush league elder advocacy that didn't compare to the stuff my parents dealt with daily when it came to hospital and assisted living and nursing home staff and back again. I cried on elevators and in my car when I left, but I did not let her see it, not ever, until this cold night at almost the end. 

I really should have known better than to stress out a dying person. It seems like with all my years of counseling training, I'd have picked this up in one of the manuals, and yet there I was, dripping tears on her bed sheet. I fail end of life in my own family. 

However, my grandmother did that night what I've learned over my conscious lifetime that moms do. I learned this mostly from her, and from my own mother, her daughter-in-law, with some other data from my aunts, my friends with kids or even without who possess maternal energy that lights the world, from my childhood stories of Mary that are my strongest mythical tie to Catholicism. I quite simply believe that Marie White stopped her own hastening dying process to attend to me. Her eyes cleared and she looked at me and she told me that  this was a real shame, yes, but I would be okay. She transmitted to me with her eyes and with her touch a desire to stay and stop my pitiful sadness that was as strong as it was impossible. 

She obviously would never have left me if she had a choice, and beyond me she would have chosen not to die at all, because she liked being alive in a practical, curious way, as well as the way of a caregiver. I actually believe that she stayed alive through as many health setbacks and eating problems and winter colds and crazy surgeries because not only did she not want to leave her family, she just didn't think that she should, or that it was a good idea. And this all sounds as crazy and woo-woo to me on one level as it sounds completely rational on every other. It is the very heart of love. And if one has been lucky enough to be loved, and protected, and fought for like that, I'm not sure what else you need. 

My grandmother would have thought that talking about being a parent was ridiculous, honestly, like talking about air or groceries or the veracity of the Holy Trinity. Some things were and that was that. Her dad died pretty young and her brother was killed in World War II, she took care of her sister and pitched in for her mom. In her world of duty you did what you did and you got what you got and what she got was four sons and seven grandchildren and that was okay too.

Yes, she worked her butt off. No, I cannot speak to her dreams and inner thoughts, but from all appearances she really liked her kids and the grandchildren when we came along. She would have always rather been with us than not. She liked helping children learn and being a parent and a coach (although not always the most tactful sort) came rather naturally to her. I think she would look back at me from whatever beyond she's in to say that this is a whole bunch of goings on for something that made a certain amount of sense at the time, that of course I cried that night, of course it was a real shame that she had to go, because she'd have much rather stayed here. As the Irish funeral prayer my sister found for her funeral program says,

"All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting,  when we meet again."

She believed that. I didn't, so much. Now I do because I like the concept, nothing more, and whenever I read these words, which is admittedly often, I smile. 

I did not go back to see her after I left the room that night, and she died a few days later. I have felt great guilt at various times since that I didn't witness her passing closer to the time, but I've come to the conclusion that we finished our business that night. It was the exchange that we needed to have to mark the end of a profound human relationship. It left space for everyone else to have their time, to say what they needed, or not. I'm pretty sure our parting words that last night were the usual mishmash -- be careful, I'll see you soon, come by when you can. 

One brief moment, and all will be as it was before. 

When my family drifted out of the funeral home the last night, I hung around until my uncle said that I had to go, that I needed to leave my grandmother sometime. I conceded and did this, but although I was grateful for the nudge, I really was, he wasn't exactly correct. As I move through the world I know all of the hype is true: I never will leave her, and she will never be gone from me. My Kubler-Ross stages of grief have moved in waves for three years, they've gone out for brunch together, picked up hobbies and gone on a few beach vacations by now. But when you aren't ever left by a person in the truest sense of never leaving, you're much less inclined to do it yourself (unless you have a personality disorder or are just not the grateful sort, I guess. I'm talking best case scenarios here.) It's the best kind of luck and the only thing about love I've ever needed to learn. That, and that when you're a mom or someone like it, you'll try to take a break from a process as arduous as dying to attend to what an overgrown weeping kid needs, I guess because you've never ever ignored anything she needed before, so why start now?

I know I've been loved like that. I don't need to ask for more.  

Thank you to Macy's Heart of Haiti for sponsoring my participation in this “Share Your Heart" promotion. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Bully: Then and Now

Thanks to The Bully Project for sponsoring my writing. Visit their website to join the movement and learn more.

In the fifth grade a boy whose name I remember well trapped me in a hallway, threw cereal all over the floor and smashed it into the carpet, all the while telling me that he hoped I knew my face was so flat that it looked like it had been run over by a truck. 

I knew. Not the truck thing, necessarily, but it was probably around then that I knew to know my face was different, because that was around when the split began in our school between pretty and not-so, between fat and thin, desired and reviled. The hospital get-well cards stopped and the mean games began, the hormones shifted and the ugly showed, if it was going to.

The funny thing was that when given the opportunity to consider it, I concluded that his face was flat too. I had to admit that he was unattractive to me, a fact I probably wouldn't have stored in my fifth grade brain if he hadn't abused me in that way when no one was looking. He gave me a reason to compare and contrast. 

I don't know who I told, if I told anyone at all. But what I do know is that I can't relate conversations from yesterday very well, but I can remember his face, and his words. I can see my green knee socks and feel the shame on my face, still. I think it's an especially cruel trick of science that our brains retain such memories so well, but then I remember that's how we're supposed to grab ahold hard of what to know to run from. It's to protect us as much to hurt us, and I can't say it's let me down in the years since.  

There was the time, swapping classrooms across the hall, when another boy stopped and for no apparent reason punched me in the stomach. I stumbled, and remember just walking, because who would believe it? Who would listen to me? 

There were the two junior high years where the boys -- some of whom are my Facebook friends now, who laugh about those days with no idea of how they harmed me, no concept of the impact of their words and actions -- made fun of my name, treated me like one of them, communicated to me with rough jokes and constant criticism that I wasn't one of the cute girls, the ones they were trying to "go with." I was a friend, though, the one who could always roll with the punches. Even now, smoothed over by adulthood and professional schools and many, many road miles all around, you can see the difference in communication style, in how we remember. 

There is at least one girl I refused to friend on Facebook, an intensely popular person in our very small pond, who missed no chance to ridicule me, to set me up in social or academic situations. She was abetted by at least two teachers I can remember, adults hired to guide us and to help us learn, who seem to my teacher self in retrospect like overgrown adolescents seeking their spot among their students. So creepy, but that was how it was from my perspective. She looked confused when I ran into her at a local writer's center a few years back, and, when she greeted me warmly like we'd always been close, I walked away with no interest in communicating. It wasn't any kind of triumph that walked with me to my car, just the calm sense of satisfaction that now, I could choose. I could set the rules of engagement. I could acknowledge old hurts and act accordingly. 

Because it's all about power, really. Misuse of it and being on the receiving end of it, lacking it but then, eventually, reclaiming it if you're lucky. And I only could, in any measure then and almost wholly later, because I was lucky enough to have just enough of the positive percentage of will and defiance that meant I could look at what was happening to me over years, years where I was treated the way I was because of differences in appearance,  mostly, and persevere. 

I could because I went home every day to a family who were not only willing to listen to my occasional pain and constant sense of being less-than in the social structure of my very small school, but somehow didn't ever allow me, in spite of all the goodness I was afforded, to rest in self-pity or to form any excuse for not plowing into my life, into my future. Effort was encouraged, accomplishments were celebrated, and success was expected. And regardless of what I encountered, I always sensed better things waiting for me, through some combination of intellect and heart, my will and yes, to some extent, their expectations. 

I really did find refuge at home, in an extended family that would have sooner died or at least suffered mightily in my childhood than ever made me feel inadequate, and that is why I believe that I not only survived, but came away with a belief that I could do great things if I wanted to. A bit too sheltered, probably, but I can't say it was the worst response to my particular situation. I can't say in another constellation it would have gone any better. It's really why, no matter how deep the valleys were (and we face them always, many of us. They don't go away in adulthood, not really, they just change.) I think I was always able to find my way out. 

I look back now and I know that I was not always kind myself. I can think of occasions when I felt wonderfully socially accepted because I treated someone else badly because, finally, I could. I'm not proud of it looking back, but I understand the psychology of that wounded child. It helps me understand the reasons petty and profound for gossip now, for hierarchies, for why we try to build ourselves up in any way by putting others dow, for what that satisfies in us as supposedly more evolved adult people. 

It's never okay, no matter the age. And it is for this reason that I want projects like the Bully movie to spark productive discussion, to go beyond banner-waving in elementary schools to a real societal shift in how we perceive and acknowledge and  yes, often abuse differences. It's why the stories from The Trevor Project make me cry, why I look for the truth in the eyes behind the surface of the young people I encounter as a teacher. Because, quite simply, no one should ever have to feel like dying, or like compromising his or her life, because of who he is, because of how she is treated based on someone else's ridiculous and small-minded projections and reflections. 

I'm not idealist enough anymore to think that bullying in its purest sense -- which will ever to me involve a child crying on a playground, a teenager with literal food on his face in a cafeteria, a person left to stand alone outside a sporting or social event, made fun of, excluded -- will ever truly go away. I'm even more interested now that it has gained so much ground in societal chatter in it never becoming a buzzword, which would be the worst possible thing to happen when, in many cases, young lives -- and happiness, and productivity, and concepts of self-worth -- are on the line. 

I know where I came from, and it's taken me thirty years to sort a lot of it out. I'd step in for some other ten-year-old girl in a second, in a hallway strewn with cereal and hateful words, and hope that it would make the difference someone could have made for me. 

This is the trailer for the movie. It starts in the DC area on Friday. I'm hoping to go see it soon. You can find it near you here:  www.thebullyproject.com

Here's some more stuff about it: 

More Information:
This year, over 13 million American kids will be bullied, making it the most common form of violence young people in the U.S. experience. Clever Girls is proud to support Bully, a film directed by Sundance- and Emmy-award winning filmmaker, Lee Hirsch. Bully is a beautifully cinematic, character-driven documentary—at its heart are those with the most at stake and whose stories each represent a different facet of this bullying crisis. 

About the film:

Following five kids and families over the course of a school year, the film confronts bullying’s most tragic outcomes, including the stories of two families who’ve lost children to suicide and a mother who waits to learn the fate of her 14 –year-old daughter, incarcerated after bringing a gun on her school bus. With rare access to the Sioux City Community School District, the film also gives an intimate glimpse into school busses, classrooms, cafeterias and even principles offices, offering insight into the often-cruel world of children, as teachers, administrators and parents struggle to find answers.

I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. Find showings in your area for The Bully Project and buy tickets here.

Honest.

I was walking to my car today, leaving Home Goods without anything, because they didn't have what I wanted. I was wondering where I was going to go next that might, jingling my keys, digging the weather, because today was another gift of pretty that we've been getting so much of this spring that it almost makes me forget about the polar ice caps, regardless of the fact that I can't. 

A woman was walking towards me, I did notice that much. When I got about close enough to touch her if I'd wanted to, she stopped, and started talking. 

(This is odd in my area, mind you. Strangers generally do not address other strangers unless directly involved in a transaction or a resolution of some stupid slight, real or perceived.) 

"Can I ask you a question?" she said. "Because you look like an honest person." 

"Sure," I said, processing concurrently just how she'd have ascertained my level of integrity in the literal one second she'd been able to look into my face. 

I took in her physical presence, wondering if she was maybe in some kind of distress, if she was the type to flip out in a parking lot maybe and start asking questions to the air and hey, I was the lucky one who just happened to be there when she did. I'm telling you, people just do not talk to strangers around here, so it just comes to mind, and besides, after years as a counselor, I've learned to respond internally as if in crisis whenever anything out of the ordinary happens. She seemed fine to me, as far as that flawed judgment can go. Physically speaking, she was approximately five foot one inches tall, roundish, black, with closely cropped hair, perfect white teeth, and a gorgeous shade of coral lipstick that screamed "Hey world, I like lipstick, look at it." (This is a sentiment I share, so I am naturally drawn to ladies who also express it nonverbally.) 

"Well, I just got a job opportunity," she said. "It is good, and I got it. And I think I should take it, but my boss wants me to stay where I am. He is guilting me about leaving, 'It's a busy time, we need you,' he's saying. And I'm not sure what to do. "

I can tell you right now that I did not think about what I said at all, or whether or not I was going to say anything. I just said: 

"I say do you. Take it. You have to take your chances, and especially not NOT take them because someone else doesn't want you to or makes you feel badly about them." 

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you so much." 

And then she walked on, and so did I. And as I opened my car and got in and realized that I had just given solicited career advice to a stranger in a parking lot, I felt floored and giddy and drunk with some kind of weird universal connection that I cannot even tell you just about what or why. 

I told Twitter what happened, worrying that it sounded like I was advertising myself as some parking lot shaman who knew stuff about things, but I didn't care. I just...maybe I should have called my mom? One of my best friends? What was I supposed to say? 

"Hey, some lady in a parking lot thought I looked honest and asked for some career advice." 

Because yeah. That is what happened. And as I told Twitter, this person looked, upon further reflection, like a person who really just needed an answer right then and there, or at least needed someone to reflect something, anything back. 

And I guess I was there for that, which is cool. And I started wondering, what if we did that all of the time? What if we stepped outside of our comfort zones more? She didn't know me. I could have been a real jerk. I could have told her to go away. I could have said, no, I'm not comfortable answering your question. 

And hell, I could still be completely wrong. I didn't ask what her current job is or what the new gig is or why she wants to leave or what she's going to. She could be leaving a senator's office to work at a fruit stand, I don't know. But as a human being who has recently given up an incredibly stable position for the unknown, I don't think I'm thinking about that so much right now. I believe that we look for other things when the things we're in aren't cutting it. And people who want us to stay in those things either live in some kind of (not entirely unfounded, sure) fear for us or aren't usually clear on our worth. But I've also come to believe (because I am in some kind of crash course on change, not that I know anything, really, I swear) that even if the next new thing isn't the right one, there will be another thing, at least one, beyond the one you cut your losses for.

I just saw a worry and confusion in this lady's eyes that I've seen in myself a million times, that I've seen so much over the past year that I am sick to death of it, I knew it like I'd seen it in my mirror. Maybe she could spot it from across the parking lot. It's possible. 

I am so glad I did what for me was the correct thing. I'm glad I didn't give in to some kind of freak out fear that she needed something I wasn't prepared to give and shut her down, because I admit it I am not immune to that reaction. I'm glad I listened. I am amazed that she chose me. 

I told my mom that I felt badly, that I felt like maybe I ought to have offered up some kind of connection beyond, asked for an email or given one. But you know, I think maybe some connections are meant to be a minute long. Sometimes any longer and it's spoiled, I guess. I hope so much that her new job is dope. I feel grateful that someone could think for even one second in a parking lot that I'd be the one to answer a question, to tell the truth. That's the grace here. That's the thing I need to live up to. 

I am so grateful to -- and hopeful for -- her, for anybody who's ever felt the need to ask and didn't. I've been her, so many times. I'm so glad she did. 

Trayvon

I'd claim writing this as entirely my idea, but that wouldn't be fair. Kelly is a friend and a fellow educator who inspires me to be a better and more vocal person. Lord knows I know how to be vocal. I don't know why I'm not in the service of the greater good more often.  Hopefully that will change. 

Trayvon walks my halls and sits in my classroom, except I've never had a student by that particular name. I have had, however, a Rashad within my walls. A Bobby. A Trevin. An Abdul. A John. A Dmitri. Those are the ones who come to mind, immediately. They are a few of the ones who have worked hard, who have suffered mightily, in many cases, whose attitudes and mileage vary. Those are just a few of the ones whose eyes have looked back into my round, demanding, mouthy white face while I demanded this assignment or that, while I told them to put their phones down, while I hid tears from their stories, who say things like "Professor White, have you had enough of your coffee today?" They want to start volunteer fraternities. They are already basketball standouts, or show up at workouts every day until the coach puts them on the team. They help to support their families, their grandmas, their little brothers. They get worn down and stop coming to class and break my heart. They are the kids (because right or not, that is what I call them, my kids), who sit in my office and who dare, for whom I dare (DARE, as though we should have to now) to ask for more.

When I landed in this spot 11 years ago -- a spot I got because I had an education, and the wherewithal to make a phone call and ask for it, which are no small things in the United States of America even now -- I had no idea I would meet these young men. I had returned from a segregated city in the midwest to my hometown just outside the nation's capital, a place I took for granted as integrated, where I had always known "black friends", not as the cliche goes of rationalizing that I had any, but I just had. I did not understand the implications of an environment where only 43 percent of my male students of color had the averaged out shot of graduating from college. I had no idea I'd meet any of my students, surely, but especially not that I would come to a place where almost all of what I call my entire "organic caseload" would consist of boys averaging 18-24, a group whose ethnic breakdown I haven't figured out, but I'm guessing based on our demographics are majority black, boys who came back to my office after I thought I'd never see them again because I gave them an earful because, I guess, they decided my brand of humor and motivation was what they needed.

And yes, I keep after them. I nudge them -- especially the ones whose eyes particularly engage, who respond to the errant emails -- to tell me their stories.  I have walked back to my office listening to weekend tales of incarcerated dads AND brothers, of new jobs at Target and moms headed back to Africa to take care of sick grandpas. I have heard about new websites for dj gigs, a scholarship application they don't quite know how to fill out but can I help, and, on at least a few occasions, out-of-reach college transfer admissions come true. 

I do not want any of these young men to die for existing, for walking down a street on the way back to anyone's house, by an animal with a nine-millimeter handgun, whose only excuse is seeing a black boy and being on a fake neighborhood watch. And because that is so, because I have looked into the faces of many young men of color and seen them, known them, heard their stories, it would be remiss for me NOT to ask justice for the young man whose face represents all of them most sadly in that role this week, whose face, I believe, represents a call for justice at a critical time in our history, a time when we cannot afford -- any of us, but especially those of us who are motivated, who have distinct personal reasons not to be -- to be silent.

I ask for justice for Trayvon and his brothers because of one of my dear friends and my most respected colleague, a strong black man raised by a strong black father and the spirit of a strong black mother gone too soon, whose life's work whether he planned it or not is becoming raising up young black men after him, asking for something more from and for them, because he knows it is possible with hard work and with someone in front of you of any color anywhere but especially who look like you, any someones who believe it, telling you that you can, that this is what you, quite simply, have to make come true to the best of your ability. On the day I graduated from my second and most hard won graduate program, a day that meant more to me than most in my life, I looked behind me and saw him -- tall, dreadlocked, smiling, clapping -- alongside my parents and my sister, my only friend or extended family member for that matter who showed up because he knew what this meant to me, and because he knows what an educational achievement means. And my family saw him there, as my friend, and knew him as such, and I knew that meant something to them too. I ask because if this were him or his child, I would tear this building down. I would want to set it on fire. This should not be, and it could.

I ask for justice for Trayvon because of my dearest mentor and friend, whose own child graduated in less than four years from a competitive historically black college on his own merits, surely, but in no small way because she stood over him from the womb willing him, telling him, to be more, and I'm sure in her most private moments praying for providence that he may be all that he was capable of becoming, knowing that he would have to have so much fortitude to excel in a society that would have him believe he was less than, and accordingly he did. I ask because in response to her question I told her in no uncertain high-horse terms that I was not going to see The Help because it was degrading to the history of black women, she said, "Whatever. Please. I liked it. Go see it. That writer, that reporter? Is you. You would have been there then, as you are there now. Shut your mouth and go." And I did, and while it weighted me down and blessed me that she did, and whereas I don't know why she chose me, I am here, partially, because she is always correct. 

I ask for justice for Trayvon because I am weary of reading ignorant, disgusting comments online about my president, specific to his race and background. I am tired of reading hateful statements about his wife and children that include derogatory comments about their color and about their physical features that are in some way considered fair game to lump in with racial slurs.

I ask for justice for Trayvon because as the child of bigoted generations I have tried to break the cycle on a smaller, more personal, scale, and it should be done more broadly. As I have stood up to systems and statements and expectations within my family and closer friends, and said many times privately, "Please do not say that. He is my friend," I must say publicly, "I believe that that happened to him because he is black. That should not be." 

I ask for justice for Trayvon because of all the reparations that have not been made, because of all the atrocities commited by whites against people of color, and not in spite of the fact that I did not have anything to do with them, but besides it.

I ask for justice for Trayvon because it is a travesty for any teenager in a so-called free country to be killed for an iced tea and some Skittles, sure, but it is even more of a travesty for this crime to be ignored on the level that it has been, for someone to get off that easy for murder.  I ask because I believe that people do not understand the cycle of poverty, or the long-lasting impact of systemic racism. I ask because I want my government to do something, to say that this is not okay, for all of the times that that has not happened. I ask because I believe that crimes against black people are considered far less serious on a daily basis than crimes against whites, and because I believe that black people, and other people of color, have far less of a voice within not only the criminal justice system but in general, than white people. 

I believe that this is true. I believe that every day I do not say it is one more day too long, and I believe that if more of us said it, if more barriers were broken down, it would solve far more problems in our world than it could ever possibly cause.

I ask because I should and because if I do not, I am part of the problem, and I do not want to be that ever, or anymore.

I am so sorry for the death of this young man, and this was all I knew to do about it. I encourage you to speak out in whatever way you can against the violent assault of any person, anywhere. It should never occur. It should never be.

Organizing

I'm home tonight, by choice. I spent the day focused, for me, cleaning, clearing out, doing laundry, putting some organizational thingamajigs in place. 

The fall and winter were pretty much a wreck around here. I was home and then I was not, day to day, week to week, spinning whether I was here or away, and nothing got done. The infrastructure fell apart. And then I read an article in O magazine, of all places, last week about clutter, and how the external reflects the internal, and how there's a reason we let it pile up and don't tend to the structures of our lives, and I knew I was sick of myself and of this and that with all of what I've got going on and coming up that I had better decide to make getting my act together a priority. I also decided that just because I'd always been told I wasn't any good at organizing and cleaning didn't mean I couldn't learn and that this messy rubber had hit the road bigtime.

So I went to Target and bought these bins, many bins, in my favorite comforting shade of green, because Oprah's organizer told me to get them. I have no idea what I'm going to put in them exactly yet, except he did say that one shoe-boxed size one should be reserved for cords and chargers, all the electronic stuff that my life eats, so I have dutifully put those cords and chargers in there. I was supposed to buy four, though, and I have three left. I need to check the article and see what he said to put in the other three. because I kind of keep looking at them suspiciously and moving them around while I do all of my other stuff, and that's just not very healthy or productive.

Tonight, because it is Friday and damned if I do not know how to rock the shit out of a Friday night, I refused an offer to go to a St. Patrick's Day bar thing, and took myself instead to Bed, Bath and Beyond with coupons (twenty percent off one item AND five dollars off the whole shebang, BOOYAH.) And after I obsessed over the shoe racks and rejected them all, because yeah, I can do that for 20 minutes, I grabbed 48 green fake suede slimline hangers off the racks and decided that they were what I needed to get my closet in shape. 

I am super excited about these hangers, y'all. They are SPIF-FY. So tomorrow is hang-up clothes day. (And everyone is jealous. Whatever.) 

I'm likely seeking an organizational center because, as I've told a few people this week, I have no sense of a comfort zone right now. Sure, there is always my bathtub (I don't know how I am not a Pisces), but that's about it, and there are only so many hours I can spend in there before it just gets weird and cold and wrinkly. I think that bailing on my job was the last bastion of fragile structure I had, which is bizarre because it's not like I've felt any kind of comfort zone there for a long time. 

And it's okay. It really is. I've been having some serious anxiety waves the past couple of weeks, yes. They are really hard to deal with, a combination of physically and emotionally challenging that leaves me feeling raw and strung out with nowhere to put myself and no sense of relief in sight until they pass. And whereas I'm trying to handle them with exercise and my own brand of therapy I can do for myself pretty well (which mostly amounts to yelling "Oh just fucking QUIT IT! Just CUT IT OUT RIGHT THE HELL NOW." at myself in my head,) mostly I'm just riding them out, because, well, I don't have a choice. I have got to learn to do this. So I'm learning to sit better with discomfort, to decide what it's rooted in and what I have to do about it. 

Because I know that this decision was right, that everything that is happening now is correct and in the proper order. I do have many moments where I panic and think, quite specifically, "What am I going to do? Who was I to do this now? What will become of me?" But I know. I know every time I tell someone, because I've had to tell a lot of someones. I know that while this is a place of risk and what may appear to many from the outside as utter lunacy, that what I've been living is not life, that what I've got in front of me, as nebulous and weird and scary as it may seem, is where I will carve out what is. That whereas I've had good and wonderful times, amazing experiences, beautiful connections in my span of years, that this is the most open I've ever been to ambiguity, to change, to a sense of myself that fits, inside and out. 

I was walking up to the town center to meet Lauren the other night, and I found to my true delight that this tree was in bloom again. 

And it struck me that it had been a year, a whole year since I'd seen it this way before, and as I instagrammed it, all I kept thinking was what I wrote in the caption: "Time flies while your life happens."

And I knew I'd been through a foggy period and now, when things should rightly be more confusing, that they were actually, concurrently, more clear. Things were happening, finally, consciously.

(Knowledge of the rightness of the current situation does not mean I am not terrified. It just means that I know it's necessary, and that's at its core fairly comforting, no matter what.) 

I'm also talking, a lot, in between long stretches of alone time. I'm talking to my friends and my family. I had this week off,  and I've quite on purpose not done a whole lot beyond hang out here, make some stronger professional contacts, and make it a strong point to see my friends. I have had very much-needed dinners with people who get me and who care, spent a gorgeous sunny happy hour with my sister, spent some time on the phone in conversation that made things that needed to be better, better. 

Connecting takes time. Sharing meals and life stories and huge and tiny things, hearts and plans and intentions, it all takes time. As alone as I feel these days, often, I know that that's more an existential state that really reflects my  need for connection more than anything. In reality I am surrounded by people who care, close by and at a distance, and it's really up to me to foster those connections better. And it's all too easy when I'm caught up in the day to day not to take it, to trudge along, to be satisfied with texts and Facebook and whatever ephemera I fling out into the ether. 

This week, it helped. I also slept, a lot. I spent a lot of indulgent morning time in my bed, way past when I ought to have gotten up and started working towards bettering the world or at least doing my dishes. The incessant improvements to my complex meant the guys with the sanders and drills were out there doing something new to the courtyard at ungodly hours every day, which meant falling in and out of restless sleep in the morning, but I would not get up. I let myself be. 

Because I don't know when I'll be able to do this again, and I know I'm storing up for a period of time where I am going to need my energy and my wits and my everything else. I'm okay with it. I just gave myself this week.

 I know this is boring. I know this isn't a creative piece, with a punchline or a thesis or a pithy conclusion that tells any great truth of life. But what it is and what I am is down in it, in a place of work and progress, in a place of reflection and building up, and sometimes when I write it down, that's the only time it seems real. I need that right now. 

Turn it up.

Last night Jen and I went for Cuban food, which was lovely. There were these mojitos that were so, so good, the best I've ever had, pretty much, and I've never really counted them among my favorite drinks. But there I was, halfway through a steak and sucking on these gorgeous, fresh sprigs of mint, happy to be alive. 

I felt the waves of an astoundingly good mood, rode them, held them at arm's length, hoping they'd stay. "Let's hold onto this, shall we? We've seen them in the wild, shh...and here one is," I said out loud to myself as I parked the car, because if there is a thing I try to do daily it's crack myself up.

It's good to keep in mind when you're down in it that it can all turn on a dime, right? Get better, feel good? It's just elusive, the real deal, sometimes, a little moreso lately with a cranking daily routine, some strange upheaval and endless introspection that lends itself to everything but happy most times. But there it was, proof for later, like that stupid butterfly of happiness you're not supposed to chase.  Or the setting it free and it'll come back to you if it likes you nonsense. Green streetlight through the window, one of my favorite people in the world -- she holds my feet and my delusions to the fire with kindness -- you need one like her if you don't have one, those drinks, a fried potato appetizer that did just what it was supposed to do, leaving me wanting more more more. The waiter was a sweet and flirty older man in a pale blue guayabera, charmed with Jen's smile and Spanish fluency that could make a much stronger man than he fall in love. He tolerated me, which was fine, he was kind, he brought me steak and then coffee and tres leches cake. It's good not to be the center of attention sometimes. I am not always so good there.  

On the way home I drove under the railroad bridge just underneath the Mormon temple, "Surrender Dorothy" spray-painted on it as it has been for all my life. I don't even know if they bother painting over it anymore, that's just what it is, a tagged command hovering over speeding cars in the shadow of this enormous Emerald City-structure, golden Joseph the archangel blowing a trumpet at the very top. It must be jarring to see it if you've never driven by it before, but for lifers here it's just part of the landscape, a flying monkey landmark, no witch in the sky, just the words, in paint, not broom exhaust. Joseph always looks to  me too precarious, like he will fall into the suburban trees and houses way before Armageddon comes, but that's the danger of calling the troops, I guess. Besides, I know he never will. I'm sure he is specially protected. 

 

 

I wisely nixed Delilah for my own playlist, and "Rock of Ages" came up in the queue and I didn't skip it, as I've been doing for some reason lately on this particular mix. Maybe because it was 60 degrees at 10 p.m., the sunroof open, and something about the night and the old song and the weather and my life came together and I hit the button on the steering wheel that miraculously (to me, I don't get wires) raises the volume. Up up and up, although now I was on the Pike and I usually try not to bother people at stoplights. I hear some dreadful noise from other cars there, and I try not to be part of the problem, but I broke the rules of street engagement just this once. 

It's better to burn out than fade away. 

I remembered an ex yelling because I let Def Leppard claim that line when Kurt Cobain wrote it in his suicide note (like he would have quoted them? I don't know what I was thinking), never having heard Neil Young in my musically scattered youth. It still makes little difference to me, although I know from "Harvest Moon" and "Ohio" now. I screamed out every word of that song, remembering the week after my grandmother died and how twice, so strange, "Coming Home" came on the radio while I was night highway driving, and how then I'd done the same thing, thrown open the sunroof on the Beetle because even though it was January then, I just needed to feel the freezing cold air to feel alive in the face of so much death and over and gone. I screamed the words then too.

"I took a ride in a world, I'll be spinnin' for the rest of my life...Are you tough enough for my love...Just close your eyes to the heaven above..."

Are you tough enough. Who wants to have to be, really? It's an interesting adjective to apply in this case, but it's probably best not to overanalyze some things, Cinderella songs among them.

It felt good again, last night, the loudness and the air and the silly lyrics. It felt like me, not just me 20 years ago driving home after a restaurant shift, all the windows down, smoking and singing and probably crying sometimes, the way you do when you're growing into your first grown-up version of yourself. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to go back there, although there are parts I'd like a do-over on for sure if I didn't think it would upset the outcomes even worse, mindful as I am of the impact of one butterfly wing. Somehow it all shook out this way. Who's to say we should change anything. 

It felt like me now, too, at least the best one who's in there, who needs some things, who will cop to wanting some too, who is still trying so hard, just like back then, to get out, to be heard, to rock in her own way, if she's honest.

Just say you need it. And if you need it say "yeah."

You should, really. I should too. But mostly I have got to remind myself to turn it up, because that is when I remember the best of who I am, or at least the most real.  

Bridge photo: courtesy UPI International

I don't know.

People seem to want to know what I'm going to do. 

Hello, how are you, I don't know. 

Other popular questions include: How do you feel? Did you know you were going to do this? Are you moving? How are you going to keep your insurance? (Followed by "you know you need insurance, right?") When is your last day? And again, and more emphatically, what are you going to do? 

I don't know.  

What are you going to do? I mean, tomorrow, or in five minutes? You may have, as I do, a roughed out plan. A glass of water. A tv show. A pizza. Hopefully not die. Tweet. Dinner out. That thing or this. But how far ahead can we really see? How far ahead do we set the intentions? The other night, for example, I had big plans to sketch out a website, to get moving on this project that has paralyzed me into panicked inaction for months (I kid you not. Months.) I needed to do this thing. And then by some freak flick of my wrist and a tendency to compulsively overclick, I wrecked my desktop resolution and the size of everything and COULD NOT WORK. I couldn't reset to default sizes (hey Apple, could you make it easier to reset to defaults around here, for some of us are fragile and dumb and need to sketch out websites.) It's still not fixed but I'm kind of used to the GREAT BIG STRETCHY SITUATION now, and I'm back to yapping, but that night was shot because I'm, oh, I'm just crazy like that.

This is to underscore that planning results vary here, but what I do know for sure is that in my life, big decisions necessarily beget a refractory period of chaos and the general need to live in my bathtub with candles and weep into O Magazine and some Thich Nhat Han for a week, along with an uncharacteristic excessive need to talk on the phone and eat dark chocolate for the antioxidants, yeah. Then there is reorganization, but it's only usually a couple of weeks later that the next steps start to fall into place: 

1. Get out of bed. 2. Make coffee. 3. Freak out. 4. Do the rest of the stuff. 

I hope you have better steps, besides making coffee, because that is the unifying skill of a good and solid population.

I admire people who know what they are doing, and always have. Beginning with my grandparents and my mother, I was surrounded FOR REAL by people who had plans and outlines and things they seemed to inherently know that they had to do and they actually carried this out, day by day by day. I admire purposeful people, with good, solid handwriting and the extra key to the room, the people who write to-do lists and do the things, who make meal plans and get their oil changed when the little sticker says to. I admire auto-payers and carpool organizers, people who make the world turn in time for the car not to break down and the kids not to get left in the parking lot. 

I can be that person, I'm just not, naturally. (Seriously, I will never leave a kid in a parking lot. It sucks to be the kid left in the parking lot. If you need a kid picked up in a parking lot on time I AM YOUR GIRL. This is one of my redeeming qualities, I think. Lord it sucks when kids cry.) 

But the world, to me, and my place in it, has always been mostly threads and possibilities. It's been career guides and options and pushpins on maps and the blending of two colors to make a crayon box hold at least 128 instead of the advertised 64. It has always pushed the limits. It has felt hemmed in by requirements and rule books. 

And for the past ten years, especially, I have constructed a spot that cut my threads and limited my possibilities. I took little trips out, even big ones (I've been thinking about Vietnam a lot, lately. It was a good one, even if the "editor" and teacher in charge of the trip dropped every conceivable ball and the work didn't go much of anywhere. ) But I never committed. I never said "This is when I jump. Today." There were reasons, financial and emotional and every other -al, sure. But the bottom line was that it's been stupid and crazy-making. It made me lose respect for myself, to a degree that I'm just now realizing. It was fear-based. It was just based on what I could see, and that's a short-view path to nowhere, for me, I think.  

 

I went down some bad roads this past week, old ones, into long-discarded neighborhoods and darkened doors. In spite of so many lovely, caring, generous voices on the phone and in my little chat box and on at least two occasions in beautiful person, I felt other and weird, like no one would ever ever ever be here again and it'd just be me and this general sense of having lost my best friend and my puppy and my grip. 

It's better now, this weekend. The center is coming back a little. Times of change are just hard, that's all, and even when I know it's good, when it was essential, the cavern inside is deep, the worn neural pathways resolute and committed to believing the old, tired worst. It is the hardest work to wear new ones, to practice better thoughts and fresh plans over and over until they zap the garbage out. 

It's a freaky thing, to feel yourself becoming yourself -- maybe again, probably for the first time. 

So no, I don't know what I'm doing, exactly. I do wish I could make myself feel better about that sometimes, and almost as much I wish I could make you feel better, too, and not just because I wish you'd shut up about it. My administrative aide was in a state on Thursday, worried what I was going to do, following around after me like Alice on The Brady Bunch checking to make sure I had all my stuff for my field trip. It's love and it's awesome, but it's stressful, too, because like I'm not thinking about this nonstop? Sure as hell I am, but I cannot let it cripple or confuse me to the point that I can't function or I think I'm doing the wrong thing, because I can and I don't. I do have a few things sketched in that I hope will lead to other things. I am reacquainting myself with my better self, the person who has been mired in expectation and settling and qualification for a long, long time. I'm practicing saying I'm a writer and an editor first. This is strangely difficult when "teacher" has long been the first identifier. I'm practicing taking compliments: "Thank you, yes, as an editor I'm not too shabby." "Thanks, I'm proud of that shot." Because I know I have to get better now, or it will affect everything that comes after. 

But it's hard, y'all. This is all hard. I'm in a really hard damn place. I've cried in the tub and I've paced my kitchen while I tried to clean it although it can never seem to get clean to the point where I can rest. I have all of these clothes I need to pitch, and shit I can't find places for anywhere. My new little ipod shuffle I got for Christmas refuses to load on my iMac and I obsess and obsess about this almost as much as the messed up desktop resolution. I cut the space where the joint of my thumb meets my first finger, and it felt like the largest affront to a 41-year-old woman in the history of surface cuts. I have written some impassioned pieces of blog science in the past few weeks, and when I needed not to be so strident I was. I love words so much. I don't know why I let them be so hard sometimes. 

But I knew in the tub this morning while I let the water run down on me and cried like a fool that I was in a necessary hard place, a place I wouldn't call good but I would allow was productive. I was cutting some stuff DOWN. Not cauterizing, no. Nothing's getting cut off or melted. It's all just here. I'm feeling it, letting it be and move through and out, which in this case meant that I got out of the tub and put a decent outfit on for my night and went and got a sandwich and ate it and it was good.

And no matter what I don't know, I believe because the alternative is bullshit that I will be okay on the other side this time if it kills me. (It won't, I'm pretty sure. Countercharm.) 

Wilder

I'm terrified. I admit it. But I'm moving. 

I want your stories and your problems right now. I want to give advice, gather you into me, sit you on my couch, turn on your stories, and make you dinner, bring you a drink. I want to help. I want to ground myself in knowing I can tell you something that might assist you. I'm so aware of what I've taken, and of what I don't know. I have a need, my innate need, and not even a sick, codependent need, but more honestly reciprocal and restorative need to give. 

It's usually so much easier to know how to do that, than to go inside, isn't it? But right now it just feels right. It feels like balance. It feels like remembering that I know things, beyond the most obscured and personal, the things I cannot tell myself. 

I'm turned inside out, myself, a lot raw, scared, more than a little bit lonely. That's okay, that happens sometimes. I can feel it now, let the current course through my skin, my arns and legs and brain, and move through it like I couldn't for so many years so easily before. There are days like today where I'm scrubbing the toilet because it has to be done, but also because focus is good, and I break. I break in two and sob scrubbing the toilet, because what better time is there to do that? And I stop and try to break the chain in the mirror, regroup, cut this out. 

I hear the returns coming in, Wolf's crazed histrionic crush on Palin from the living room while I move from the toilet to the floor, grabbing the new, cool scrubber thing I got to reach the upper parts of the shower the last time I was at Target. And I suppose that I could stop this and yell on the internet about politics some more, make snide comments on Twitter, despair in community and sarcasm. But it came full into my consciousness tonight that that is not going to stop any of what is happening and nor is it going to make me feel any better about this inexorable madness that I feel sliding across our brains, our impressional psyches and our faces, our souls that don't need this shit, right? 

Old Adam the crow 
He's flying away from your field 
And you will never know what makes him run 
I dreamed of my father 
Who drove me out of his home 
And I dreamed I've forgiven my wilder son

I listen to Hem always when I write and that is the song that was just playing now as all of the thoughts moved through, and it keeps wanting to crawl into this post apropos of nothing, maybe, but probably something, as is the way. 

I can't tie anything into a bow and I'm learning in the past two weeks -- with all of the questions and the doubt and the wonder and the fear, the love and loss, betrayal and beauty and sadness, mixed in with the normal every day -- that I'm going to have to be okay with that for awhile. Every minute when it seems unbearable is met with the curtain held back from the air through my sliding door to test the rising temperature, a few more minutes of twilight at the end of every lengthening day, a meal I churn out in my very own kitchen that pleases me, as they generally do. 

It's minuscule, progress, I'm finding, as I become intimately acquainted with what that means to me in a new context. It's a daily, maddening slog. I've never been through this in this configuration before, but I've been through things that could have been like this if I'd taken them to the wall, and that is the thought that keeps me moving the most, that keeps me from slipping over like I've done before, that makes me know that whatever happens, it was the right thing, even if only just when I thought it was that moment. I didn't know it before, but I can eat that fear. I can swallow it in pretty big bites, just short of whole. I didn't know I could until I did it, I was pretty sure I couldn't, but I did. And I keep doing it in some small way every way, in ways I wish I could fully share right now but maybe someday I can. 

I don't have any more. I have what has to be enough for now. 

After leap day.

I keep forgetting that I quit my job. I know intellectually of course that I did it, also because I blabbed it all over creation which is one of my ways of making something seem real. (Besides, you know, just looking at it and identifying it as real and making a sandwich or something. Obviously I am not one for economy of speech or action a lot of the time.) 

But I keep having these moments since I did my Leap Day thing where I realize that holy shit I quit, I did, I did oh my God, I did. And now what am I going to do? The fear monster lurches up and for what appears to be a maximum of thirty seconds I freak out and there is a valley in my sternum where all of my panic and anxiety have a timeshare, and then all of a sudden it is gone when I realize that yes, it is done. I shrink into myself in bed at night, hug myself even, staving off worry that comes most heavy in the dark. But then it passes, because it has to. The thing is done, finally, and there is some kind of basic relief in not having to think about it hypothetically anymore. I can rest in that feeling for a long time, turns out.  

These are called helicopters in certain circles. I will write a story about them someday too.

I have had to tell people, had to talk it through, the need-to-know-basis people as well as those who I'm just lucky enough to have around who care. And through that telling I'm feeling a certain level of figuring out what I think and feel about it, because that's the curse of the verbal processor. And yet I feel a remarkably lessened need to justify, to make it better for anyone else, beyond common courtesy to people who do have some kind of investment in my happiness and who are supports for me, and that is new and probably good. Laying your decisions on other people in that way isn't fair, and it does nothing to give me power. It just means I can say they didn't want it, they thought it was a bad idea, and that's a weak way out, really. Approval is so fleeting, anyway. It just was a necessary move for me, and although I wish I could entirely reassure myself that it will be an easy road to a new situation, minus major bumps and losses and fears and hangups, I can't. I have no idea. I know how I can sketch the outline in my mind, how I already am doing that with the personal imperative that I not get too far ahead of myself lest I wreck myself in that imaginary process, but you know as well as I do that the best laid plans for everything are just that. 

HYSTERIA OMG IT'S ALL GOING TO EXPLODE IN AN EXPLOSION. 

I don't really think so, though. I think, mostly, that I have to keep my wits about me, as birthday boy Seuss might say, "that's important to do/ for someone as fucked up yet witsy as you." (I made that up. Please do not sue me, Geisel estate. I love Yertle the Turtle the best. I repped him this week. Don't sue me.)

Apropos of all of this, when I was on the plane to Blissdom last week, a relatively short flight from Baltimore, I got out my iPad and I started typing. "Goals," I typed, while the little lady next to me gawked over my arm and her vodka at my digital ruled paper. (I let her look. Whatever.) Well technically first I typed "I'm free from Wednesday until Monday. That is enough for me," which was a dirty dirty lie, and "I was born with a hole in my heart/the size of my landlocked travels," which was a lyric in a favorite song I'd just listened to that turned out to have another shade of meaning too, I guess. And then I typed some goals for the vodka lady and me, taptaptap:

*To move through the world joyfully. 

*To feel strong, connected, and content. 

*To do work that reflects my gifts, interests, and values. 

*To build my own business. 

*To love and be loved. 

*To live in community. 

To move through the world joyfully? GET OUT, right? But really. I looked out the window and back at my screen and that was the first thing that came up, the top of a list of basics.

I've had some before, I have, a long time ago and recently. For instance that is a dog on my head, who may not have been sharing my joy, come to think of it. 

There were some more specific things besides these that still need some hothouse time in corners of my heart and mind, but the general stuff made sense. It's the stuff I've stood up in front of classrooms of teenagers seeking career direction and told them to prioritize, while I basically ignored it myself. It's the stuff I've told them that they get the luxury to consider at their ages, without so many constraints of finances or personal responsibilities to others (although they have those to, obviously. I've just learned a lot about the power of the reset and the experiment, and you just have more chances for that at 19 than 41, if I understand math at all, which is admittedly shaky ground.)

My advice turned inward, finally. I'd been talking to myself as much as them for all of these years, never really having the courage to step outside of that preaching spot of inaction, although I danced with it sometimes and went home alone. And whereas I have a bit more on the line at this point, it's really all relative. I had no idea on that Nashville plane that I was going to do what I did this week. Other things transpired to move it forward, to make the words more real, shifts in my heart and mind that made it possible, a sense that if not now, when, if not me, who, and all that jazz.

I don't know how it happened, exactly. I just know that the writing is opening up a little, and that's good. I'm feeling a little more conversational here than I have in a long time, and I'm going to go with that flow. I do know that I have received incredibly generous and supportive feedback from the internet this week, some from people I know well and some from strangers who connect with the concept of leaping, with taking a chance against all good sense and physical evidence. I'd like to share some of that here moving forward because I think in a time in the world where these is so much anger and confusion mixed with hope and raised voices (because far beyond me, this week has been about Rush Limbaugh daring to call someone else of any gender a slut, a Maryland vote for marriage equality and a likely referendum to put the issue to a popular vote that is stirring and scaring my homegirl soul on a very basic level, Kirk Cameron bitching about gay people and people inexplicably listening, a mean-spirited watch for Lindsay Lohan to fail on national television, and Santorum everywhere, the list goes on.) people are crying for chances and change and the potential to make whatever is into something better.  My tiny life is a part of that in some way, so many others are too. I'm grabbing ahold of that story, and maybe I'll find a way to tell some of it as the days go on. 

What I did learn this week is that true friends are essential, that I can have challenging conversations, tell and hear the truth and not die (I learn that anew every time, what?) and that some people will amazingly offer help and resources just because, especially if you cop to needing them in the first place. I found solace in my pictures and some music that I hadn't found in a long time, and in pre-spring cleaning, in rolling out the refrigerator and sweeping behind it, in deep cleaning the inside of it, because it's among my least favorite chores and it's satisfying to get it done well. I learned that an excellent meal and one really, really good vodka gimlet  with someone who fundamentally gets me and makes me laugh until I choke on that drink, is the best capper for a heavy week, is the best indicator of living right on some level.

There is something about big change that sends me back to the basics, to the things that will always be, as a gentle reminder, maybe. I am still more excited than scared, and I'm going to hold onto that for as long as I can, at least until the way clears out a little.  

Without a net.

If I had to tell you what I really want, it's love -- love like anyone would like, sure, the part where someone kisses especially you and holds your hand and makes things a little easier sometimes, even if it's just changing the channel or letting you bitch for 15 minutes with impunity or that other thing you like, that's nice. I'd be lying hard if I said I didn't want that in my life, so I won't insult you or me. But over the past six or so years, I'd say that it's more specifically that I want to be in love with my life, more than anything. 

I've been thinking about this for a long time, in more complicated, pointless ways. I've been thinking about where I should live (that isn't here), with whom I should be (who isn't anywhere), what I should do (not this, oh God not this) and the statement I want to make (mostly muted, at least in a big way.) I've been looking at things from the negative and the can't-have place almost entirely, and it should shock no one that that hasn't been helpful at all. 

What I want is pretty basic, I guess. I want work I don't hate and even more hopefully that I might love, that lights me up and makes me better, that helps me contribute to a larger sense of something. I want a house, some kind of house with windows and light and a door to a street and a sense of sun even when it's going down, because as pretty as sunrises are I'm just not a natural morning person and the setting of it is so pretty, really. More my colors than the morning. 

(I never tell anyone to click on my pictures, but seriously? Click on that sucker and look at it large, and you will see the only tourism propaganda for the Brunswick County, North Carolina, beaches you'll ever need. You could follow it for two hours every night for however long you're there and come home changed for the good, I swear. My Indigo Girls have a line, "I wanna clear my head, I wanna drink that sun." I wanted to eat this one, eat it with a spoon. Transformative, even unconsumed, I swear to you. Anyway.) 

I want a dog and I want a hand now and then. I want farmers' market Sundays (that's a little want, but if you've lived it you may know that it's nice. Vegetables. Flowers. Cheese. Happy people. It sets a really good tone for the week.) I want a block, maybe, or just a street, a something. 

I have not had any idea how to get this for the longest time. I stared down an expanse of not it, not happening, of trapped and done and final. 

Last fall Karen came to the Baltimore area to speak to a group of university students, and because we don't see each other nearly enough and she was going to be so much more wonderfully close than Texas I went up to hear her speak and to have dinner with her after. As part of her talk she put a slide up of some words I said to her a few years ago, in an interview about myself, mostly. 

Karen Walrond took that picture within my picture. The words on her little girl's hands were mine at one time. 

And when I saw the words that I said on the screen I started crying, because I knew that although I had meant absolutely every word of what I said to her that day in that Chicago lobby, that I believed at that time that that was what I had done, that I had not lived out the intention since. 

I knew then that I was flailing, that I was stuck, that my story was laden with excuses and rearview mirror thinking, with fear and with the bad idea of making decisions by default. 

I ate my steak and felt like a big fat liar. 

*

A year or so after that dinner, yesterday, to be exact, I quit my job. 

It went like this:

I planned and plotted to resign, thought and dreamed and talked about it, and procrastinated for quite some time. I told myself all of the reasons why it was a bad idea. I set a malleable deadline in the middle of this month that I was afraid I would not hit. I bothered very nearly all of my friends with my overwrought concern about the whole big thing.

And then last weekend I was mean to someone I care about very much. I was just plain damn mean, and although I had reasons at the time, unearthed insecurities and worries and anger and unmet needs that I didn't entirely invent in my head, the outcome was my responsibility. The behavior was familiar and I could remember times when I'd been that way and it scared me, because I knew it came from a similar place when I was feeling similar things.

And so I stepped back from that experience, and I decided that the things that had been eating away at my life and my psyche,my heart and my mind for years, were taking over in the worst sort of way. And that my anger and my frustration had built up over that period of time to the point where in moments of abject weakness and existential  exhaustion I hurt people who existed in my life solely to support me. And that regardless of fear of poverty or embarrassment or judgment or my own paranoia and anxiety, I needed to walk away from the things that contributed to my lesser self, to this continual lapse back into this shitty, shitty place, and reach for something better. 

I waited three difficult days after I came home, although I'd have done it on Monday, because I am a person of symbols and milestones, and I turned in my resignation letter to my very nice dean on Wednesday. 

And after a really good discussion about intention and passion and finding one's right place in the world while not contributing to the ruination of everything else, I walked out of her office into a cloudy, misty, foggy Maryland last-day-of-February, and I couldn't stop smiling. I am not specifically given to hand gestures and I threw my litte fist into the air and I said "FUCK YEAH" and that alone would have been enough for a lot of people who know me pretty well to know that I was happy, that I felt I'd done the right thing.

And you know, I might have been the dumbest ass job-leaving-poverty-seeking asshole in this whole wide world at that moment, but I didn't care. What I knew was that the person I had worked and lived and patterned my way into being was not the person I wanted to be anymore. I knew that I was done hurting -- hurting me and hurting people who were important to me, because I would rather work at a fruit stand and live in a shack by the ocean than ever, ever, ever see pain in someone else who matters to me, because of me. 

I have no idea what I'm going to do. I don't much care yet. I will soon, I'm sure, and truth be told, I've sent more emails and made more intentional plans in the past two days than I have in years. I feel energized. I feel set in motion. I feel like while I can't undo anything or promise I'll be a ray of technicolor sunshine every minute going forward, that I have a better shot at being a good presence, at being a support system, at being a partner in all ways on the planet to the people in my family and in my broad, lovely, supportive, far-flung circle of friends in a new, intentional incarnation than I have for a very long time. 

I'm nervous. I'm a teeny bit afraid. But I welcome challenge, and new experiences. And I know, in the most liberating way, sitting here all by myself, that I will never regret this decision. Never. I have turned it over and over in my mind for the past 36 hours, listened to myself as I've told the story, stepped outside of myself and looked at all of the reasons why and why not, and I still know that even if I fall on my face in the days going forward, that I will never be sorry I took this chance. And that is almost worth the doing of it, really.

I feel really grateful that it became possible. 

I will never win an Academy Award, but this is one of the biggest moves of my life that has been the longest time coming, and I do nothing without a circle that I am very fortunate to have. I want to thank especially Deb, Schmutzie, Suebob, Kim, Heather, and TwoBusy, for their intellectual and emotional support in the final run up to this; Sarah, my dear friend Renate (buy Screaming Orphans cds! Do it!) my sister Katie and my mom for loving me and suffering through this way longer than that; my mentor Elisa, for clear insight and perspective, and the Blissdom 2012 circle of awesome who tripped the very last cord: Julia, Robin, Anissa, Katherine, Shannon, and most especially, the amazing Motherbumper Katie, who crazy clown danced for me when I needed it so badly, and who is my heart living way too far away. David Coverdale can stuff it in his oxygen chamber, because none of us should ever have to walk this road alone like a drifter whether we were born like that or not, and I feel really fortunate that I have suckered so many people into ensuring that I don't have to.  This big old transition is one thing that it turned out I was just not able to process and act upon alone. I hope that now that I've put my own mask on, I can be more effective for y'all.