LaurieWrites

Happy

I am struggling with my chemistry, a lot. A lot a lot. It hasn't been this bad in a long time.

I had been feeling frustrated for a season of time, processing hurts and worry and assorted garbage. I think all of the transition -- the job change alone, plus the deep fears that my high blood pressure episode brought up in me, when I honestly thought I was going to die or be so impaired my life would never be the same -- got to be too much. I got snappish and pissy and overworked, angry again. I took on too many things after my job ended, piling on commitment after commitment in a panic, instead of stepping back, breathing, figuring out the logical and strategic way to manage this huge life change. 

I can tell you the exact tipping point.

When I got out of the cab at Penn Station on my way to the train last week after BlogHer, I rolled my unnecessarily gigantic suitcase up and over my ankle, ripped the skin off the side of it, and crunched my foot. It was a feat of totally involuntary and ridiculous clumsiness. Then the gate agent wouldn't take my e-ticket, yanked me out of line to go handle that, quite rudely. I was afraid that I would miss my train, and at that point, I needed to be home so badly that I freaked.

By the time I got on the train, I was done. My energy and adrenaline, all of the raw material I'd poured into the past three months, were gone. 

I came home, tried to sleep, and somewhere around day three, some familiar patterns emerged in my brain. And I got sad.

(Are you bored yet? I am. This whole thing is a colossal pain in the ass.) 

This descent is not new to me, but it is always jarring, frightening, and an inconvenient life and work killer. I am working my way through it every day, to try to make a plan, to take specific steps to accomplish the things I must do, to try to talk to my friends and family as I am always, still, entirely embarrassed and irritated to do.

"No, I don't feel so good. No, I'm not going to do that. Yes, I have called, yes. I know."

It is such a drag not to have good news. I want so badly to have good news. I'm surrounded by love but this is when it has trouble really touching me. I have angels on my phone and in my gchat, making me promise things and setting things up so I won't fall through this hole again. I can't tell you how hard it is for me to reach out and ask for help. I can't adequately explain the paralysis that hits me. The last time it was this bad was, honestly, 2005, which is when I started blogging, so I guess that's reasonable for what I know is a big transition year in terms of where the story goes from here. 

I'm making myself postpone radical decisions until I run them through my brain a few times, which means that I may take this trip I so badly want, yes, but in September, not tomorrow. Today I should send in three queries, but no, I will probably in fact send one. Today I will.

It is a bitch to know how to be a case manager when it's my brain. It feels like the most astoundingly reductive thing to do to myself, when in terms of clients all I've ever thought about (except for the occasional super mean one, full disclosure) is how to build up. 

But yes, I'm sitting with discomfort rather than racing around trying to make it go away. I am crying when I need to in hopes that the tear supply will run out and it will process my excess physical energy in a good way. (Apparently my eyes like to cry right now. It is incredibly inconvenient and I also have a chronic headache for the first time in months.) I am dragging my ass to yoga and om'ing as I'm told, adjusting the poses for hypertension, like a middle-aged boss. 

But the truth is that I would like a new Instagram filter for my life.

I would like to trade in these cards for some better ones right now.

I would like to avoid the parts that I know trip me up. I would like to push through the tangles of my neurons and synapses and just feel better. 

I am also trying to stay task-focused, because honestly I have a lot of stuff to do. So I was scrolling through pictures tonight, trying to get up my urge to post my images from the summer, none of them satisfying me at all in the way that they usually do. I came across this one. 

(Yes, these are pictures of me. It's a case study, kind of, if a lazy one.) 

This was Mom2 New Orleans, a couple of years ago. 

I'm sad I lost that ring on my right hand, but I know that I was happy. That night was so much fun. That was a great trip. I learned things. I  spoke. I made great connections and some new friends who are still in my life. My dad bloggers let me tag along in the Quarter, and it was the best of that place too, in spite of the craziness and gross puddles of God knows what (Sue me, I love it, even though I probably shouldn't.) I felt comfortable and secure in where I was and what I was doing.

Last year, I came home from San Diego and I looked like this: 

So tired. Kind of ridiculous. Still happy. Best trip, really, and there? I worked really hard, too. It was different, though. It made sense. I felt good about it. I came home strengthened in friendships and love, in my sense of myself in the work I was doing. 

I do not like how I look now enough to share it. This is no commentary on my physical appearance, honestly, but there's just an expression, you know? I don't know what it is, but I don't like it. 

One of the most challenging things about depression is actually the moments when the clouds break, when I start to feel better. It can be terrifying, striking a psychological chord much like "Oh, have you lost weight? I thought your face looked a little thinner." 

And then I might freak out because what did I look like before? What happens if you try to grasp onto this feeling of rare chemical normalcy, try to make friends with it, and then it leaves again? It's the classic taste of honey/none at all conundrum. 

It's worth it, though. It is. It just doesn't feel like it in the moment, even if it feels like it in the end. 

I know that the only way out is through, and that I can commit to the "through" so much. I know that this -- whatever this is -- is temporary, and that it maybe can even lead to something better.  I know that I am lucky to have friends who will check up to see if I'm writing for my own sake, if I'm going to post, if I'm going to go to the doctor, if I'm going to leave my house, if I need a place to stay if I do decide to just start driving. Lucky lucky lucky. 

It's just hard to feel the lucky sometimes, when it feels so bad, and finding it hard to feel lucky even when you know you are is a particular kind of guilt barn-burner, so screw that noise. It's just really important to get through it, to get through all of this. It's really important to make something better out of this stretch of days until they're over.

It can just feel so, so bad. And that is when hope is the most important thing. 

Falls

I knew this weekend might be hard. I've been struggling with some anxiety-slash-existential crisising that tends to be worse around holidays that mean a lot of social and family stuff going on. So I did what I don't want to do at all when that's happening (because I never said I was normal, what?) and I started reaching out to make some plans to be with some, you know, other human beings.

My friend Jen likes to hike and look at leaves and climb things, and in fact works to teach little children to enjoy these things as well. These are things I'm not prone to doing at all usually when left to my own devices, but that means it's good for me to get off my ass and do it, I just need a little help figuring out where to go, apparently. Maryland, in spite of an unfair reputation as DC's phantom limb plus Baltimore (which I love, too) is really quite beautiful, and there are some mountainy places within an hour of my house. 

We went here: 

I sat on a rock at the bottom of a place near there, while she did that: 

There are days when I would be willing to push myself to go up there, too. Yesterday I felt kind of like a jerk that it was not one of those days, but I also knew that I wasn't feeling so strong. I hadn't slept much. I needed peace more than adrenaline right now, enjoyment rather than mastery of my surroundings (Fancy!), and plus I'd already walked a lot on the Cliffs Trail, so whatever.

I also got it that what I was thinking of mostly as I sat there at the bottom of those falls, rather than the accomplishment of scaling the rocks and seeing the little water pools and colorful, poorly-placed tattoos of those high-schoolers up there up close, was how many more calories I'd burn doing that rather than sitting right there on my rapidly-expanding ass. I've got some body image stuff going on right now, heyyyyyyy, and I really need to show it who's alpha or I'll end up 'round the mental bend and I do not need that right now for any other reason. 

Anyway, this day altogether at the end of it was a completely soul- and mind-clearing experience, all of those things you may like to think are dirty lies that people tell you about hiking and camping (which I have still never done) but they really aren't. The weather was perfect and I got time to spend with a friend and talk through the stuff going on in our lives, when I wasn't wheezing and leaning against a rock hoping I wouldn't die as she said "YOU wanted to take the CLIFFS TRAIL, LAURIE WHITE. When they FIND US just REMEMBER THAT."  

Plus I put my dirty, unpedicured feet into this, you guys: 

Look at this at your feet and tell me you don't see Nature Jesus. Go ahead. 

I also learned the origin of the phrase "blaze a trail," so, linguistics! Idiomatic studies!

Please don't tell me if this isn't true, because it would ruin me. 

Then I saw goats on the highway on the way back, and  I got to yell "GOATS!" because honestly, I pathetically love goats and if I had an animal farm it would be a goat farm, even though I know that making that crazy expensive cheese is a fat load of work that I don't really want to do, so I'd be, like, a social media writer person with goats, and I don't know if that would be the best idea.  

I was kind of done in emotionally at that point. How much can a nature-starved suburban person take in a day before leaves start to sprout from your brain? It was like that time I had an art hangover in Florence, except everything was mostly green and not Catholic and gilt and boobs. That is until we passed a huge spray-painted sign that said "BIKER BASH" in front of a highway bar called Fat Daddy's, because this weekend is Rolling Thunder in DC (I skipped going this year, but if you're ever in DC on Memorial Day Weekend, you should go. This is where I tell you why. It's pretty great.) And we joked about going in, but I was only half-joking, one because bikers are generally nice and fun guys who are way less creepy than your average guy in a bar, true story, and they will never, ever judge you for how much beer you drink (that is how you tell a fake biker from a real one: beer judgment.) And two because I was imagining somehow being a bit player or maybe the main girl (AU REVOIR SIMONE!) in a reenactment of the Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Tequila scene, which is some fine cinema with which I hope you are acquainted.

Afterwards, there was beer, and these perfect little bloody Mary oyster shooters, because the best kind of naturalist friend is the one who knows her not-quite-so-naturalist-friend quite well. 

I hate this picture of me, but I am happy in it, so there, so here it is, killing me softly, living on my internet website. 

After two of these I ended up reeling off all of the ways in which Jen needed a social media strategy and dammit, she was going to have a blog, because there had to be other people on the internet who were as interested in showing children and even people like me who really don't care about leaves and plants and general woodland life.  

I am just dim enough to need days like this to remind me that things in my life that are troubling me look different, and often not as overwhelming, when I change my scenery with some purpose. They were still there, they were still things that were concerning me or that I had framed as problems that I needed to solve with my imperfect little mind, but I was in motion. I was taking pictures because I like to, which is something I forget to do an awful lot for someone who loves to do it so much. I wasn't sitting still and fretting in my living room or in my car or wherever else I like to turn over to the bad neighborhoods in my mind. 

I wasn't panicking and missing the present. I was moving my body in a healthy way. I don't know when this became such a remarkable occurrence, honestly. 

I basically need to get outside more often. 

On the Mobbies and Failing at Asking For Things

Someone nominated me for a Mobbie award, which are the Maryland Outstanding Blog Awards as determined by the Baltimore Sun.

I'm a Maryland blogger, for sure -- a Maryland native too -- and in spite of my general weirdness about rankings and what have you, I admit I was pretty happy to be considered on a list that has to do with my state in particular.

I am extremely patriotic to this little place, honestly. Look, it's the moon over the Severn! Isn't that pretty?

Thrashers!

Crabs on my very own dining room table. (And yes, that's a Post. Sorry. I read them both.)

All photos are mine. Yes, I have Maryland content, people. CONTENT. You know that's what the people want these days.

(I call it writing and photography, but I'm old-fashioned in that one way, I think.)

All of this combined explains why I was able to swallow what little remaining pride I have and ask for votes in this contest. I hate asking for votes. I hate asking for anything.

I really do. It borders on pathological.

But this time I am making an exception. Why?

1. I do not seek recognition and then I wonder why people don't read my stuff even when it's good and why I don't get jobs. Just that simple.

2. I honestly have been working hard at this stuff for five years, in a variety of venues. I'd like it if that was valued on some level. So if asking is nothing more than a spiritual or self-confidence exercise, cool.

3. I'm mildly competitive and I don't think it needs to be a dirty word for women if you aren't a jerk about it.

4. I think my blog reflects equal and perhaps higher quality and sustained effort than most of the people currently beating me. (This is truth. This is 30 Days of Truth right here.)

5. I vote for other people. I help them out when I can and really don't complain (unless the voting interface is as clunky and weird as this one, which yes I'd complain about. But I'd do it anyway.) I think it's essential to help other writers and photographers if you like their work, because really? This isn't easy and it's fairly thankless most of the time.

And it turns out that asking pays. Duh. (I guess no one wins an election without asking, right? People don't just organically show up to vote just because.) With the help of my friends, I am somehow up to number four on the personal blogs list and number six on the Twitter list. I don't have much of a chance in the "overall blog" category -- my blog just isn't that big -- but the other two were a surprise.

So if you wouldn't mind dealing with the Baltimore Sun's registration process, please visit these links and cast a vote for LaurieWrites (they have me down as Laurie White) and @lauriewrites in the Twitter category. You can enter me in for Best Overall here, for an exercise in futility. You can vote every day until Friday, actually, if you're really bored or have some karma to restore for any reason.

I apologize in advance for the voting interface. It's a typical newspaper registration process that seems to have attained a new level of complicated. But again, karma!

I will really appreciate it. And I won't probably ask for much for a long time. Maybe.

Head Like a Hole

It's my third week off and I am restless. I am also keyed up and ready to do something except I'm not sure what it is. There are too many loose ends and options right now and it is imperative that I remain calm. I am compulsively looking for freelance jobs which is taking up a great deal of my mental space and not helping me make the most of any kind of relaxation/down/woohoo I don't really have to go anywhere today time.

It's not going so poorly, actually, the making contacts part. I am just out of practice at quantifying my skills and experience because I've just been dawdling along doing a whole bunch of things with no pressure for the past five years and now here we are. Well, except for that whole journalism school thing where I had to justify every fact of my existence every single day for almost two years. Hey, yeah, come to think of it that was pretty stressful. And also I've been on deadline for something real or imaginary in my brain pretty much every minute of every day since 2002. I am not so much about the mental vacations.

So, okay. Scratch the no pressure. But, really, what can I say when people ask me what I can do? I can write things, a lot of things, effectively. I can speak coherently. I can help you figure things out, tell you what looks good where on your website or where all of your typos are, really quickly. I can take pretty pictures.

That is not specific enough, I'm afraid. And so I re-learn how to package this package that is me, and that makes me nervous because I'm constantly red-penning everything, especially myself, and I'm out of practice with resumes. I have watched some really terrible television. I go for the occasional walk. I try really  hard not to spend money, which, in the summer? Ugh. So I've been staying home a lot, in a house in a city that decided to skip May and head straight for August and our air conditioner is broken.

I did go to New York for a few days, on the Bolt Bus. That was really fun. I saw a really good, old friend who let me stay with her at her conference hotel and some newer blog friends and spent time kicking around the city. It felt good. I have pictures for months backed up or I'd show you some of the better ones, but here's my  new favorite bar near Union Square from my phone.

The bartender was standard issue no-nonsense New York pub but he talked about the oil spill and made me cry.

I can't really look at many of the pictures of that, speaking of which. I feel like I'm not witnessing but I have to really limit myself. I found myself calling up some of the images in my head while I was driving yesterday and it is hard to drive when I'm crying. I am unsettled by the state of the world in general. I don't know how you can't be. I want to write something for the Love the Gulf project (via DebontheRocks) but I'm having trouble finding the words. 

I want a new blog. I need to carve out a few days to understand SquareSpace.

Speaking of walking, which I believe I did up there somewhere, the exercise is going so-so and that has been the big come-to-Jesus this week. When my routine changes things tend to fall apart in that department. I had been going to kickboxing at L.A. Boxing three times a week for over a month. The scale wasn't really moving, although in either direction so that was almost okay, because I was loving it. It wasn't boring and I felt like I was getting back in some kind of shape, then I stopped working and one excuse led to another and there I was on Thursday night, blocked and afraid to go back because I knew it would be so difficult. I cursed myself because for the thousand-millionth time in my life I'd done it, I'd fallen off of an exercise schedule that was really working, that was making at least one part of my life feel in good, stable shape, and I'd blown it.

Stupid schedules. Stupid brain. Stupid stuff that I can't break through sometimes no matter how hard I try when the inertia takes over.

So I went back to the gym, doing the thing I know I need to do in this mind over matter situation and got in the car in spite of the fact that I didn't want to and didn't feel like it. It was hotter than it is in my house in there but I got my favorite bag in the corner and kicked out a lot of the stress and frustration and anxiety of the week. And I didn't die. I felt a little less stressed, even.

Look, face all sunshiny like the hand of HEAVEN blesses exercise.

Not really. Just flare.

I felt a lot weaker during and after class than I had felt even two weeks ago. I need to go back regularly. I need to recommit. The instructor looked at me quizzically but didn't ask me where I'd been and I still felt compelled to babble an excuse at the end, anyway, like he was my platoon leader or something. I take things too damned seriously. But how many times have I said that I can't stop because then it's so hard to start again, unlike other things that I can't stop if I tried forever? How many times has this happened? I know I'm strong. I know I have endurance. I know this isn't even entirely about my body, that my mind is so much better off when I'm burning off all of the nervous energy and feeling good about meeting physical challenges.

And yes, it is a kick to see my arms have some definition.

I am mad, I am so MAD that I've gained back 23 pounds, even though I know how hard it is for me to lose, I know how much harder it is, even, for me to maintain, no matter what the motivational police say. This is a difficult, difficult process for me. I know it. I know it. I know I can't get all negative and crazy about it or I'll stay on the downward spiral. The shame diet, as some idiot broadcaster said on the news the other night, does not work for me in any way. But still? Mad mad mad.

And then my sister and my mother reminded me of a race we'd been planning to do for awhile. It's tomorrow in Annapolis, with a bunch of our friends. It is a 10k that my mother and I -- at least -- will mostly walk, but it's a 10k anyway. My nurse practitioner (who is way better than any doctor I've ever had besides the one who fixed my face, by the way) said a few weeks ago that I should walk every day for 15 minutes just to remind myself that I was moving forward, or maybe just so I could say that I was. I haven't been following that direction either and I'm not sure I can make it all up in one day, though.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ten kilometers. Tomorrow. I don't even know how many miles that is.

But you're reading some ramblings of a sucker who's about to get into her car and drive to Annapolis, yeah you are.

Drafted

It is really time to deal with the fact that eight of my last ten posts since early April are drafts. These are not your average serial blogger's meant-for-a-diary-but-can't-write-with-a-pen-anymore-hand-cramps-up posts. It's just that right now I can't complete thoughts in very rational ways, much less sentences that turn into posts that maybe have some point or purpose.

I have stuff to write for people that I haven't written. I have so many things swirling around that I don't know how to say. Walking through my on- and offline lives feels very much like slogging through the deepest wet sand part of the beach and has for months. Here are some key points that have not made it to publish, that just kind of died in the water for what appears upon review to be very good reasons.

• I've lost the narrative again and if I told the true story right now it wouldn't be a good one.There was a part where he was playing and talking about music and I realized that even broken he knew what he wanted.
• I wandered as I love to do and chatted with people and probably smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank beers if beers were available (I have no memory, I don't know what trouble of that sort we got into) and it rained and the kids all slid around in the mud and I ruined my Keds, and at the end I bought the most perfect concert shirt ever in the parking lot for ten dollars. 
• And that is where the church leaves me - the rolling away of the rock from the tomb and the body gone, maybe, but literal ascension into heaven? Nah, that's where I can't suspend my disbelief but in all manner of things I can go figurative.
• If I did what I wanted to do right now, it would be extreme. It would be something along the lines of ripping the roof off of this bitch.
• I love professional ice hockey. I've loved it for most of my life and I will love it until I die. (Ed. note: Because finally I can get to the point.)

So. Yes. Who knows? Don't look at me.

I'm actually assuming already that this will be a draft. It's bad habit-forming. And they all kind of say the same thing, I think I just tried to dress them up in different clothes. Let's say the lucky ones got the cute little sundress, the dirges got the big clunky sweaters, I don't know. It's just occurring to me that in the effort to write things true I often end up sounding exactly unlike myself.

I want to burn this place down right now, you know. Kill the archives and start over. I don't threaten ever to quit blogging. It would be the emptiest of threats because that will never happen unless blogs go away or I am somehow incapacitated. And who would I be threatening anyway? It's my own business, what I quit and what I don't, carry on. I just don't like it here anymore. It is on my nerves in every single way. But the simple truth is that I don't know where to go. I am overwhelmed by templates and options and things that go bump in my browser.

It doesn't really matter where you put stuff anyway, what little white box you type into. It's just really, really upsetting when the only currency you've got goes away and just like I have assignments to fix other things in my real life life (oh because I do, I have a rack of assignments at the moment to fix things up around here) I feel like I need to speak to it here, for me. It's just that it's a house falling down. It's a minor disaster.

Because when I lose the words it means that the way I work stuff out is broken and it pisses me off. I mostly don't want to talk about my problems until I absolutely have to and then it's really awkward and uncomfortable. Thankfully there are a few people left in the world who I can talk to right now to whom I feel so closely bonded that I don't care if they think I'm weak or broken and in whom I have the kind of trust it requires to let them see me that way. 

Oh my God, they are so super lucky.

But that actually is really lucky for me. I am oddly guarded for an open person and confidences are terrifying. Honesty sucks because it's difficult. I haven't held a hand in years and meant it except for my grandma's while she was dying. I choke on "I love you." I lost my will to say it for the most part when my heart broke once and for all five years ago and I still don't really want to,  because if you touch me you can maybe hurt me, true story. 

Also I don't like to look or feel like I'm stupid or incompetent or out of control, and I will go to the most stupid, incompetent, out of control lengths to prove that I am not. I am the person who goes to therapy in hopes that I will define my problem for the person in the first ten minutes and save us all a lot of time. I don't want that person to do her job. I want to do her job, better, like I'm up for a certificate of merit or a raise, for God's sake. I just don't want to do any of my jobs, this daily set of odd, mismatched things anymore. I am finally really tired.

It is a strange dichotomy, to be as isolated and off my rocker as I feel right now, and yet to have in some ways the closest relationships to other people, the most honest, the most personally chosen, that I have ever had. I'm not complaining about it, not at all, although it's been hard work except when it was really easy. It has not been without cost and disappointment. I guess when you hit a certain point you figure there isn't time for anything else but the obvious and real, the stuff that works. And the world can surprise you, I'm finding. It gives you people you feel like you've known your whole life, who understand everything the first time. It gives you rooms to cry in and people sitting there handing you tissues who have been watching and knowing something's not right and just weren't quite sure how to put it out there.

Because you thought you were handling this so well on your own? Because when it comes down to it a lot of this shit is hard, I guess. A Facebook friend posted Plato's words as her status the other day:

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

When it is so hard to start with yourself in that endeavor of kindness, it is lucky to have other people who can do a few of those things for you until you can, who will talk to you on phones that you force yourself to dial, who have eyes that give you hope just because they're there, who appear in tiny chat boxes from a highway or a continent away. It is important, I grudgingly admit, even if it's really uncomfortable to retrain yourself to hold hands. And this is especially so when your every other impulse is to dart into traffic alone because the data you have collected about the world somehow suggests that that is where you belong. It's enough to believe in the occasional tiny thing until you can dare to consider bigger ones.

And finally you, which is of course to say I, roll over those inadequate words in draft and click over to "publish," so you can finally let them go.

2009, right?

This year was really great. It really was. 

I mean it. 

It was hard and it kind of kicked my ass as I believe I have stated here before but among the mess of growing pains and things I complained about and stupid, difficult lessons I had to learn (all of them in some way because of things I screwed up or didn't care to prioritize or procrastinated about, really) so many great things happened to me. So many wonderful people literally entered my life as some of my dearest friends, and others stayed, they stayed like they always stay regardless for some reason beyond my comprehension and for this reason alone I should not be allowed to complain. 

I don't know what has happened to me to deserve it, but there is one thing I can say for sure about my life. And that is that although I may joke about being a freak magnet and how strangers come up to me out of the blue in places like public restrooms and malls and tell me personal information including their most disturbing problems, that I also concurrently have attracted some of the best people I know exist in this world to be my friends. 

(I'm an unequivocal fan of my family so I should note that they are never excluded and never far from my heart or mind. And this year was mostly great and especially meaningful with them, too.) 

I started off my year losing my grandma and I wrap up this year heavy with that knowledge still although it's processing better these days. And I am learning to use her as a catalyst and a guide as I believe she would appreciate, although I still think mortality sucks and we all got a raw deal but there is nothing I can do about that. No wonder everyone loves this Twilight train wreck. It's like global death anxiety permeated the pop culture. 

I also went back to work full-time after finishing my graduate degree and that was a really difficult transition, I admit. I was tired, really, fundamentally, after 15 months of such crazy concentrated newsgathering work and a crushingly disappointing news bureau experience that was so stupid it almost defied description. I was bummed out about my weight and nervous that I couldn't do anything about it due to some bizarre combination of my body's stubborness where that is concerned, my relative dislike of exercise and my infinite love for wine and cheese and things that make you go mmmmmmmm in general. 

I began to deal with that and in some stroke of luck won an insane Biggest Loser contest at my workplace. The mood police were on duty and along with the effort to exercise almost daily and eat better I lost 20 pounds and actually felt really great by the time May rolled around. 

Summer rocked. Summer was fantastic. I was in a naturally fabulous mood for the first time, I shit you not, since my ex-boyfriend left in the winter of 2005. 

Four years. Four years of maintaining, of tolerating my daily life, punctuated with occasional minor happiness. Suck. 

Anyway, I was so grateful that I remembered how to be happy this summer without effort. I couldn't really believe it was happening but it did and I feel very, very grateful that although since then I've hit upon some darker times again that it happened. I know it's in there. I am inspired to keep working and striving towards it, even though that just means living my daily life in the best way I know how. I know I have the capacity for joy. 

(If you don't understand this part it's okay. Just know it's in no way as self-indulgent as it can sound. It's really, really tricky.)

BlogHer in lots of ways made my summer and my year, and not just because Chicago is one of my favorite places in the country and it was invigorating to get a tattoo there. It was a profound experience for me this year. It's difficult to explain it, and that may be why I never wrote a recap post, but it's like a three-day festival of everything good about my corner of the Internet. So maybe it's my Blog Woodstock, or three-day Lollapalooza (I am incapable of speaking in terms other than outdated music festivals, apparently.) 

It is this community that has built up around me in the past five years live and in person. It is wine and words and pictures. It is a ridiculously good time and I'm sure that for a lot of people who have not embraced the particular world of blogging that I do it would make absolutely no sense whatsoever, but that's okay. I wouldn't get what those people do either, maybe. I don't care about skeet shooting or Bunco or any number of other things that are probably pretty cool if you yourself do them, this just happens to be what I do. You know, over there, in that hotel lobby with some fucking awesome women who happen to think it's totally fine to take pictures of ourselves reflected in salt shakers. 

Anyway, I've more or less integrated the people and experiences that mattered to me from this summer's experience into my daily life so it's not such a shocker.I could easily call them out. Karen makes me feel beautiful. Laurie put me in her phone in the lobby and brought me down a barrette the next day because I said I wanted to learn how to fix them in my hair and beyond that is a genius who became someone I could visit at the beach the very next week and at her house months later. Sarah reflects me back to myself in the most peculiar way and makes me believe in best friends like when I was 15 but without the crazy, and also may have to bring me beer in the nursing home. Suebob and Maria make me wish I lived in California. Melissa is illuminated and makes me want to be a better writer. Suzanne and Heather astound me with how much I am inspired when I'm near them. It is infinite, really, and I think we are all so lucky we have it. I believe so much in the ultimate goals of that Web site and this community. I will always be so glad I've had the opportunity to be a part of it. 

By the way? Genie is the best (and also MY) BlogHer roommate who also became a mom this year and I am so happy for her and her little family. This post made me cry, because it is one of the nicest things anyone has ever written about me, ever. It is also one of the most scarily accurate summations of my personality - the darker side of it with the light of understanding and compassion shed upon it, mind you - that I have ever read and this is another freaking example of why I'm so lucky. SO LUCKY.

(This is my year-end recap and is therefore by its very nature allowed to be narcissistic. I'm calling it. ;))

There is such power in relationships. I may not have gotten the boy in 2009 that I really think I want, I may never get him, and in some ways, eh. Maybe I'm the reconstituted Virgin of Guadalupe or some shit like that. But dammit, I have FRIENDS. Offline ones, too. They are not written about so much, they are not often seen here, but they are real and they are so loved and appreciated. They tolerate my iPhone addiction and tell me they love me and know my story as writ on walls in hieroglyphics back when we used those, you see. 

I spiraled out in the fall and the bad times hit again. The living situation was a little weird and work was hard. I struggled with what my next step should be and creative inspiration was limited. 

But I kept writing. I kept shooting. I kept at it, although I didn't know why, and that's probably what should be my epitaph. 

She kept at it although she didn't know why. 

This year I took a long trip to California to watch my sister celebrate her master's degree. We had a really meaningful family vacation in August, and reconvened on the same beach in November to celebrate Thanksgiving and my uncle's birthday. 

I spent some time late in the year with one of my oldest and dearest friends, someone who in spite of miles and distance and such different lives will always be one of my touchstones, who taught me in the weeks after that visit that we never, ever know what effect we're having in the moment. We just have to do and say the best things we can. We have to be honest to the best of our ability with the people who mean the most to us, the people we'd save from fire and flood if we could. We have to trust them to make the best decisions and to be able to hear what we're saying when it is based in deep love and concern. 

I had some great meals this year and some disasters. The best in restaurants were a Cioppino at Sogno DiVino in San Diego's Little Italy that I would have shipped to me frozen without question and a shrimp burger and beer at Fannie's on Tybee Island, Georgia, that combined with an ocean view made my trip and made me believe once again in the restorative power of coastal American food. I ate more sushi and edamama this year than I have consumed in my entire life thus far. I still didn't have my own kitchen yet, so I didn't cook a whole lot myself. That's on my list. 

I drank a lot of wine (mostly Spanish and South American, red) and some reasonably good beer. I hated the Pittsburgh Penguins and lost my mind when they knocked the Caps out of the playoffs, but this season I had a fantastic seat at a game because Sarah and her father-in-law are nice. I still believed in Terrapin basketball and the Washington Mystics. I saw Green Day live and it changed my life. 

I wore MAC #3 perfume and green eyeliner almost every day. Green and orange are still my favorite colors. I still miss having a dog, also daily. I spent ridiculous amounts of money on my paid-off car. I got an iPhone in March in Austin and it is perhaps my most favorite material possession ever, second only to the pink Sony boombox that saw me through the late 80s and many, many dubbed tapes from the radio. 

Michael Jackson's death knocked me sideways. 

I stood in freezing Washington, D.C. at the Inauguration concert and felt an energy that I have never felt before in a city I've lived I've lived beside my whole life. I watched on my television the next morning as the first African-American president, a person I still believe to be a true agent of change, took the oath of office. 

I went to Charlotte twice and Austin for SXSWi and the aforementioned Chicago and San Diego and Pittsburgh and to New Orleans for my most awesome first Mardi Gras. I finally sat on and broke my beautiful green glasses so I have to get another set of frames. I spent a stupid amount of time searching for my chargers for my seemingly endless array of electronic devices. I made three apple pies. I finished NaBloPoMo.

I didn't welcome Christmas. I wasn't ready and to be honest I didn't really care. It came anyway. 

It is January now. The last month of 2009 was punctuated with me entering this photography contest and being so blown away by the nice things people were saying about my entry that I felt that whether I won or lost I had already accomplished something. And then another friend called and asked me to enter this other cool contest for people of the blog sort and these two things combined have served to make me ready to make a life change that has been simmering for a long time. Like a decade. 

I think it involves Virginia and I am seriously freaking out. 

Speaking of the aughts, I think I might do some sort of wrap-up posts this weekend because this was a DECADE here, people, and for me it was the most profound one yet. I'm coming up on an anniversary next week that started out a very happy one and ended up sending me into my own personal bell jar for most of the aughts. It is fundamentally why this blog exists and why I am currently inarticulately telling you about my year. I'm going to write the shit out of something about it because you know what, I can. 

Happy new year. 

And I'll tell you one thing - and you can write this down, as we are wont to say in my family: 

Next January 1, 2011? If I'm not dead, I'll have just turned 40. I'll be writing some crazy wrap-up from Pittsburgh if the Caps play up there in the Winter Classic because Kim and I have a tenuous date for it already. 

And also? Next January? I think I'll have some kickass things to share. Really. Because I'm finally allowing myself to expect a lot from a year, whether I'm ultimately disappointed or not. I'm not staying home so I have to go big. 

All I ever wanted.

I am leaving town tomorrow for a week and a half. I am so excited about this.

It's been a rough sort of month.

I have purchased a bottle of Stoli Vanilla and I plan to go visit my surly friend at the Myrtle Beach General Store from whom I can potentially purchase Blenheims spicy ginger ale to mix with this tasty stuff to make the best beach drink ever, even if it's not going to be 85 degrees on my beach like it usually is when I'm there. I will pretend. I love that beach hot or not.

I have new tires and an engine that should (please please please) work following ridiculously overpriced service yesterday, so in spite of the fact that I have to drive late into the night tomorrow I won't be as in denial nervous as I usually am about my poor little car.

I have, in my possession, all cameras, plus chargers, and also lenses, that I need to function for two weeks, both still and video (this is huge.)

Two of the sweetest little girls I know are waiting to make their birthday cakes until they get back to Georgia from Disney so we can do it together. Please to see the state of my two-sizes-too-small heart before I heard this:

And kind of what it felt like after: 

I'm not very overwhelmingly grateful right now, I'll admit it. I'm very focused on lack, and what isn't going right, and how I'm disappointing people and not succeeding in ways I'd like to. I'm all "my back hurts," because it does, like every day, and "I'm not losing weight like I want to lose weight," and "that person..." and "he...." and "Oh God I need coffee."

I need not to care about that, any of it (except I can't not care about coffee) for a week. I need to drive on other roads and think about other things. I need to figure out what's next while not thinking specifically at all about it.

Isn't that when it's supposed to figure itself out?

The Final Curtain

I was driving to work today down a winding road I always drive on when I leave from my parents' house, that's a mess of construction right now because of course they've torn down the forested areas on the left-hand side, probably to build another CVS.

I was late, of course, woke up anxious but not hung-over this morning, the anxiety of letting go of years of pain and grief and love making my mind and my arms and even the bottoms of my feet tingle, which all of the Buddhist stuff I'm reading right now tells me is a good sign, a sign that things are moving, that I'm living in my feelings, letting them go through me instead of walking around them in circles, simultaneously clutching them close and then forcibly discarding them, over and over, like I have for so many years.

Sucks. Not gonna lie, and my only consolation is that at least it's real. At least I know things now. I have some truth to work with, which is helpful. This week I've deleted so much, so many words and images I clung to, up to and including stuff that just entered my inbox and my hopeful little mind this month, and pondering the reasons behind that really takes me down a bad road with the universe almighty, so I'm trying not to. Like I needed more reasons to work with. But that's neither here nor there but somewhere else entirely, as I did things anyway this week that I've never been able to do in the interest of purging, put up electronic blocks so that no words will be exchanged, no more in either direction. It's so weird and sad, but I have a bigger picture that I hope will save my life after a fashion. It is one I didn't want, as the redemption I wanted and prayed for looked very different and still does, but I have it anyway. I got truth from someone nice, or actually, that's not the right adjective, it does her a disservice - just someone good, who told me stuff I didn't want to hear but that I already knew, because that was what I needed to wake up.

As soon as I turned onto the road, I'd noticed the car in front of me had a Massachusetts tag so I flipped it off, imperceptibly lifting my middle finger off the steering wheel, because well-adjusted isn't my bag on a few select issues. The car crawled along in front of me, following behind an impossibly slow Caterpillar construction-type truck. I forgot halfway down about the license plate, obsessing instead about the Caterpillar, and how slow it was, and how did people stand driving vehicles that slow because me? Can't do it.

We made it of course, slow as he went, inching past the man in the hard hat holding the "SLOW/STOP" sign, wearing the impossibly heavy outfit that made me clutch at my neck in this heat. And just past the site where hundreds of trees are dying for houses that won't sell, in this richest of areas that has so many weird priorities, the car between me and the Caterpillar put on its right-turn signal.

And just like all those nights reversed when you'd follow me most of the way home from work or wherever else we'd been with two cars, when I'd go left while you went straight across the big road on the green light, waving at me or flashing your lights goodbye, I waved a little tiny wave instead of flipping the Massachusetts car off when it turned right, and I kept on going.