LaurieWrites

Contextually speaking

I'm doing fine. Really, really fine.

A friend of mine who reads this site called today and basically asked if I was standing on a ledge somewhere. The last post a little dark, yes?

Well, yeah. That part of my story is dark, and sad, and it perhaps could use some context. I carried it for a long, long time. And a little more than a month ago (a month that has flown, by the way, faster than any I can remember...this life goes by us so damned quickly) I got backed into a corner by a wall of words and people with agendas that I didn't and didn't want to understand. I got really, really uncomfortable and I let myself feel that way and then I forcibly let it go. I freed myself from this whacked out psychological and emotional prison, overnight, because I had to. I couldn't take it anymore, and although I may hold on for inexorably long periods of time to impossible situations - a mix of my genetic codependent programming and my own resistance to giving up anything that I identify as MINEMINEMINE - when I can't take it anymore, I REALLY can't take it anymore. It was as difficult as saying, "I so love you, you are so dear to me, but I can't talk to you anymore, and I can't let you talk to me" which, by the way, are words I never thought I'd have the fortitude or phonic capability of uttering. 

Is there a way to feel a bigger ass than to not be over something when you feel like you should be? So what I did was to give someone a pass, not hold them accountable on any level anymore, and just look at my own actions and words and decide what to do about them. I didn't blame anymore, I didn't say, hey, what about those things YOU did, what about YOU??? There wasn't any point anymore, it was all sand through my fingers.

And somewhere on the plane back from California, after more than a week of immersion in the world of words and people who write them, of awesome people and landscapes and straight talks with people who love me, I decided that if stuff came up in my head about this lousy and increasingly ridiculous situation, no matter how random or sad or pitiful-sounding, I was going to take it wherever it went and I was going to WRITE IT DOWN. I decided to do it for all the years I didn't because I was afraid that the person I was so screwed up about would read it, and actually know how I felt (God, the truth, it just sucks so hard, doesn't it?) But what never occurred to me in these years of censoring because I was afraid of how he'd react (it was always, always about him, on so many levels, in so many ways) was that I was digging myself into a hole of shame and depression from which I would eventually erupt, snakes for hair, shrieking at the universe with 800 axes to grind and in dire need of anti-anxiety medication and multiple shots of the brown liquor.

It got pretty deep there for a couple of months, let's just say, but I think now that it was just the final dark phase, the final letting go. Mostly of illusions, I know, but they were mine, thanks and I didn't construct them by myself. I had help, although somehow it's always come back around to me, to my fragility (fuck that), to my issues. And by the time I tried to fix it for the millionth time a couple of months ago, there was nothing left to fix. There was no connection there but memory, and for the final time I was not afforded the compassion of honesty, of being treated like a person who can handle my shit, who will not fall apart. No matter what the reason, no matter how well-constructed the logic of handling me with insulting and patronizing kid gloves, that ended it for me. There was a person, completely ambivalent about me, and me all building elaborate altars with my hands, hauling ass like those dudes who worked on the pyramids for 87 years, to something that never really worked in the first place.

At least I know I'm committed to causes I care about. There's some positivity there. Turns out my pea brain will go to great lengths to hold on to people who made me laugh and feel deep love once and were better than adequate at the kissing thing. And actually that's a flippant understatement. I had a great thing for a minute that lasted for a few years. And that was the minute that was in my mind when I was writing and feeling all of this old, old stuff that came out in the previous post. Yesterday morning I expected to feel stupid about writing it. I expected to want to set it back to draft, because it's amazing how jarring your own words can be staring back at you in black and white from this screen.

What I didn't expect was that when I walked to the parking lot to my car to go to work, that I'd feel so much the opposite of what I wrote. That I'd feel happy, like a weight had been lifted. It was so strange. I had no idea I'd be in a good mood all day, that I'd not be dwelling, that I'd feel a clearing in my heart and mind, for real, for the first time, not like all the other times I told other people I felt it just so they wouldn't worry and I could pretend everything was cool.

I didn't know how much I missed being funny for real instead of just darkly so. 

Maybe, although I feel like a weird poser reading a few pages from the Tao te Ching here and there throughout my day, and reading books written by Buddhist nuns and monks to try to put some good stuff in my fucked up brain, maybe it's helping. Funny how admitting I felt things but following that up by doing absolutely NOTHING about them is helping. Funny how letting all of the old stuff rise to the surface and releasing it here, in the only place I feel like doing that it seems, has been transformative. And although I'm afraid there will be backslides, because there always have been so why shouldn't there be again, I think maybe this time there won't be. I think this time it's happened. I think I did it, that thing he told me I'd apparently done last year, because he is apparently not as perceptive as I always thought he was and maybe didn't know me as well as I thought he did, bless his heart. (Or maybe I was just that convincing, because I wanted to be, and I made him believe it.) Maybe I'm doing that thing he was always doing in relation to me, so much so that it was the title of the only song he ever wrote with me in mind. I think I'm moving on.   

August, 1999

I was afraid of you. I met you and immediately I saw something in your face, felt something in your heart, and I didn't want it as much as I did want it far, far away from my wounded self, the self that just packed up a bunch of shit in a truck and left a man who wore decorated ties daily crying through the window panes on the apartment building door on a cloudy day in an Ohio apartment with only a dining room table left. The self that put my precious dogs in that impossibly large Budget rental truck and drove with them standing shotgun on hind legs peering out at mountains we'd driven over twenty times, this time back to a state and a life that seemed like the right thing to reclaim.

Once there, my drunken uncle came out of the house, as happy to see me as I was horrified, and I sat down on the stoop and cried, overwhelmed as I can often be by a surplus of stuff, by a surplus of feeling.

"Why don't you just go back if you're happy there and going to be miserable here?" she said. "You have the truck til tomorrow. You can just turn it around, turn it right around."

Two unreturned weeks later, only two, scant, unfair weeks, you were there in that room with your words and your ideas and your directives. Your hair was long and you were loud and I cry as I write this, I CRY, the memory still so strong of someone that it still seems so unfair and so not right in the scheme of things was not meant to be my lobster, my person. All this evidence piled up at my feet to the contrary and yet I don't buy it, refuse to. 

I hate you as I write through this as I promised myself on the plane I would, to maybe relieve this ache behind my eyes, this adrenaline pumping out of the souls of my feet, this weirdness that won't leave. You don't read so I'm free. I hate you as I love you, hate my own pathetic e-mails and cards, hate the fact that we didn't get it right even though we tried so fucking hard (I mean, really? To fail at something at which you try so fucking hard? That's sad.), hate that it took me eight years too long to find a balance in my chemistry and my bloodstream and my soul, to find the path that is somehow saving me even though I don't really know what it is most days, even though as I know things are coming together as I've wanted them to forever, that feel like they're falling apart at a rapid pace. Hate that you left me. Hate that you love someone else in spite of my efforts to send good thoughts in that direction. Hate that I went left instead of right, on that first crucial day and so many others.

Hate that you left me. Hate that you are not here. 

I told the truth, my only consolation, and it's not entirely small. You were my best friend in the weirdest sense of that term and my mirror, someone I never got bored of or sick of or worse yet felt that loathing of sameness, of why are you here and why are you why are you doing or saying that thing? I just waited for what came next and it was always better if you were there than if you weren't. This is why I no longer trust my heart. I'd looked for you in so many corners and in so many smoky stupid rooms with people who didn't understand, who played the wrong songs and gave away my presents. You called to me from a crowd of thousands, in a room with three other people. You scared me to death and you made me so happy. I don't know where you are, which was the plan. You still make me cry.

Marine layer

I go home today, which I think I'm happy about but I'm also scared to death of all the work I have waiting for me when I get there. My mind is so full of everything right now, just everything. I am drowning in pictures and family and BlogHer words and lingering weirdness and worries about money and the hows whens and whys of everything I'm going to do between now and...well, the end of my life, per usual.

I woke up again today in the spare bedroom at my sister's place, looking out on a cloudy sky over the ocean again and it depressed me again. The ocean view, of all things, depresses me here, which is insanity itself. It's the clouds, what they call the marine layer here. Weird. We sat on the beach yesterday around 4 in the afternoon and it was freezing.

California has been really interesting, but in that way and more not at all what I expected. I've seen my sister's life, where she is for this span of time, and I'm glad for that. I'd have to be in San Diego for a long time myself to get used to it. There's just something so different about the east coast sensibility, it's imprinted on me, its DNA I guess, the loudness and rudeness and kindness, the food and music and fonts on street signs and everything else about it that makes it unfailingly, if annoyingly, my home. I could try to be somewhere else again, and indeed I think I will soon, but it'll be within spitting distance of I-95, no doubt.

We've done so much since I've been here and it's been good but I'm tired. The knowledge that you take yourself with you wherever you go has come back to me quite clearly since I sat in the lobby of the hotel in San Francisco overnight, waiting to catch a bus. My writing isn't working, and I still feel, above all of the other things that I feel, very, very lonely. I keep tying knots in the rope of that and hanging on, but I'm running out of space, so I hope it shifts very soon. And for today, may that shift include a painless transition back to the land of monuments and ridiculous traffic, because for now - fight it or not, like it or not - that's where I belong. Because it's where all of my stuff is.

like the back of my hand

I just remembered the smell of my old house in Kettering, Ohio, a place I really liked in spite of the odd living arrangement with a tiny roommate who nonetheless was very loud, on the phone every morning at ungodly hours, shouting her obsessive-compulsive neuroses into the receiver at her best friend in Cincinnati and her mother just god-blessed blocks away, every day. She also stomped around in Doc Martens - the more conservative, appropriate-for-work variety, although with the lower heel and Oxford styling that transitioned her from college and the Cure to a nonprofit gig in town that made her cry.

Wow. Who knew I remembered her in that much detail? You'd think 11 years would take more away (sadly, in her case, would that it had.) Anyway, the house was in disrepair, which explained why the owner sold it out from under us just  a few months after we rented it. I liked it, though - my upstairs dormer room, the funky porch, the street lined with trees and friendly people.

I find myself thinking about Ohio a lot, for a variety of reasons. I'm in California now, as distinctly an un-Ohio-like place as one can get, honestly. I actually feel like quite a bumpkin here. I open my mouth and everything I hear myself saying sounds like the equivalent of "Y'all come back now, heah?" because we kind of do sound like hicks in my family and Maryland, while not considered the SOUTH all in caps by anyone south of us, it's way more southern than a lot of places. The sounds I make are so...obvious compared to the long, flat expanse of California vowels. And now, feeling stupid FTW!

San Francisco and San Diego are so very different, and I've enjoyed them both for different reasons. Since I got down here to the southern tip of this coast to visit my sister, I haven't wanted to do much of anything, which is terrible because there is so much to do here. I've been cool to just sit in her living room and have us both be in the same place, to wander around on the street, to sit on the sand for awhile in this impossibly constant sun.

I'm just weary, tired and - in a good way -  really ready to relax. August is going to be crazy nonstop (cannot believe I'll fly to New Orleans and then to Denver for this little matter of confirming the Obama nomination) and I feel myself wanting to curl into something as a precursor to that, away from the stress that marked the first seven months of this year. My sadness is still there inside me, at the core of everything, in spite of the best things I've known to do for myself to move away from it. I still take it out and look at it now and again. I saw a Boston Terrier on the street in downtown Ocean Beach the other day, and suddenly found myself crying. I couldn't look at him. And on the train down from Santa Barbara, on a trip that was so cramped and long, I surrendered to pms and the culmination of all these months and cried into the blurry window from behind my sunglasses for awhile. As many people as I'm in contact with on a daily basis, as many ideas and possibilities as I'm letting in and looking forward to, I still feel oddly unmoored.

It's amazing that I'm as functional as I manage to be and that I don't feel like I'm getting on anyone's nerves really bad but my own. I'm reading Pema Chodron's "When Things Fall Apart" right now and there's a bit that's resonating for me now, that in order to become indestructible we must be willing to be annihilated over and over again. You have to be willing to continually fall apart in order to come back together and then fall apart again. Okay, check. This, along with the usual directive to accept that everything is temporary, nothing is that solid, or unchangeable, that's carrying me along when I'm trying so hard to find solid ground. 

That said, I'm going to go to the zoo today and then follow around the geeks at ComicCon some more downtown, because damn, ain't nothing that serious...and I really want to steal one of their ginormous Wonder Woman totebags.

Covered in roses

Today started with an excellent breakfast at Dottie's Bluebird Cafe (I think?) in downtown San Francisco with my BlogHer roommate Genie and the excellent Jen Zug who was a fellow reader at the Community keynote Friday night. We spent the hour wait in the gray damp morning talking about nothing and everything in between and decided it was worth it when the food came. Wow. Best breakfast, really, that I'd wait for again, which generally speaking isn't the case.

After breakfast Genie had taken off for the airport and I stuck around in the room to check my e-mail and try to arrange transportation to San Diego from San Francisco, a task I thought would be stunningly easy. Cue the Westin kicking me off the wireless when the BlogHer "FREE" bizness stopped almost exactly at noon. Then cue me trying desperately to cram two weeks' worth of crap into two suitcases, while the "what to keep" pile of stuff I was bringing home from the conference got smaller and smaller.

Suitcases closed, I arranged my camera and purse and whatever other detritus of my life stood between me and a life beyond the Westin walls, when a wave of horrible emptiness came over me and I began to weep. I'd had a dream about my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend (whom I do not know and will never, by the way? So, weird?) in the early morning hours. I felt suddenly, overwhelmingly sad. BlogHer was great and powerful like Oz for me this year, and it was over. I missed my family. I hadn't seen enough of the city. And most of all, I was oh so VERY all alone in this hotel room and thus it would ever be. I really really lost my shit there for a minute, and as a result had absolutely no idea what to do next.

What I did was somehow manage to pile all the junk into a set-up that I could stumble downstairs with, stopped crying after a few minutes, and went out to the elevators. And when the elevator doors opened up, there was my dear BlogHer co-editor Catherine Morgan and her mom, smiling big smiles and inviting me to run around the city with them to do some last-minute shopping and sea-lion watching and whatnot. Catherine and I connected at last year's conference and I'm in touch with a number of my BlogHer girls (as I call them in my head, where it is neither inappropriate nor reductive, by the way. ;)) every day. She stuck with me today as I realized that a $350 rental car return fee in San Diego wasn't going to cut it, and worked with my quiet hysteria while I tried to arrange alternative transportation. She and her sweet mom Frances listened to me babble on at lunch, and by the time I left them at the sea lions to go meet two other really great women who had stuck around, who I felt comfortable reaching out to for some company and support even though I didn't know them very well at all until tonight, I felt - if not completely settled with the weirdness of the day and every single conflicting emotion that seems to bookend everything for me these days - at least grateful that I'd had that time with people I liked and cared about. At least I wasn't crying anymore, In fact,  the crazy sea lion barking made me laugh out loud and that's definitely preferable to the weeping.

This kind of experience is what I really love the most about what BlogHer has brought to my life in the past three years and what makes me go all warm and fuzzy about it like I don't about many, many things, trust me. I'd call it out if it wasn't true and when parts of it don't work for me I do that too. But the stark truth is that very few things in my life have given me the chance to not only get better at the writing but also to connect with people in these really astounding ways. It's an experience that takes me up really really way high sometimes. It can have me stupid in the street at 4 a.m. with people I've just met. It makes me laugh and talk and eat and drink and think and cry when it's over.

Which it is. And I am finally getting the hell out of here.

Learning to fly

I always worry about my plane crashing. I used to be a pretty normal flyer - a few butterflies on takeoff, random worries about the things that go bump on the plane, as it were, gratitude when I was on solid ground again, annoyance that that woman with all the crap in the overhead bin just couldn't slide over just a LITTLE bit so as not to impede the progress of 100 people trying to get the hell off.

Sometime last year I became a super nervous flyer. My mind became a total jackass and turned me into that person who actually buys the little bottles of cheap red wine for MEDICINAL PURPOSES. I don't know why, but it made a (total of, with layovers) 20-hour trip to Hanoi an exercise in hell, and sets me on the edge of my seat for the bulk of every flight, unable to sleep.

My trip to San Francisco for BlogHer, I planned for this - planned ahead, that is, with a little bit of medicine for mama to take the edge off, I admit it. I wished I didn't have to, but I was not going to go through this hell again, leaving me uncoiling for the first day of an event of which I do not wish to miss a single minute. Crazy stuff: it worked. I made it everywhere in good form, arms and legs quite loose and brain not completely overwhelmed and just all warm and fuzzy and in love with the universe.

Still not a huge fan of the flying thing, but if pressed, I would say that the reason my plane didn't crash on the way here was so I could read last night in the Community Keynote.

I love this conference. It's my third year, and the haters can shut it, because not only is it not ONLY about the shoes (although, for me, it's a little bit about the wine, but that makes it no different than anywhere else in my world) it is about everything else. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me in my writing life, and it's up there in my personal life as well. I am an unashamed, unabashed supporter. And now my love is just off any chart in existence, because no other opportunity has arisen in my life - ever - to get up and read something incredibly deeply personal in front of almost 1,000 people, and - once I got out there, after much pre-reading angst - to look out and feel completely supported and at ease.

And afterwards? AFTERWARDS? I'm still amazed that several wonderful people took the time to seek me out - in the hotel lobby - on the way to the party - at the MightyHaus shindig later - to tell me how they felt about what I wrote. They told me their very personal and meaningful stories. They cried. They made me cry. They said things about me, about bravery, about...well, just a lot of things that I have trouble owning for myself a lot of the time, and have to say I don't always believe, but this has been a pretty big step in the right direction of shutting up the aforementioned jackass brain.

I'll write more about this later - my battery is dying and I have to go speak on a panel about blogging without kids (which, gotta say, after standing up alone in front of a ballroom full of people? let's just say I hope it isn't harder than I think it's going to be.) But because I know some new people are stopping by here today, thanks to the awesome Eden Kennedy, I just wanted to say that the experience was one of the best and most meaningful of my life. I'm really glad my plane didn't crash so I could do it, and I don't really know what happens next, ever, with anything, but this was pretty fucking awesome.

Race and Gender in Election '08

Cynematic's pre-post on the panel here.

Adele Nieves

Maria Niles

Caille Milner:

Jill Miller Zimon: Mainstream media pushes what THEY think the conversation is!

People who blog politics tend to be junkies.

Cynematic: Metaphor fatigue with identity politics.
Ridiculous to say I could only be a race person or a gender person.
Power works upon us, we get called forth as a woman.
Identity is open source, not in a box.

Question about Obama New Yorker cover:

When satire missesthe point, it reproduces what it is meant to criticize.

Jill: In Ohio political blogs, what is sexist enough? What is racist enough?
Very few white feminist bloggers wrote about Michelle OBama lynching image on Daily Kos.
Shout-out to Professor Kim @ BlogHer.

Liz Rizzo: We have to be really careful about images. They have power.

Jen Posner: In this election year, we as bloggers will be sought out more. Important to develop relationships with media and get our voices out there. Be really active.

Caille, Jen: Women must get past their resistance to submitting op-eds and blog posts!

Laurie Toby Edison: Bad reaction as an artist to Obama New Yorker cover. Then saw it.

Satire can do lots of things that we really don't like but are profoundly okay. That cover was something else.

Deep images in this culture about race and gender. Tap into them, raise up this stuff we are all carrying around. In that case, cover not satire, deep racism in this country. Thining about it - I'm Jewish, if they showed a bunch of Jewish men running their hands over mon ey on the cover, same thing. Tapping into worst part of zeitgeist.

Why is McCain's "whiteness" not a problem?

Maria: White, male, able-bodied, straight, all these are the norm, anything else is othered. Don't talk about McCain's whiteness because we don't have to. Intrigues me we don't talk about white identity.

In order to get there, we first have to acknowledge privilege. Getting past that is really difficult.

Admitting your privilege and guilt are two different things.

Mention of Blogging While Brown conference...Late, late registration is open.

Jill: Asked black friends, WHY DIDN"T YOU EVER TELL ME I WAS A CLASS-PRIVILEGED WHITE FEMINIST?

Laughter.

Audience: White people need to talk to white people. Not black person's responsibility to educate.

Jill: I don't want to talk to other white people - not a primary source. Wants to talk to people who can help her understand.

What can we do beyond govt. policy - what can you do in communities, towns, workplaces - what has worked and what hasn't?

Jill: Take risks, don't be afraid to sound stupid or something potentially offensive. If you're a white person don't let yourself be overwhelmed by guilt. Not about being guilty, it's about doing what's right, opening up conversation and dialogue.

When it comes to communication with people in community, people who aren't like you are part of your country and community. Blogs, news, elections pull it together, all looking for a government that works.

Do not be afraid of what's different.

Maria: There are all sorts of ways we're privileged and not beyond race and gender. Be superaware, challenge yourself, read people who don't agree with you. Can get single biased view from MSM all you want, plenty of other points of view out there.

Caille: What has worked for me is just finding different way to talk about these things so people don't immediately freeze up and get defensive. Watch how you talk to and about people. What are you saying, why are you choosing them? Are you talking to this person who looks different the same way you'd talk to someone who looks the same as you and if not, why?

We don't understand the world w/o language. If we start with what's coming out of our mouths, that's good.

Adele: As media makers, how are we changing this, instead of playing exact same game?

In the hot seat!

My BlogHer post from last weekend was featured today on AOL's "In the Hot Seat" politics feature. Check out the comments. Intense.

Also, because I am not in enough places online, I have a page on Thirty-Something Bloggers right now. I stumbled across it, and have no idea who's ultimately responsible and it could be some kind of front for a pyramid marketing scheme for all I know. But I doubt it.

And horrifyingly, I say that I am incredibly tired and that's all I got. Really.

July

It is incredibly hot in my room. My roommate's dog bit me last night because she was laying by the couch and when I went to get up I nudged her with my foot and it woke her up and freaked her out. I hate when dogs and I don't get along, them being one of the rocks I build my church on and all. I just downloaded Alison Moyet's "Alf," a 1984 gem of a record that I loved then because I was already far too uncool to prefer the old Yaz stuff beyond "Don't Go," which really serves as a snapshot of my failures at hipness but overall success at liking something and sticking to it when that seems to makes sense.

I'm also back from vacation, having survived a 7 hour car ride with my parents and being crammed into the backseat of my father's Cherokee alongside all manner of coolers, grocery bags, crumpled hanging clothes and finally a ridiculous number of towels purchased at a frightening (FRIGHTENING) outlet store somewhere along I-95 in central North Carolina. The place is called JR's, and my mother claims she goes there to buy her perfume for cheaper than Macy's, but really she'd go there anyway. Suffice to say there were Harley grandpas with earrings SMOKING IN THE STORE and also buying Lucky Strikes, unfiltered, because clearly they must only cost 12 million dollars a pack there and not the current 27 million that I notice whenever I blow through the gas station store to buy water or coffee or whatever substance of choice.

Seriously, 6 bucks for a pack of cigarettes, people? I smoked for a long (too long) time and even then, I don't know, I guess I finally quit for serious like 7 years ago, and they must have been like $3.50/4? I literally couldn't afford it, which means it confounds me that people without jobs and bank accounts or fixed addresses seem to have an endless supply of Camels.

Where there's a will there's a way, in George Bush's America. Remember him? I know, right? Barely.

Back to the original point - if you're on 95 anywhere between here and the redneck Riviera, please to stop in JR's. If you're a mental collector of kitsch and weirdness and the occasional sight that kills your soul, you'll thank me. If you're not, just keep on til you hit South of the Border, because that'll do 'er too.

(Pictures of the talking Moses, Jesus and Mary are forthcoming from the Bible books section, and also a shot of the "JUNK FOOD HEAVEN" sign above the snack bar. I did not get one of the "bitching post" sign in the dedicated Harley gear section, but let's just say that there are also leather bustiers and chaps to be had at JR's. Oh yeah.)

Myrtle Beach is still there. I love the ocean. (I capitalized "ocean" at first, because clearly I assign it godlike qualities.) The weather was less than stellar, which was sad, but given that it's poured buckets of rain here every day for a month, I guess it shouldn't be that surprising. I feel myself changing so much that it's really hard to fit into the old familiar construct of my family. There was a time in the back of my father's car on the way back to the condo that I thought I was going to scream or jump out of the car, where I could feel myself...I don't know, molting, shedding skin, popping out of a plastic egg like exploding silly putty. It makes sense, at 37. This is just a really remarkable year of transition and change so far and the way my intuition's talking, it's going to keep going. Whatever. Bring it on. I'm getting used to it, finally.

Now it's back to work for a few days and then on to California, where there will be another beach, I understand, so that helps me get over the pain of the South Carolina rainy days. There's also a $60 admission fee to Sea World out there, so I'm not sure if they're giving away exotic fish to go with it, but again, told I should check it out. I'm going to rent a car and drive down the coast from San Francisco to San Diego, and the thought of that, I have to say, fills me with some kind of weightless elation. I think it'll be really nice.

Before that happens I should probably be more nervous about reading in front of 1,000 people but I'm not. After a long long time of saying no, of being afraid of my own shadow, I'm just doing things, things that scare me, things that I'm neutral about, things that seem to be the next best thing to do. Some of them are falling away, and some are leading to better things and useful things and even things that might eventually put checks in my mailbox and my name on the pages. This is the way, as Rilke said in that quote that's helped me out a lot at various times in my life, you live your way into the answers, kicking, screaming whatever. It just happens.

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.