Maybe Baby 2

I have been looking at porn.

This porn comes in the form of a Facebook page for local moms who are selling or giving away baby stuff. 

I’m on this page because one of my best friends is pregnant, and I have hopped so far aboard her baby-train, I’m surprised I’m not morning-sick myself!

In the past few weeks, I’ve begun reading a book on pregnancy that she read and loved (The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy), crocheting baby bibs, buying scrap fabric for burp clothes, and practically stalking her to ask if she wants a breast pump I found online. 

As I spoke of in my 2014 blog post “Maybe Baby,” I am not sure whether I want children. 

As then, I am not in a serious relationship, and I still am not willing to go the motherhood route alone, so there’s no real reason to question if I do or do not. But, reasonable or not, that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it. 

With every article on our drought, the cost of living, the planet’s imminent demise, the expansion of the stupid class — I am convinced for a few moments never to bring children into this hateful world. 

And with every true breath of fresh air, every warm hug, every belly laugh — I am convinced for a few moments that I want another human to bear witness to this world’s incandescent beauty. 

I am the age my mom was when she carried me (33), and then my brother at 36. I have been emailing and asking her all kinds of questions about her pregnancies since I began reading the pregnancy book — what was your morning sickness like? what does pregnancy feel like? did you have food aversions? stretch marks? hemorrhoids? (god help us, she did not!)

I have had the liberty and the luxury of asking my mom these questions, and too, my friend who is pregnant, does not. And I am very aware of this fact, and I think it has spurred my devoted interest in her pregnancy — I want to be there as much as I can, because I want to make up for any absence she might be feeling (real or imagined, to me, since I haven’t spoken to her about it yet). 

I was on the phone with my mom this morning, telling her that I feel my heightened interest in my friend’s impending mommy-hood is also that she’s my first local BFF to be pregnant. One of my other best friends in Long Island had a baby last year, and I was able to be there for a few days when the baby was a month old, but that’s all. There wasn’t the same imminent babyhood. 

I told my mom that I’d been thinking about my very best friend from childhood, a woman I’ve known since we were 3 years old, and how I can’t imagine what it will be like if and when she gets pregnant across the country from me. And I began to cry. 

Of course, it’s about her, my New Jersey friend, and it’s also about me. About how I’ll feel, if and when I also choose to have a family — assuming I’m able — so far from her and my own family. 

This is big business. This mommy stuff. 

And I am wanting to prepare to make that decision in a realistic way — so I have doubled-down on my work around intimacy and relationships (or in my case, habitual lack thereof). This morning, I told the woman I’d been working on these issues with by phone for about 6 weeks (a stranger whose name was passed along to me from a woman I admire) that I have reached out to someone local to work the rest of this stuff with. 

And I have. I will continue this relationship work with this local woman who has known me for nearly 8 years, who has seen me at my best and worst, who can call me out, see patterns, and provide so much space for my feelings and vulnerability that I can practically swim in them and still feel safe. 

Yesterday morning, this same woman (as we were talking about what my issues were and what I wanted to work out) said that she'd always felt for me that my issue was around deprivation. 

… 

She’s very astute. 

And it’s also funny to me because it’s one of those things that doesn’t come into focus about yourself until someone else (who knows you well) reflects it back. 

I am very aware of this time in the generation of women around me. My friends who are certain they don’t want kids, ones who know they do, the ones who can't, and ones who, like me, are unsure.

It’s a particular, cordoned off time in our lives. And I’m holding the space for that, leaning into the grief of potentially not seeing friends change their whole lives, them not seeing me do the same. I’m aware this is “future-tripping,” but it’s fair to acknowledge my feelings around it, anyway. 

I’m allowed to not know what will happen (for me or for my friends), and I’m allowed to have feelings either way. 

Today, what that looks like is picking up a bitchin' breast pump for my best friend. Continuing to do the work toward an intimate relationship with a man. And letting myself be both sad and happy for and with my peers. 

Still?

While waiting backstage last night for a long scene I’m not in to finish, I leafed through an old book of opera history, the only book in the room.

In it, are pages and pages of photos, and I was struck by how similar everyone looked to today. Yep, there’re the same cheeckbones, facial structure, haughty gaze we still see in others and starlets today. Some of the photos were dated 1898.

Over a hundred years ago, people looked relatively the same. They portrayed the same stories of love, hatred, betrayal, and sacrifice. And I commented to the other actor who was also waiting backstage on how shockingly similar we looked, and how our stories, our desires haven’t changed for tens of thousands of years. Mythology and the Bible tell the same stories, and people probably looked relatively similar too.

Sure, we might be a little more refined about it, not sacrificing goats or children as often. Not slaying enemies in the street. But for the most part, looking back through time, we’re the same people we were thousands of years ago.

And my co-actor said something that struck me: Well, yeah, because we have the same brains we’ve had for thousands of years.

For some reason, this made me pause, and things clicked into place in my head. We’ve been retelling these stories through pictoral, oral, and written history for eons. Homer wrote about the same passions and impulses as Shakespeare as Langston Hughes as Brene Brown.

We’ve all been processing the same emotions for millennia. There’s something kind of humbling and shocking about that realization. Perhaps even a little bit disheartening! But mostly, I think, connecting.

It makes all humanity more relatable.

I remember reading a story of a therapist who was going to be working with a group of Rwandan refugees. She was worried that she wouldn’t know how to relate to them, how she would be able to talk to them about what they’d been through because it was so alien to her experience.

What she found was charming: Her first client wanted to talk about how the guy she had her eye on was hot for her cousin.

We all have the same impulses. We all have the same chemistry and wiring, inhibitions and ambitions. Beyond the length of recorded time, we’ve all been trying to make a go at this thing called life.

And I find that oddly comforting. 

Stay in Touch.

I received a birthday card in the mail from my father the other day.

On the front are printed all these large, cartoony instructions saying, “Daughter, Whatever you do, don’t open this card!”

On opening it, the message inside reads, “You still don’t do as you’re told.”

And there’s a handwritten note, wishing me a happy birthday and telling me to stay in touch.

It’s both funny and tragic. It’s funny, not for it’s printed content, but for the fact that it continues my father’s understanding of me and our relationship: He’s the good one, I’m the fuck-up. He makes the rules, and I don't follow them. What a set-up. 

This is “funny,” because it’s sad. Because it’s continued confirmation of how unrealistic our relationship is, and because it confirms that this is not a person I want to be in communication with.

Lest you think me harsh to judge or condemn a relationship based on one tin-eared card, believe me, this is the softest of these messages I’ve received. And continue to receive from him.

On Saturday, I got the chance to talk to my mentor. We were talking about amending relationships where there is discord, or where I simply don’t feel at peace.

This, of course, is one of them.

But, my father was listed in a category of others, too: People I’ve fallen out of touch with out of self-preservation.

I wanted to talk to my mentor about whether I’m in the wrong… that still-lingering “good daughter” or “good friend” guilt. Shouldn’t you show up no matter what? Isn’t that love? Or is that obligation? And does it matter?

Isn’t it my job to adjust myself and meet these people where they’re at, regardless of how they’re harming me?

Because as painful as it is to know how intractable the situation with my dad is, I still lash myself with reproval.

I should be able to withstand my crazy aunt’s needling about my family’s ills. I should be able to listen to her constant health complaints and victim-laden phone calls. I should be able to because she’s family and because she’s alienated nearly everyone else she’s related to.

I should be able to sit in a car with my manic friend, even though I get quiet and withdrawn around that kind of unpredictable behavior. I should be able to meet her level of enthusiasm and kookiness because that’s cool, right? Why can’t I just be cool, like her?

I should be able to be in relationships with people I don’t want to be in relationships with, because that’s what “good” people do, right? Because that’s what we’re told good people do.

But, to quote that myopic card, I rarely do what I’m told. …

What my mentor offered me was there are some relationships that are once or twice a year out-reaches. And that’s okay.

Send your aunt a birthday and holiday card, and call it a day.

Allow your friend who makes you uncomfortable to have her own experience, and you don’t have to be a part of it if you don’t like how you feel around her.

Reply to your dad’s occasional emails, thank him for the card. And leave it at that.

There are relationships that we invest more in and there are those we invest less. It doesn’t mean that we don’t care for the person. It doesn’t mean that they are bad, or that I am.

It just means that my self-exacting standard of communication needs relaxing.

You don’t have to invest in relationships that cause you pain.

Believe me, I’ve done enough work in trying to make these particular ones work. To find common ground and compromise and a way of communicating that is healthy, or at least not harmful. And unfortunately, there isn’t one.

I wish and try and hope and beg Universes that they were, particularly with my dad, because who wouldn’t? But, this is an intractable situation. And I have bloodied my fists knocking on a closed door, trying to break in through a side window, and torn fingernails trying to dig underneath all the battle defenses that each of us have drawn to come to a relationship with him that I can be in.

But, when you come to the end of the line, it’s time to get off the train. This one doesn’t go any farther, no matter how much I wish it did. And I do. And I probably always will.

But in the reality of today, these relationships are not serving either of us. I can’t demand someone to show up or behave how I want. I can only adjust myself to what is. And allow myself the compassion to stop haranguing myself for not being able to adjust them.

And I can do that by staying in touch. Just barely. 

Elegy.

He cannot picture life without alcohol. Some day he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol or without it. Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping-off place. He will wish for the end.

- Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 152

If your newsfeed is anything like mine, over the last two days it has been flush with messages of condolence, sorrow, bafflement, gratitude and even ire.

In response to the suicide of Robin Williams, I have seen an interesting splice of my “friends” wrestle with his end.

One friend wrote that he, too, suffered from depression and loneliness, but he “pulled himself out of it,” without the “resources” available to someone like a celebrity. This friend was angry that someone could be so selfish and blind to the opportunities present to him.

But as we can read in the above quoted paragraph, there are times when we ourselves are blind, and nothing can make us see. Or we believe that nothing can. Or we believe that whatever "is" is not fast enough or strong enough or consistent enough. We believe only in our aloneness and our constriction. And from that place, there is no perspective, hope, or option. From that place, there is only annihilation to end the suffering.

Money, fame, or accolades do nothing to quiet the internal storm. In fact, they can often keep us farther from our truth because we now believe that people are counting on us, maybe in this case, to be funny and on and up and impervious. Don’t show weakness because that’s not what they want to see. And the further we drift from our truth, the larger the distance between how we feel and what we show to the world, the more gaping the hole and gnawing the desire for relief from that fissure.

I cannot claim to be inside the head of anyone other than myself. And from that vantage point, I can admit that I hear that voice at times which tells me there is no solution except for annihilation. I am not alone in hearing it, but I am lucky enough to know to reach out when it whispers. Although that doesn’t necessarily quell that voice. I can’t really know what it is that shifts when that desperation is upon me, but my experience has told me that something does.

In those bleak moments however, that is impossible to remember. Impossible.

I rely on the faith and fortitude of others in those moments, but I have also built a conversation and culture among my friends that allows for that vulnerability. I have built conversations that can include language that is desolate, dark, and hopeless, and I have faith that these friends can hear that and hold it for me.

Because I have come before to that place where what you saw and what I felt were so antithetical, it landed me in lock-down psychiatric treatment.

I have come to that place where I screamed for someone to see beyond my mask to what was really going on and to who I really was.

When they say, “It was a cry for help,” that’s what is meant: Please see beyond the smoke and mirrors that have kept you from me, that I thought were protecting me, and see through to the hemorrhaging, terrified, devastated human heart.

We can only be reached, and potentially helped, in the sharing and access of that heart.

But that is the most vulnerable, humbling, and painful admission I know.

It’s been written that it seems everyone loved Robin Williams except himself. Some argue there is more to it, to depression, to addiction.

But it seems to me that the chasm between internal and external became so great, that the only solution he saw was to fall in.

And that decision (although decision implies choice) -- selfish as some may call it, unseeing as some may believe it to be -- is one of the loudest calls to compassion that I know. 

Well, Shoot.

There has been all this heartache in me about wanting my father to change. To be loving, available, vulnerable and open. I have wanted this to happen for as long as I can remember, and I’ve held out a resentment toward him for his inability to do this for that long, too.

I have tried many ways around and through this resentment: loving kindness, acceptance, letters to god, letters to him I didn’t send, letters to him I did. Individuation meditations, praying daily for his peace and happiness, envisioning him as a child... But nothing has moved this boulder of a need.

And I finally realized what the need really is. It is not that I need my father to change. At this point, it’s that I need him not to. Because if he did, then I would have to look at being loving, available, vulnerable and open to him. And this causes trouble, because this is not safe.

So, keeping my resentment toward him has been a circuitous way to protect myself from my being vulnerable to him.

It’s all well and good to want someone to change – but when faced with the actuality of their transformation, how do we deal with that?

I wish I could tell you that I have overblown the situation, and he’s kinder than he appears, and being vulnerable to him could maybe, possibly, just-give-it-one-more-try, be a good idea.

But it’s not. Unfortunately, I have enough evidence to support this. Not ancient, you yelled I was a liar during a game of Clue when I was 5. Like, recent, appallingly turning my vulnerability against me evidence.

So, here’s the thing. I can forgive all of that. I can be willing to forgive it all, anyway. But do I want to change my behavior? Not really.

I’ve spent all this time trying to find my way around the rock of resentment to get toward connection, but when I look instead at what the rock is doing for me, not to me, I get to see that maybe it’s been doing the right thing all along. And this realization is hard for a person like me.

I have fear that keeping myself separate from him will cause bile in my soul and in my body, and corrode other relationships. I have fear that by not being vulnerable to him, I’m going to call down some cosmic retribution and be serially alone. I have fear that I’m not “spiritual” enough, or evolved enough or recovered enough, or else I’d be able to have him in my life as a loving and caring adult, both ways 'round.

I have shame that I can’t allow this relationship to flourish. That I refuse to be the asshole who riles on the ground before him and begs him to love me. I have been doing that for as long as I can remember, too.

But the thing I always thought I wanted was for him to do that too. To acknowledge his faults, to claim ownership of his behavior, and to beg my forgiveness.

What I see now, is that if he actually did, I don’t want to give it – that forgiveness is a door to love. And with him, love is a door to hurt.

The boulder has been there doing this job all along.

Until I learn a “healthier” way of screening those doors, they’ll just have to remain shut. 

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.

1 + 1 = Forgiveness?

Because he was an electrical engineer and adept with numbers, it was always my father I went to with math homework.

This near-nightly escapade always took the same tired route: My dad trying to explain to me a concept that was assumed, understood, and so ingrained for him by now that he couldn’t explain it properly, and his getting frustrated when I couldn’t understand what for him was plain and evident.

I would get frustrated at his impatience, and the fact that I had to do this homework so I had to sit with him. And eventually, we’d become locked in a battle of wills so contentious, we’d end up screaming at each other. We call this 4th grade.

My brother told me a little more than a year ago, when I was going through chemo treatment and my dad was unable to show up for me, that what I was asking my dad to do (show up emotionally) was like asking a crippled person to walk: It’s impossible. It’s unfair, and it’s presumptive.

The same assumption that my dad had about teaching me math concepts, the ease and obviousness and facility he had with numbers, I have about emotional matters. I simply assume that because this is something so damned simple and easy for me, even when it’s painful, that everyone should be able to do this.

I am making the exact same mistake he did with me: I am shaming someone for something they are not able to do.

So, when I contemplate following up my dad’s return voicemail from Father’s Day, I have found that I want to do what I always want to do: Hash it out. EXPLAIN to him what is so obvious to me: I needed you to show up for me, and you didn’t. In fact, you blamed me for not being attentive to your needs. And you threw in my face every time I’ve failed in my life as if that would manipulate me into realizing, once again, you’re the savior and I’m the fuck-up.

I want to tell him this, of course, in a gentle, loving way, because then, of course, he’ll be able to hear it and understand it.

If I explain it really  s l o w l y  as if to a child, my dad can’t possibly not understand that his behavior across the years has been abominable at many times, and that I don’t like to be in touch with him because of it. That I don’t trust him because of it.

However. I’m simply expecting what he expected of me back then: Comprehension.

No Comprende, Mamasita. He don’t get it. He won’t get it. And you can sit with as many graphing calculators and pie charts of his behavior and your feelings of hurt and betrayal as you choose. You can even make a PowerPoint presentation about how his increased anger and violence was inversely proportionate to your trust of him.

However. I’d be wasting my breath. And do people even use Powerpoint anymore?

I still remember concepts my dad taught me about math. I used the one to figure out a percentage this morning. Somewhere between the yelling and the tears and the slammed books and doors, I did learn something. But what was the price of that education?

My dad was not a teacher. And my dad is not an empathetic person. It just is. Just as a paraplegic, my asking him to do what he is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually unable to do is unfair of me. My expectations on him won’t make him walk.

I hate relearning this lesson. It too ends in tears most times. But, today, I do have a choice between struggling to opening his mind, or to simply let him be a cripple and relate to him as such. Because it seems like the person who needs to learn something is not my dad (someone I have no control over). The person who needs to learn empathy here, soy yo. 

Smalls tasks. One thing. Little pieces. Eventual mountains.

The thing about “eventual mountains” is that we actually have to have the presence of mind to turn around and acknowledge we’ve reached the top of a mountain. Otherwise, small tasks never seem to add up to anything significant, because we’re always striving without appreciating our own efforts.

I’ve noticed this week that my patience with people I come into daily contact with is … thin. That I envelop the small irks with a candy-coating of relish. (Not like real relish, that’d be gross.) From the first work email I replied to yesterday morning, back from the long weekend, to the impatience I had toward someone else, I knew that I was taking on more emotional attachment to these interactions than I truly had to.

None of this was personal. "I didn’t cause, can’t control and can’t cure" you or your behavior. It is not my fault or responsibility that you, woman, are a tight-ass, type-A, micro-managing, self-righteous, impervious, judgmental bitch.

IN THIS inner maelstrom of judgment toward others, I remembered something significant: We are only a percent as judgmental of others as we are toward ourselves. It’s something I’ve heard again and again. If you hear someone being judgmental of others, just know that they treat themselves with a spiked lash of self-derision infinitely more rigid than they use on others.

And so, I’m brought back to myself. Where the only chance for change, love, release, is ever possible.

If I’m so mean to others, so angry, and rigid, and correcting, and impatient and punitive toward them… how on earth am I to myself?

And, I’m reminded of something else: Every single person who’s ever told me that I’m too hard on myself.

I never actually take this in. I brush this comment aside like so much hippie, free-love nonsense. I don’t treat myself harshly. I’m fine to myself. Fuck you.

But. I’ve begun to see the veracity of this opinion. That it’s not actually opinion, when I really listen to the thoughts I fling at myself. I am very exacting and punitive toward myself, though I’m very good enough to hide it, or to brush it under the rug.

I’m coming to see that I have internalized a pattern of self-deflation. Having experienced enough external feedback in response to being authentic, I’ve become habitualized to doing it to myself. Better not to show who you really are, what you really want to do, what talent you really have, because it will be taken away from you. Trouble is, I’m the one doing the taking these days.

Better to stop myself early from doing anything worth doing, because I “know” I’ll just fuck it up, it will be taken away, it will be flawed eventually.

It’s the reason I continue to hold on to second-rate things (and ideas, and jobs): No use in having something really nice, because you, Molly, will fuck it up anyway. OR, it will be taken from you, and you will be heart-broken. Better to have or do something only half-assed, because then you won’t be disappointed.

Nor will I actually be fulfilled.

And, by the way, did you happen to catch all that self-derisive talk up there? It’s not actually that explicit when it’s happening. Instead it’s a mercurial thread of poison in my water supply.

A friend told me last night that I haven’t caught a break in a while. That no wonder I’m tired and frustrated and feverish with the “Divine unrest.” The Universe owes me a break.

But as we spoke about self-flagellation, I replied to her, I haven’t given myself a break in a while. To which she replied, Well, you are the Universe.

Tis pity, tis true.

I believe we, in some ways, create our own reality. And if there is a constant badgering of myself, a constant deflation, and a “cosmic” interception of my touchdown passes, born of an (old) idea that I can’t have nice things, do good things, have success, and ease and partnership and fulfillment and joy … then of course that’s what will be reflected back to me.

Last night, I re-posted a 2012 blog of “What ifs” in the style of Shel Silverstein. As I read it, I began to rephrase the questions in terms of affirmations. Instead of “What if I believed I were safe,” I read to myself, “I am safe.” “What if I allowed myself to laugh,” becomes, “I allow myself to laugh.”

I see that how I am behaving toward others is a reflection of how I behave toward myself. And that awareness is one of those tiny steps I need to be conscious -- and appreciative -- of as I climb this mountain toward health. 

This Used to be my Playground

I’ve been thinking in detail about my home town today. Thinking about describing it to you: Up the block lived the boy I had a crush on, across the street from him was our teenage babysitter, the park where they buried plastic eggs every Easter, the library I used to hide in, and the honeysuckle fence by the elementary school we all learned to eat from.

I catalogued it all in my brain before I got up. The radius of what I knew determined by how far we’d bike. The friends who lived the flat road across town to the other elementary school, and the bakery where my mom would buy bagels each week, and sometimes cupcakes with frosting heaped on top in the shape of Sesame Street characters – we’d beg for Cookie Monster, since he also had a cookie stuck in his mouth.

The Dunkin Donuts down the hill where I got my first job, and how you could smell the doughnuts baking from the top of the hill. The house next-door where my best friend lived, yellow, now beige with new owners. That big house on the corner that burned down amid rumors of arson and insurance fraud.

The houses you knew to skip on Halloween, and the little league fields with an actual brick concession stand. The tire playground that used to stand at the grade school, where D. fell off the top of the pyramid and broke his whole leg. The small white, bean-shaped rocks that carpeted that playground; I picked up a handful the last time I was there, and when I rub them together in my fist, the sound of scraping unlocks my childhood.

I was going to tell you about the awesome 4th of July parade one year when I bought a Strawberry Shortcake ice-cream pop that, once eaten, revealed a “Get One Free” prize on the wooden stick, so that the free one I got had the same message.

The street I first tried to drive down, the patch of pavement where I fell off my bike and broke my foot.

I’ve been thinking about all this, everything I knew and remembered, that shaped the world outside my front door, because facebook told me yesterday that an old classmate’s mom suddenly died of cancer a year after his father died of it, too. And I was picturing where his house is, just a block from the library, one I’d have walked past thousands of times. It abuts the big park where we all went on Memorial Day when school was closed, and there’d be hot dogs and cotton candy.

For reasons I can’t explain (and despite being tired of talking about my own cancer -- Tired of referencing it like people reference a year abroad: "Well, last year when I was in Scotland –" "Well, last year when I had cancer..." as it simply is my frame of reference right now. Tired and bored of it, and yet astonished at where, like yesterday morning), its presence and reality will side-swipe me.

My sudden grief wasn’t all about me: it was the sadness of the reality, once again, that life is so uncertain, so sudden, and so disillusioning. That life offers those of us in it, grief. Live long enough, and it just does.

When my final grandparent died last year, my generation, the one of my classmates, became solidly in the center of life’s process. Our parents are now grandparents or grandparent age. We’re them. And the generation we’re birthing is us. We’re transitioning to the center of that boat.

Some of us already have transitioned, lost parents long ago, and have always been in the center of that boat. But there’s no illusion anymore that this is something we may be exempt from.

I don’t really know why I cried when I saw this. I felt for him, for the innocence of our town, for my own remission/relapse fear. For sudden grief that doesn’t permit goodbyes.

I don’t know how to end this blog. I don’t say that “those were the days,” that the experience was idyllic, though these recollections tell me it was closer than I knew. But the fact remains that those of us who grew up, who learned to ride bikes and squirt super soakers at one another, who bought Big League Chew at the same candy store and rang the same Halloween doorbells, will always be connected.

We may not be or have been friends, we may barely know the lives each other lives now, but by circumstance and proximity, we shaped for one another those two square miles of childhood. 

The B Word.

Balance. Without it, I tend to become the other B word.

Someone asked me how the whole, "I need friends who don't live hand-to-mouth," blog went over, if there was any push-back from it. I said, not that I know of, but that I’d spoken to some other folks over the weekend, and was reminded of something very important in life: Things are not black and white.

When I stopped drinking, it was because I was an alcoholic. I put the bottle down, looked around, and declared everyone close to me alcoholic, too. Whether they were or not, I was on a crusade of reform, and they all were alcoholics who needed to stop as I did.

Well… two things: a) yes, most of the people I was associated with “at the end” were in fact drinking alcoholically, but b) that didn’t mean they or anyone who drank were alcoholics. In the beginning, I needed that kind of black and white thinking, because being close-ish to people who were drinking was too difficult a gray line when my line had to be crystal clear.

But, just because that was the way for me, I came to realize that wasn’t the way for everyone. And after some time passed, and indeed the folks who were hopeless sops like me faded from the foreground of my life, I got to see that some people (god bless them) can drink normally.

There’s one friend who stuck through my own transition. She described this "normal" drinking to me: she literally says to herself, “Hmm, I’m beginning to feel buzzed, I should switch to water.” Uh… I didn’t get that memo. “I’m beginning to feel buzzed,” was always followed by, “A few more will get it done right,” or if I was feeling temperate, “I should switch to beer.”

So, my friend does not react to alcohol how I do. And I have to come to see that there is a world between sauced and tight-ass.

In the same way, I recognize that as I begin to assess my behavior and extremism around money, scarcity, and deprivation, I am being called to allow others their own experience, even as I diagnose and address my own.

Just because a friend opened a new credit card, doesn’t mean I have to stop hanging out with them. Just because a friend is earning less than I think they deserve in the world, doesn’t mean they’re addicted to deprivation. Just because other people behave differently than me, doesn’t mean my way is the right way, and most importantly, doesn't mean I don't have anything to learn from them. 

As with getting sober, I do have to admit that some of the folks around me may indeed have trouble in this area – water seeks its own level, after all. But, that doesn’t mean I have to be an asshole about it.

And, that’s what I’ve gotten to see these past few days I’ve been declaring myself needing to “move on” from friends and communities who have what I’d declared a “faulty, diseased, and only rectifiable by a spiritual solution” relationship to money, and thereby the world.

It’s a good thing people don’t take me that seriously!

And it’s a good thing I can remember to not take myself too seriously, too. If I’d stuck to every declaration about myself… by this point I would have been:

Vegetarian

Israeli

A prostitute

A suicide victim

A daily exerciser

T.V.-less

Caffeine-less

An organic farmer

and a truck driver.

The thing is, I can’t make blanket declarations for myself or anyone else. I have no idea what my path contains or eliminates, thereby no idea what others’ do.

There is some truth to wanting to learn from and be around people whose relationship to money can model my own. But that’s because I have a problem with it. Not everyone does, and if they do, it’s really none of my business.

It comes to equanimity, and allowing others and myself our experience without judgment. It means having openness, compassion, and respect toward all people on all paths. It does certainly include me getting help for a pattern of beliefs and behaviors that have led me to despair and insanity, but it also includes me being more generous in my assessments of life. Allowing for the gray, for the middle-ground, for difference, for balance.

Because, solvent or not, nobody likes a bitch. 

Seeing Someone

Yesterday, I saw my new somatic therapist for the 2nd time, and we’ve decided to continue to work together, for the next little while. I don’t know, exactly, what changes will be wrought from it, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to again who’s third party and kind and uninvested in propping me up or giving me advice.

Which isn’t to say she isn’t keen on helping me recover and heal, but she doesn’t really have any agenda except that. Which is nice.

At the end of the session, I said how it galls me that I was supposed to, all these years, work on trauma recovery and grieving, and now I have to go through recovery from the trauma and grieving of cancer to even get to that layer of healing and muck.

She said something heartening, which I’m not sure I agree with yet, but maybe will eventually: That it’s all connected. That if we work on one part, it’s pulling on all the others. Like a spider web, if I work and tug and pull and excise over here, it’ll ripple across and affect the other parts.

We’ll see. As always, the act of showing up is one of hope that things (that I, my life and how I engage in or hide from it) will change. I have hope, every time I call a friend or reach out for help or write this blog – this blog is an act of writing myself out of the darkness.

In my “stats,” I see someone read that first blog called “Cancer,” so this morning I went back to read it too. So much of what I wrote about the recovery process was true and so many of the questions are still the same, if not a little more in focus. My cousin is a doctor in palliative care, and reads my blog (Hi, L.!), and she emailed me the other day after she’d read my blog to say she’d never thought of life-threatening illness as trauma before, but of course it is. And to thank me for the bravery of putting my process of coagulation up for the help of so many.

It’s interesting to read back to that first blog, and to read the virulent ambivalence of being “an inspiration.” And it’s something that came up yesterday in my session: the desire to be someone who holds the torch, and the desire to stop being the f’ing person who holds the torch all the time.

The duality of being a leader, if you can call this that (which, frankly, I’m coming to see it is), is that sometimes you want to just march along with everyone else. You get tired of standing at the top of the mountain alone to look out and see where you should go next, what horizons need staking. You get tired of being the one who charges into the fray – of being the person, as I wrote in that blog, who just “goes with it,” faces it, accepts it.

AND YET, of course, for me, I want to be that person, too – I want to be the person who is a light for others; I want to be a teacher and a leader and an inspiration. I want to exact positive change in the world.

Yesterday, in session, we spoke about vascillating between both these feelings, and allowing it to be. It’s part of owning the all of myself: the fearless leader, and the exhausted soldier. The tireless explorer, and the guy who just wants to carry the horse oats and play cards in the tent.

I think part of my ambivalence is a conscious understanding of what leadership might mean, too. To recognize, without slipping into workaholism or unseeing “progress,” that I am, and have always been Both/And.

At some point, I also told her that I’d been scrolling through my profile photos on Facebook just the other day, since I’d put a new one up. And I came, on Tuesday, sitting in my car waiting to meet up with some folks, to the photo of myself at graduation from Mills College in May of 2012. That I stand with a cap and gown, long hair, and a “radiant smile,” I told her.

I told her how I began to cry, looking at that photo, out of grief that that girl had to go, and would go, through all this. That she had no idea what was about to happen. That the innocence of that moment and that glee was … time-limited. To see that girl, to know what she was about to go through, to feel so sorry that she does and will, and still is, is grief. To know that my right eyelid will never look quite the same, an eye infection during chemo causing it to droop slightly, so that I can see it now, though others can’t. To know what that graduation day meant to me – to accomplish something, to put my energies in and to excel, learn, progress, and shine.

I suppose, truthfully, I can say the same for my current profile photo. Almost 2 years later, headshots for theater gigs. The result of something I’ve also put my energies and monies and progress toward in order to shine the way I know that photo does, too.

It’ll take some time, as I wrote in that first cancer blog, to heal from all this. But I am a leader with a torch--though, please, sometimes, can you be one too?

The Tell-Tale Heart

Written 2011:

i meet with a grad student who tells me not to take split-level poetry because all the under-grads write about is date rape – so i don’t tell him about the drunken carride from two strangers, later finding an earring twisted into my shirt, or being turned away from four Korean hospitals because rape is not an emergency.

i read an article on how to snag a man which suggests that women think about something naughty when out because women won’t pick up on it, but the men will – so, i imagine licking pre-cum from a cock, which provides a lascivious revolt against public decorum and not undamp panties.

but, in the unwalled house of my memory, these situations sometimes mix – and the salt sours, the armor rebuilds, and the currency of reality cripples.

In Bernie Siegel’s book, Love, Medicine, and Miracles, he reports that his research has shown that most cancer patients have suffered a significant breach in trust at an early age.

“I will slice your face with a razor blade/

and watch your smile fade.”

- The couplet I often recite in my head when I’m feeling cornered, scared, and angry.

I informed you a little while ago that it seems like repairing my relationship with intimacy, trust, and sex is probably back on the agenda. Yesterday, after my work at my shamanic journey group, this was made pretty apparent.

And luckily, one of my great friends in attendance told me afterward that our mutual friend is having a hugely positive experience with a therapist/healer around similar issues. I plan to contact her today.

In fact, I’d referred the same friend to my own “intuitive” (read: psychic), and it’s just humorous to me that me and this group of women have this rolodex of woo-woo witchy healer folks. And damned, if I’m not grateful for it.

For those unfamiliar, shamanic journeying (according to my novice understanding) is pretty much an intense meditation, but there’s a drum, the sound of which is purported to help induce a dream-like state—it’s like a guided meditation, where instead of listening to someone’s voice tell you to follow down a path in the forest, you sort of follow the drum, and make your own path through the forest. I’ve been journeying for years now, and find it to be one of the best and quickest ways to access internal information—however uncomfortable that information may be.

Yesterday’s overall message was that I have to repair my relationship to trust. Yuck.

It’s like trust for me is a broken port, and until it’s repaired, there will be glitches and sparks and melted fuses.

The thing about sexual trauma is this: you want to show people (the right people) the wound, you want to share about it, you want to exorcise it, you want to talk about it in order to heal from it, to release it and move on from it. You want to expose it to fresh air so that it heals instead of festers. You want to bring it into the sun and let the forces at work do their magic to create something beautiful out of something horrifying.

And yet.

Because of the nature of sexual trauma as a secret, and the prevalence of people dismissing it as exaggeration… You also don’t want to share about it. You are ashamed to bring it out, to tell anyone, to share about it. You feel that to mention it is to invite revulsion, rejection, dismissal. And perhaps, you have experience to back up that fear, and so you remain locked up tight with it, and it will continue to burn a hole in your heart.

The longer you hold onto it, the more painful it becomes, until it becomes something so immense in your heart and head that you can’t imagine that you can actually share it with other people, because it will overwhelm everyone, including yourself.

This, is why god made therapists. Healers. And friends with rolodexes.

The arrows toward healing this next came from “going in” to my meditation with questions about my recent fatigue. Over the last month or so, I’ve been so fucking tired, and my western and eastern doctors can’t figure it out, except that my eastern doc said, “You’re energy center is depleted.” Well, yeah. But why?

The information I got last night was that I have been fighting this, this knowledge, these experiences, this anger, this sorrow, … well, for years. I’ve been avoiding it for just as long. I’ve been fighting dealing with it, but it’s there. Believe you me, apparently, it’s there. And somehow my awareness has cracked open about it. Somehow, I am aware that I am exhausted from this fight, from this constant battle to suppress, dominate, and deny.

Some veil has lifted, some curtain shifted, and I am finally able to experience the exhaustion.

And if I want to get healthy, then I have to heal it. And if I want to heal it…--well, as I mentioned earlier, I’m more than a little ambivalent about doing so.

First things first. Call my friend who’s working with someone. Get that info.

Second thing? Ensure that I approach and treat myself with the most radiant compassion and care that I can muster, cuz,

We’re gonna need a bigger boat. 

Cookie Monster

Otherwise, who would eat the blackened one?

This single line is the first poem of my first chapbook, back in 2010. The essence of its meaning is the idea that I must eat the blackened cookie in order to save others from having to eat it. In fact, it meant that I would choose that cookie above others on the savory plate just so no one else would have to touch it. I would throw myself on that sword before you even had to see it was there. I would do this for you.

That was 2010. I revisited this question a little while ago, and asked myself, if not me, then who would? No one, came the answer. No one had to eat the rotten, blackened thing. No one had to throw themselves on a sword. There is enough that we can all have a chewy, chocolate chipity experience. There is enough that none of us have to be a martyr and I can let others choose around the thing (or choose the thing) if they want.

Today, in my new dating world, I find myself, per metaphor, rushing to knock others over on my way to the hearty cookies. I am not patient to wait for the tray to be passed around the table—if there’s a way to get the good cookie, I will elbow your ribs to find one. In the process, I will annoy or anger you, or I will eventually upset the whole tray, and no one, including myself will get a cookie.

Because this way, too, the belief is there is not enough.

Call it cancer, age, healing, I am not willing to eat the blackened one anymore. I am not willing to drink the dregs, settle for less, diminish my worth, stand silently… or, apparently, be patient. In an effort to reverse years of sour cookies, I am finding myself clawing my way to the better ones. But only here, in this dating world. Only here, am I getting to see where I have long-harbored ideas of lack, and so perhaps one could call me “grateful” (gag, sputter, gasp) to have the experience now and the perspective on myself to see what is happening.

I WANT CONTROL. I am so attached to an outcome (the good cookie), I think that I can poke or wink or smile or demure or hearty laugh or intellectual conversation or sex or heavy or shared interest my way toward that outcome. Yet, see above: upset tray.

In many ways, it’s the same as diving for the blackened one. It’s a manipulation of the results. The belief follows that if I eat the blackened one, you are saved, and you are able to love me. The belief was that if I ate the sour cookie, I am the silent, steady rube whom you will reward for my sacrifice with accolades.

Both manners of being are born out of the fear of lack of love. Fear that I will not be taken care of.

It does not surprise me that a monolith of emotions and emotional backlash and predatory fear have arisen as I step into the dating world. It simply confirms why I’ve stayed away as long as I have. I know there is work to be done here, and avoidance is a great way to not have to feel those feelings. To not have to look at the monster and, perhaps, Hulk-like, calm it down until it reverts back to a normal, California girl.

If you stay out of the dining room, you neither have to eat the blackened one nor cut a path through to the full ones.

But, eventually you get hungry. 

My object now is to whisper in that girl’s terrified ear, There is enough (love). If you wait and allow the tray to be brought to you, you can have one. If you allow yourself to focus on the rest of the meal, the chicken and potatoes and brussel sprouts (cuz you know you love em), the tray will come to you. If, instead you focus jealously on GETTING A FUCKING COOKIE you will miss the bounty that’s in front of you.

Which is another way to say that my being so singularly focused on the outcome I want around this (or any) situation, I’m actually making myself miserable. I notice that calculating all the angles to my end-goal (through poking and winking and sexing and making you see me) is taking me out of the joy of the experience. It’s removing me from my center, my self, and from the fucking thing I wanted in the first place: to date.

I certainly am learning things! And I am going to try to eat my potatoes, and TRUST that I can be present in the moment, and let all the other moments follow in their own order and time. I will try to trust that I can relax into the moment, into the joy, into the newness and the awkwardness and the hilarity and the growth, because there is enough. 

And, who knows, if the cookies do run out, maybe there’s a Junior’s Cheesecake in the kitchen. 

Modern Family

Yesterday could not have been more marvelous. Oh, San Francisco friends ~ How I miss you!!! And how I don’t realize it until I see you.

Having lived in SF for almost 5 years before moving here to Oakland, I had the (I can’t even think of the proper word – I don’t think I know it) intensely fulfilling and soul-affirming opportunity to meet and grow with a pack of women. Many of my desperately favorites were at my friend’s Memorial Day bbq event yesterday.

The feeling of guts relaxing, smiles expanding, hearts sighing, that’s how it was. I can’t stand it.

But I could, and I did. I was there, and present, and helped, and talked, and listened, and laughed, and sun-baked (beneath a generous layer of SPF), and hammocked, and cherry picked, and peach picked, and dribbled little lines of peach juice down my chin, and made children laugh, and they made me laugh, and caught up, and shared, and understood, and was understood. Oh, this family gathering. This is my family, part of it anyway. And how good it was to be back with them.

So many things have changed. The children are bigger. One is moving to Japan. One got braces. One got certified. How many things change when we aren’t looking – or in communication.

The phone works, sure. The bridge works, sure. But how me and this particular group of women met, and shared, and grew, it was in person. It was by witnessing monumental and incremental growth over weeks and weeks which became years and years.

Yes, I’m feeling a little sappy. But I can’t help it. I love them. And, they love me. This is a section of people who know me in a way few do, who have witnessed my own growth and change, and who like me, accept me, are fond of me. As I do them. What a miraculous gift. What a fucking gift.

I don’t know quite the solution. Does there need to be one? The ache that I realize was there? I felt the same way when I went to a workshop run by the same woman who hosted this barbeque – the workshop was in January, and I arrived and saw two women I hadn’t seen in likely a year or more, and again, my guts sank down from somewhere behind my ribs, where they'd been benignly pinching my lungs and inhibiting my breathing, they sunk, phoom, back down to where they belong in the grounding, rooted, centered calm.

It was at that workshop that I realized how much I missed them all. This won’t be another diatribe on how I don’t feel connected to the East Bay as in the “Exile” blog. I do feel connected, more connected, than I had, with more women than I had. I feel friendships, and activity partners, and women to share with. But. … I’ve only been here a year and a half, almost two. That’s not 5. That’s not in the same way.

Things change. They must, and they have to. Can I change with them? How do I balance? How do I maintain – or if change is necessary, not “maintain,” then, but evolve? How do I evolve with the reality of distance?

Because I won’t always be here in the Bay. That much is likely true. And what happens then? I have a dear friend who moved to Brooklyn last year, and we speak on the phone maybe once every two months, with some smatterings of texts, but we’re not nearly as close – this woman who was once as close as my heart.

How do we do this?

I’m not sure. I know that I obviously missed these women more than I knew. I missed the way I feel when I’m around them – known and loved, exactly as I am, for who I am. Women who know me well enough to jibe at me, laugh with me at myself, and poke into parts of me that need to be poked for movement to happen. These are women… for christ’s sake, I can’t stop gushing.

What now? If I’m aiming to be responsible and adult in my life, to take action where I’ve taken none, to believe that no one is coming to change or live or make my life for me – then, how do I incorporate this knowledge? The knowledge that I want more of that – that I want those connections kindled, or renewed?

I love my new friends – they are buoying me in ways they don’t even know. But I miss my old friends. I miss so much of what’s happening. Life is so damn short and quick, and things move so suddenly. Someone moves to a new town. Someone to a new country. Someone is engaged, or married, or pregnant. Someone is in a break-up or new relationship. Someone is changing careers, or expanding a business, or taking a new class, or forming a girl’s band (yes, that’s me and my friend with plans to jam with her drums and my bass, here in the east bay).

I want. Terrible words. But, I do. I want – I want what I had, but in the present. I want what I had yesterday – the gut-release, the warm bath, the mild pleasant smirking at the familiarity of us all.

I want. In the present. And how. 

What Ifs – A Response

What if I thought more of others’ happiness

What if I were grateful for what I have

What if I took good care of my possessions

What if I took good care of my body

What if I allowed myself to receive love from others

What if I allowed myself to receive my own

What if I believed I was alright

What if I were grateful for my coffee mugs, 

                                                 gifts from kind friends

What if I were grateful for the furniture in my apartment, 

                                                 free, all of it

What if I were grateful for the electricity

                                                 clean water

                                                 hot water

                                                 a refrigerator

What if I allowed myself to fill my refrigerator

What if I allowed myself to believe in my inherent goodness

What if I believed that I was more than my wants

What if I believed that I was able to carry more than I ever have

What if I thanked others for their kindness

                                                 What if I meant it

What if I let myself feel love for other people

What if I let myself feel generosity of spirit

What if I thought there was enough for everyone

What if I thought more about everyone

What if love was a gift

What if I let myself breathe 

                                                 when I hug people

What if the smell of children’s hair was enough

What if I let myself believe in my dreams

What if I let myself support them in an adult way

What if I opened to hearing your praise

What if I opened to hearing your guidance

What if I opened to hearing your story

                                                 without thought to improve, correct, enhance

What if you were enough.

What if I were enough

What if I let myself stop 

                                                 worrying

                                                 being small

                                                 hiding

What if I believed it were safe

What if I believed you were safe

What if I believed that I were

What if I let myself be

What if I were more generous with my gifts

What if I were more generous with my affection

What if I were more generous with my laughter

What if I could relax

What if I could relax.

Pulling a Carmen: 2

When I began this blog-a-day back in November of last year, my first post was called “Pulling a Carmen,” as I'd been reading and was encouraged by her own blog-a-day postings. In the time since, sometimes I just find it hugely funny how parallel my path is to my fellow blogger and friend.

For recent example:

• I also just starting going back on to the internet dating scene. In fact, I have a coffee date today with someone I met on JDate

• I too have said fuck it, and asked out a dude yesterday. Unfortunately, turns out he’s married, but it felt really good to do so.

• Several of the books that are lining my desk and bedside table are travel books about Europe, underlining my intention to take a real freaking vacation some time this century.

• And, I also rented a camera and video camera from the school’s A/V department to begin taking pictures again. 

Sometimes I feel awkward about our exceedingly similar trajectories, as if I’m copying her, but the reality is that independently, we come to these things, and then come here to write about them. It’s really funny, and also somewhat comforting to know that there is someone who is traveling a similar path toward “To thine own self be true.”

On that note, I went to see my friend’s band play in the city last night, and then headed with my girlfriends to go out dancing in Oakland. Prior to both these… we went to the Dharma Punx meditation – nothing says spiritually fit like meditating for 40 minutes before downing coffee with an add-shot. ;)

But to relate it to the ‘self be true’ part – each of these are places where I want to feel more connection. I hadn’t been to see live music in MUCH too long. It’s on my current list of “Serenity Moths” on my refrigerator (a list of things that aren’t cataclysmic, but slowly and subterraneaously eat away at my serenity and foundation). Yes, “Absence of live music” is on there, and so should be “dancing.” I’m a white girl. I have no ambition or goal to be anything but a mildly flailing Elaine Benice, but … i love it. The absence of self, the absence of self criticism or posturing or need to be anywhere or anything else. Lost in the music.

The band brought something else up for me. Like the “dropping” of the whole acting bent at the beginning of this year, what I’ve dropped more often than anything is the “being in a band” idea.

As you may know, I have 2 guitars, a bass, and a small USB plug in keyboard. Each as dust-covered as the next. The bass amp sits as a monument to abandoned dreams in my apartment.

Last night, watching my friend’s band, I remembered that this is something I want to do. In fact, I’d emailed one of the guitarist’s wife about 6 or more months ago to talk to her about her own process of getting toward singing in a band - embracing her inner teenage rock chick. If I had my … well, if I had my own back, I guess, I’d play bass, and I’d sing. Talk about vulnerability.

This week, I stood practically naked in front of an audience and spoke my poem into a microphone in a moderately full theater. That isn’t nearly as frightening to me as standing in front of an audience, singing, or playing.

The truth is that for several years, I’ve been gathering information about the whole bass playing thing. But, no, I haven’t been playing. A few years ago, I asked a guy I knew for bass advice, and he sent me a long list of places to start (which I didn't pursue). About a year later, I contacted this other guy about bass lessons (which I didn't pursue). … And the guy I asked out yesterday is also a bass player. Apparently, I have a thing.

Every few years, I’ll troll craigslist, and I’ll answer a few ads for singers. I even recorded myself a little on my computer’s Garageband to send as a sample. I got a “not a good fit, but thanks anyway” from one, and no reply from another. And, hey, I don’t blame em. When I’m terrified, it comes through. I don’t know. I’ve written here about it kind of frequently – and dismissed it and been “embarrassed” by it just as often.

However, once again, the thing that occurred to me last night as I watched my friend’s band was another case of “I want to do that” … followed by “I can do that.” There is no one stopping me, obviously except for myself and my fears, and that critic that says “Not good enough” and chops me off at the knees before I start.

One thing I’m working on releasing at the moment, a pattern and belief and behavior that is just not fucking serving me anymore, is my need or habit to stay small.

When I was living in South Korea, my friend nicknamed me “Ballsy Mollsy.” I had the absolute chutzpah and hubris to ask anyone anything, go anywhere, and do pretty much whatever I felt like doing in the hedonistic way most drunks do.

However, there is a quality of that Ballsy woman who still I am, somewhere, and who I want to resurrect or reveal or uncover or let loose – or even just let into the light a little tiny bit.

I find it’s happening in some ways. And I know to have compassion for myself as I try to aim in this direction which has been a Siren song for me (uh, no pun intended) for … oh, 15 years.

But compassion for slow progress, and acceptance of stagnation are two different things. And I’d really like to move forward from here.

So, for your reading pleasure, here’s a poem composed about a year ago. Reading aloud is encouraged.  As is recalling the line "So let it be written, so let it be done." Cheers. m.

Band Practice

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TNK tnktnk THWAP

Tnktnk THWAP tnk tnktnk THWAP

Tnka tnka thwap

Tnka tnka tnka thwap

Tnka tnka thwap

Tnka tnka tnka thwap

Tnka tnka thwap

Tnka tnka tnka thwap

TNK TNK THWAP!