LaurieWrites

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.

August and some other things.

So. Things have been pretty heavy around here. So look! 

It's me! Mildly inappropriately clad in a dress I mended poorly all by my damn self in my hotel room just minutes before Robin wrote profanity on me at a party! She is balls to the wall, y'all, so it's convenient that she tells you that up front. Or, as I captioned a photo of her the other day, "Honey Robin don't give a shit." 

And I'm overtired of the honey badger business, too, but it just made sense. 

Anyway, that should lighten it up a little. If it doesn't I don't know what to tell you. It's all I got. 

Return from BlogHer 2-aught-11 has been difficult. Things were already feeling teetery before I left. Summer schedules are challenging and work is heavy. Major events happened early in the season, and I'd been spending a lot of time since then either on the yoga mat refocusing or screwing around at home, wondering what the next thing was going to be. 

Then I went to California and was surrounded for four days by so many of the best people I've ever been lucky enough to know. It is just true. There were probably 50 people there who I could call (if I liked to call people) and talk to about just about anything related to my life and my work, and they would listen and provide some kind of feedback and it would likely be very useful. This is very cool and incredibly overwhelming for my brain and my heart all at once. And nothing that is overwhelming for these two components of me is entirely good. But there's nothing I can do about it. I can't not go. That doesn't work for me. And once I'm there I'm no good at filtering or managing my time with people versus time alone. I don't have any time alone, unless you count the random walking back and forth to places, and even then? Never happens. Rarely happens. So it's a lot, but it's too much good stuff, if that makes sense. 

(I also worked very, very hard on a couple of projects during the conference this year, in addition to having bad words written on me and having some of the most fun times I've had with some people who are very important to me. I also made some good connections and got some great ideas. And also posed with Sarah and a toilet, and the worst slogan I have ever seen for any product ever. (Sorry dudes.))

(I don't know what is wrong with us, either. She doesn't know how grateful she should be that I posted none of the shots of her watching the, er, Kleenex-testing station, with the peculiar Pinocchio-ish Animatronic child blowing snot on a crappy tissue that splits right in half, and then the Best. Tissue. Ever! that wouldn't break if Voldemort snorted into it through his wand. 

"I'm a real boy! Watch me fake blow my nose! I will make you throw up, right here in this expo hall!" It was not enjoyable in any way.)  

Do you like how I'm flip-flopping here between bitching and sharing ridiculous things?

It's almost too much to go there, to have this kind of experience and feel like you're home when you're not and then come home and not feel at home. All the pieces are rearranged again and this year almost as soon as I walked in the door exhausted from the Metro I proceeded to embark on a series of poor life choices in response to this tailspin. I think I'm going to spend post-BlogHer week next year in a distant tropical location, where I give my iPhone and computer to a trusted caregiver and lie on a beach with  bottomless beers and trashy books.

I hear people bitching on the internet about this or that thing related to the experience every year, and I can't even process it. I don't even care about it, because for me it is such an intensely personal thing. I am too personally immersed to criticize the nuts and bolts of any one part of it. And maybe that makes me weird, but I don't question where anyone else finds their place and their people. I don't. (I mean, I may wonder why they like that place or those people, but it's really none of my business.) 

So yeah, I came home, and freaked out. Hard. 

My car blew up. There were other things, life things, a few scary things that I wasn't sure what to do with yet. The huddled masses came streaming back from the beach with burnt noses and a million, time-consuming questions. It turns out that returning from a few days of zero humidity and the pure streaming sunlight and blue sky of heaven to a vat of sticky air and clouds gives me a five-day not-quite-migraine. I had been away from yoga for a week and I immediately twisted something in my neck that made standing a challenge, and also sitting, which made me extra pleasant in the place where I am required to go daily. (Don't turn 40. Do some Benjamin Button thing. Start the incantations now, is all I'm saying.) Worse, I felt all of the ideas I'd had and discussions I'd felt were productive slip away in 48 hours, and everything was swirling around in my brain so much that I couldn't capture it in an appropriate to-do list.

I didn't feel like doing this, not at all: 

 That's my boyfriend Bob Harper from the Biggest Loser, or perhaps @mytrainerbob to you. I dragged myself out of bed on BlogHer Saturday at 6:50 a.m., to go downstairs and watch him lead a terrace full of women through a punishing workout. I didn't meet him because I got a little bit shy and a little bit feeling like I needed to jam from his oatmeal breakfast before it was over because I had done an hour-long flow yoga class after his workout and a shower was a priority if I was going to meet any of my other myriad obligations that day. 

So. Almost two weeks later (is it two weeks later? Lost track.) I still feel like I'm missing stuff. I missed everyone uncommonly when I came home this year -- actually reached out to talk to people on the phone when I got back, a level of missing that is strange for me. I just don't know what to do about it, this reorganization time, besides reach out more to people in my life. But I can't spend time with people every minute. I can't constantly be reattaching some virtual umbilical cord. This is the way my life is right now and I have to learn to rest in it to a point. 

I don't think I'm doing a very good job. So what I am doing is isolating more, even when I know that that is really not a good idea. I just don't like what I have to tell people, the truth of things. I hear myself rambling and it just seems better not to talk. There are things I can't even deal with myself right now, so how can I explain them to anyone else? 

I can just feel things changing, in the oddest, most unavoidable, way, some fundamental things about what I want to do and where and with whom I want to be. I'm in touch in a pretty clinical way with things I'm not happy with in myself, with the unhelpful ways I approach my daily routine, with ways I don't relate well to people and let them down (or at the very least am less to them than I could be), with goals I'm not achieving because I've not been so much lazy as I've been terrified.

Yes, I do some things right. Yes. I have skills and assets. I will still help you if I can. 

But it's a necessary time to focus on the "needs work" list. Because I think I'm coming to understand that when we or our circumstances change, our desires and deepest understanding of what moves us (which also tend to starkly and uncomfortably illuminate what doesn't, and to what we can no longer cling without great cost) do too. It's either bend with that (I'm crazily thinking "enjoy the go," and just, no no no. Also, advertising is our societal drug. This is proof.) or you don't, and eventually -- if you are anything at all like me -- you end up cracking up a little past the usual benchmark, kicking the wrong asses and taking the entirely incorrect names.

It's like my internal house is on fire and I'm constantly cataloguing what and who I'm going to grab first, and what I'm going to let incinerate. It's a disturbing, totally involuntary feeling, and I can't say it's comfortable on any level. It just is. 

(Please go and read that post when you're done with my droning here, if you're not offended by profanity like I am not. Her name is Noa. She read it at the Voices of the Year Community Keynote this year. It is perhaps the funniest goddamned thing I have ever read on the internet, second only perhaps to Hyperbole and a Half's "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS" post which has the added benefit of having added a slogan to my regular speech. Although I'm thinking "Fuck you, this is a pan," is going to go in there too.) 

I've done this before. Although it's been different, I've been uncomfortable and I've struggled. I've tried to get help with it and I've tried to listen to the discomfort for the signals of what I ought to do next, because I believe that they are always there. I'm trying to be brave when I'm really the opposite, and I'm trying to be strong although somedays that's overrated. When I have to go through the motions, I do, and when I have to be a teacher, I am. It's just putting one foot in front of the other, sometimes.

And I also can't say that all of this changing and the burning house concept is bad, entirely, because I honestly don't know yet.  There's very little I can do about it, but walk through it the best that I can. At least I feel somewhat motivated.

And I think that pretty much brings this up to date, which I feel compelled to do around here from time to time.

Tattoo Me

BlogHer's almost here and I'm feeling a little crazy like I get every July. The drumbeat under my feet, the wacko dreams (No, I am not working registration. No, I am not late for the only assignment I have this time. No, I am not traveling to California via ZipCar. No, I did not sleep through my final exam. Simmer down, brain!)

You will not find, from me, any advice posts of any kind. I can sum up my BlogHer guidelines for myself in basically a line or three:

There are as many BlogHers as there are people there, so now there will be approximately 3,000 BlogHers. Neat! Don't have anyone else's. Have yours. If you want to sit in a hallway and feel persecuted this year, knock yourself out, self, but that's not the best path to self-actualization, for real. 

Likewise, don't blame anyone else if your BlogHer sucks. Give credit, sure, if you feel like it. A little bit of credit is always nice, and God knows if I have fun there it's mostly because of some other people. You're in charge. You really are, I promise. 

Have fun. Please have fun. 

See? Done. And those are all just for me. 

I go every year because it's just my thing I do. I am psyched every time and I have fun every time, in different ways. I love my friends from the Internet, and I love San Diego, so this year is shaping up to be pretty great, fingers crossed. 

(Sure, I hope I end up on the chocolate and Champagne yacht, but those people haven't returned my email and even if they don't? I can get my own damn chocolate and Champagne and drink it in my room with people of my choosing and that'll be just fine.) 

But I really started this rambling nonsense to say that I'm getting the urge to do this again: 

(My roommate emerita Genie took this at the Tattoo Factory in Chicago, BlogHer 2009. I am multi-tasking. I'm a little bit impressed with me, only because this means I didn't fall asleep.) 

Genie won't be there this year, and I'm sure she'd internally freak out in San Diego just like she did in Chicago when I decided on a whim as I unfailingly decide most big things that I'm going to have permanent ink injected into my skin. It's just a thing I do. I haven't gotten anything for my 40th birthday yet like I planned, so I have two weeks to figure this out if I want to do it while I'm in California. I know damned well that Sarah won't have any part of this activity because this is one of the major interests we do not have in common (so much so that she may well have had to look away from that picture.) Maybe Mr. Lady and Redneck Mommy will accompany me? 

Or maybe they'll just take ice from a hotel room bucket and numb up my nose before they pierce it. Hard to say. 

This is a really long-winded way of saying I need my 40 tattoo. I wasn't sure if I was finished or not. I'm so not. And what this has to do with BlogHer and San Diego and my friends and ice buckets and rogue piercings, well, yeah, I don't really have an answer for that. But I promise it all kind of makes sense in my head. 

(And if you're that person from Twitter who told me a few months ago that I should work out my midlife crisis in some other way, please know that I've had approximately 87 of those already, and they generally result in me sitting on my couch eating seven popsicles, drinking medium-grade Spanish blend and listening to Lodi on repeat. The tattoos are the fun part.) 

If you'll be in SD I'll see you there. And I'm open to ideas for art. 

Story so far

When I told Karen a few years ago that I believed in creating my own story, I had no idea that I'd end up sitting weeping in the front row of an auditorium a few years later while she spoke, those words of mine projected on the screen. 

I knew I'd meant it when I said it, the morning I originally told her some fragments I could remember of what had brought me from all the places I'd been to that Chicago lobby. I thought it was true then. So maybe that made it even more upsetting when I saw it so big in front of me and knew that if this was the story I'd put myself in charge of creating, I wasn't sure I'd done that great of a job. 

That didn't feel very good. 

#######

Some of it I can't tell you. Some of it I'm not even that good at telling myself yet. I know whatever this is this time that it's big and impossible and existential, that it has to do with the roads I drive and the places I go every day, a life that doesn't feel like it fits that well at all, even though I've done the human dance of adaptability and forced myself into a barely functional mold to make it look like it does enough hours of the week to get by.

I know that it's hard to see families and compare them to my life of fractured time with lots of people, on the fringes of everywhere, never going home to anyone or waiting for them to come to me. That's sad, I know, but it's just true. I was telling a friend last week that I look around at other women my age and I feel like there was a point where something happened for everyone else (gross generalization, yes, and "everyone" is hyperbole) and that it did not for me, even though I tried.

And I know that even worse than that, even beyond the preemptive grief for babies I'll never have and maybe even any kind of family life, who knows, that I could tolerate this chasm of a feeling so much better if I felt a stronger drive to do anything, really. It would be nice to have some sense of mission or purpose beyond the grind of groceries and gym and social activity. 

I would like it if I liked what I did, for the most part. I would enjoy feeling competent again. It would be nice to be in a place where people actually came over, maybe. Community, that would be good. 

It would be useful if within the world of opportunities and possibilities I know exist, that I would have the capacity to choose one, a few maybe. That I would not constantly look even through my third eye and see nothing but a swirl of too much, and have no idea which way to go. This kind of confusion shorts out a brain quickly, it turns out. 

#######

I don't know what I ever dreamed, if I dreamed, because a lot of times I wasn't about big dreams in the way that I usually hear people talk about them. I more trusted that something good would happen, something basic and cool and maybe even worthy of comment. I never wanted too much, just enough, to be it, to have it, to exist within it. And whatever that was, I know it wasn't this, and I can't explain to you the chaotic, horrible, silent nature of that feeling. I know that I wasn't meant to spend so much time alone, or to live my life in its current structure. I wonder what I'm paying for, sometimes -- what gift I've wasted or god I've shamed. I wonder what wrong corner I turned, what debt I left unpaid besides all of the ones I know about. 

And yeah, I do think, shamefully, a lot of the time, that it's no fair. I think of good intentions and hours of brain-splitting work, of parking lots and pizza trays and faith and love and trust. I think of pointless hours on the elliptical and karma and time spent invested in other people's well-being, of people invested in me.

And then I know that's wrong, immediately. You can't count beans or dreams or people. It was all just what it was. 

I don't know how you put so many broken pieces back together. 

#######

I'm two weeks in to getting better, again. I'm two weeks in to taking the pills and walking the walk back from this place, because a month or so ago I crashed again and it's always ugly when it happens but it takes some time and trauma to wake up. 

I went to the doctor. I sat half-naked on the paper on the table and told a stranger who was looking at a laptop instead of me -- new computer system, damned thing, have to input everything as we go -- the bare minimum of what was wrong, and got bored advice about what to take, and none about who else to see. She didn't know. No leads. So I called a person I thought might be able to help me, using my own bush league clinician's brain to scan through lists of MDs and LPwhatevers on a website. And when I called, my office door shut, my mantras shut down, a bored receptionist told me that I might be able to get in in July. I repeated July back to her as a question, told her that wouldn't help me and hung up. 

I wondered, if I gave up after one call, what people did who didn't speak the language well? Who were even more fucked up than I was? Who were old or truly alone or permanently terrified, beyond my ability to snap into functional for the three minutes such a loathsome phone call takes. 

July. 

I went to my yoga studio again, instead, where the oms flow and so does a fountain, where I contort myself silly in 90-degree rooms and feel peace like I don't have anywhere else. I went to work. I shot a big job. I took the little pink pills, willing them to work faster, apologizing to myself again for quitting the last time, when I felt better, when I got my cyclical attitude about medication, my stubborn aversion to things that work, that seem just the slightest bit easy. And as I felt the chemistry start to right itself again inside my head I was able to do some other stuff, the things I find impossible when I'm in the bad place. 

It's mostly nothing big. I cleaned my refrigerator. I did laundry. I picked up most of the clothes off of the floor of my closet and hung them up, categorized by the part of the body they cover. It's still a wreck in here, mind you. Vegetables keep rotting faster than I can eat them. Blouses fall down wispy from the hangers. But I try to stay a step ahead. I even shut the computer down sometimes. 

I envy you, you know, the people who are able to do this without assistance, who can just...do this, all of the time. 

I haven't been writing though, because when I do I ramble. And I'm afraid of what it means to talk about this, and for me lately, this is all there is, pretty much. I'm afraid of what it means to talk about anything these days, honestly, but I'm not sure it matters so much if I do. I'm pretty sure it matters if I don't. 

It's not like this story hasn't been told ad nauseum, both explicitly and in millions of desperate, flailing words that dance around it, so many things said instead. The truth of this is tricky. And the thing is, if you run into me tomorrow, after I've forced myself to get out of my bed that I love and want to live in, made myself get dressed to go to somewhere that works for me on no level to do something I don't like, I'll be okay when we talk. It'll be the usual non sequiturs and wisecracks. I might even offend you, probably accidentally. 

I probably won't tell you then that this chemistry is a low-grade kind of hell, and that two weeks ago, again, I couldn't see my way out of it. And now, today, I can, just a little, the slightest bit of enough to think my way around the hypothetical failure of my story so far. 

What I Love.

As much as I really am my very harshest critic (seriously -- the trash you talk about me will never surpass the voices in my head) there are some things I like about myself too. For instance, I have better-than-average taste in music and a sense of responsibility to other people and the world at large. I understand how to competently merge on the highway. I make a kickass grilled cheese sandwich and I do not purchase cheap beer.

But when it comes down to the very awkward -- for me, anyway -- question of what I love about myself, I think the most important thing is something that I can only describe as my constant engagement with life, and a commitment to learning and experiencing new things as much as I can until I die.

That sounds wrong, and vaguely awkward. I can't really sum it up.  

EXCUSE ME WHO CAME UP WITH THESE PROMPTS ANYWAY?

But all I know is that my willingness to try new things -- to learn them or go to them or hang out with them or eat them or purchase them -- has made a profound and positive difference in my life.

It hasn't always felt like it was so great at the time. I climbed a rock wall once, for instance, and that pretty much sucked. I am a terrible rock climber. I don't have an extreme sports bone in my body, and I fear the destruction of years of reconstructive surgery and invasive orthodontia, to tell the truth. But when a (cute!) man with very serious looking climbing gear and an earnest expression handed me the little shoes and the helmet, at some point over the past decade I learned not to cry about it, but to put it on and try it until I either accomplished the goal or failed.

In this case I almost achieved the goal before I nearly stroked out -- major anxiety attack -- at the top. But the point is, I tried.

Over the past ten years, especially, I've had several opportunities to respond to negative situations -- heartbreak, depression, the impossible grief that comes with the deaths of some of the most important people in my life. And although some days it felt like swimming against every imaginable current just to meet the basic demands of my life as I was going through those things, I really never stopped living. I caved in all but the most basic, essential of ways. I raged and drank and babbled to my friends, but I never stopped, in very small and some very big ways, reaching for better.

I miraculously never stopped trying, even when the last possible thing I wanted to do was try anything. Even when the last thing I felt capable of was another activity or thought or plan.

This is the characteristic that led me to take a trip almost every month in 2005, the year the supposed love of my life left to follow his me-less dreams. I cried my way through the American Southwest for the first time, and ended up in California for the first time the following year. I also signed up for my first photography class in the deepest throes of depression following that breakup, and it would take an entire blog to describe the effect that has had on my life.

This is what led me to blogging and the rack of great friends I got from that, and back to school and across the world to take a cab across Hanoi alone and sit with kids who couldn't hear or speak, which was only one of the reasons that it didn't matter that our languages were different.

 

My rolling stone brain gives me my stories, by virtue of the hands and feet it sends on various travels and the mouth that goes along. And although my life may lack some of the fundamental things I still kind of believe I ultimately need to think it was what I wanted it to be, in the meantime I live it every day.

Because the alternative is horrifying. Because when I'm idle I'm insane. Because there is so much to do -- can't you see it all out there?

I don't wait for anyone to go with me, because I can't afford to.

Even when I'm sitting still, I'm planning. I'm dreaming and imagining and knowing that no matter how many years I have left, it will not be enough to do all of the things that I have the capacity both to rock and to fail on the face of this planet. And as much as that could be overwhelming, I'm just glad I still think that way.

I want to go everywhere.

I want to learn languages.

I want to see so much more live music.

I want to be the writer I've always wanted to be, in every way that I can possibly make that real.

I want to be part of a community -- a real one, one that is physical and that I can feel around me in my  house or on my street.

I want to take your picture.

I want to understand major political conflicts and economics and learn sign language and how to change my own oil.

And they're not all big things, either, the things I pick up. This fall I made chicken soup from scratch for the first time. It was a pain in the ass, but it was completely rewarding and now I know how and I can do it again.

As long as I'm alive and capable, I won't ever stop learning. I won't ever stop doing stuff or going places or trying things. And I kind of love that about me.

Following are the writing prompts for 30 Days of Truth, should you be interested in doing so yourself.

Day 01 → Something you hate about yourself.
Day 02 → Something you love about yourself.
Day 03 → Something you have to forgive yourself for.
Day 04 → Something you have to forgive someone for.
Day 05 → Something you hope to do in your life.
Day 06 → Something you hope you never have to do.
Day 07 → Someone who has made your life worth living for.
Day 08 → Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.
Day 09 → Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.
Day 10 → Someone you need to let go, or wish you didn’t know.
Day 11 → Something people seem to compliment you the most on.
Day 12 → Something you never get compliments on.
Day 13 → A band or artist that has gotten you through some tough ass days. (write a letter.)
Day 14 → A hero that has let you down. (letter)
Day 15 → Something or someone you couldn’t live without, because you’ve tried living without it.
Day 16 → Someone or something you definitely could live without.
Day 17 → A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
Day 18 → Your views on gay marriage.
Day 19 → What do you think of religion? Or what do you think of politics?
Day 20 → Your views on drugs and alcohol.
Day 21 → (scenario) Your best friend is in a car accident and you two got into a fight an hour before. What do you do?
Day 22 → Something you wish you hadn’t done in your life.
Day 23 → Something you wish you had done in your life.
Day 24 → Make a playlist to someone, and explain why you chose all the songs. (Just post the titles and artists and letter)
Day 25 → The reason you believe you’re still alive today.
Day 26 → Have you ever thought about giving up on life? If so, when and why?
Day 27 → What’s the best thing going for you right now?
Day 28 → What if you were pregnant or got someone pregnant, what would you do?
Day 29 → Something you hope to change about yourself. And why.
Day 30 → A letter to yourself, tell yourself EVERYTHING you love about yourself

The Opposite of Love

Everything I hate lives with everything that I don't, here in this room in this vaguely shabby hotel, somewhere near the edge of California where I've found myself.

A cell-deep collection of involuntary self-loathing can span coasts, it turns out. Travel exhaustion and the edges of a Xanax half life skew my sense of operating as a flawed cog in a broken wheel of a world. I had hours strapped in an airplane seat to catalog my sins in my constant, subconscious way. I'm irritated as usual by the attention deficit that makes it impossible to write without interruption of tabs and tweets and ideas, endless whatevers that kill my continuity and goals. I'm obsessing about last night. What I had to say seemed important then, so critical to share, and now in the light of day -- in my memory, in my brain -- I sound screamy and obnoxious.

The patio door is open, mostly to combat the fumes in a recently-painted room, a mint green painted over what was obviously dingy white. Beyond it the wooden gate opens up to damp grass and a life-sized Buddha tucked in a corner of the yard under a canopy. California is cool and misty today. I want people to like me and I want to be left alone, and I never know when those two desires will, disastrously, coincide. I cannot fold my clothes. I did not return the Red Box movies. Money in general is a disaster. I am late for lunch, for the party, for this thing or that. 

I want to ignore my pathological hatred of the telephone and call people who will ground me, who are home to me. I tell myself they're busy, and wonder when I got so shy.

I am so impatient. I miss you against my will. I feel stuck, lose things constantly, easily overwhelmed by logistics and minutiae. I click the wrong buttons, ignore important envelopes, forget to turn in leave forms, overlook your e-mail, conclude for the millionth time that I suck. There is the wine on the wall in this room already from a freak corkscrew accident, blown deadlines in my inbox, an increasing sense of permanent aloneness (I am profoundly leaveable, that is just what happens) that grows intolerable but seems unchangeable, necessary.

A little girl screams and laughs upstairs for a long time, and my typing is more aggressive. Shut up shut up shut up. Intolerance. She is quiet and then I'm sorry. She is little, no knowledge of deadlines. She has the good sense to be on vacation.

I'm fat again. It all came back, in a six-month counterpoint to last year's fitness successes that had me liking pictures of myself for a change, feeling confident and healthy. I let go, relaxed into winter then spring then summer, and there it is this fall: the heavy boulders of the chins, the rolls, the concession to history that I hate.

I am too much and won't ever be enough.

I have this friend stopping by to pick me up, to drive me up a mountain to gorgeous, completely unfamiliar territory. She'll interrupt the noise, another person who distracts me from my mental tapes with brilliance and understanding, the occasional challenge. I set my coffee on the patio table, walk barefoot through the wet grass with the camera that for me reframes everything, and shoot the Buddha.

Following are the writing prompts for 30 Days of Truth, should you be interested in doing so yourself.

Day 01 → Something you hate about yourself.
Day 02 → Something you love about yourself.
Day 03 → Something you have to forgive yourself for.
Day 04 → Something you have to forgive someone for.
Day 05 → Something you hope to do in your life.
Day 06 → Something you hope you never have to do.
Day 07 → Someone who has made your life worth living for.
Day 08 → Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.
Day 09 → Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted.
Day 10 → Someone you need to let go, or wish you didn’t know.
Day 11 → Something people seem to compliment you the most on.
Day 12 → Something you never get compliments on.
Day 13 → A band or artist that has gotten you through some tough ass days. (write a letter.)
Day 14 → A hero that has let you down. (letter)
Day 15 → Something or someone you couldn’t live without, because you’ve tried living without it.
Day 16 → Someone or something you definitely could live without.
Day 17 → A book you’ve read that changed your views on something.
Day 18 → Your views on gay marriage.
Day 19 → What do you think of religion? Or what do you think of politics?
Day 20 → Your views on drugs and alcohol.
Day 21 → (scenario) Your best friend is in a car accident and you two got into a fight an hour before. What do you do?
Day 22 → Something you wish you hadn’t done in your life.
Day 23 → Something you wish you had done in your life.
Day 24 → Make a playlist to someone, and explain why you chose all the songs. (Just post the titles and artists and letter)
Day 25 → The reason you believe you’re still alive today.
Day 26 → Have you ever thought about giving up on life? If so, when and why?
Day 27 → What’s the best thing going for you right now?
Day 28 → What if you were pregnant or got someone pregnant, what would you do?
Day 29 → Something you hope to change about yourself. And why.
Day 30 → A letter to yourself, tell yourself EVERYTHING you love about yourself