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. 

Everything After

*I have no interest in publishing this post, but there you have the story of my blog life. 

I'm back home, wandering the rooms, frantically pounding out work that didn't happen when it was supposed to because so many other things were, not really sure of my space yet, pressing my thumbs against my arms for some sense of solidity. There is dust everywhere, half-dead pots of herbs, anthems on the tv and a newly strange sliding-glass-sized view. 

I feel weird, ungainly in a different way than I usually do in August. I promised myself last year at this time I would have a refuge slated. I dreamed a place -- anywhere in Europe, mostly, or maybe just a beach anywhere, because I am predictable -- to ease into where I could breathe out the exhaust of intense ideas and social interactions, of the competing pressures of moving and traveling and presenting and being, of speaking and hearing millions (what had to be, right?) millions of words, alphabets of them crashing into each other and melting in the New York heat.

I didn't end up doing that for myself, of course.  It was an extra, unhappenable thing, that ended up seeming untenable for lack of dollars and sense. So I'm trying to make that happen here, which would work better if I could drum up the energy for groceries beyond coffee rations and soccer game Prosecco.

It's not so bad, as it always isn't, unless it really is. It's quiet but a little too much, the familiarity not exactly what I wanted, but it will have to do, because the urge to work to go anywhere in this moment is absent.

**************************************************************

I want to be better this year. I am dissatisfied with myself, my thought processes, the way I dwell on wrongs. I'm not proud of so many things I'm thinking and feeling, of my dissatisfactions and my petty irritations. I am good things amid the wreck, but it's the wreck I mostly see. Mirrors are hard things.

I don't know what will happen now. I'm scared of it, to tell the truth. There is this next expanse of time to fill that I don't understand quite yet. I feel like I'd been looking at life since May as a pre- and post-BlogHer proposition, and now that the post- is here I'm out of mulligans (That is a golf term. I'm pretending to know something about golf now. See? I'm a damn dirty liar.)

I'm afraid of not doing whatever it is that I'm capable of doing, basically. I'm afraid of not fulfilling a prophecy that I can't possibly know, but feel like I should.

I'm afraid of being alone, of lack of love, and a little bit, of myself. That I'll never get it. That I'll dwell too much in possibility and miss the exit. 

I worry that I'll always be one step behind, that what I leave won't mean anything, that the things I've broken down will be the story. I'm sick of myself, of my indecision, of any kind of unhappiness, of grieving what I've lost and, worse, what I just can't have. I'm sick of working on boundaries and letting go. I'm sick of working on anything. I'm mad at myself for the things I can't stop being sad about, for resenting the relatively small things I have to endure, for not being more graceful in disappointment and want, for my inability to recover from pain more quickly, for my tendency to dwell, for being the worst. person. IN THE WORLD, right? 

I hate that I'm embarrassed to write this down, that I know I'll be embarrassed to send it out into the world, navel-gazing, self-loathing bullshit. Emotional dreck, whatever. 

I know I can be better, is the thing. I know that all I can do is take responsibility for the things I've done that aren't so good, and move on, to dare to hope, I guess, for a little slant of sun. 

I wish it would hurry up, though -- the better-getting -- because I am tired of this particular stretch of verge-of-midlife-suburban-wanderer highway. I aso know that I can sit down on my living room rug and turn up my hands and invite it, too, that I'm probably missing it in the fray. I know that I can forgive myself for the things I smack myself around for, that I can say for sure that even my most ridiculous actions are generally rooted in some hazy good intention, that I am not really all that bad. 

Maybe I feel like if I dump this out old-style  the poison of my thought processes that are wrecking up my plans will seep out of me. I told the people who so kindly and remarkably (honestly, I could not believe it. I was terrified to see it, as much as I was pleased and gratified) filled a room the other day to listen to Neil and Schmutzie and me that I am never as happy as a writer or an online person or a person of any kind as when I come back to this empty white blog box and type stuff into it, so maybe this is just some sick way of proving that true, that there's a comfort and satisfaction in it even when I can't see the screen for dumbass tears. 

**************************************************************

I need something better, you guys. It's been a long time coming dancing in front of me. I don't mind working but I feel like I've been grasping, and no good comes of that after a time. I think I know that I have to do some radical, physical, movement to get to what it is, the yard and the sun and the dog and the face I can kind of see but not quite, that I want to acknowledge as my truth, somewhere I can land to do what I know I want to do. I can't sit here anymore, not in this zip code or this head space, and expect to have the generalized sense of being on the right path that all of this 2012 drama has been about. 

I know this, and I know it has to start now. I knew it when I was walking those crazy halls in New York and I knew it when I hugged my friends with a peculiar sense of desperation. I really knew it when I bought myself an extravagant lunch and then took two cabs and finally ran for a train only to come back to sit in this spot again. I know it when I look for what I'll never find on the internet and yet can't seem to see here either, when I refuse phone calls and shut people down, when I do whatever it is I do to knit together a routine. 

I know it. I don't really want to, because for some reason it is a hard last hurdle to jump, but I do. 

This time I really do. 

*Photo by Leslie Fandrich, who is a very sweet soul, among other very good things. Text by Robin Plemmons, who is Robin Plemmons, master of train horns and human hearts. 

PS: One more thing! Tonight, Alexis Hinde posted a lovely video in answer to a dream Schmutzie had last night about Bret Michaels, who is one of my favorite last vestiges of the hair metal culture of my teenaged years, and who -- I am not kidding you -- I admire for his staying power. Say what you will, but dude is a master of reinvention, and also a mogul.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn is one of my favorite songs of all time, and for reasons only she can know, Alexis offered to sing it. She did a beautiful job, and it made me feel much better about life, the universe, and everything before I called it a day. We're not sure if it's cool to post it here, but just knowing it's out there makes me feel better.

It's the little things, the little things that are big things, that keep us going.  Thank you, Alexis, and Schmutzie for everything else, pretty much. 

Several Random Facts About Me On a Flight From Seattle to Phoenix

I was reading Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project book on the plane, and she had some ideas for lists and because I actually think she has some good ideas and it's probably wise for me to stop being so skeptical about all of the things all of the time, I decided to make myself write some. If there's a thing I need right now it's some grounding. I'll let you know how it turns out, unless I just stop talking about it altogether, in which case, well, carry on.  

I have sung five songs at karaoke in my life, and besides the dreadful mistake that was Wooly Bully, they are four of my favorite memories (I am an excellent Peaches AND Herb, put it that way.) If I were to imagine my most epic karaoke of all time, it involves The Winner Takes it All, by ABBA,  an octave down. (that piano at the end is tinkly heartbreak.)  Also Frida is my musical muse. Tell me I Know There's Something Going On was not one of the best songs of the 80s. Go on. TELL ME. 

I know I will move to a new city in the next two years, but I have no idea which one. I'm undisturbed by this.

A lot of times I think I'm a fuckup with impulse control problems, unmanageable moods, and a pathological aversion to patience, but I look around at my life and the quality of the people in it, and I think maybe a bad person couldn't have attracted this many awesome people as friends. I am so lucky in this area of my life.

I do not remember large chunks of my childhood and it freaks me out sometimes, but given what little I remember from college, my neurolinguistics class did impress upon me the brain's survival gift of self-censorship, so I roll with that.

I love Maryland. It's weird and small and in the middle of lots of other things, but it's charming in its own way, so I'm not at all sorry that I'm from here or that I've lived here for so long.

I like most dogs way better than most human beings.

I was nearly fluent in French when I quit taking classes, and I still frequently hear certain words and phrases in my mind in French first. I have never been to France, outside of the airport for a layover. This is a thorn in my traveling side.

I've written through my relationship with my grandmother in a way I feel has helped me to grieve more effectively and has also honored our relationship. I'm not saying something about her won't come up in the future, but I feel full circle with it now, and it makes all of those times I felt so awkward and repetitive hitting "publish" feel worth it. Blogging made this possible, so I appreciate blogging. 

I believe that my feelings are readily visible, like a stock market ticker on my forehead,and it bothers me much of the time. Two of my best friends have told me in the past three days that I am difficult to read. I am confused by this. Also apparently I'm dumb as ice. This is reassuring.

I took this picture of a man eating fire.

I would have married exactly four people in my life so far. I dated three of them.

My life is completely different than it was before the Internet, and I still geek out about it every day. I will never not be amazed by this screwed up communication revolution. You guys. THE INTERNET.

I'm a lot funnier in real life than I am online. I think so anyway. So I've been told. Now I don't feel funny at all. If you want to make yourself feel unfunny, type that you're funny. What a drag.

I got a depressed friend through two years of our waitressing job in college by constantly repeating "We're not here for a long time, we're here for a good time," because after the first time I said it she asked me to say it again all the time. It was a strange arrangement, but it seemed to help her, so whatever. I think I'm going go start saying it more, to me.

When I need to calm down on a plane, I listen to Belle by Al Green, Lodi by CCR and all of Hem's No Word From Tom. Lodi on repeat is excellent for meditation (for a weird kid born in the 70s, I guess. Throw some Rhiannon in there and I'd be good for several hours.)

Writing drives me crazy and if I was able to function without doing it, I would. I think constantly in partially formed, editable, language and it has to come out or I'm unpleasant and not funny. It's kind of like runners who don't run (so I understand. I'm totally okay with not running, ever. I hate running. It may be a worse compulsion than writing. Maybe.)

This is what I look like when writing is driving me crazy. It isn't cute. 

My happy places are hockey games, the beach, sleeping in with a person who makes coffee, brunch, and concerts. I cannot, however, deal with standing-only, general admission shows anymore. It finally happened.

I don't think I can come up with one more not-riveting thing about myself, except that I'm the most left-handed person I know, in all ways physical and psychological. That's probably the best place to leave off at this point.

I don't know.

People seem to want to know what I'm going to do. 

Hello, how are you, I don't know. 

Other popular questions include: How do you feel? Did you know you were going to do this? Are you moving? How are you going to keep your insurance? (Followed by "you know you need insurance, right?") When is your last day? And again, and more emphatically, what are you going to do? 

I don't know.  

What are you going to do? I mean, tomorrow, or in five minutes? You may have, as I do, a roughed out plan. A glass of water. A tv show. A pizza. Hopefully not die. Tweet. Dinner out. That thing or this. But how far ahead can we really see? How far ahead do we set the intentions? The other night, for example, I had big plans to sketch out a website, to get moving on this project that has paralyzed me into panicked inaction for months (I kid you not. Months.) I needed to do this thing. And then by some freak flick of my wrist and a tendency to compulsively overclick, I wrecked my desktop resolution and the size of everything and COULD NOT WORK. I couldn't reset to default sizes (hey Apple, could you make it easier to reset to defaults around here, for some of us are fragile and dumb and need to sketch out websites.) It's still not fixed but I'm kind of used to the GREAT BIG STRETCHY SITUATION now, and I'm back to yapping, but that night was shot because I'm, oh, I'm just crazy like that.

This is to underscore that planning results vary here, but what I do know for sure is that in my life, big decisions necessarily beget a refractory period of chaos and the general need to live in my bathtub with candles and weep into O Magazine and some Thich Nhat Han for a week, along with an uncharacteristic excessive need to talk on the phone and eat dark chocolate for the antioxidants, yeah. Then there is reorganization, but it's only usually a couple of weeks later that the next steps start to fall into place: 

1. Get out of bed. 2. Make coffee. 3. Freak out. 4. Do the rest of the stuff. 

I hope you have better steps, besides making coffee, because that is the unifying skill of a good and solid population.

I admire people who know what they are doing, and always have. Beginning with my grandparents and my mother, I was surrounded FOR REAL by people who had plans and outlines and things they seemed to inherently know that they had to do and they actually carried this out, day by day by day. I admire purposeful people, with good, solid handwriting and the extra key to the room, the people who write to-do lists and do the things, who make meal plans and get their oil changed when the little sticker says to. I admire auto-payers and carpool organizers, people who make the world turn in time for the car not to break down and the kids not to get left in the parking lot. 

I can be that person, I'm just not, naturally. (Seriously, I will never leave a kid in a parking lot. It sucks to be the kid left in the parking lot. If you need a kid picked up in a parking lot on time I AM YOUR GIRL. This is one of my redeeming qualities, I think. Lord it sucks when kids cry.) 

But the world, to me, and my place in it, has always been mostly threads and possibilities. It's been career guides and options and pushpins on maps and the blending of two colors to make a crayon box hold at least 128 instead of the advertised 64. It has always pushed the limits. It has felt hemmed in by requirements and rule books. 

And for the past ten years, especially, I have constructed a spot that cut my threads and limited my possibilities. I took little trips out, even big ones (I've been thinking about Vietnam a lot, lately. It was a good one, even if the "editor" and teacher in charge of the trip dropped every conceivable ball and the work didn't go much of anywhere. ) But I never committed. I never said "This is when I jump. Today." There were reasons, financial and emotional and every other -al, sure. But the bottom line was that it's been stupid and crazy-making. It made me lose respect for myself, to a degree that I'm just now realizing. It was fear-based. It was just based on what I could see, and that's a short-view path to nowhere, for me, I think.  

 

I went down some bad roads this past week, old ones, into long-discarded neighborhoods and darkened doors. In spite of so many lovely, caring, generous voices on the phone and in my little chat box and on at least two occasions in beautiful person, I felt other and weird, like no one would ever ever ever be here again and it'd just be me and this general sense of having lost my best friend and my puppy and my grip. 

It's better now, this weekend. The center is coming back a little. Times of change are just hard, that's all, and even when I know it's good, when it was essential, the cavern inside is deep, the worn neural pathways resolute and committed to believing the old, tired worst. It is the hardest work to wear new ones, to practice better thoughts and fresh plans over and over until they zap the garbage out. 

It's a freaky thing, to feel yourself becoming yourself -- maybe again, probably for the first time. 

So no, I don't know what I'm doing, exactly. I do wish I could make myself feel better about that sometimes, and almost as much I wish I could make you feel better, too, and not just because I wish you'd shut up about it. My administrative aide was in a state on Thursday, worried what I was going to do, following around after me like Alice on The Brady Bunch checking to make sure I had all my stuff for my field trip. It's love and it's awesome, but it's stressful, too, because like I'm not thinking about this nonstop? Sure as hell I am, but I cannot let it cripple or confuse me to the point that I can't function or I think I'm doing the wrong thing, because I can and I don't. I do have a few things sketched in that I hope will lead to other things. I am reacquainting myself with my better self, the person who has been mired in expectation and settling and qualification for a long, long time. I'm practicing saying I'm a writer and an editor first. This is strangely difficult when "teacher" has long been the first identifier. I'm practicing taking compliments: "Thank you, yes, as an editor I'm not too shabby." "Thanks, I'm proud of that shot." Because I know I have to get better now, or it will affect everything that comes after. 

But it's hard, y'all. This is all hard. I'm in a really hard damn place. I've cried in the tub and I've paced my kitchen while I tried to clean it although it can never seem to get clean to the point where I can rest. I have all of these clothes I need to pitch, and shit I can't find places for anywhere. My new little ipod shuffle I got for Christmas refuses to load on my iMac and I obsess and obsess about this almost as much as the messed up desktop resolution. I cut the space where the joint of my thumb meets my first finger, and it felt like the largest affront to a 41-year-old woman in the history of surface cuts. I have written some impassioned pieces of blog science in the past few weeks, and when I needed not to be so strident I was. I love words so much. I don't know why I let them be so hard sometimes. 

But I knew in the tub this morning while I let the water run down on me and cried like a fool that I was in a necessary hard place, a place I wouldn't call good but I would allow was productive. I was cutting some stuff DOWN. Not cauterizing, no. Nothing's getting cut off or melted. It's all just here. I'm feeling it, letting it be and move through and out, which in this case meant that I got out of the tub and put a decent outfit on for my night and went and got a sandwich and ate it and it was good.

And no matter what I don't know, I believe because the alternative is bullshit that I will be okay on the other side this time if it kills me. (It won't, I'm pretty sure. Countercharm.) 

Wilder

I'm terrified. I admit it. But I'm moving. 

I want your stories and your problems right now. I want to give advice, gather you into me, sit you on my couch, turn on your stories, and make you dinner, bring you a drink. I want to help. I want to ground myself in knowing I can tell you something that might assist you. I'm so aware of what I've taken, and of what I don't know. I have a need, my innate need, and not even a sick, codependent need, but more honestly reciprocal and restorative need to give. 

It's usually so much easier to know how to do that, than to go inside, isn't it? But right now it just feels right. It feels like balance. It feels like remembering that I know things, beyond the most obscured and personal, the things I cannot tell myself. 

I'm turned inside out, myself, a lot raw, scared, more than a little bit lonely. That's okay, that happens sometimes. I can feel it now, let the current course through my skin, my arns and legs and brain, and move through it like I couldn't for so many years so easily before. There are days like today where I'm scrubbing the toilet because it has to be done, but also because focus is good, and I break. I break in two and sob scrubbing the toilet, because what better time is there to do that? And I stop and try to break the chain in the mirror, regroup, cut this out. 

I hear the returns coming in, Wolf's crazed histrionic crush on Palin from the living room while I move from the toilet to the floor, grabbing the new, cool scrubber thing I got to reach the upper parts of the shower the last time I was at Target. And I suppose that I could stop this and yell on the internet about politics some more, make snide comments on Twitter, despair in community and sarcasm. But it came full into my consciousness tonight that that is not going to stop any of what is happening and nor is it going to make me feel any better about this inexorable madness that I feel sliding across our brains, our impressional psyches and our faces, our souls that don't need this shit, right? 

Old Adam the crow 
He's flying away from your field 
And you will never know what makes him run 
I dreamed of my father 
Who drove me out of his home 
And I dreamed I've forgiven my wilder son

I listen to Hem always when I write and that is the song that was just playing now as all of the thoughts moved through, and it keeps wanting to crawl into this post apropos of nothing, maybe, but probably something, as is the way. 

I can't tie anything into a bow and I'm learning in the past two weeks -- with all of the questions and the doubt and the wonder and the fear, the love and loss, betrayal and beauty and sadness, mixed in with the normal every day -- that I'm going to have to be okay with that for awhile. Every minute when it seems unbearable is met with the curtain held back from the air through my sliding door to test the rising temperature, a few more minutes of twilight at the end of every lengthening day, a meal I churn out in my very own kitchen that pleases me, as they generally do. 

It's minuscule, progress, I'm finding, as I become intimately acquainted with what that means to me in a new context. It's a daily, maddening slog. I've never been through this in this configuration before, but I've been through things that could have been like this if I'd taken them to the wall, and that is the thought that keeps me moving the most, that keeps me from slipping over like I've done before, that makes me know that whatever happens, it was the right thing, even if only just when I thought it was that moment. I didn't know it before, but I can eat that fear. I can swallow it in pretty big bites, just short of whole. I didn't know I could until I did it, I was pretty sure I couldn't, but I did. And I keep doing it in some small way every way, in ways I wish I could fully share right now but maybe someday I can. 

I don't have any more. I have what has to be enough for now. 

n. lacking courage; very fearful or timid

He told me last week that I was a coward. I said get it straight: I was a scarecrow, not a lion -- a fool, sure, but not a coward. Except I guess in some ways I am pathetically afraid, the person I am with him, anyway.

I still didn't like it. It still wasn't nice to hear.

People, through some fault of their own or none at all, mostly make you what you are to them, and also who you are in their orbit. The way they talk to you, you to them, how they hold or discard your heart, how they smell (this is important), what they ask of you and how they respond -- it makes you this being that you weren't the minute before you met them, the minute-before person who you will never be again, although if it's not right that's who you'll always be after going back to. It's freaky and uncomfortable. It's science. It's something else, isn't it?

We scrapped out this long, heartfelt, baffling road, he and I. A coward could never have survived it, would have dropped dead eleven months in, the first time she was made to feel unnecessary, inconsequential, distracting from the truly important stuff. And more than a decade later, it's never over, sometimes it feels like, except I think that calling me a coward ends the game, even if he's even partially right. It's not something I ever want anyone to say. It's not something I want someone to have even a partial hand in making me be. It's not something I want to be capable of on my own.

It is not who I am.

This is me a little while ago, in the summer time, my favorite. Flawed, absolutely. I have so much work to do, always, always, keep on moving, doing the work. Figure it out. Make the calls. Be so much better. Do the hard stuff because if you don't, who will? Try to achieve some semblance of what you're capable of before you die.

I still, after careful consideration of this assessment, don't think she is a coward, at least not in the ways that count the most around here.

 

It's better that we don't talk that much anymore. I don't think we bring out the best in each other.

New York Story

I was writing this super heady crazy thing about how I was in New York and I woke up in this hotel room that I never intended to be in (with friends, not strangers, uh, to be clear), with all of these fuzzy feelings from nowhere because wine and meatballs are weird and kind of awesome in that way. And Occupy Wall Street was all over the television that I never turn on in the morning because I hate noise in the morning, but the person left with me in that room needs noise in the morning, because we're all so different, right? 

And it reminded me that the previous day, before I beautifully ran into Diane, and then Neil and Amy, in the lobby , I had entirely intended to take myself down to the protest to shoot pictures of it for...some reason. Posterity? Documentation of something actually happening in a mostly reactive, crazed society? Yes, I guess. I mean, I live in the D.C. area. I've seen the Occupy D.C. site (the one before it moved, anyway.) I could shoot that. But New York, where Wall Street is, seemed a more important site to document. 

Except then after a period of traveling I saw friends I never see, whose powerful words reach me through a medium that didn't exist until I was an adult, who matter to me in a distinct and powerful way that I don't always remember until I see their faces and bodies and hear their voices again. So I decided it was more important to stay in a hotel bar and talk to them about writing and their lives and what they wanted from tomorrow and whenever. 

I was correct. It was, and they were, more important. It really was. I have not one regret. 

But what was funny was when I ended up in that room the next day, with that news story playing, I muttered "civil disobedience" aloud when I heard it. I've always liked the concept, and how the phrase sounds. There's probably not enough of it. And I wasn't sure what it meant that I'd skipped observing a powerful display of it in action for a conference about how to write better, about how to put my voice into the world in some kind of constructive way, but I knew that that was all there was for me to do, for a number of reasons. 

None of this is easy, really. This world, this country, our states and counties and on down to our individual lives. We do the best we can, for the most part. 

I just know I woke up in that room happy, oddly comforted, and then someone turned on the television. There is a lot of noise. 

We have to find our friends -- the people and spaces who and that will take care of our hearts and needs. We need to find the places where we can best spend our gifts, contribute whatever it is we're capable of and willing to give away. We have to find our refuge, no matter what anyone thinks, no matter what we thought it would look like before. I believe that now more than ever, even the parts that scare me. 

I thought this was a midlife crisis, I really did. But what I think it is now is waking up. It's as harsh as every morning. It's as challenging as unfailingly fucking up my coffee beans to water ratio. It's the most essential thing, I think, that I've ever done. 

I hate it and I love it. I don't know if you or anyone will like me on the other side, and the most perfect thing is that while I do still care about that, that I don't care about it the most. That's a big deal. Not to demean anyone who is sitting in a specific place to advance a much larger cause, but I think that's an occupation of something. 

Of Maryland Os and Accents

My beautiful friend Samantha Jo made this version of the accent meme video that I just love.

I've never met Sam in person (ed. note after I drove to work and realized I was probably wrong about this -- and now I'm thinking this is a dirty lie, and that I met her at BlogHer New York or somewhere at a BlogHer, but it wasn't QUALITY TIME, you know? So maybe I just think it didn't count. Or maybe I'm just delusional and forgetful like usual. We should probably go with that), but we click on Twitter like nobody's business, and I know without meeting him that her kid is the kind of kid I'd have wanted to have if I'd ever had one. (I've always hoped I could order a boy if I managed to be a mom, and the communication that she and Theo have resonates with me as  the kind that I'd have with a child who belonged to me. Intuition is a weird thing.)

Also, things have also been kind of heavy around here for awhile, which isn't exactly accurate, because my in-real-life is a much stranger mix of pathos and humor, and I'm thinking maybe the blog should reflect that more?

I don't know. In any case, I did the accent meme, in spite of my relative hatred of video. Here I am, discussing aunts and terlets and Maryland o-faces. It's as unexciting as that doesn't sound.

It's incredibly long, but there were lots of questions, and not only am I not that concise, but I can also go on and on about words. If you want terse and short, ask me about chemistry or equations or some shit like that. I'll guarantee you 27 seconds, maybe.

Suebob did it tonight too, because I asked. I consider her quintessential California, so we're basically coastal opposites.

September

It's harder to talk here when I've been away. I feel like we should have a gathering-in of some sort, me and the strangers and small cadre of friends who drop by. It feels a little forced to pick back up again, because I've never been one of those vignette sort of bloggers. Not the "Hey, so this one time, when I was doing this thing? And that funny thing happened?" Not me. I sometimes wish I were, sure -- that I had a handy toddler sidekick to provide me with material. A goddamned dog, even. But nope. Just me. And I also don't feel so touchy feely lately, nor into the creative writing and the developing of a construct or a flowery means by which to impart a central truth. 

I am beat down tired. I am exhausted and dehydrated. If I were Brittney in the dark days I'd have shaved my head and beat the crap out of a paparazzi SUV with an umbrella last week. 

It's a good thing I'm not her. 

I've been thinking about this blogging thing more because I happened upon a comment recently from someone very popular in a particular social media SPACE. She said that she was so glad her awesome life happened in the awesome place where said life currently happens, because if she'd stayed in the shitty environment where she lived before all of the CRAZY SUPER AWESOME, all by herself, ostensibly, she wouldn't have had anything to blog about, not ever. 

Her shitty environment resembled mine in some ways. 

I wasn't sure what to do with that information. Maybe blow my brains out? Maybe just stop living my entirely boring, unbloggable, less madcap than the average person like that person kind of life? Maybe apologize for inflicting all of my nothing on the world for years, all my pointless, useless, not-even-Seinfeldian not awesome? Because whoa. I know it's one person's point of view, but a lot of people happen to co-sign this person's words. And if she said it? Well yeah, here's my nothing. Eat it up. 

I am, as they say, winning with this train of thought. 

Anyway, I have always been really irritated with discussions of "the writing life", of what it means to be a writer and where people write and how they write and what provokes them to write and what they eat when they write. It's like losing weight, kind of. You eat less and you exercise. There's no magic answer and billions of people spend years trying to conjure it up. In this case, you just have to write. 

And a lot of times, I don't want to, although it is, sadly, one of maybe three basic strong skills that I possess (the others are guessing with freakish accuracy how much grocery store salads will cost before they're weighed, and also I make a perfect grilled cheese. So basically, science.) To avoid writing, I tell myself that I can't. I tell myself that I'm blocked. I do every which thing to work around it except the thing itself, because I have some kind of stupid gold standard for what people will find, here, on a blog I've had since aught-six, on which I write for entirely free, which very few people read. 

I'm not sure what I'm after anymore. I started with minutiae and terrible fonts. I started with the desire to write about anything but the devastating, disgusting heartbreak I was going through at the time, and in some ways I succeeded. I wrote my way into a minor part-time career as a writer on the internet. I got a journalism degree. I met my best friends. 

This blog has been crazy good to me. Incredible things have happened. I have opened up so many doors. I've gotten better at some things. I've stayed the same at some things. 

I'm not entirely sure that I'm a better person. I'm thinking a lot about that lately. 

But the deal is that I still come here. I log in and there's still this blinky white box that I am supposed to fill with something. And I feel the need to do that still and I feel weighted by the knowledge that I have no idea what to say right now or where to go or what to do. I see so many people doing things and grabbing things and being things and calling themselves things and the options and the intersections and the noise make me a little bit crazier, I think.

And I know in my heart AND mind that these are some of the most annoying posts I have ever read on other blogs and it kind of makes my mind hurt to be responsible for one. But it's just true that I process by dumping words, whether spoken or written, and if I don't do it right now, I don't know what else to do. So here you have it. So just for kicks, here are some segments of posts that I have in draft that I can't finish:

*We had an earthquake and the aftermath of a hurricane here, which meant that it poured rain for days on end. It was like the whole world went dark. It was weird.

I wrote this in draft and never hit publish. 

Thus it happened that I was napping yesterday at a completely inappropriate time for a grown person. I was racked out so hard, I was dreaming about Kate Winslet saving that person from the fire and Ryan Gosling breaking up the street fight and at some point I was back on a boat in California too. This nap was kind of like that freaky Wonka boat ride.

Then my bed started moving.

I have a big bed. I have what I consider the best bed in the world, and this sucker just, well, this is not to say that it has never moved with assistance (shut up) but it has never just spontaneously moved itself. 

"Ryan? Kate?" my dream self said. "California? Lunch? Oompa Loompa?"

And then I woke up. And yes, not only was my bed itself moving back and forth like I really was, finally, in Oz, but, oh hey look, my building was moving too. 

I didn't understand it, because I am rather dim when fully conscious and I was just waking up. And also, as it turns out, I am fairly calm when I assume that my 12-floor high-rise big ass apartment building is going to fall down into the courtyard whose renovation over the past eight months has been the stuff of my jackhammered nightmares. I love a screw-up like that. Whoops. 

For some reason the bed moving and the swaying of the whole structure fit together. It wasn't until the interior walls of, well, my whole PLACE started shaking and threatening to cave in that I assumed the obvious: 

My across the hall neighbor was knocking out a wall. Everything is construction around here, all the time. 

See? Dim.

My litany went like so: 

"The building is going to fall down. The fucking building is going to fall down. The neighbor is knocking out a wall, and the guys downstairs probably finally hit the essential parking garage column that was holding the whole shebang together. Isn't it funny how that happened at the same time? That is really crazy. Whoa, moving. Still moving a little.I'm probably going to die in this building. Hmmm. Wow. I hear sirens."

Not once did an earthquake occur to me.

Dim. Dim dim dim. And also I live in such a general state of enslavement to construction at every turn that I just assumed that that was it. 

*Whoops. That was long. Sorry. 

Then I tried to write about yoga:

I was standing in the yoga studio hallway last night, outside the class that I had given the task of making or breaking my shitty day. 

No really, it was a shitty day, a shittier day than average in what has seemed to be a string of more of them than usual since the spring. But as has been my habit since January, I pulled myself out of my force field of anxiety, self-flagellation and unfinished tasks and dragged myself to the yoga studio that I haven't really been to enough since my car blew up last month. 

I was a few minutes early. This is the only place to which I am early on a regular basis, because I like to nest in my corner of the room. A very nice woman I've spoken to before was standing next to me. She said hello, and then she asked me if I would be willing to let her observe me in class and offer me hands-on adjustments throughout the hour and a half. She is in the teacher training program, and she had one more in-class private session to go for her certification. 

"Sure," I said, to her smiling, serene face and calmly modulated tone of voice. And then my brain kicked in. 

"Sure! Sure I'll let you touch me during the whole class, and move my legs around and press on my shoulders and oh yes, you're holding a strap, too! Oh my God. What did I just do? Are these leggings clean? This is a hot class, right? I hope you like sweat, yoga teacher lady. A lot."

She looked  so grateful that I could almost ignore my lunatic brain. I've been in that kind of a jam, where I need to cross something off of my list that requires another person, and it's a pain in the ass to ask, because no one really wants to be jarred out of their semi-comatose routine to do anything out of the ordinary, they just want to go in there and down dog their crappy work day away. 

Especially people like me, who don't really like to be touched by strangers, and who are jumpy enough that the prospect of a person, however nice, watching me go through an entire yoga class and moving my limbs around randomly when I screw up is enough to cause a mild sociopathic break. 

But I said yes. And then I babbled some more things, including a stellar moment when I told her I was okay with this as long as she didn't get too "handsy," like she was a guy at a bar with dollar bills and not a nice middle-aged lady in an unassuming yoga class outfit. The only handsy out of line she'd probably get would be to bust out some Reiki moves when I wasn't looking.

Handsy. Really, Laurie. HANDSY. 

Anyway, she said "handsy" back at me, and nodded solemnly and said she would not be it. I yapped something about my neck hurting and gestured oddly to a part of my neck that didn't really hurt. I also wondered again why I leave the house so frequently.

I tried to write something coherent about depression during suicide prevention week. That didn't get very far:

Someone fairly prominent in the social media world killed himself last week. I didn't know this guy, and I'm not linking him up here, because there's really no point, and I'm guessing it was peace that he was after. But I did go to his Facebook page from the link provided on Twitter , and there weren't that many messages yet. I guess people had just found out, although 2011 provides degrees of hearse-chasing like no other year, basically. 

The top message that I read was typed by a woman who, oh, I don't know where she was sitting? On her fucking lanai? In her goddamned bed? At her shabby chic kitchen table sucking down coffee? And she was all, oh, I'm so sorry for your friends and FAMILY, so and so, but you know, life is a choice, and you made the wrong one. I'm sorry you felt like you had to do that.

Maybe she tacked on an "xoxo", I don't remember. 

Really, social media lady? That's big talk, calling out a newly dead social media guru on his Facebook page. Let's have our last interaction with a guy who was miserable enough to end his life be a mild beratement. That's productive. Because he was apparently not excited enough about the stuff that amps up your stupid ass to keep this train going for one more day? Good for you.

And also he is dead so he can't flame you back. He can't even unfriend you.

No, really. Good for you. 

I tried to go to her profile. I'm not proud of it, but I did. I don't know what I thought I was going to do there, maybe sneer at her pictures of her Maui vacation or what, or of her living, berater-of-dead-people self. I couldn't see anything, though, and it was just as well. People like that woman suck. There are a lot of them, these people who think they have it all down, especially when it comes to the life-ending choices of others. They suck when they invoke the Bible as a reason why it's a sin to take one's life, and they suck when they use guilt and no knowledge whatsoever of what it's like to be in those sad, sad shoes as an excuse to feel superior over a dead person.

I would say that of all the bullshit ways to use Facebook? A crappy comment to a dead person about the way they died clinches the top loser prize.

And there you have it, the random detritus out of the way.

I'm going to start fresh tomorrow.

747

I dreamt about a plane crash last night. 

I'm a terrible flier, but this time I was on the ground. I stood in a field -- expansive, familiar -- like my uncle's old back pasture combined with a farm we used to visit every summer. 

I never remember my dreams, and I'm terrible about remembering my dream people, also. They're like stick figures, usually various people I know meshed together, so I can't really tell who's doing or saying what. In this case I knew it was my closest faces surrounding me, this one and that one, standing around in the grass, who knows why. 

I looked up at the sky, and saw the wide underbelly of a noiseless jumbo jet, strangely covered with dials and gauges, like the cockpit control panel turned inside out on the bottom of the plane. I jolted in my sleep as the dream plane flipped upside down, crashing nose-first into the trees, crushing a plat of houses that went up in flames. 

My dream friends screamed. The grass caught fire, flames speeding toward us. I felt us collectively unsure of which way to go. Moving backwards seemed a good idea, but no one is really fast enough to outrun that kind of firepower.

I woke up, then, as always happens just before the outcome of a disaster comes clear. Curling into myself, I knew I didn't need an interpreter to tell me that this was not a good sign of what was going on in there.  That plane is the most terrifying image I have ever seen in my mind.  It's been with me all week.  Over and over it crashes, and the flames go up. I never have figured out why we were standing there, just passing time.

This is why it's better that I usually never remember my dreams.

*************************

I've been surrounded by construction since the spring. The racket of jackhammers and the smell of burning tar are a constant. No matter where it seems I walk, there are orange cones and caution tape, back hoes and guys in hard hats, and in one memorable case, a crane directly over the building where I work.

Every morning, the sounds drill through my brain. I've worked very hard and failed to force my brain to convert them into white noise. I've gone into the bathroom and shut the door, climbing in the tub with a comforter and a pillow. I've buried my head under more and more layers of covers, pointlessly. The doors and walls aren't thick enough, the constant sound too loud, Gaslight-crazy-making via jackhammered cement.

The courtyard looks better. The lighting is nice and the trees and flowers are fancy. There is, disappointingly, no water feature. I cruise through the Pier One site, looking for the chaise lounge on clearance at a store near me. It may actually be nice to sit on the balcony in the fall, if the noise ever stops.

I'm not sure they'll ever be finished.

*************************

Last week there was an earthquake and the remnants of a hurricane here. The East Coast seemed to go under water. The sky looked and the air felt strange.  So many voices said it wasn't a big deal, as people drowned and lost their homes and worried about what might be, days before it was clear what was really going to happen after all.

It's easy to tell a person standing on a pier looking at the wreckage of their house that it's not so bad, when you can't see them, when your home a thousand miles away or maybe even next door is not submerged. It's easy to say that they shouldn't need government assistance. It's easy to make it about you.

This week answered back with a certain amount of sun. Life and brains rearranged around the sensory knowledge that what feels like walls caving in is something that comes up from the core, no warning. There's no way to predict it, and once it starts, you hold on to whatever's close and wait for it to pass.

Apt, that's all.