"There's gotta be something better than this..." ~ Sweet Charity

Why, didn’t every 7th grader want to become a botanist and live in a tree to be away from people? 

I am at the radically awful and hopeful place of beginning to work on relationships, and my relationship to relationships. 

Coincidentally or not, the last time I started this kind of work, I was into the deep and dredging and combing-over-my-sad-history-of-self-abandonment-and-isolation part when I was struck with a bout of Leukemia, and had to stop.

Now that I’m through a round of work on my relationship to money, scarcity, “under-being,” under-earning, me and my mentor agreed that we could work on the other side of the “romance and finance” coin.

Color me thrilled. 

In fact, I am looking forward to it, … sort of. Not the work itself, but the results of it. 

I am not meant to continue my early patterns of self-insulation through isolation or self-abandonment/-destruction. Or, rather, I’m not content to. What I’m meant to do is really only up to me, isn’t it? And a few strokes of fate, I imagine. (hello, cancer.)

But, whatever role I can have in loosening the noose of “Trust No One,” I am signing up for it. 

I do feel that I am in a better place to begin this time than I was about 2 years ago. I’m working with someone who knows me well, who’s walked this path with and before me, and whom I trust and love.

Even though our particular histories are dissimilar, their endings and the feelings they’ve evoked in us became the same. 

She’s told me that my feeling of imminence, urgency & impatience with myself and "the world" will fade: I am a 33 year old healthy smart beautiful woman. Why the fuck have I never been in a relationship that’s lasted over 6 months, and only two of them at that? Why have I been unintentionally celibate for years on end or find myself particularly attracted to taken men? My “hot” years are fading; I want to take advantage of them!

And yet. I seem to land in the same place each time I try to throw myself into the ring, or try to avoid it. And so, it’s time to try something else. Something I know will work, because it works for thousands of other people who walk a path of recovery. 

I’m not stoked. But I am. 

It’s sad stuff to riffle through. There is a Trail of Tears that’s led me here. But I feel ready for this. No, not eager to riffle; yes, eager to heal, move on, move forward. Let whoever I’m supposed to be, or whoever I’m hiding, to integrate. 

Does this look like a bright shiny pot of gold(en haired children) at the other end? Likely not. 

I finished the work on money, and I’m still in the thick of the results of patterns that brought me here. But I imagine they’ll shift over time. 

So, too, I imagine with the love and relationship stuff. I won’t buy a wedding dress at the end of it. But perhaps I’ll buy date one. 

(p.s. this missive is in no way a passive request for dating invitations. but thanks.)  ;) 

A Kick Start.

Well, folks. Tomorrow I will publish my indiegogo campaign to help me pay the back-rent accrued when I was in chemo.

It’s been a short, strange, and amazing process. About 2 weeks ago, I was sitting with a friend in a café, both of us “applicationing,” online searching, looking for work, looking for authenticity.

I said to him, “You know my favorite thing I ever did? I hosted this group art show in SF.”

I showed him the LocalArtists Productions page, practically defunct and way out-dated. I told him how successful it was, people came, people who didn’t know they could sell their art sold their art. I even sold some!

People laughed, ate, met, mingled. It was divine.

I then told my friend that I haven’t painted much since then. That I can’t really in my small apartment with a cat who likes to walk over wet paint. I told him about this art studio I found while exploring the 4th floor of my apartment building, and how I’d inquired to my landlord about it, and how he’d said, yes, I can rent it for $25 a month(!!!), if I pay off my back rent.

Almost $4000 now. Out of work for 6 months, only working part time after that. I racked up quite the debt. And have been slowly paying it back. But…

Here’s where lightning struck. My friend said to me, “You should do a Kickstarter. This is exactly the kind of thing people use crowdfunding for."

I looked at him, stunned, quizzical, a little vague. I tilted my head, trying to process what was just said, offered, opened up before me.

I replied, incredulous, “I guess people would donate to a cancer survivor who wanted to make art again, wouldn’t they?”

And so it was, 2 weeks ago we started something new.

Planning meetings, a few video shoots, a lot of “omigod, I’m not even wearing any make-up, I wish I’d smile, I look awful” moments. And it’s done. It’s being polished, and tomorrow morning, I will push this campaign out into the world in the hopes that others will actually feel something from it.

In the hopes that I can stop writing “back-rent” in my monthly budget. In the hopes that I can sever that weight of debt from that time in my life.

As I sat with my friend going over the language in the campaign, we have been talking a lot about “closing the cancer chapter.” And I turned to him and said, “This isn’t closing it, you know? This doesn't make it 'over.'”

There is no “closed” when it comes to cancer. I’m in remission. I’m 2 years into the 5 year “almost as healthy as normal people” period. But it’s never closed. It can be moved on from in many ways, but the simple existence of the campaign itself is proof that I’m willing to move into the world in a way I wasn’t before cancer.

Everything I do is in reaction to it.

I told my friend, tearfully, that this campaign is important. It’s helpful. But it isn’t the end. The “closing the chapter” is a great sound-byte, and I’m using it. But it was important for me to say to him, “Not quite.”

For better or worse.

I am proud of the strides I’ve made since being sick. I’m proud of the advancements and actions I’ve taken – being in a band, singing, being in plays, a musical, going to Hawaii, Boston, Seattle, trying dating again, flying a goddamned plane! – and I’m overwhelmed by the support I have gotten.

But, it’s so hard to sit with the reality that I am who I am because of what I went through.

I still get nervous when I get a sore throat, cuz that’s how I was diagnosed. I still have to keep extra tabs on my health insurance. I still have a butterfly-shaped scar on my chest where the chemo tube went.

And last week I put on a sweater I hadn’t worn in a while, and pulled a strand of hair caught in it. The hair, my hair, was long, past shoulder length. It was from before I was sick. Before my hair fell out.

It was like seeing a unicorn. Evidence of a mythical time. A time called, “Before.”

It existed. I existed.

The cancer chapter isn’t closed. I don’t know if it ever does.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t take action and strides and make use of the persistent lesson to live.

I am proud of the woman I have become and continue to evolve into. I know she exists now. And maybe she always did. 

Vision Quest

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day about what I know to be true. I know that, up or down, since I left my home at the age of 23 I have always had a safe place to live. Everything else in my life -- job, money, friendships, romance -- can be in upheaval, but no matter what continent, coast or city I find myself in, I manage to find a safe and comfortable place to live.

My acquaintance said, for him, he knows that all he needs is a rucksack and he’s fine.

We’re at different places and have different needs for sure.

But it causes me to think about my assumptions about my life. I have this assumption, this belief and history to back it up, that I will always be taken care of on the home front.

I also have assumptions and belief and history to back it up that even though I don’t know how, financially, I always do land of my feet. But that usually it takes a long while, and the outcome of that is not always what I want to be doing, but I am eventually safe there, too, even if a little battle-weary.

I also have other beliefs and history backing up my assumptions: I don’t know how to live a balanced life. I don’t know how to have a relationship. Or how to earn enough to support myself in a field I love.

I have beliefs about myself that keep me stuck. And what I then have is entitlement.

Someone should tell me what I should do, because I don’t know how.

I've been looking back at some of the writing work I’ve been doing lately, finally moving on past the section on amending relationships in my life, and in my prior writings and inventory work, I read that entitlement around jobs comes up virulently.

And only a few days ago was I able to see that for me, entitlement is an outcome of hopelessness. I can’t, I don’t know how, I’ll fuck it up – you do it for me. You make it work.

Another thing I noticed in my writing was how some of my despairing fears have dissipated since I began that inventory work over 6 months ago. Some of the same haranguing thoughts about my own ability to speak up for myself, to follow my dreams, to do things I don’t know how to do have been challenged since the time I’ve written them.

Since the beginning of 2014, when I decided I was going to make a go of this acting thing, I’ve been in 4 plays. That doubles the number I’ve been in since 2006. I made a decision and followed it up with action. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I took a few classes at Berkeley Rep that I didn’t find altogether transforming; I found a proper headshot photographer; I replied to audition calls.

I have been stalling on putting myself out there for my essay tutoring work, because I don’t know how to do it.

And this leads to a feeling of, If it’s supposed to happen, then it will. It’ll just happen.

A friend calls it “going rag-doll on G-d.” Okay, you want “surrender,” you want me to let go of my plans because my ideas are limited by my fears? Sure – here, you have it. You drag me along into the life I want to have.

The point is, there’s a difference between surrendering and giving up.

This blog is a little all over the place today, but so’s my brain.

Basically, I have some beliefs about my life, like my home, that make me feel secure. I have other beliefs about my life, like my earnings, that make me feel uncertain and hopeless.

There’s really no reason for the difference, except I continue to reinforce them both. I am blind to the changes that occur in and around me when it comes to perpetuating my negative beliefs.

But looking back at my work from 6 months ago, acknowledging the success of following a dream, I really have to acknowledge that I don’t have to do things the same way, right? I really do have to let myself see that I’m not as helpless as some part of me wants to believe, right? I do have to accept that I’m not as broken as I want to believe, right?

And, so this is the work, now. To pull back from the chatter which causes me to stagnate and become paralyzed against action. The work is to see that positive beliefs exist within me, and to let those fuel my action toward my next place.

I am not stuck. I am not helpless. I am not depressed, deficient, or despairing. I am only short-sighted. 

And for that, I can get better glasses.

Recalibrating the Bar.

Surely, normal is relative. I read some of my blogs about my past, and I think, Jesus, this is not what “normal” people have dealt with. I listen to some of my acquaintances share their histories, and I think, “Thank god things weren’t that bad with me.”

In some comparisons, my life has been saner and pretty charmed; in other comparisons, it’s been dysfunctional and tragic.

Yesterday, I came home from hearing tell of someone’s tragic past, “worse” than mine. Then I picked up where I left off in Autobiography of a Face, because surely the story of a little girl’s jaw sawn off through cancer is “worse” than my own story.

And I decided then, it is time for me to recalibrate my bar for normal and dysfunction.

I was feeling activated by the story I’d heard earlier in the evening. I was feeling protective of the children that story was being told to, and I was experiencing a hardening in my chest, made of anger and self-protection against the terror of that story.

And despite the fact that things in my life have been on the plus and minus side of well-being, I think it’s time for me to start marching toward those people and experiences that don’t trade in trauma.

There tends to be a uniting force among those in my crowd, knowing that we’ve, most of us, come from some kind of trauma. Wherever that may fall on the spectrum of horror. But, we feel an understanding with one another on the basis of a shared experience, and sometimes this unification posits us against more “normal” folk, folks who perhaps didn’t come from that seething primordial ooze.

The problem, and I’ve contemplated it before, is that when you trade in trauma, there’s no value in happiness. When you bond over tragedy, how do you boast your success?

Over the last few years, my threshold for violence and gore has lowered dramatically. Even “silly” crime t.v. shows that used to be my favorites, I’ve had to eliminate from my visual diet. I just can’t stomach them anymore.

As time has passed, I’ve become more aware and attuned to when those shows or images are getting to me – when I’m cringing, or closing my eyes – and I’ve taken note of those cues, and begun to drop them from my cue.

It feels the same to me with these stories that are around me.

I read Autobiography last night, despite knowing that I didn’t want to read it. The language is beautiful, the plot is compelling; by all counts, it’s a well-crafted book. But I don’t think I want to read any more – in fact, I know that, and I’m going to have to decide if I heed that information or not.

The same is true with some of the stories I hear around me. It’s going to be up to me to begin either seeking out or attracting into my life people, not who don’t have those stories of trauma in their past, but who don’t feel compelled to broadcast them. Who don’t feel compelled to do so inappropriately.

I am not saying that I will only surround myself with “normal” folks, or that the stories of our pasts are not important. I am, however, saying that my trauma meter is full, and I need to back away from media or people who will put it over the edge because of their own hemorrhaging boundaries.

I am, of course, an advocate for sharing of ourselves, as you've read over and over in my blog, but I stand behind the knowledge and hope that others click to read this on purpose, that this blog is chosen as a media source for them, that I'm not dumping it on anyone. I also think perhaps it is time for me to begin walking farther away from the retelling of these stories, as repetition keeps them powerful.

I don’t know what the line of balance is between honesty and appropriateness. But I do know there is one.  

127 Hours

From my blog on Friday, March 29, 2013:

“...Afraid, Brave, and Very, Very Alive.”

These are the words that close Brene Brown's book The Gifts of Imperfection. The last “guidepost” to what she calls Wholehearted Living is “Laughter, Song, and Dance.”

It's funny; she spends a lot of time saying how most people feel really vulnerable when dancing, concerned with what people think of how they look, or scared they'll be told to “dial it down.” That's not my experience of dancing; it's my experience of singing.

Yesterday, I had another voice lesson, this time with someone in the cast who’s also a professional voice teacher. We’re working on my “belt” range, where I need to be to sing for this role, and also the range that, when done correctly, feels to me like yelling.

Shouting.

Being Loud.

Being Heard.

And where I begin to pull back. Close my throat, muffle the sound. Close off. Shut down. Shine down. Diminish. Dull. Deflate.

I am so achingly terrified of being loud. Because deep in my history is the terror of being hit.

If you make noise, you are noticed. If you are noticed, you are a target.

This terrible defense mechanism I’ve built that stifles me. Stifles me from the thing I am most passionate about. I don’t think this is coincidental.

(I believe) We are pushed into the places of most discomfort in order to heal from and emerge from them.

The years spent avoiding singing. The years spent writing quietly. The moments when I do try, the self-doubt that pounces on me, that shushes me.

I am walking right into the center of one of my greatest fears. And I am emotional. Scared. And also, trying.

I am trying so hard. I want to do this so badly because I love it. Because I feel it’s beautiful, and transporting, and transforming. Because I believe that song is one channel my soul wants to shine through. Because it makes me happy, gleeful, expansive, collaborative, alive.

I have one foot in a bear-trap. Constructed practically in utero. It is rusted, craggy, and defunct. What this feels like is chewing off my own limb to free myself. Painful. Awful. And completely necessary.

I don’t know what the outcome will be by the time the show opens in 3 weeks. I don’t know if I’ll power through the “shouting” that I think I’m doing, but exactly what my teacher yesterday applauded. I don’t know if I’ll pull back. I might. It might still be too frightening to be truly heard, and to truly give what I know I can.

And no matter the outcome, or what I perceive as the outcome (since apparently, I can’t hear myself very well through all my shushing and evaluating and mishegas), I must also know and acknowledge, that whatever the result, I am indeed trying to dismantle this old trap.

Which is something I wasn’t willing to do before. 

Disarming.

I am having a languid, delightful time getting to know someone. A man.

The same someone who inspired me to look at how much I don’t want to let a romantic interest get to know me. And, for whatever this is or will be, it’s really, really nice.

I described to a friend what it felt like to be held – not spooning, or even the enjoyable resting of your head on the guy’s chest – but simply standing, holding one another, like the kind of extended hug that someone forces around you until you relax. Until they can feel your shoulders drop, and your lungs start to inhale again. Until you feel safe enough to breathe.

It’s like that, only without the imperative insistence of the extended hug. This feels, to me, mutual, natural, like we both are relieved just to stand there, heads tucked, arms wrapped, bodies together, and breathe for a minute, guileless. It’s similar to the feeling I sometimes have when I realize that I’ve been holding my breath or breathing shallowly for too long, and I finally take a nice deep breath into my belly. Filling out my whole body with awareness, instead of constriction.

It’s a feeling that you didn’t know how stressed or armored or anxious you were, until it falls away so fucking naturally and quickly, that it almost makes you dizzy. And suddenly, you’re just two people, two hearts, unaware you were looking for relief and comfort and ease, until now you’re experiencing it.

It’s benevolent, and it's grace.

For me, it’s also an awareness, I think, of how lonely and body-starved I’ve been. Not for sex, though sure, but for that kind of holding. To be held. It’s actually, now that I think of it, what I came to at the conclusion of my meditation retreat in January. I concluded that this year, I wanted to learn to let myself be held.

I almost always hold my breath, as I’ve written about before. Even in the safety and constance of my own home. I am always on guard, protecting myself from something. And it’s just so tiring, but I don’t realize it – didn’t realize it, until in this togetherness, I find it fall from around me, and experience feeling unburdened and relieved of that something. 

I am not Fate’s author, I am only the scribe. So, I can only report to you what I know, and share with you how I feel in the moment, today. As everything changes so quickly.

But recognizing for myself that there’s another way of being, that there’s an open way to be, that in fact that way of being feels like its own ecstasy, I think I’m learning that my armor is not as useful as it once was. And that being held, without that shield, is more healing, joyful, and filling than I could have predicted. 

Excising a Lily-Liver

As part of my personal work, I am called to amend relationships in my life that are in need of clarity and repair.

As part of that work, I broke down my list of these people into three categories: People I fall out of touch with; Men I intrigue with; and My dad.

I’ve begun the work on those I’ve fallen out of touch with – it’s usually out of a habitual belief that I’m not good enough to show up for relationships and I self-prophesize that by allowing relationships that I value fall away. These are relatively easy to repair, and by doing so, I get to challenge these false and long-held beliefs by being consistent, responsible, and focused on the truth.

Amending my relationships with the second set of humans is more … well, I was going to say more difficult, but it’s not more “difficult,” it’s just harder because I have more invested in those. If you don’t know what intriguing is, it’s those little flirtations, vaguely flirtatious texts or conversations, or over-active “likings” of someone else’s Facebook page in a "winking" kinda way. It’s, for me, engaging in flirtatious behavior with people I don’t want to go any further with, and sometimes with people I have no interest in, but who I know I can reach out to when my self-esteem meter is low for a little infusion of “See, I have value: he wants me,” and a little hit of adrenaline from the oblique exchange.

This is a very old habit. And it’s excruciatingly unfair to both the men and to myself, especially any of those who think there’s still a shot. It’s unfair to me, because I continue to feed the delusion that my self-esteem comes from others, and to crowd the field of actual potential partners with distractions – albeit often very handsome, talented and hilarious distractions.

Since the time that I wrote down the half dozen or so names of those with whom I was actively engaging in this behavior, about half have simply fallen away through circumstance and lack of my engaging. They’re intrigues, not relationships usually, so they don’t require some big conversation like, “Hey, I’m trying to be more clear in my relationships, and I just want to say that I really appreciate you as a friend, and that I see us just being friends in the future.”

The funny thing about saying this is that, when I’ve given that speech in the past, usually the response is, “Yeah, totally! I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Which is fine. I love you and your egos, and I will help preserve them too; I’m not here to bust your balls. I’m just here to offer us both some clarity and let us both off the carousel of “Will we/Won’t we” so that we can get on with our lives.

But. For some of the people on my current list, that conversation is necessary, and in a truncated, “light” version, I had that talk with one of these men recently. And the backlash from it was … well, people don’t like when you change the rules in the middle of the game. And I’m having to show up for the fall-out of that, even though I just want to avoid it. I participated in the game, I should participate in the dénouement.—Oh, but how much easier to Cut & Run!! Oh, old M.O., how I love you! … and miss you.

Because I don’t really do or want to do that anymore. See: first subset of humans: retracting from relationships because I don’t believe I can show up.

It’s the same underlying belief in this second category. 

More will be revealed, and I have some writing to do and a conversation to have with some for whom I’ve changed the rules. It’s not comfortable, but neither is predicating a relationship on false hope.

The final category, I see now, has its foundation in the self-same belief that I can’t show up for relationships. In this case, with my dad, I’m being asked to be honest with him in a way that frightens the shit out of me.

I would LOVE to lie, avoid, detach, retreat, and retract. But each and every day since the invitation to his wedding came in over the phone, I’ve been called to take a different course. Because, I have been using the above mechanisms for how to manage this relationship. I’ve been detached and retracted, and avoidant. And, much like with the men, I’ve created a game that I don’t want to play. One in which my dad thinks I want or can have a relationship with him.

To tangent:

This morning, I will get an ultrasound of my liver to confirm or disconfirm cirrhosis. About two months ago, my liver enzymes came up elevated, and although I simply think it’s my body’s reparation from 6 months of chemo a bit more than a year ago, I am also very aware that in Chinese medicine, the liver is the seat of anger. And two months ago, I was very angry. For a long time. And this dad stuff only serves to aggravate it.

I was at my therapist’s last Wednesday, and I told her that I would really love to be able to forgive him, but I am not able to do that. I’m terrified that my lack of forgiveness for him is perpetuating the problems in my life, and creating holes in the foundation of my life and relationships and happiness -- and my health.

I told her, it’s astonishing to me that I can have forgiveness for my rapists, but not have any for him. Compassion, I have in crateloads. I know how this person came to be, and it’s a sad state of affairs. But, no matter what modes of self repair I try, I can’t find my way to forgiving him, and I feel that I need to in order to move on with my life.

She said something critically important: You can’t manufacture forgiveness.

If I’m not there, then I’m not there.

“But what about that he’s getting older, and what if he dies and this is unresolved?”

You can’t manufacture forgiveness.

I can’t bully or force myself into a feeling that I don’t have. She said that I have some word she couldn’t place that indicates deep disappointment. And betrayal. And this is true.

And I would love to “get over it.” But I’m not there yet, and beating myself up for not being at a place where I’m not doesn’t help me get there quicker.

I honestly don’t know if I’ll get to this place this lifetime. The very last time I was vulnerable to him and depended on him, he used it as a later opportunity to shame me for not being the daughter he wants. This is a Catch-22 relationship.

But. It’s not.

The catch is that I have to be willing to show up with my truth, which, like my friends and like those men, is that I don’t like who I’m being in this relationship, and it’s harming me. I don’t like to show up in a falsetto range “happy” conversation with him, when that’s not at all true for me, and so I avoid the conversations. But, he’s pressing now, and there’s a deadline.

The truth will out, as Shakespeare wrote. The work on my part will be to get ready to deliver it. To get ready by remembering I’m acting in an esteemable way by showing up for my part of the relationship. I’m also working on steadying myself for the fallout, of which I anticipate there will be much.

Again, people don’t like when you change the rules in the middle of the game.

But this was a game I started playing when I was a child. The rules have changed. It’s time for me to let the other players know. 

To let them know I've stopped playing. 

Card Reading

I had very specific plans for when I came home last night: watch Apollo 13, “take care” of myself, and go to bed by 10.

Only one of these happened.

For most of the day, I was out & about in lots of conversation with lots of people, expending lots of up, outgoing energy, and I wanted to counter it with some quietude. Before coming home for the evening, I was in a coffee shop, finishing up some extra work, and addressing cards for some friends.

I didn’t have the address for one, so I texted her for it, and told her that I must have 10 of her envelopes at home with her address on it; in fact, I had one of hers on my mantle.

She asked me which one, but I couldn’t recall exactly, and told her I’d send her a photo of it when I got home.

This, was the first domino toward the hijacking of my evening.

I did come home, take a photo and send it to her, a lovely decorated envelope with stickers and curly-cues and kind words, like all of hers. Next to it on my mantle (well, the top of a bookshelf, really) were a card from the director and one from the assistant director of the play I was in in April, with deliciously glowing, appreciative, complimentary, and supportive words. Such kindness and such a reflection of my being “seen” by them, in one of my aspiring avocations. The last one up there was a thank you card from my best friend on Long Island’s wedding, thanking me for being there and what a treat it was to have me there, literally in her bed, the night before the wedding, and helping/watching her get ready the next day; that it wouldn’t have been the same without me.

You can see why I keep these things.

But, it was also time to probably pack them away, do some cleaning. And I wanted to send more photos of my friend’s envelopes to her, since I knew she was in a space to need her own (literal) sparkle reflected back to her. 

And, down the rabbit hole we go, into the desk drawer where I keep cards, envelopes so I can remember return addresses (yes, I know there’s a better way), and art inspiration bits, like postcards from galleries or pages torn from magazines.

I’ve known this drawer needs attending to. If, god forbid, I were to croak, it would be hell for the person cleaning it out, and I know they’d just trash the lot, since, who keeps someone else’s old greeting cards.

But, also, it’s unusably full at the moment. Because in it, too, are all the cards I received when I was initially diagnosed with Leukemia in late September 2012, and also a host of them came in around the Hanukkah/Christmas season that year.

I’ve been avoiding having to carve through them. Because how can you discard those messages?

When I was sick, I lined all the cards up on the walls of my hospital room. I taped every single one up around me, to remind me of the network of support and love that I had. Each card, a message of love, faith, healing, fortitude, just for me. You couldn’t come into my hospital room without immediately knowing that I was loved. And how f’ing important was that.

This was not the room of a dying woman. This was not the room of a woman told she had a 40% chance of living through the next 5 years, even with treatment. This was not the room, either, of a woman who looked like a patient, despite the baldness, weightloss, and IV stuck into my arm and chest. I wore jeans and a sweater, like everyone else. I was a human, not a patient. I was a woman loved, not a pity case.

How rallyingly important was that to know, feel, and remember every single day.

But, when the trips to the hospital were finally over, and it was time to reacclimate to living in my apartment full-time, what to do with those cards?

I’m a keeper of things. Sentiments, magazine pages, interesting rocks I find on a mountain or beach. I wouldn’t say I’m a hoarder, but I do have a bag of gently used tissue paper in my closet … but it’s folded neatly and in color blocks, so it’s okay, right?!

I also have a bag in my closet of the covers to theater booklets of plays I’ve been to; movie stubs; plane tickets; the brochure for a place I went camping or an attraction I toured.

The trouble is, I’m not a scrap-booker, so I just kinda carry this bag of non-chronologically ordered “crap” with me from home to home. But, that’s okay. One day, like the cards, I’ll go through them.

But, last night was for the card drawer.

It was slow-going. I had to take a deep breath before taking the rubber band from around the batch of 2012 holiday cards. I knew this was going to take a while and probably bring things up.

But I began. And with each card, I was reminded of why I’d kept them until now.

Here’s the one from my college classmate, now in LA, saying she’d enclosed a gift card to Trader Joes.

Here’s one from a former colleague saying she loves getting the bloggish updates I was posting then to my lotsahelpinghands website.

Here’s one handwritten from an Etsy company saying “a friend” was thinking of me and wanted me to stay warm. This, I remember, accompanied a package of 6 “chemo caps” ranging from thin to thick, the one I wore most, a fuzzy leopard print that kept me feeling fun and warm. I still don’t know who sent those, as there was no name. Thank you, whoever you are.

Last night, with each, if I knew the sender and their cell number, I took a photo of the card, and sent it as a text with a note of thanks to them. Each text, a reminder to us both of what friendship means, even for people who aren’t close.

It was nearly 11 when I finally decided to stop. I’ve barely made a dent into the drawer. But was able to cull a few things out, deciding that with some, having a photo of them now is enough.

At the closing of this activity, I found myself in soft tears of gratitude. So many people surrounded me with love. With funny cards and sentiments, with crazy wacked-out envelopes, with heartfelt messages of hope and healing. And only a handful of these folks were people I keep in regular touch with. So many people came out of the woodwork to support me.

I was told once during the time I was sick, that I had no idea how many people were rooting for me. I agreed. I knew I had no idea, and I knew that was astounding and one of the greatest showings of human generosity that I’ve witnessed.

I had priests, rabbis, Muslims, and Buddhists praying for me. My mom’s hairdresser and my Aunt’s student. I had a class of kindergarteners praying for me.

I remember, too, when I was sick, trying to figure out how I could send thank you cards to everyone who’d contacted me, but I could only handle a few.

In this retread through the cards, in sending them back out to their sender with my note of thanks, I hope I am closing that loop of love, and letting you all know:

Your prayers worked, and I love you back.  

Not Knot.

Last night, I listened to a woman share her intense pain and entanglement with her past. In listening to her, I realized something crucial for myself: I don’t actually feel that way anymore.

Despite the trailing tendrils and my habitual gnawing back at it, my past and I are actually not so enmeshed anymore – at least, as I listened to her, not nearly as much as we were. No. That’s not accurate. We’re just not. It’s there. I poke at it, like a plate of live octopus bits, still wriggling on the plate, long after everyone’d finished jamming them into hot sauce and tried to chew and swallow before they attached to the inside of your gullet. (Uh… See: My years living in South Korea for reference!)

But, I poke at it, and if I do, it’ll squirm. But for the most part, my past isn’t a thing crawling toward and suffocating me anymore.

Listening to this woman, hearing her say that she can’t seem to get under her past, I realized very clearly that I have. Again, it’s there, but it’s not a shackle around my ankle anymore; it’s just some dust I can kick off my shoe.

(Apparently, this'll be a metaphor-heavy blog!)

I have liked to think that my past is something I’m still slogging through, carrying around behind me like a behemoth, its hot putrid breath at my neck asking me how it feels, whether I am able to ignore it now, How ‘bout now, Now?

I’ve liked to think that my past is still a quicksand pit I’m wading through, slow as molasses, fetid and shoes lost.

But, something about having this woman’s story as comparison (not better or worse, simply different), I got to see into a mirror that I haven’t been able to hold up for myself.

I am not there anymore. I am under my past. I’ve excavated, charted, spelunked and had more than one canary die down there with me.

But, in the end, in the now, we’re kind of done there. There’s a cave we’ve dug down into, we’ve opened the land around it, we’ve cared and cleansed and ameliorated the land. We’ve begun to forget that it was a horrid, dark, and dismal place, now in the open space that we’ve created from it, and we’ve used that dank soil to plant new things. Exposed to the sun, it’s something new, now.

(I do like me my extended metaphors!)

(Though, actually, I’ve done this exact work in visualization meditation over many years, opening the cave of my pain and my past, exploring, mourning, and later watching flowers begin to sprout where there was only hurt. I’ve done this work of opening my past and my pain up. It’s finished, or as finished as it can be.)

So, I got to see something yesterday that I haven’t been able to see yet: The truth.

As I listened with compassion to this woman tell us, tearful and anguished, that she is so knotted with her past she can’t see her way out, I wrote in my notebook:

            My past is really not that knotted anymore.

                        Actually.

The Runaways

I sent out a mass text on Wednesday to several women I know who’d understand. I asked them to help me not quit my job that day; that for me quitting without a safety net is equivalent to drinking; that I was at the end of my rope.

I got several texts back, including from a woman I am only acquainted with but who I admire, and she offered that if I called her, we could pray together. Sure, what else have I got?

When I called, I imagined we’d just say some rote prayer that is common around, but instead, she launched into a several-minute long prayer personal to and about me. In it she said, to me and to the ether, that this job is just a recreation of my childhood trauma and neglect, and to help me see that and heal that. She said many other loving things, but this is the part that has been sending shock-waves through me the last few days.

I’ve “gotten” that my relationships in the world tend to be mirrors or recreations of older, historical relationships. It’s been clear that my acceptance and pursuit of jobs that make me want to cry with frustration over the hemorrhaging of my time is a pattern of low self-worth and despair.

However, there was and is a new level of understanding – an “aha” moment if you will (not gag) – as I listened to my friend’s prayer. How is my job a recreation of my home life growing up?

Well, at home, I was a runaway.

When I was little, I only did it twice. I got as far as our public library, with a small backpack filled with maybe an apple and a sweatshirt. But at 7 or 8 years old, I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a place to go, there was no where to go. And so I defeatedly walked back home, and slipped into my house, where no one noticed I’d been gone anyway, just like the time before.

In my home, my gifts were not encouraged or noticed; there was an unstable force that expected perfection, meekness, and to be obeyed; and finally, all of my most basic needs were met. I was fed, clothed, and housed -- anything else was bonus, not to be asked for and not to be expected.

(It wasn’t prison life, I know; but this is the interpretation and internalization of a small person with a brain that analyzes and makes judgment.)

So. How have my work environments been a reflection, a recreation of this initial home environment?

Perfectly. Perfectly parallel:

Basic needs met. Check.

Gifts not seen or utilized. Check.

Perfection and meekness expected. Check.

Unstable authoritarian. Check.

And finally,

Somewhere I run away from. Check. Check, the whole of my life, check.

I have held 6 jobs in the past 8 years.

Each year and a half or so, I become so frustrated with the confines of my environment and the yearnings of my soul, that I quit. I quit without a safety net. I quit with nowhere to go.

And so I do what I did when I was young: I go back home. I find another underearning, underbeing, dissatisfying, deadening, useless position that also meets my very basic needs and has a few coworkers to be my allies.

I keep this job until I end up crying in my car for an hour (See: this Tuesday). And then I quit again.

Rinse. Repeat.

So, today, I am attempting with every fucking fiber of my being not to quit. Not to start the cycle again without a plan – without someplace to go. Without someplace to go that is “right,” that is safe, that is not running from the frying pan into the fire.

For me, to quit a job without a safety net – meaning, another job or enough savings to carry me through to another job – is tantamount to drinking. And as a sober alcoholic, that’s a pretty serious parallel. It is deadly for me to do this again: I eventually begin to think about driving into oncoming traffic. It is insane for me to do this again and expect that in any way it would be different than before.

So, what is my solution?

I have tried every mode of visioning, job window-shopping, informational interviewing, praying, meditating, and begging known to me to try to “conjure” or land on or decide or realize or discover what the job, the career, for my life should be. And I have landed on nothing. I am absolutely blocked in this area of dreaming.

A therapist once told me that I don’t let myself dream.

And this is true. Why dream, when it’ll be taken away or I’ll fuck it up anyway, which amounts to the same thing?

I had a moment last night when I heard someone say that “we” are the kind of people who try to get away with doing the least work.

I thought about that. Why is that? Because I completely identify with that.

I leaned to my friend on the left, who identifies with that way of being, and asked, Well, what about workaholics?

I leaned to my friend on the right, who is a workaholic and would no more do the least amount of work necessary than eat sand, and asked her about it.

Later, in talking with her, I’ve come to see that although the routes are very opposite, the motivation and the fear is the same for both “underearners/under-be-ers” and for workaholics: Things are not going to work out; I'm not going to be okay.

For the set that does the minimum, the fear (for me at least) is that whatever it is is not going to work out anyway, so why try? Why give the world the satisfaction of seeing me put effort in, if it’s only going to turn to shit?

For the workaholic set, the fear is that unless I have my hand in everything, it’s not going to work out. I must make sure that I’m doing everything possible, or it will turn to shit.

In both these scenarios, the fear is that the result will not be favorable to us. On the one hand, why try to make it work – on the other hand, make it.

In both cases, there is a lack of faith in the positive outcome of things, or in an outcome that is unfavorable but doesn’t demoralize and crush us into smitherines. Because, for me, that’s the final stage of the fear – I will be so demoralized, I will be annihilated.

But aren't I there anyway?

So, again, what is the solution here?

It seems to me, that I needed a safe place to go when I was running away. And although I cannot conjure or envision for myself a job or career that I want, I do think that I can try to envision for myself a safe home.

Though, even in my home life now, I’ve recreated what it was like when I was a kid: My own small room that was safe, filled with things I’ve made and pretty things, a place I could hide, be myself, and a place where I was mostly alone.

What is a real safe place, not like this isolation? Where would I want to run away to?

I believe that as I try to answer this question, to envision what an ideal safe home looks like, I will begin to have movement on the job front. I will begin to create that environment I crave in the external world. And though that might not mean a lightning bolt in terms of a career choice, it may help to make whatever my next transition is one that I don’t have to run away from.

I think I might be...healthy.

It’s been surprising to notice how nice I’ve been to myself this week as I crawl out of the hopeless, “what am I doing with my life,” place.

Without real conscious intention about it, while I’ve been wading through the mire of job postings and life meaning, I also allowed myself to buy a silly book, read it in the sun, and then go see a funny movie. I went to a community party, even though I still don’t feel “cool” enough to be a member of that community. Surprise! I know people who were there, so I guess I must be. I mean, I knew several people, wasn’t lonely, had many conversations, so I guess I belonged, right?

I made another nice meal for myself after therapy last night. I painted my nails for my job interview, and I’m awake again early to go to the gym to feel strong and proud and accomplished. 

I participated in a staged reading Tuesday night, my first. And I had the insight and perspective, as I sat in that empty stagehouse, to notice that I was doing what I told myself I wanted to do while going through my chemo. I could realize I was accomplishing my dreams. Following them. They sure don’t feel accomplishy (yet) in the dim lighting of a poor cast and poor audience. But, it’s a case of feelings aren’t facts.

I’ve had several long phone calls with good girl friends. Went out to coffee with a co-worker and sat in the community garden nearby, plucking a strawberry off its vine. I stood on a dock swaying in the Berkeley marina one day after work.

I showered.

Despite going through what feels like a dark time, a lost time, I realize that I have an impulse toward self-care I didn’t know I had.

Two friends texted me yesterday to reach out for support in their own journeys. To ask me to remind them that life is abundant and fear is an asshole. Which I gladly did. And it reminds me to remind myself of these things too, but moreso, it reminds me that those are core pieces of myself, pieces that friends see in me, and reach out to me for: I’m an uplifter. Not always, I’m not Pollyanna or inhuman. But, I am someone who more often than not is there to remind my friends that what we’re doing is not impotent. That life is worth living.

I’ve been prefacing my sentences this week with, “Despite the fact that the planet is dying…”! Despite the fact that the planet is dying, I want to leave an imprint in it; I want my life to count; I want to move the needle of human progress forward. Despite the fact that the planet is dying, we continue to bring children into this world because every generation has had its reasons not to. Despite the fact that the planet is dying, I will go to the gym today; meet with a former theater collaborator to who reached out to me about a book she wants to write; I will go to the farmer’s market and eat a plum off a tiny toothpick.

My habit toward self-care, toward health, has become something so natural in me that it’s unnatural. And if such things as this can make seismic shifts, I guess I can remember that life is abundant and fear is an asshole. 

How I met my best friend from Long Island in South Korea

It’s 10 years this Fall since we met. I’d come off a 14-hour flight from JFK into Seoul. I seem to recall I was actually picked up by the Assistant Principal of the pre-school where I’d be teaching who drove me the 45 minutes back to the Samsung Apartments. The LG Apartments were over the hill. 

I arrived to a large 4-bedroom apartment with heated floors, one Texan, and a Canadian, the two other “native English speakers” who taught at the school just up the road – or over a fence if you were late and feeling adventurous. I tore my favorite pants that way.

Further up that road was a mountain spring, where my Canadian roommate, the one who showed me the short-cut, would refill his water, in line with agimas, old hunched Korean women with no front teeth who would cut in front of you no matter how long you, young white person, had been standing there waiting to fill up at the fresh, cool water tap.

The Texan insisted that I come “into town” that very first night, before jetlag and culture shock set in. Beer. The great equalizer. It was halfway through the school year, so the Texan had met some of the other ESL teachers in the area, one from South Africa, one from Ireland, all in our early to mid-twenties, all young enough to be stupid and adventurous, but old enough to have consequences. We celebrated on the first of many nights to come over uncountable pitchers of piss-water beer, bad games of darts, and laughter that always got too loud, and if you were me, too sloppy.

About a month into my new life there, culture shock, homesickness, alcoholism running like a hotshot through my veins, I found myself hailing a cab in a dark corner of Seoul. Well, I was attempting to hail a cab. But wherever we’d ended up wasn’t the typical wei-gook (white person) hang-out, and fading, wasted, and tired, there weren’t any cabs.

This is where we flash forward through the two Indian men offering to give me a ride home, me saying no thanks; long minutes passing without a cab, and them coming back; me agreeing to the ride. This is where we flash forward through them pulling the car over on a lonely stretch of highway, and taking turns raping me, too drunk and immobilized to fight.

This is where we flash to them actually driving me home, and where I collapse inside my apartment’s front door and begin to wail.

And, by the grace of something I will never quite call coincidence, this is where Jess walks out of her boyfriend, the Texan’s room, and comforts me.

She picks me up, I tell her what happened; she offers to stay in my bed with me, I tell her it’s alright. But the darkness of my bed is too large, and I pad across the heated wooden floor to their room, knock on the door and ask her to stay with me after all.

Jess insisted the next day that I go to the hospital. I wouldn’t have. Never would have even crossed my mind. She came with me to all 4 of them, because at each we were turned away, because “rape is not an emergency.”

To flash forward over the harrowing and humiliating events of that day that only compounded the isolation and violation I’d suffered, I’ll tell you it’s over. And the rest will have to remain the content of therapy sessions and the slow course of healing, which over the years since I’ve considered turning toward volunteering at a crisis hotline. But honestly, it's not over. I’m not over it enough to help others. 10 years later.

Two years later, I lived in San Francisco. Jess lived in upstate New York in a partially-converted garage next to a washing machine while earning her Teaching Certificate. 5 years later, she met an old high school-mate at a New Year’s Eve party. 9 years later, I watched them get married. And three weeks ago, she had a baby girl. Who I’ll get to meet, and hold, and smell next week on Long Island.

My friendship with Jess is inextricably linked to one of the hardest events in my life. I’d barely known her before that night, met her sure, another East Coaster, great. But friends? As dramatic as it is to say, but real enough anyway, it was while holding the hand they’d botched the IV into that Jess and I became friends.

It’s accrued and built and become many more colors and tenors and experiences over the decade, mainly on the basis of a shit-talking, wise-cracking, overly honest relationship. (Yes, the nurse stuck her hand up Jess’s vag to pull out the rest of the placenta.) And although it started as it did, and though I would eagerly and instantly give that experience back--despite how it might “benefit others”--our friendship is easily one of the great and unexpected treasures of my life. 

Rage against the dying of your light.

So, I’ve seen this somatic therapist (Rosen Method) now about 4 times, and each time I plan to go, I wonder if we’re “doing” anything, if anything is “happening,” especially if anything is “changing.” I want results to long-harbored ills, and I want them now. Or at least evidence that we’re heading in that direction.

Damn this woo-woo laying on of hands, heal thyself bullshit – gimme the Rx, gimme the fix, and let’s get on with this “life” business. Or more accurately, let’s get on with the happy life business. Enough processing. More doing, more getting, more fulfillment, more joy, more security, more ….

She told me that if I keep on trying to skip over my emotions, they’ll still just be there. Waiting, licking at the back of my throat, causing the tension in my shoulders I’ve carried for decades. If I put a lid on them, feel them well up, and force them back down, … well, I could finish that sentence with, “Then you might get cancer.”

But I’m so good at emoting. I’m an emotional wreck! No, I kid, but I am an emotional person, I feel things, deeply, often, sometimes. So, where am I not feeling what needs to come up and out?

“Anger wasn’t an allowable emotion,” I told her. I know I’m not unique in that. But anger was modeled as a way to impose, control, terrorize. Anger, I interpreted, is bad. It causes people to behave badly, meanly, poisoned.

Anger, I also surmised, is consuming. When you are angry, you are nothing else but a hot, raging ball of ferocity. No humanity, no compassion, no faults.

I’ve worked on anger before; I’ve read Julia Cameron saying, Anger is a call to action. It shows us where our boundaries are being crossed, and calls us to take action in their assertion. (to paraphrase.)

Anger is healthy. Anger is right.

Anger is totally not allowed.

This isn’t to say I don’t get angry, anyway. Ask my coworkers! But I feel it as a place where my veil of self-control has slipped, instead of as an integrated part of my expression. I feel my anger as a failure. Something to be overcome, overruled, rooted out.

But, that’s simply not the case, and the more I keep it separate from myself and an integrated whole, the more compartmentalized and dissociated I will be.

It’s not like I want to be the Hulk, or a crank, or someone who’s angry all the time. I just want to allow it to be a part of my emotional range, just like compassion or amusement, and like boredom or fear or apathy. I don’t quash with visceral force even these less “comfortable” emotions; I don’t feel shame over feeling them. Positive or negative ones.

But Anger. And grief. Get the cold shoulder. The taut one. The tense, clamped down, forcible shoulder.

Being a somatic therapist in this way of working, it’s sort of like reiki, only she’s not "sending me good vibes;" she's observing how my body tenses or releases, acknowledges “true” things, or asks me to rephrase, since that didn’t “feel true.” I don’t know precisely what polygraph she’s plugged into in my body, but when I do rephrase to something less "proper," I do feel the difference.

She can feel very acutely when, this week, I began to talk about my disappointment around work. And I began to say that it feels like I’m just giving my dad more evidence that I’m the fuck-up daughter. He’s the Dudley Do-Right (his words), beyond reproach and reproaching everyone else – can you feel my anger, too? – and that I don’t have a firm career track, a “successful” life, feels like more evidence for him that I’m the fuck-up. She asked if I felt that way about the career stuff. And I said, no, I simply feel like a failure. Which I interpret through all the lovely filters of his I’ve internalized as a fuck-up. Which I suppose is the same thing, come to think of it.

You’ve heard this before from me. The antipathy toward getting better, or simply seeing myself as better because it would change the entire nature of my relationship with him. There wouldn’t be a relationship – certainly not the one we’ve had, at least. And so for now, in fact since cancer, there is no relationship. Yell at your sick daughter while she’s getting chemo, and you stop getting the right to shame me. Sorry, Pops. I’m sitting on the bench right now.

But I haven’t walked out of the park, have I? I still want revenge. I still want to pain him. I still want him to see the error of his ways then and now, and be the father I want that I’ve never had. I still have that hope. And so my anger kicks in when I recall him to others. My frustration. My deep deep disappointment.

But only for a flash. As soon as I let myself have a moment of anger, even now, I have this impulse to say, Well, focus on yourself, Molly, and what you can change, and your expectations; you’re living your life away from him, and yadda yadda bullshit.

I need to feel angry! I need to feel betrayed. I need to rail against the fate and circumstance of it, and I need to let it pass.

I never let it pass. Pass through me. Through my red, pumping oxygenated blood.

She asked me as I lay (clothed!) on the massage table, Can you feel that? Can you feel when you got angry how much energy there was? Your voice got loud, your body got hot.

And then it was gone. And then my shoulders tense, my gut constricts. I’m not allowed to be angry. I’m not supposed to be.

I don’t want to let it flow through me. I’m terrified of being consumed by it like they were.

But, I have had the experience a few years ago around grief. I was terrified that if I began to let it out, it would drown me. If I started to cry, to feel it, it would overwhelm me, and I would be lost in it. In the psych ward in it. So, I held it back. (I do still.) But during that time, maybe 5 or so years ago, in the presence and care of another therapist, I let myself feel some of what I needed to. I let it pass through me, out of me, I let it disorient me.

But it didn’t dismantle me. I wasn’t wrecked by it. I felt it. It was hard and sad and wracking, but it wasn’t annihilating.

I will try to remember that as I go forward here, because it feels really old and really sad to hold my body in fight/flight/freeze all the time, and to interpret my life and myself as anything other than brilliant. 

Don’t Hold Your Breath.

No, really, Moll. Relax.

A woman recently told me that the body is the last hold-out. It’s the last place we carry anxiety, tension, fear, even as we’ve worked through it on all other levels.

I hold my guts in tension 99% of the time, even when I'm by myself. I rarely breathe to full capacity, unless I’m reminded to. There is always a slight constriction of fight-or-flight going on in my body.

The few places I can recall this not to be the case are when I’m hiking, walking in the woods. Hm, well that’s the only place I can recall at the moment! Although, it also happened when I would go up to Sonoma to visit friends, an old boyfriend. I would say I could “breathe bigger” there. There was something about the openness, the closeness to nature, the un-cityness of it all that allowed me to open, too.

I’ve done a lot of pondering on how to bring that feeling, that sense of ease, of safety, home.

I realized something significant this week. My fear takes two tacks that leave me hamstrung in a Catch-22: On the one hand, I’m atrociously scared of being boring, being neglected, being overlooked. Yet, on the other, I’m afraid that if I am seen, I will be annihilated, attacked, shamed.

What’s a girl to do?

Well, I can’t control the first part – I cannot control how I am seen or embraced by others.

But, what does the first part really mean, anyway? It means that I’m scared my needs will not be met. Though what I can control is that I am healing in a way that means I’m better able to take care of my own needs, and to invite others into my life who are able to meet them too, without dumping my own onto them.

So, if I can come to believe that my needs will be met, because I and the world around me are meeting them, then I don’t have to fear being overlooked and languishing in the abyss.

To address the other hand, the fear is that I am not safe in the world. That if I peek my head out, if I take ownership of my needs, become brave enough to step out of the shadows, I will be suffer.

How can I dismantle that part? How can I force myself to believe I’m safe in the world, and not the object of opprobrium if I raise my hand and say, Hey, this is who I am and how I want to express myself in the world – isn’t it cool?

Well, I can’t force myself. I can convince myself, my jury, through overwhelming evidence to the contrary that I am safe when I am myself.

I just have to be willing to look at the evidence. And that’s hard. 

Who wants to look inside themselves and declare it good? Who wants to walk with a spine of confidence in their music tastes, clothing choices, reading material? Who wants to feel proud of their contributions in the world? Their aspirations and hobbies and dropped hobbies and efforts and set-backs and dorkiness and naiveté and thirst and laughter?

Who wants to say, "Yes, this is me, and I am good. In fact, I am great"?

Perhaps we all say we do, but the issue to me is that every time I think a thought like that, I have a gremlin born of those ancient fears that croaks, "You think so, do you? Well, here are all the ways you’re not."

Every time you begin to catalogue your achievements, you are slammed with doubt. And so, you stop cataloguing; the doubt wins, and the evidence slackens and dulls.

There is so much effort (it seems to me, right now, and may change) to loving ourselves.

There is so much effort in deciding to face that gremlin, allow its ire, yet continue with our own mantras of belief.

Belief. It’s all we really have, especially when we’re not willing to accept the evidence yet.

On both sides of my fear aisle, I am called to believe: a) That my needs can be taken care of because I believe they're important; and b) That I am safe in expressing myself because I believe I am important.

That’s a lot of work for a given moment! And that’s why my guts tangle nearly every waking moment.

I don’t think I have an anxiety disorder. I know moments of peace and relaxation and ease. I know that it is possible for me to strive to have them more frequently by doing this dismantling and believing and accepting of facts.

But, until then, I will just have to remind myself to breathe. 

In Vain.

God? G-d? Him, Her, It, We, They?

The Great What Is?

The tendency of all things toward progress, perhaps. Toward health and order.

Cut your hand, and assuming all other things are right with your body, it will heal itself. In a week or two, it will be good as new. Sometimes scarred, but altogether, well.

In parallel, cut your spirit, your psyche, and the tendency of them are toward healing and health. If we don’t hide away the wound, or habitually fiddle with it, we’re sort of compelled to heal. It’s the natural state of ourselves, and it’s my experience and observation that the order of life will lead us there.

In this, I can believe.

In benevolence, I have a harder time, these days.

I’m at the part in my personal work where I’m supposed to think about “god” and my relationship to it, whatever I choose to define it as. I’m at the part where I come to believe that it wants the best outcome for me and all creatures. The part where I’m supposed to take a deep breath, open my arms, and fall into the caring embrace of this power.

Balls.

Because here’s the part that snags my shirttail: sometimes “god’s” plan includes the death of babies. Sometimes it includes the overdose of a friend, the death of a parent before you're old enough to know them. Sometimes "god's plan" includes rape. And of course, sometimes it includes cancer in a healthy 30 year old.

I will not stand with those who say it’s part of a plan. I don’t think it is. I think you can take those experiences, and choose to integrate them into a theology and a world-view that helps you get through them. Mostly, you can choose to tell yourself, perhaps truthfully, that their or your experience will benefit those around you. That others get to witness how you struggled, railed, and got through it anyway. I do believe that we can choose to turn our experiences into something valuable.

(Though I do have unresolved issues with being or using anyone as a goddamned touchstone on how to life your life more fully. "I could go at any time, just like him -- I think I'll learn from his pain & in homage and reverence, I'll paint that portrait; become a doctor; take a trip." Balls. F' you, man. My life is not your feeding ground. -- ... unless of course, it is.)

But I will not say that I believe that “god” puts these obstacles before us on purpose. I just don’t think it’s that intelligent.

The intelligence in focusing all flowers toward the sun (or moon, depending), the intelligence that makes all those little newborn turtles scurry toward the ocean, the intelligence that turns felled trees into compost: it’s order, it’s incredible, it’s inspiring, but it’s not benevolent, necessarily, and it’s not because a force underlies all and declares some of those turtles will be scooped up by predators in their first moments of life – that’s simply part of the order of it.

Because here’s another side to the whole “God as benevolence” thing: it means (or can mean) that we believe we have an ace in the hole. It means wishful and fantastic thinking that “god didn’t take us this far to drop us on our ass” or “god is slow but never late,” which translates to, if I hold out long enough, if I pray hard enough, if I act well enough, I’ll be alright. And buddy, that just ain’t true.

It’s not really about god at all. Being or becoming “alright” has more to do with how we chose to interpret and incorporate out life experiences. God isn’t gonna rescue me, reward me, or punish me. It just doesn’t care like that. But I do. And you do. And together we can form a lattice of support that feels bigger than ourselves, that carries us through and over those hard times. Together, we are aimed toward health, and we connect to improve our chances of getting there.

In that, I can believe. I can believe in our collective desire toward joy. I can believe in my desire to clear out the junk in my heart, so that I can help you toward joy, too.

Is that “god”? Not really. Is it good? You bet.