there’s a mess in my head and i can’t make any sense out of it

Christmas ended up being a weird non-event. There was homemade pasta and a movie and a long walk followed by a lengthy bus ride at midnight in the rain, during which the bus driver talked to me at length about his cats and a bedraggled woman with a push-cart gave me a broken candy cane. And then as this day I’d opted to largely ignore drew to a close and I was trying mightily to fall asleep in the dark, suddenly I was crying, a lot, silently but fervently, like my face had just sprung a leak.

Apparently I’d forgotten exactly how bad last Christmas actually was, but it came rushing back to me and left me feeling all hurt and sad all over again. And a couple of things conspired to make me feel about a thousand times worse, pretty much immediately:

1. I was not actually alone, and evidently I no longer trust any human beings enough to actually display real emotions in front of them, and if I accidentally do so, I will immediately and irretrievably lose my shit entirely;
2. My overriding impulse was to somehow flee the scene, as though I could maybe outrun these particular feelings if I just got a good enough head start;
3. Apart from embarking upon an eight mile walk in the middle of the fucking night, fleeing was actually impossible at that particular moment in time;
4. The words that started falling out of my mouth when I got caught crying sounded embarrassing and pathetic, especially to me, things like, I do not do this in front of people, you will make fun of me…? But they were coming from some extremely sad and wounded inner child who hasn’t quite made peace with things yet to the degree the semi-functional emotionally-compartmentalized adult I actually am likes to believe she has;
5. The basic level of human kindness with which this was all met was fully unexpected, which made me cry even more, because for some horrible reason I don’t have the emotional fortitude to examine properly, my reaction to people being nice to me is to basically weep;
6. And in the midst of all of this it struck me rather forcefully that I was actively putting myself in a position where I was going to get incredibly hurt, through no one’s fault, really, except my own for actually believing that I possess some level of control over my feelings when I most assuredly do not.

I did eventually stop crying and fall asleep, and something happened a few hours later in such a sleepy haze I’m not sure whether it was real or a dream–this has been happening to me a lot lately, and I’m generally opting to believe “dream”–but I eventually woke up all irritable and moody and kind of snarky and mean and I’ve been basically knee-jerk reacting to everything everyone has said to me all day and the thing is, you guys, I feel like I’m 16 all over again lately, and it was no fucking fun the first time around and it’s even worse now, when I’m used to at least being able to hang onto the illusion of having some measure of control over my own thoughts and behavior and feelings. I’m picking fights and listening to The Cure and acting all mopey and sullen and on top of all that, my inner grown-up is rolling her eyes at me and telling me to knock it off because this shit is annoying, and she’s right, and I used to know how to do that, I think, but I seem to have lost that skill rather recently, and besides, the dumb fucking teenager with no sense of self-preservation at all keeps whining, oh, who cares, so let me get hurt, it’s always worth it.

But it’s not, is the thing, not always. And maybe this is the new and confusing thing, maybe? Maybe that tiny little sliver of self-preservation, that teeny little shred of value, maybe that’s the thing that’s different. I don’t know how to get what I want and what I need in line with each other, and I don’t know how to let go of the thing in my hand that’s on fire and burning me, and this really, really petulant part of me is very incensed that apparently, the time has come to learn these things, because it’s the opposite of fun, and the thing is, it hurts anyway, and that? Well, hell, that just isn’t fair.

happy holidays

It’s Christmastime and I’m thinking about my family.

I haven’t talked to my family since sometime in June, when, at the advice of a therapist who assured me I’d already done more than I could reasonably have been expected to in efforts to repair these diseased relationships, I quietly cut them all out of my life. A lot of people got cut out of my life in that sweep, really–everyone I wasn’t absolutely sure I could trust. Everyone I felt any amount of ambivalence toward. Everyone whose motives in knowing me I questioned.This wasn’t huge or ugly or dramatic, and nor was it impulsive or something I regret. This was one of the most carefully-planned events of my life, secretive, quiet, and methodical, and it was worrisome, too, because I had to take it on faith that the people I wanted to keep–my people–would still be there once the dust settled and I rejoined the world at large.

(They were, across the board.)

Anyway, it’s Christmastime and I’m thinking about my family, but not in some kind of melancholy maudlin way. I’m just… thinking about them. Wondering at everything that’s transpired over 35 years to bring us all to this point, this place where I’ve decided it’s okay if we just don’t know each other anymore, because knowing them causes me actual injury.

*shrug*

You do what you need to do.

I’m thinking about how, when I was not-quite 18 years old, they quite literally dumped me on a streetcorner in Manhattan with $250 in my pocket and immediately checked out of my life in every conceivable way, except the way where I apparently still owed them something for their time, inconvenience, and expense in having raised me (badly and as inexpensively as possible). I’m thinking about how, in the 18 years since, the only time they have ever come to visit me, no matter where I’ve lived, was the time when I was 21 and they “surprised” me with some kind of horribly ill-conceived intervention during which they told me I had a moral obligation to

• apologize to the husband who had abandoned his family the week before, with the parting words, “If it’s the last thing I do I’ll make sure I see you and Adam starving on the street”;
• not only allow but invite said husband back into the home he had willingly left;
• accept and understand that I deserved to be choked, hit, kicked, and generally terrorized by said husband (he had spent Thanksgiving Day in what I can identify now as a cocaine-induced rage, but was just terrifying and confusing at the time, and destroyed our entire living room before slamming me against a wall and strangling me, then storming out with the above delightful words);
• acknowledge that whatever was happening was not only bad, it was my fault, and I was being “selfish” (actual word used) for not fixing it.

Fourteen years later I still have a real problem reconciling that day in my mind, and I have even more difficulty understanding what on earth I was thinking in ever speaking to them again after that.

Anyway. It is Christmastime, and I am thinking about my family, and thinking… I should have let this break stick the first time I made it, 16 years ago.

i started writing this on december 2

I woke up just after 5 a.m. fresh out of a dream in which I was saying things that can only be categorized as blisteringly hateful to all of the people I am currently angry at. I’ve been unusually level-headed in the wake of recent events–well, or so it would appear. I’ve been venting to other people, you know, people I am not currently angry at, and engaging in the occasional revenge fantasy, and sometimes perhaps indulging in mild obsessions about things in general. Until Sunday, I hadn’t been eating or sleeping much at all, which was nice with the 15 pound weight loss kickstart but is probably not a good thing, on the whole; the human body is surely not designed to thrive on copious amounts of cigarettes and coffee and a 45-minute catnap twice a day. Anyway, I was feeling better, or so I thought, until several extremely stupid things happened late last night in a short period of time and I wound up so angry and bent out of shape I had to just shut down for the night and go to sleep.

And in my sleep, all the things I wanted to say, I said. While there is some measure of satisfaction in that, less satisfying was my largely realistic dreamscape in which my perfectly valid expressions of vile hatred were met with reactions like, “Why can’t you ever just be nice?” Because you see, everything is my fault and the rotten things people do that affect me are done pre-emptively in exchange for what will eventually be my reaction to them. Because this makes sense, right?

1. Dream: I am with Ray and Tarryn at some kind of bar and I have an overwhelming urge to punch her in the face even though I have no idea who she is. Later, Ray and I are having a Discussion re: Ways I Am An Unsuitable Mate, and I break in to ask about Tarryn and how much of this has to do with her. Because in dreams, Ray is much more forthright and honest than he is in reality, he responds with the truth, and I say, offhandedly, “Yeah, I was wondering why it was so hard for me to not punch you both in the face at dinner.” He replies,

“See. This is why I never tell you anything. You’re such a bitch. She’s amazing and doesn’t deserve this shit from you.”

I was in the middle of a heated and carefully-worded reply indicating that if she were really so amazing perhaps she could find her own boyfriend instead of sinking her talons into mine, oh, and also, she wears too much makeup and looks like an aging hooker (truth–I saw pictures; see above re: mild obsessions) when I woke up. Strangely unsatisfying.

2. Not a Dream: Last week I went out with Ryan and we had this wonderful time, all sparks and magic and stupid grinning and the kind of kisses that take on lives of their own like a force of nature. This was, frankly, terrifying. The last time I encountered that kind of rampant chemistry he turned out to be so screwed up in ways I could never have fully predicted, broke my heart completely and blamed me for it, and then kept telling me he really wanted to be my friend while… well, being someone who was many things, but definitely not my friend, and the whole thing left me all messed up and miserable for close to two full years. I could posit a believable theory, in fact, that Ray only happened because this guy had left me critically wounded first and not only did I have no real defenses left against anything, I had also concluded–I’ll admit it–that love was largely a farce and an excuse for people to be horrible to each other, as if we really needed more excuses for that, our very favorite human activity.

This was a Low Point for me, really; that degree of cynicism does not come naturally to me.

Anyway, so it was a very exciting night, but also a completely terrifying one, because what experience tells me is that when something amazing happens, human nature is to run away from it as quickly as possible while leaving a bread-crumb trail of mixed messages and strange blame behind you and everyone winds up sad and alone and entering full-steam into a completely inappropriate relationship to ease the pangs of a broken heart, and by “everyone” I mean me. And for some reason I did not want this to happen. Call me crazy, but I thought–nay, I hoped!–that perhaps, for once, this could be handled in some kind of sane fashion, in which maybe we would continue to get to know each other and eventually, over some kind of reasonable and protracted period of time, decide that either this was a thing that wouldn’t or couldn’t work, or that maybe it was a thing that would or could and we should maybe try that. No real pressure or anything; it was just that for once, the idea of a second date was actually appealing, and that hadn’t happened yet over the course of about two dozen first dates of varying quality.

Naturally this was not to be. Apart from the I’M CONFUSED AND TERRIFIED HELP ME insanity I directed at… OK, well, every friend who was willing to listen, and plenty who weren’t but refrained from telling me outright to shut the hell up already my god you’re crazy stop it, I handled this with some degree of grace. His life is complicated and mine is in a weird place and I am genuinely unsure as to whether he set up and then executed the most unnecessarily elaborate blow-off plan in history (A+ for forethought and effort, seriously) or if things really are just that complicated. Who knows?

He keeps randomly getting back in touch and being bafflingly cryptic and non-specific and I finally just decided I didn’t really have room in my brain to try to interpret the mysterious mating rituals of someone I only knew for a day in the first place.  But it would have been fun, you know?

3. A long, strange reality far weirder than any dream: Thanksgiving and everything after.

I have to be careful with this story. Like I need to protect it or something. Also, I don’t understand it myself, despite what feels like eternal discussion about it. (Recurring topic of conversation between two people you could not PAY to shut the fuck up around each other: Deconstructing the nature and potential of this non-relationship. Christ. Particularly fun when one party is experiencing Feelings and is exactly drunk enough to be incredibly honest and articulate and also believably claim the next day to not remember anything he said. Three hours, dude. THREE HOURS, and I have to remember this whole endless and circular line of rationalizations alone.)

Okay, so on Thanksgiving I was feeling kind of… weird. It’s really strange to spend one of those big holidays alone–there’s nothing to do and no one to talk to and I start thinking about my family and that is a tortuous path indeed. So I was listening to music and doing seventeen different things on the Internet and one of the tabs I had open was fucking OkCupid, where lonely dysfunctional people go to meet other wildly damaged people in hopes of getting naked with them as rapidly and often as possible. And a random IM from a random person popped up:

(11:00:27 am)Random Stranger:Ah, the festive tradition of an OKC surf? With an open chat no less? What’s the story here?

I don’t usually reply to instant messages. In fact, I usually block people when they try to chat with me when I accidentally leave the chat on. Responding to chat messages has brought me, in the past, the likes of Emotionally Crippled Wheelchair Guy, Immediate Commitment Guy, and, more recently, Going To Have A Long Conversation Then Get Pissy After Request For Nude Pics Is Denied Guy, so I pretty much have a 100% track record of complete fail in this arena. And yet… and yet….

(11:11:30 am)Me:There’s always a story, isn’t there.

(11:12:00 am)Random Stranger:Not always. Sometimes, your just in the express checkout for a carton of soy milk.

(11:13:20 am)Me:But why soy. Why that store. Why that moment. If the answer is as simple as “because it just happened”… still a story.

(11:13:24 am)Me:Just a sort of bland one.

(11:14:14 am)Random Stranger:Well, what would be the purpose of a bland story?

(11:15:58 am)Me:Cosmic absurdity? We spend so much time searching for meaning, and so often it comes down to, “well, so that happened.”

Eventually we ended up at a pub where we drank a lot of beer and traded dysfunctional childhood/relationship stories for many, many hours. And we’ve only rarely shut up since. It’s been interesting, this one, in ways I’m still working on translating from nebulous, vague thoughts to actual English words (and meeting with very little success, apart from the occasional breakthrough epiphany).

Well… so that happened.

update

All of these things I want to talk about–well, write about–but I feel like I need to move again. The blog, I mean, not geographically (again). I don’t know if Ray is poking around here or not and in light of how everything ended up, I’m not particularly comfortable with him having access to my personal thoughts and meandering emotional outbursts. I don’t know. I need to think about it a little longer.

The past few weeks have been challenging and interesting–a lot of very bad things and a lot of very fun things. Only a certain percentage of the bad things–maybe 25%, maybe 35%, not much more than that–were definitively my fault. Most of them were pretty next-level circumstantial fuckery, and a good portion were entirely Other People’s Fault, a concept I’m still having a little bit of trouble wrapping my head around.

This morning I got on a bus right outside the house I live in now and rode a couple miles uptown to a coffee shop, where I ordered a ridiculous quantity of coffee that was served to me in a beer stein and spent nine hours working. Then I walked the two miles home, the skyline lit up in the dark to my right, and thought, so. I guess this is where I live now. This place. Austin.

It’s kinda okay.

Year in Review

1. What did you do in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Moved to Texas.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I picked a word at the beginning of the year to shape it: “evolution.” That seems to fit.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Caryn had Cody in September. My friend Julie from high school had her first son Lane. My friend Danielle from high school had her third child, first daughter, Catherine, just this week!

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No! Hey, look at that! A bright spot!

5. What countries did you visit?

Nada. Someday I’d really like to actually have an answer here.

6. What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Sanity? Stability? Security? Mindblowing sex?

7. What dates from 2011 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Bah.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I’m looking forward to having a year someday when my knee-jerk response isn’t, “Surviving.”

9. What was your biggest failure?
Oh, wow, where should we start? I created so much failure this year. It started to self-spawn after a while, there was so much of it.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I twisted my ankle. Oh, and I had a total nervous breakdown. That was pretty long overdue.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
Nothing really comes to mind. I love the couch and loveseat Ray and I bought off Craigslist, but eh.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Jolene’s. She’s a rockstar.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Apart from my own? Well, lots of people’s. But let’s not get into that.

14. Where did most of your money go?
I wish I knew. Living, I guess.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Moving to Austin. An amazing first kiss from someone who then dropped out of my life! Dating sucks. The kiss was still amazing, though.

16. What song will always remind you of 2011?
I’d like it if nothing reminded me of 2011.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

a) happier or sadder? Happier, strangely enough.
b) thinner or fatter? Thinner, by about 25 pounds now.
c) richer or poorer? About the same, actually, which is mystifying and sad.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Productive things. Personal writing.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Being miserable, drinking.

20. How did you spend Christmas?

I have no idea what I’ll be doing more than ten minutes in advance anymore.

21. Did you fall in love in 2011?

It sure seemed that way at the time, but you can’t actually fall in love by yourself. Takes two.

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Breaking Bad was pretty awesome.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
“Hate” is a strong word. But let’s say there are some people I’d think twice before risking injury rescuing from a fire, should that ever come up again.

24. What was the best book you read?
That’s a good question. I was reading a lot early in the year but nothing is jumping out. Let me think. “A Wolf at the Table” was pretty good.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I’m not sure I had one!

26. What did you want and get?
A diagnosis for what the hell is wrong with my brain, and thus, my entire life.

27. What did you want and not get?
Soooo many things.

28. What was your favorite film of this year?
I liked 50/50 a lot.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 35 and I swear to god the only thing we did was go to the Adult Megaplexxx and buy lube.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Maybe I’ll have a New Year’s Eve so excellent that it redeems the entire miserable year. Hope springs eternal! That’d be nice, really. I’d enjoy that.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2011?
Jeans and t-shirts.

32. What kept you sane?
Interestingly, the nervous breakdown really helped a lot in this regard. I’m still pretty overly willing to extend trust and second chances to people, but I’m a lot better at cutting out toxic people, and that’s really improved my emotional health a lot.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
It’s always Johnny Depp.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
I wish Occupy were accomplishing anything. It’s important, but the lack of focus and the general shenanigans make it impossible to take seriously.

35. Who did you miss?
I found myself missing my grandmother a lot this year. I miss Alicia and our long g-chats. I miss Rasee because she just seems so much farther away in another country than in another state. I miss the kiddo pretty much all the time; that never goes away.

36. Did you meet anyone new?
So many new people. Dating is kind of horrible. Made a couple of friends out of it so far, though, so that’s pretty cool. And I always enjoy the reminder that actually, I can pretty much make friends with anyone.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2011.
It’s not actually my job to excuse other people’s bad behavior when they’re not even interested in acknowledging it.

38. Quote or song lyric that sums up your year:
Difficult not to feel a little bit disappointed or passed over

Here I am expecting just a little bit too much from the wounded

39. Anything else?
What, that wasn’t enough??

in brief

I have so much to tell you, and I promise I will, as soon as I can find the focus to sit down and do it.

Instead, please accept this brief and almost entirely non-explanatory list:

• I had an extremely unusual Thanksgiving. I don’t think I told you that yet.
• I’m going to move because I don’t want to live in my ex-boyfriend’s apartment with all of his stuff anymore. I am going to end up with roommates, which means I am officially regressing to my early 20s, and I am kind of comfortable with this. The less money I have to worry about actually earning each month, the more time I will have to focus on the Projects with which I suddenly find myself.
• I have Projects. At least two, maybe three if I can get my shit together and get over some arbitrary and unfounded fears about the third one and just do it. Me “getting my shit together” about anything is always an iffy proposition, especially if there is some kind of fear involved.
• I have three different posts here half-done and saved as drafts that are completely unrelated to any of these things.
• That book I’ve been trying to write for three fucking years? Totally different book now. Goddammit. OK, four projects.

next time

Ray came over tonight to get some of his stuff and we had a strange, unusually honest conversation.

I don’t really feel that I have much to lose anymore in just being honest with people. And so it occurred to me to tell him what I had been thinking about–something I had been thinking about, to be honest, since the very first time we had met. The thing is, I look an awful lot like his dead wife.

And I not only look like her, I share some weird superficial similarities with her. Same favorite movies, same favorite authors. I’m different than she is–I’ve never been bulimic or a cutter, for instance–but there are a lot of obvious and overt ways I’m a lot like her, and I have been since the first minute we met.

Mostly, though, I look like her. We wore the same size; we wore the same size shoe; we had similar taste in clothing, even if I tended to dress a little better than she did on a daily basis. We have the same wild hair and the same big smile and the same heart-shaped face. I could be her twin, or her younger sister, and this has always been true. I’ve always known this was true. And if I am being objective and fair, this has to have been difficult for him.

He really, really wanted me to be her, and I never was, and he had no real interest in learning who I actually was. He was a lot more interested in all the ways I failed to be Jami.

What is interesting is how quickly and readily he agreed with all this. How much Tarryn looks and acts like neither of us. I want him to be happy, I do. I just wish he could have, would have, gone about this in a way that wouldn’t make it so impossible for us to be friends down the line. Because the thing is, he doesn’t really know me, and never did. Every thing he learned about me, he dismissed or compared or generally denigrated. He’s still pretty consistently surprised I’m willing and able to talk to him without yelling.

I’m–you know. I’m over it. He hurt me really badly, but I’m okay, and I know there’s better out there for me somewhere. But I wish he hadn’t bothered lying to me. I wish he’d had any interest in really learning who I am. I can’t fault him, exactly, except for being painfully un-self-aware. But I do want him to be healthy and happy. I do.

It wasn’t selfish when I said, “The woman who has no problem ripping your relationship apart to get what she wants–that’s not someone you should trust.” I don’t want him anymore. I just don’t want him to run back to me again the next time he gets hurt.

thanksgiving

This time just one year ago, my life was in wreckage. An entire lifetime of confusion and failure to acknowledge my own feelings (valid or not) and inability to make sense of many of the things that had happened to and around me finally caught up with me, hard, one day in October of 2008 when someone I had lived with and loved for the better part of six years reacted to me with self-righteous anger and irritation when I told him the only way we could continue to be together would be if he stopped cheating on me. It was a strange moment, and one I find myself remembering often–because in the face of his selfishness and entitlement, I finally became very clear about the reality that this was not what love was supposed to be.

Of course, with Great Revelations come Great Backslidings, and I ultimately made things much, much worse for myself before I could begin to make them better. My equal and opposite reaction to being treated with what I could easily recognize as indifference bordering on cruelty was to open myself up to everyone around me, to reach out in genuine love to everyone I met, regardless of who they were or how they treated me. I would like to say, and believe, this was some kind of altruistic impulse, some kind of desire to be the change I’d like to see in the world, and there was an element of that to it. But for the most part, I was throwing darts in a dark room, blindfolded, hoping against all hope, against everything I have ever seen and been taught, that one of those darts would find a valid and viable target–that someone, if I cast a wide enough net, would see the potential I had to be amazing, and love me back.

The problem with this indiscriminate dart-throwing is that people who are broken with their own problems of confidence or shattered with grief or looking, themselves, for Unconditional Love, can smell that desperation, and, intentionally or not, they take advantage of it, manipulate it to their own ends. They can rationalize the most stunning displays of callousness because it is so easy to see that this woman who values her own ability to love and trust so deeply simultaneously loves and trusts herself so little, values herself so little, that she will forgive you no matter the crime, and keep on loving you no matter what.

Jolene said to me recently something like, “This is what has always been so difficult about watching your relationships. You have such a kind heart, and you are so forgiving, and you love them so deeply, but they are not nice to you. And that doesn’t seem to cross your mind or bother you. That they are just not nice.”

And this is true. This is completely true. It’s a very sad realization, that my default expectation for so long has been that I will be treated poorly, and for some reason, my responsibility there is to accept that graciously. That when I react in anger, it is because I cannot control my temper; if I react with hurt feelings, it is because I am too sensitive. Because far be it from me to have any expectations whatsoever of people, to demand at least basic levels of respect and good will from those to whom I am closest. The thing about being a martyr is that your entire sense of yourself is wrapped up in taking emotional responsibility for every bad thing that ever happens, while giving credit for the good things to everyone else. And the thing about doing this is that no matter how much you insist otherwise, what you are doing is playing the eternal victim, of circumstance and other people and timing and life itself, but trying to spin this in a completely different light, as though you’ve chosen these things with deliberate forethought and insight, trying to imbue yourself with power you really don’t feel by acting as though you are so above it all. So much more enlightened. And the truth of it, the simple truth, is that all you are doing is reenacting the oldest patterns in your life, over and over again, trying different techniques, modeling yourself differently, evolving and changing and claiming you’ve learned so many valuable lessons, when the biggest lesson of all, the one that has been right in front of you since you were eight years old, the one you have consistently failed to absorb because–because!–it is not actually about you at all, is that some people will just not love you. Period. Full stop. Some people will just not care, and no amount of catering to their whims or altering yourself or shrugging off their clear and obvious signs of indifference will make them start to.

And finally, in this understanding, there is true power. This, this is the thing I have been doing wrong. And in a very real way, everyone who always told me everything was my fault was right, because regardless of who started it, or how, or why, the length and depth and endurance of these things, the chaotic spiral they create for me as I try to resolve them with infinite amounts of patience and intuition and reason and forgiveness and love while chronically failing to understand that, as they say, it takes two to tango, that is all on me, and I am the only person who can change that, who can say, “No… no, you don’t get to treat me that way,” and walk away.

So today I give thanks, that I have somehow hacked my way through what seemed to be an endless overgrowth of sticker bushes and needle-y branches to find myself in an unexpected clearing, looking at the sky, and understanding that it was never my job to be perfect, it has only ever been my job to be me, and making decisions and forging relationships based on insecurity is not who I want myself to be, and not, really, who I am. And the ruins and destruction I’ve left in my wake, I’m going to have to go back and clean all that up, as much as I possibly can, and a lot of it is going to be difficult and painful and time-consuming and costly and require a certain amount of dedication and commitment I’ve never managed to muster in the past, because I never believed my own well-being was worth the trouble. And now I do. And while it’s intimidating, and scary, well… I’ve lived through more difficult things than simply confronting and accepting my own mistakes and consequences, and I’m still here to tell the tale.

I am grateful; I am so grateful.

• For learning, at a very young age, what true friendship is about, and for consistently finding supportive, loving, amazing souls who offer, without hesitation, their shoulders to cry on, their perspective when mine is skewed, their understanding of and gentleness toward my own tender heart, and their ceaseless buoying of my own flagging spirit with their eternal faith in me, regardless of how often I frustrate or infuriate or sadden them. I have taken this for granted more often than I have ever openly appreciated it, but I really do not believe I would be here, now, were I never blessed with the love and kindness of those who have happily walked beside me, arms outstretched when I fall every time, regardless of how often I slap their hands away.
• For finally taking the time I needed to explore the ugly, hidden parts of myself I was always afraid to confront, and discovering in this an ability to offer myself compassion and forgiveness I had never before allowed.
• For living in a cool new city, with a clean slate and a wide-open future ahead of me, meeting new people, being surprised, and moments of genuine joy.
• For a clean, safe, comfortable apartment I can afford to maintain on my own, while I make my living doing something I truly love.
• For finding the strength to understand that letting go of those things that cause more harm than good is not a failure, and is, in fact, perfectly in accord with my own sense of values and justice.
• For continued good health, for a sense of stability, for second and third and fiftieth chances, for clear, star-filled skies, for perspective, for sudden thunderstorms, for occasional fearlessness in the face of passion, for the ability to communicate, for the power of grace, for a sublime ability to laugh even at the worst of times, for a list of regrets comprised of many more “sorry I did”s than “sorry I didn’t”s.
• And for this life, the one that’s been tragic and challenging and beautiful and terrifying, but never, ever dull, and being built of something, under layers of dysfunction and confusion, strong enough to withstand that, and brave–or stupid–enough to never stop going back for more.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, may you love and be loved, be joyful, be honest, be brave. Be you, unapologetically. Eat and drink and be merry and kind, today and every day. Be thankful. This is your life, and it’s all happening right now, one minute at a time.

Happy Thanksgiving.

so… that happened.

The Universe theuniverse@tut.com

3:14 AM (1 hour ago)

to me

What if every unexpected delay, postponement, or redirect, Kathy, only meant that at the very last second, right before the scheduled manifestation, I had an even better idea?

It happens.
The Universe

 

snippet

“I have this neighbor. He’s like 70. The other day he came over and he was talking all this seriously offensive shit. Niggers this, queers that. And, I mean, it’s the environment he grew up in. He’s probably never really explored it. And he wasn’t being offensive, he was just using offensive words. Like he didn’t know any better, I guess, or something. And I got to wondering about what we’re going to end up doing that embarrasses the shit out of our kids and grandkids. You know, what’s going to make them roll their eyes and tell me, ‘Shush, Grandpa, you can’t say that.’”

“I’ve wondered about that too. There’s got to be something. I sure as shit don’t know what it is, though.”

[five minutes later]

“…and this guy was retarded or something–”

“–Actually retarded, or… retarded?”

[beat]

“That’s–”

“Yeah–”

“That’s the thing.”

“That’s exactly the thing.”

“I actually saw some PSA recently about ‘the r-word.’”

“I know. It’s totally a thing now.”

“But I’ve never called a person with disabilities a retard. Only people who are, well, being retarded.”

“Yeah, I know. But this distinction does not hold a lot of water. I know this and I still can’t stop saying it.”

“I know. But it really is the thing, isn’t it.”

“It is. I had a friend rip me a new one one time over it. That was a couple of years ago. It had never occurred to me before.”

“Shit. ‘Retard’ is our ‘nigger.’”

“We should work on that.”

“Then we’ll be boring when we’re old.”

“You’d rather be an asshole than boring?”

“Well… yes.”

“Huh. Me too.”