Cooking With Gas

One of the hugest disappointments of my life online is that wordsalad.com is not available. Suckers. Parked there for who knows what and for how long. I tried other combos of .infos and versions involving my name and whatnot, but none of them resonated, so I've stuck with the pedestrian, eponymous title that I gave my site on the day I set it up.

But to me, it's word salad. I don't like the definition that I learned in speech-language pathology classes (my undergraduate major) because it's pretty negative. I've always thought about it in a more fun, Alice in Wonderland jabberwocky sort of way, and I wanted it for my blog.

I wanted it for my blog because word salad....well, that's pretty much my life. Not a word cake or a word buffet or a word whatever else, but a word salad.

It keeps on going. The words keep on coming out. It continues.

So when I submitted my post to the BlogHer Community Keynote a month or so ago, I did it as a personal exercise, and it really worked. It was super helpful. It meant disclosure on a level I've rarely been comfortable with, as many words as I put out there on a daily basis.

And then? They picked me.

And now, oh holy hell, I am going to get up and read this post in front of 1,000 people, give or take. I'm setting it back to draft here because we're not supposed to share what post it was, but I know some of you who drop by here regularly have read it. It's really special to me, was as easy to write as it was difficult, contributes to a larger truth and conversation as much as it's myopically about my life, and for those reasons I'm pleased as much as I'm terrified. I'm going to get reacquainted with it in the next week...going to print it out and read it on planes and in bed, until I'm quite sure I can read it without crying.

And in spite of all of the pain and trauma that the past three years have held for me, I'm going to keep getting comfortable with the fact that there's been a bigger picture here that reveals itself in tiny snapshots day-by-day, not by any means a paint-by-number. It's been completely abstract. Some days, even recent ones, have been shitty ones that involved choices I didn't want to make and words - thousands of them - that I wasn't sure were right but I somehow knew needed to be shared. It's involved the despicable, necessary act of letting go of someone I thought I knew, someone whose choices confounded me but who I knew I had to accept or die.

Turns out she was me. Who knew?

So I've been cleaning up the place a little bit. And it's funny what happens, when you get right(er) with the world - not with God, necessarily, although I'm pretty actively engaging with some spiritual stuff too. Just right with the things that haven't felt right, the places in my heart and mind where I've felt akilter, where I've left things bad with other people or with myself. And that along with this keynote thing, and the other things that are happening, are strengthening my belief that this life is a circle. You come back around to the stuff you haven't learned until you learn it better, you make friends with old stuff that didn't get resolved, you make yourself face pain and depression and anxiety because it's the only way to let it move through you and away. You can't always medicate it. Sometimes you have to feel it to acknowledge it and move the hell on. I haven't felt this actively engaged with life - the good stuff and the deepest, grossest basement of it - in, well, I was going to say years, but really ever.

I don't really know what's happening right now, but I know that I'm open to whatever it is, and not just because I don't have a choice. I know there'll be good and bad days ahead, just as there have always been. But I am holding on tighter to a core of something, at the same time that I'm letting go. It gets easier with some practice.

And...and...I love this site, no matter what the name is. I almost shut it down a few months ago, sick of myself and the world and the garbage in my head. But something wouldn't let me do it, something told me that if I started over somewhere else with one of the multiple domains that I now own, that it wouldn't make any difference. Just like relocation doesn't always fix stuff - sometimes you have to hunker down and bloom where you're planted (hackbarfhack.) I love this site because it's my single-most dedicated activity of a weird, strange, random, horrible, beautiful period of my life. It's the fruit of something daily, the effort to make some sense of this nonsensical world and one life lived within it. It's at the same time nothing, and in the ways that it's connected me to so much goodness and opportunity, it's everything.

Comments

[Genie]

I'm so glad you stuck around on this little corner of the internet. :) Go team - and looking forward to seeing you next week!

[Jennifer/The Word Cellar]

Hm... Seems like lots of people are busy being born and cleaning house, so to speak. If nothing else, you're not alone in all of this. Your phrase "You come back around to the stuff you haven't learned until you learn it better" resonated with me. I wrote something similar in my last blog post: "Over and over again, we must learn what we already know."

(Can't wait to hear you read next week!)