I am so tired of bad or just annoying news. I'm trying really hard to be positive because although some things are making me sad and some things are really on my nerves and I don't know how to handle some other things, I've got some other things to be very happy about.
So I'm trying to be good and I'm trying to be a grown-up and I'm trying to take care of some of the things that no one else but me can do. Like, I need to go to the dentist. I needed to find a new doctor. I need to get the bloodwork done that I've been putting off for a year. I need to get a (blech) mammogram.
So I found the new doctor, and I made an appointment a couple of weeks ago, after my mom nagged and nagged and nagged for days. She just started going to her and said that I would like her, and when people in my life say that I tend to believe them, as prepared as they are for me to call bullshit on what and whomever.
I don't know what the ethics are of disclosing a doctor's name online, but let's just say that her last name? Is almost identical to that of a 140-character message that I send way too many times daily, except with a d in between the second "e" and final "t". Trippy, right? Gave me some serious joy. She was also lovely right off the bat -- maybe a little younger than I am, not creepy or distracted or cold, just warm enough, focused, direct. The office itself was also professional and fairly quiet, in the basement of a newish medical building, really nice except for its lack of any kind of 3G or regular G reception. Seriously. Phone dead the whole time, and you know how that flies with me.
The medical assistant did her thing and then she took my blood pressure. It was 150 over 100, she said. Did I normally have high blood pressure? I told her no, and she said okay, the doctor would check it out.
The doctor came in and asked me again what my normal blood pressure was, and I was all, I don't know, pi cubed? I don't know math. It's usually pretty normal, never been a problem.
"Okay," she said. "That's something to keep an eye on. Plus, people are sometimes anxious or under duress when they come here."
Under duress. Bingo. She just described everything. I neglected to cry like that "I MISS YOU JESSICA" jackhole in the State Farm commercial, but I kind of wanted to. Oh Dr. Twitter (not exactly, but that's what I'll call her) I am. I AM! Thanks for noticing.
Then she decided to take it again, and I started to freak out a little. She spoke in slow, measured tones that make freaks like me crazier, as she wrapped the TOURNIQUET I MEAN CUFF around my arm and squeezed it and leaned down and read it and said "Hmm."
The 150 was the same, but we were down to 92 on the bottom.
Then she sat down on her little stool and started pounding away on her keyboard, making notes, no doubt, about my descent into hypertension and cardiac disease at 40.
"Okay. We need to monitor this. Let's have you monitor it at home daily for a month to see if there's any change, before we talk about other interventions."
Neat! Where would I procure a blood pressure cuff? Does Target carry blood pressure cuffs? MISSONI BY TARGET BLOOD PRESSURE CUFFS? Actually, what really immediately occurred to me was the blood pressure machine at the Giant that I'd stick my puny arm in when I was little just to watch it expand and retract, expand and retract, no doubt enraging a then-40-year-old woman whose doctor just told her the salad days (with dressing, anyway) were over. Oh hi, future self. Sorry for being a little asshole.
I nodded calmly and didn't ask her what kind of cuff to get or how I was supposed to do all of the actions associated with a blood pressure reading, including the occasionally impossible task of interpreting numbers, by myself, upside down. Were there left-handed blood pressure machines?This would probably be its own special kind of hell.
I also started to feel a counterproductive pounding in my head, and I told her that yes, lately, I had felt this. I told her that sometimes I don't sleep very well and that on mornings after that I feel a little weird, a little more odd lately. She nodded her head and said yes, yes, yes to all of these things and I just wondered the whole time if there was a blood pressure app, if I could press my broken iPhone screen up to my bicep and have it spit out ridiculously accurate numbers.
I'm really not sure I'm equipped to care for myself in my middle age, even, forget when I'm actually old.
Anyway, I left, some crazy orders for tests I don't want clutched in my hand. I walked out into the sunny day, and I did what any mature woman of an advancing, withering age would do.
I texted my mom.
"I finally have high blood pressure like you said I was going to give myself. Yay."
She asked me several questions and then she said "You'll need a cuff" and "What are you doing to follow up on the other stuff" and "Is she going to treat it" and what and when and then I went back to work.
Today is a lot of things. It's Mardi Gras and it's the beginnings of Olympic hockey that I can't access online without a forgotten e-mail log-in and it's Tuesday. I have a snow/Valentine's Day/Presidential hangover.
There is a lot going on in the world, it seems. The calendar is weighted down with commemorations and what have you.
Today is also Pancake Day. I grew up eating pancakes every year on the night before Ash Wednesday, on what we called Shrove Tuesday in my house. I didn't learn the Fat Tuesday term until I was old enough to go to bars called that where no one should ever go, seriously don't go to them because the floors are gross and the drinks are unnatural colors and all of the drink machines are swirling around and around in those colors so if you're a little "under the weather" as it were that can really get to you.
Anyway my grandparents typically hosted pancake night (which is part of Pancake Day, I guess. Like how I make this stuff up on the fly?) and my father and his brothers and assorted aunts and cousins would come over for the most epic breakfast-for-dinner you'd ever care to see.
It was one of my favorite things growing up.
In the past few years I've visited New Orleans several times as I've gone on about on this site and in the process have learned to love all things traditionally Mardi Gras from a place where it really happens. Today I brought a grocery store King Cake into my classroom for my students to try. They're from all over the world, literally, places like Moldova and Thailand and Cameroon and Gaithersburg. They tolerated my drivel about Mardi Gras and Carnival and a side dish of it being all about the storm before the supposedly self-flagellating calm of Lent, although I made sure to tell them that it wasn't a religious thing for me anymore because I didn't want them to feel like I was pushing it because I wasn't.
I also made sure that no one ate the baby, which Giant actually makes really easy because they freakishly tape the plastic baby to the box with its one-millimeter diameter arms reaching up at you while you're in the checkout line. HALP. HALP THE BABY.
That was the only weird part.
I wrote about how Lent is not the 40-Day Shred last year and my irritation with people who "give things up" although they have no connection with this as a meaningful time of year, and because I don't practice the faith of my mothers and fathers I absolutely don't either. I re-read the piece this morning and felt a little softer now (and not just because I've gained most of this stupid weight back), like people really are in most cases doing their best and don't set out to thwart God by shutting off Facebook for Lent but I do still stand by most of what I said in general. Lent is not a pop culture phenomenon. If I all of a sudden decided to go on a diet and blamed it on Ramadan I would expect one of my Muslim friends to call me out, that's all I'm saying.
What I miss is certain rituals that meant my family would be together. And I would really like a waffle tonight but I don't feel like making it. I think I'm just tired or snow-burnt-out. I know I am frustrated by all that I didn't accomplish while I was holed up for over a week because besides cooking and surveilling the skies for more frozen water and shoveling for hours my brain sort of shut down. The Super Bowl feels like it was a year ago. It has all been a gray, cold, snowy wrinkle in time, seriously.
And today I feel like I want this warm, wonderful tradition to recreate itself for me and I don't think it will and honestly, I don't feel like working on it. I also don't so much want to go to IHOP either but maybe I should or maybe I should just shut up.
I'm idealizing something that is a memory, that I need to put away and sometimes I wish I was better at doing that.
And I have to admit that today this is making me a little melancholy at the same time I am fully aware it is not a tremendous problem. I am so not usually alone but the traditions I carve out beyond the major holidays and birthdays that my extended family and friends still celebrate are small and many times I'm the only one who
knows about them, which as much as I like to do it still makes me feel like a bit of a quirky, weird loner. On Valentine's Day, for example, I hacked my father's car out of three feet of snow and ice on all sides (not an exaggeration.) I had put my remaining wonderful bottle of Ruby Cuvee in the snow in the backyard and after I came in from the three-hour marathon I sat in the kitchen and drank it and wished for...I don't know what. Love? High-quality sparkling wine at all times? The snow to go away?
I don't like letting things pass me by even if sometimes I feel silly doing it alone, which feels a little weird sometimes, even if when I'm being honest I know that Valentine's Day itself sucked the most on a few occasions when I had a boyfriend.
I am talking in concentric circles to myself again. This is why I don't write. This is why I don't hit "publish." This is why everything stays in draft. Everything sounds selfish and unimportant in the context of others or a world in trouble but the thing is that when I spend a lot of time alone these things come to pass in my mind. Something is off-kilter. I can't really pretty that up too much and today I don't really care if you (whoever you are) judge me so much which is kind of freeing.
It's fine. I have lots of good fragments, sometimes I just wish they fit together better, which makes my life sound a little like an Ikea bookshelf but if the shoe fits, eh. Hopefully when I am next moved into my own place again I can feel the urge and the freedom to gather people in like I used to. I was good at it and I miss it.
It's just hard to live in the in-betweens sometimes. It may not kill me but sometimes it doesn't really make me that much stronger anymore, either. It just makes me wish and wonder and hope more than is good for a feeling sort of person. That's all.
I began writing a blog four years ago with one of the most frightening broken hearts on record, a completely (so completely) fucked up head and a shattered sense of who I was on every level of which I am and am not conscious. I felt like shit and it showed, and I continued to feel that way and show it to varying degrees across these ensuing four years, give or take some days when I was happy.
Me and B and a juice box on Moon River. When your best friend's baby - a magic child indeed - immediately decides you're soul mates when you meet her for the first time in that way that only open-hearted children and dogs do, if you're not immediately happy about that situation, (if you're me anyway) you'd need to be hospitalized if it didn't make the lights come on for a minute, or in this case the week I spent with her following me around calling me Laurie Wife and getting in bed with me before preschool just to chitchat about the day's plans and send me home with a raging case of the flu. I am overdue for a visit with my girls.
New Orleans, 2008, the night we met Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler. I called these days breaks in the crazy. It's even worse to feel bad when you've got a life that involves this kind of love and opportunity, but it's no less real at the time.
Anyway, motion was crucial. I threw myself with insane, frenetic abandon into whatever activity or diversion or stopgap measure I could get my hands on, from one of a gazillion bottles of wine to a trip across several time zones. Some things were smart, like the whole camera thing, which has worked out pretty well, and writing in general, but everything in the aggregate was just a lot. Other things, like blowing money at Target when I didn't need to and pushing myself past the point of exhaustion for relatively trivial things, maybe not so smart. It was just that I had a strong belief that if I stopped I'd die, or implode, or make poor fashion choices or ill-advised phone calls, sometimes concurrently. I was on a mission with no theme, which means I think that I can simply call it survival.
Today I am better, pretty good even. I look at my now as distinctly different from the days that began in January, 2005, and really escalated from the end of 2007 until they tapered off in January of this year, that last 15 months a period of such loss as I've never had in my life, which served its purpose so thoroughly that I'd almost consider it useful if I hadn't hated most of it quite so much.
I've talked about you enough, maybe?There's just a lot to say. It was a bit of an unusual situation. Thanks for teaching me that swearing was therapeutic and entirely forgiveable by you and Jesus. (Guess whose opinion mattered to me?)
I've completely come to terms with the way love walked out (whatever, Sammy Hagar. WHAT. EVER.) and the very unbalanced way I responded to that development, which in a sentence is a miracle of whose magnitude only I'm aware, plus maybe the two or three people who were willing to listen to me at my most jacked up about this, when I was completely convinced I'd nevereverevereverseriouslyever be better. I'm even comfortable with the idea that what I lost was better off that way, that what was allowed to emerge as a result is such a better thing even though it's still totally rough-draft and work in progress and utterly, comically half-baked. Suffice to say that I never liked Barenaked Ladies as much as I forced myself to, and I also don't like tennis and I can admit that now.
Also today I don't check my stats for twice-daily hits from a college in a city that I thought took away everything of value that I had or would ever be given or become, which was a simple, reflexive belief and not in any way an over-dramatization of events as they occurred, both externally and in my brain.
And when I started this blog that was all I thought about and couldn't write about, not really, because of the person behind those stats, hello, so the posts on here weren't even really openly about what was going on at the time, which makes all the very authentic stuff that's happened to me as a result of this site all the more awesome and serendipitous.
It's thankfully not about a man at all anymore. Today I don't check those stats or any others (which some of my best sources of writerly conscience would remind me is because who the hell reads you if you don't write so why would you need to check on nothing? So yeah we're gonna try to get on that around here.) I also don't censor myself in real life or in print so much anymore in fear of who will read or stick around, or what they'll think about me as a result of it. There's nothing I can do about that anymore. There was, actually, nothing I could do about that then, but I still thought I was driving this train all alone at the time, which, sorry, none of us ever is.
So I'm better. I don't know how or exactly when it happened, whether it was journalism school ending or my grandmother dying (because when you lose someone so elemental to your existence who would never voluntarily leave you ever you realize that most of the other stuff, it matters so much less, and a person who would isn't meant to stay) or the sudden emergence in my life of a number of absolutely perfect-for-me people in various quarters or maybe it's all the eclipses. Sometimes I think it's just time rewearing a new route through my neural pathways, to cut the counter-productive, played-out bullshit ones off at the knees. (That's a wreck of a metaphor but I'm leaving it.)
You know, I don't know, and honestly I don't really care. I'm just grateful. I'm so grateful that after years of anti-depressants alternately saving me and kicking my ass (because they came along when I desperately needed the curtains to open so I could see some alternatives where there hadn't been any but I am terribly non-compliant with any kind of medication and with these, for me, it was part of the "I feel better I don't need you although you made me feel better in the first place" game), and off and on- with therapists who didn't really get it beyond that they liked the way I told stories and finally one who completely got it and I believe, in a few hours of discussion, helped my head, that I am not miserable. I'm not (entirely) manic and I don't obsess over my problems to the point that I can't act. I'm conscious of goals and somewhat able to complete them. Every funny thing I think or say isn't an exercise in darkness or sarcasm, which was the case for awhile there. I don't cry every week, much less every day, except for when I hear a song or see something in real life that appropriately triggers it (i.e. the difference between mistakenly coming across the Leader of the Band (shut up.) on the radio and crying real tears or, conversely, just weeping out of nowhere at work because that's how my body needed to process unprocessable emotions. Important distinctions.)
Speaking of that, I can really listen to music again, which is huge, because for awhile there I couldn't handle the places it took me, and whereas I'd still go out and listen because I can't not, I didn't have the ongoing relationship to it that is essential to my life because I couldn't swing the triggers.
I am thrilled by depression's absence, to the point that the normal both acutely and chronically upsetting stuff that's woven into every day is manageable now. When you've felt existentially unable to function, like the ground is going to open up and swallow you or you don't really want to die but you just kind of wish you didn't exist without needing to act in any way to end your life, when you need to medicate yourself with something in order to simply make it to the next block on the calendar, I don't see how you can look at being content without feeling incredibly grateful for the simple absence of pain. I'm not arrogant about it - I know with 12-step acuity that on any day, around any corner, the bad place could open up again, although I'm thinking that I have some coping skills now that will make it less likely to take over in such a comprehensive, long-standing way. I just take every minute of it now. I'd pay for it. I kinda did.
This really has nothing obviously directly to do with where I've been for the past several days, but in lots of ways it's inseparable from my ability to experience these things now. Because you know, today I can look you in the eye with minimal need to mask my panic that I'll say the wrong thing, like, every time. And although I might wake up and think, God, I was a pain in the ass, or worry that all I did say were the wrong things (so many of us are too hard on ourselves, I think) I can shut my own shit down long enough to listen to your story without being too distracted to take it in and I can trust myself, from this place of relative contentment like I haven't experienced in my adult life, to tell you mine in a more constructive, maybe collaborative way. I don't have to control so much, although I'll always want to control a lot of it, let's face it. Bottom line, I can hear you (the lot of you, the so many of you that I'll be getting around to naming in a few days because I can't not, not this year because you're too important to how this is all playing out) and not completely freak out at the prospect of you hearing me. I think that means we all sound pretty good.
I think that all of this collectively means I'm back in the game, and somehow I needed to state that for the record before I moved along here. We'll see how it goes.
My friend on Ash Wednesday: My friend is an atheist and she said she was giving up sugar for Lent. Me: Does she know what Lent is? Friend: Yeah. I told her she was actually just going on a diet.
I try so hard, so very very hard every day, not to judge, but that is just silly. It's the silliest thing I've heard among a number of comments I've heard this past week about what thing to give up for Lent, whether it's the usual chocolate or swearing or something more of-the-moment like Facebook. (Sorry, I think giving up Facebook for Lent is silly too.)
I was raised Catholic, significantly, seriously so, and I don't practice anymore beyond the fact that I still own a rosary and use repetitive Hail Marys on occasion when I'm really freaked out or need comforting. Because I don't practice, I DON'T GIVE UP anything for Lent. I'm totally aware that it's happening, but I don't engage with it on a daily sacrificial level. Because guess what? It is not a fitness challenge or an internet meme - it's a religious observance and a spiritual practice, arguably the most serious in the Christian calendar. And while I don't practice Catholicism anymore, I have much respect for the genuinely faithful people who use this time as an attempt to better themselves either by giving something up (more traditionally) or working more mindfully on improving something about themselves.
My strong feelings about this are tied up in the deepest stuff of my life and my heart, namely my grandparents and how seriously they took Lent, among all the things they took seriously about living a committed Catholic life. My remaining attachments to the church - which are many and varied in my heart in spite of my political and ethical differences of opinion with the Vatican - have to do with them, for the most part, and the way they lived their lives in the most faithfully Catholic of ways, on a daily basis and in times of religious observance. One did not eat much on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday, as they were fasting days, and certainly not any meat. There was no consuming meat on any Friday in their house, because when they were young you didn't eat meat on Friday, all year long. It was the night for little glass bowls of egg and tuna salad, for toast and soup and cottage cheese. It was a time to pray more and to go to church more. It was serious Jesus business, it was, and just reading this I cry because they were just that good, and that good to me. I cry a little bit because this memory makes me wish I still believed.
It was so not the life I have now, the life where I eat steak on Ash Wednesday.
The past I lived and the present I'm struggling through combined with my weird hybrid belief system make me cranky about people grabbing onto Lent as a time to shred with Jillian Michaels (Yes it's 40 days. No, it's not the same.) or to whine to their friends about how hard it is to give up some first world convenience or the other. I'm sorry. I'm a total Facebook crackhead like many of my brothers and sisters in Internet addiction, but giving it up is no kind of real sacrifice. It's irritating, sure, because who in the hell wants to miss out on 40 days of fake pokes and little green plants and wall posts going "Hey. What's up?" But a real, true sacrifice? I think not. Ask a kid in Darfur, loser.
I'm sorry I'm so rude about this, but I rarely rant anymore and this is just...GETTING TO ME. It's driving me to caps, because people just don't seem to get it. Lent is supposed to commemorate the spiritual crisis of the Christian MESSIAH and, oh, SAVIOR OF THE WORLD, undertaken as he wandered in the desert for 40 days. Call me crazy, but if I don't believe in that and I latch onto it as an excuse to lower my cholesterol or look better in a bridesmaid dress? That's just creepy. And yeah, in my lapsed Catholic way, maybe even a bit karmically frightening.And even if I do believe in Jesus and the benefit of a spiritual test, I have to wonder if giving up a social networking service is good enough.
I guess I look at it in a context of other religions and what I wouldn't do. I wouldn't borrow elements of Ramadan that might work for me, or Passover, because I don't know shit about either one of those important holidays and quite frankly, they're none of my business. They are not my cultural practices so until invited to participate I just need to observe.
There is so much I need to work on in my life, so much I need to improve and lose and gain, weight and attitude and brain cells and what have you. If I'm going to do it I need to to tie it to what makes sense for me and my life. If that isn't Christianity on a daily basis - which right now it's not - I need to keep my hands off the traditions associated with it, mind my business and head to therapy or Weight Watchers or the gym.
And in my peculiar, particular catechism, an atheist wanting to give up sugar needs to do it without any help from God, because - well - to attach it to Him, for them, just misses the point.
I was supposed to leave tomorrow for New Orleans and I had a panic attack in the middle of the night and canceled the ticket. I feel relieved, although I'm sad I won't be there to see the party unfold.
I just can't do everything. I'm finally reaching that conclusion and it's taken me a long time. You can't do everything, not by forcing or not sleeping or ignoring the stuff you really need to do to do the stuff you want to do. These elementary, elemental truths are a long time coming for me. I'm having like ten existential crises per day right now, coming as I have to the end of a major life event (school) and facing the paradoxical great wide open and choking narrowness of my daily life on the other side of it. I'm in that horrible spot where I don't like anywhere I am or anywhere I have to go, and yet it's not so bad, it's just the nagging sense that I ought to be somewhere else, that where I am this minute I just can't be for another one, I can't stand it, could you stop talking to me about this particular thing at this particular minute because hello my head is going to explode.
My diploma came in the mail last week, in spite of the fact that I owe $55 to the university for a parking ticket. Fuckers. It made the degree seem sort of real but it also clarified that I am never satisfied, not with anything. I'm always afraid that they'll come and take it back when they realize the administrative error. I fixate on the train wreck of the last three months instead of the sum total of the work which really wasn't so bad.
I'll go into more detail at some point perhaps about just how long it took me to get the weird mailing tube open that the diploma came in (a classmate called me three DAYS later to ask me how I got it open. She'd been trying that long, and yes, life is that hard sometimes for stupid reasons and that sucks.) and how I took pictures of it both in the tube and out, and how I may have cried a little from relief, mostly related to the parking ticket and also a library book that I'm not sure they'll ever get back.
Personally, I am not happy. I am...discontent. Dissatisfied. And I really wanted to go to Louisiana and forget about the reasons why, to watch a city just freak out about itself for five days. But unfortunately the running isn't possible this month. I'm really just too tired. I don't have enough money for it. I don't have the physical stamina. So I'll stay here in this city that is kind of driving me crazy right now (I really want to move, every minute, but I have no idea where and that's clearly no good place from which to make a decision) and I'll keep overusing parentheses and do my Photoshop project and get geared up for Texas next month instead.
I'm actually going to housesit for my parents and sit still for periods of time. I have visions of a living room command center of vision boards I've had the supplies for since January and back taxes and blog posts to get some more of this garbage out of my head. I have visions of doing all of my laundry and cleaning out my car for spring (please, please, spring.)
And in the midst of all this I'll continue to deal with the reality that at this fragile moment in my life I have no belief whatsoever in miracles, which is the reason why I believed I needed Mardi Gras in the first place.
Several years ago a man I thought I was going to spend my life with (oh, hope and belief, how cute and uninformed you are, in all of your hope and believiness!) made me a mix cd for Valentine's day. He was a pop music geek and a romantic who worked diligently not to be one - he was a lot like me in those ways, come to think of it - so like all people with that combo going for them it all comes out in the tracks.
Some guys I'd been involved with even tangentially over the years (i.e., had crushes on or vice versa all the way to verging-on-to finally-becoming boyfriend) had much darker taste, such that when a tape came out of that it involved inscrutable alt-rock tunes that had no meaning other than the fact that we'd heard the song together once and it was SERIOUSLY RAD, or he thought I got his nihilistic view of the world even if I didn't share it and that was cool so he slapped some 8-minute prog mess on there. I got a Metallica mix once, which, if not warm and fuzzy, I have to admit was kind of hardcore, in a good way.
But this was a very different relationship, and this cd was different. It was sweet and thoughtful and a little sexy even (really, hi, to see us you'd never guess, but anyway it was like that sometimes, actually a lot of the time then, hahaha, anyway, I'm totally blushing right now.) It was produced with a billion times more care than your average thing of any kind because that is how he produced things, dear little earnest man. He was a musician and music is very closely woven through my day-to-day, and so it was through ours. He is still (aggravatingly) responsible for the five or so sweetest material things anyone has ever done for me, and this was like number three maybe.
I listened to the cd in my car and I actually SQUEEE'd out loud, and said, "Oh, I love you too" although he was not there, because I am a dork. And I also cried. I am so not a "squee'er", especially not all in caps, although I am indeed a crier. I was touched and relieved and all kinds of things, I mean, I knew that this person loved me a really lot but here was some kind of tangible evidence. IN SONG. How awesome was that?
When you feel about music like I feel about music, as an emotional marker and cultural indicator and just, well, it's hard to explain, it was just very awesome.
He put a song on the cd called "Someone" by the Rembrandts (yes, the band responsible for the Friends theme song. Have to pay the bills somehow. Not all of us have a trust fund...except their kids now, probably.) I had never heard it before, which was typical. Champion of underdogs and the underappreciated that he was, he had a habit of finding the one song by the band that no one else liked (and in some cases believed to be incredibly lame) as proof that they were, in fact, genius and although on many occasions I thought he was so, so sadly wrong in this case I have to admit that it kind of worked for me.
It is the most pathetically sappy pitiful song, and the fact that he closed out this cd with it touched me.
So I made it our song in my head, although I didn't tell him. Proof of my crazy, perhaps, but it just didn't come up, like a lot of other things that just...didn't come up. We didn't have "a song", not really, unless you count "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch." (because I guess I'm just not that much of a lady.) We didn't dance. We talked about music all the time (allthetimeallthetimeeveryminuteweweren'teatingorsmoochingorathemovies) and listened to it together constantly but not in this "Oh listen baby they're playing our song" kind of way. There was a random Lou Rawls tune (because we were really 55 and not 20-something?) which verges on
not-terribly-happy, so I don't like to think about that. In the aftermath of our relationship there was another song I identified with (again: super pathetic), and the only one he ever wrote about me was about that eventual end, which, wow, that sounds kind of terrible now, but then again I didn't write stories or poetry about him either. We were all kinds of busy being in the trenches together on a variety of levels, way more serious about everything individually and together than a newly dating couple should have been and it really didn't leave much time for assigning symbols or dreamily picking out songs or even writing them for that matter, although I wish now looking back - looking back sucks, don't do it - that we had tried to do more of that kind of thing instead of all that trenches stuff. It gets so serious so fast. The fun goes away when you need it the most. And so.
****Have fun. That's my only advice, which you should take seriously given that every relationship I've ever been in has failed miserably. No really. I have a lot of learning experiences from whence to draw my wisdom here. Pick someone who you think is cute whose basic annoying traits you can forgive who likes to have fun with you and doesn't tell lies, rage at you, hate your family or criticize your work or basic belief systems, who makes you laugh (super important, because it's harder to want to punch someone in the face so much who you think is hilarious) who you like to talk to and also to listen to (key point. Please see 1997-1999 in my personal history for proof) and who calls you out on your more ridiculous bullshit without making you feel like a fool, and you will live happily, if a little combatively on occasion, but that's okay cause who needs boring lockstep eh?, ever after. Mazel tov, may the road rise to meet you, etc., there you go - and that was free.****
Anyway, this gross song went like this:
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No, I'm kidding. That was Christopher Cross, who will never be responsible for "my song" with anyone, although I do love "Never Be the Same", and I apologize to all of you "Longer" people. Except oops, that was Dan Fogelberg, who I'm fond of so I'm sorry I went there. Poor Dan.
Anyway, this is really it.
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If you don't watch it (which I really can't blame you for and it may in fact be advisable that you don't) it kinda goes "Someone to love me the way that you do, someone who needs me the way I need you, someone to show me the way that is true, blahblahblah and on and on about how much this person is so happy that this other person is someone who will do all of these fabulous things and after all this TIME thank GOD IT WAS THAT PERSON because that person ROCKS and everything and everyone else SUCKS."
And there's this other horrible part about having no one left to turn to and the world falling down and not being able to face the morning and how this SOMEONE just fixed that right up too. And then the singer incongruously and rather rudely screams out COMEONCOMEONCOMEONYEAAAAAHHHHHHH like he's being beaten to death just as he realizes how FREAKING LUCKY he is, and wouldn't that be a bitch?
Taken altogether I thought that was a great choice for a unilaterally chosen "our song," which makes the "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch" thing make a whole lot more sense.
I hate this song now and it makes me cringe for reasons far less musically judgmental than it might have then. I lost the cd (on purpose, probably) a long time ago but for the last eight years I believed in some version of that squee and all that stuff I believed because I could not stop believing and not just because Steve Perry would find me and kill me if I did. I just couldn't stop. It didn't make any sense and it was also unfair because hey, if you feel so terrible about something and you're a fairly decent citizen of the world who regularly swerves to avoid hitting squirrels and who puts the grocery carts back in the cart corral it only makes sense that it would stop, right? That you would stop FEELING BAD? Because feeling bad sucks! Feeling bad isn't good!
Right???? It only makes sense that your usually-not-incompetent brain would be able to overcome what can only be determined to be a chemical mess, that the switch that flipped would shut down if indeed you were wrong in the first place? That one day you'd get it? That because you are a relatively logical person on a decent day that the evidence would begin to add up?
And it also makes sense (although I don't ask for much, really) that the universe might throw ANOTHER SOMEONE (although not as miserable as this poor, singing soul, please) in your path within that time frame who would figuratively kick the previous someone's ass on multiple levels and make him a non-sequitur. A blip even.
This did not happen. Hello, thanks for playing. And I was not a wallflower all this time. Quite the opposite. I am never still, constantly all the time with the go go go and the being with the people and the going to the places. I have been as open to meeting people without taking the horrifying step of joining a kickball team as it is possible to be in this area.
Nada.
Now. As much as I believe in independence and being a whole human being and not just an appendage to another person in a "relationship" - and I totally check out in this area - it made this chapter of my life really difficult. It made me very unkind towards myself. It made me jealous of friends and family and complete strangers whose someones stuck with them when mine did not (translation on a bad self-pity day: who found them compelling enough to stay with. Who did not want to be without them.) It made me irrationally angry at people who would minimize what I saw as a terrible blow, even as I grew sick of myself because I knew it wasn't that bad in the overall scheme of things and stopped talking about it with much of anyone for a long time because really, what difference did it make?
As this summer wended into fall, I couldn't stand it anymore. I was tired from this year. I had things to do and I needed all of my brain to do it. I was wrapping up a graduate program. I had places to go and things to do. My old situations were not serving me any longer. Everyone else involved had moved on. More to the point, I started to think boys were cute again. So in a last-ditch attempt to excise this out of my body and mind like a tumor, I went for it. I approached the topic directly with the only person who could really help me, in a strange twist on High Fidelity that involved only one person, not five, who was unfortunately not John Cusack.
It was weird and awkward and uncomfortable and painful. I randomly ended up where he lived and that turned out to be helpful. I made my delusional side listen to things I didn't want to hear because I knew it was essential for long-term survival. I saw him as a friend and someone who regardless I care about so profoundly, which is just true although hardly anyone understands that.
And it has been really hard. I've been very unhappy for a number of weeks now, absolutely on purpose. It's been like a vaccination, going back to this someone for antibodies against old, weird belief systems that aren't serving me anymore.
I did it to wake up, and you know, it turns out that I'm alternately really awesome at and really suck at it. I do truth really well, and that's what I've done. Removing denial, forcibly, is like emotional brain surgery and it turns out it's pretty intense. So I've felt lonely like I haven't allowed myself to feel for years, because as long as I lived in a fantasy land I never had to. I was in a between-time for so long, and now on the other side of this? MiserableLand. All the layers are gone and this lonely is inside, like Liz so eloquently says. It's in spite of being surrounded by people more often than not, except when my body or my mind or my heart gets too tired and I have to hermit myself away for awhile.
This season it sunk in that the someone in that old song is gone, on both sides. I am not the girl who identified with the song and he is not the boy it was about or even who sang it. As ready as I've been for so long to move past that, I had to come to understand that there was something I needed there and that's why I kept it. There was something that I relied on in what happened to me and who I became in that relationship to shape my world view and even though it wasn't working anymore I wasn't ready to let go of it yet. As ready as I was to have someone else fill in both of those blanks, I was afraid it would never happen and so I stayed stuck.
It turn out I have to walk through a lot of fear at this age, I'm finding, to be hopeful and to trust again, as well as to accept that what happened didn't fit my idea of how my life was going to be and that's got to be okay. I have to deal with my worry that whomever I opt to let into my life now, or whomever randomly shows up, is not going to make me even marginally "squee," and worse than not knowing what songs I like (which I know sounds crazy but you have to know me to know what this really means) won't really care what they are anyway. I fear not being comprehended or comprehending, which was so fundamental to my evangelical belief in this old situation, and is so essential to any choice I make to include any other person in my life. I worry about my insistence on insisting that I'm okay on my own, no matter how hard it is, because my insistence can often look a lot like bitchy and that's not what it is at all, 90 percent of the time.
Through the worry I move forward. My fall of whatever this has been has opened up to more hope than I've felt in a long time. I know I did the right thing by telling the truth, by finally owning what I felt so I could move through it and put it away. And it's amazing, the things that are coming to me, the way life is circling around to put me in touch with an overwhelming amount of love and support when I really really need it - or maybe now that I'm opening up to it. I can feel the tide turning, even though some days are still pretty hard, because I am myself, let's be honest.
And you know, there's an important election tomorrow. In some ways this is all cycling through perfectly, because an anger and sense of frustration that started seething eight years ago just may come to an end and that seems appropriate for now.
Meanwhile, I read stories that give me hope, and can feel genuine happiness for people who have made it through as well to a place where another person naturally fits into their lives and doesn't have to be forced in, because when all is said and done they can't. My awesome friend Kristy walked a tough path in matters of the heart and in other ways, moved to California and in that reinvention found happiness with a person who did the same. What she writes in that post, save for some of the details, reflect some of the same hopes I have for partnership, should it ever happen for me for real. Scott's words about Erin do the same. (and their photos don't do such a shabby job, either. Beautiful.)
You can't rush it, these stories say. You have to let go of the past, make decent friends with who you are and the kind of person you want to be for someone else, and maybe if you're lucky it'll happen.
There just isn't one someone, I guess. There wasn't for me when I thought there was, it's as simple as that, and hopefully after all of this I can scrounge up the courage to give it a shot if it ever seems like it might be so again. I'm thinking I probably can, but I'm going to try not to think about it for awhile.
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