LaurieWrites

Over all we've left undone

(This is a writing exercise for me for the last day of 2010 and the week of my birthday and of a decade...and yes, I'm calling this the end. It's every Reverb10 post I missed and all the truth I can handle right now rolled into one. I'm so glad it's over. I'm so grateful for the chance to mark this time I can't see straight. Happy new year to anyone whose eyes reach this page.)

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"Starless night, come fall around me
Over all we've left undone
I know a light that shines forever
Howsoever we may run."

~ "Reservoir", Hem

When I finally realized I had no interest in forgiving you it freed me up to consider why I should.

I  haven't been able to do it for a long time, it turns out, even though now I have to really work to see your face in my mind. I think that everything was just too much when it hit and kept hitting, the list of grievances too long, the memories too persistent and sad. I'm also as oddly ambivalent about forgiveness as I am any apology that is less than spontaneous and independently given, which may or may not be a result of being raised to believe I needed to talk to God about it, channeling my redemption through another human being who would close the screen and send me to an altar, assign me a certain number of prayers and call it even.

I don't know. I'm still oddly, ritually Catholic  in that part of my mind, as distant from any practice as I am. And anyway, what I can say I believe for sure is that I don't know if I can believe someone's really let go of anything, even if they say they have. I don't know who should. I think some things are, actually, unforgiveable in a way.

And for a long time, I didn't know I was going to have to. We couldn't or just didn't stop talking long enough for me to figure out that you were gone. And when we finally did stop -- when my grandmother died and I learned what real, bottomless loss and grief were -- I had nowhere to put the rage it turned out I'd been hiding under instant messages and inane e-mails since the day in January when you walked away from me and invalidated everything I'd imagined we were.

This was, of course, the problem. Suppositions in matters of the heart are a tragedy in waiting, a sad fact for situations so prone to them, unfortunately. They don't work in the worst, most consequential part, which is to say the longest run.

You have to ask the questions with potentially dreadful spirit-shattering answers early, just in case those answers make you turn this car around eventually. That's what I learned from this. You have to split hairs and clarify semantics. Because if you don't you'll end up on the phone with a grown man's mother, a week before he's going to leave your ass and your city and all your stupid, fragile dreams, and she'll ask you about what kind of socks you think will be best because it gets really cold where he's going and isn't this so exciting for him? Or maybe you just end up sitting in a Dairy Queen parking lot with your head on the steering wheel, mumbling it's fine that you're checking the classifieds in another city, honey. It's fine, really. BUT WHEN WERE YOU GOING TO TELL ME?

Now. Oh.

When I took my head out of my ass and  finally let the anger out, I'd carried it around for several years, and not like a baby, as a therapist suggested once. It was more like a hand grenade, honestly -- a live hand grenade baby in my purse, I guess. For God's sake no one jostle that thing.

Honestly it was partially my fault, or the involuntary fault of my deluded little brain anyway. I had one thing (one thing only) in mind when you walked down those stairs and away, theatrically crying like it wasn't your idea. One sinister subconscious plan all the times we talked in the just-friends zone for years after. One thing when I went to your adopted city and stared at statues of men on bronze horses and walked in other peoples' footsteps painted on the concrete, anything but free myself. All along I really believed and claimed that I was there to close a door when really, no. That wasn't why I was there at all. I was holding that door open with my shoulder and my knee, juggling grocery bags of delusion and crazy and not-so-shatterproof hope.

I had a brain full of incantations and silent pleas.

I had given you that red-string Chinese bracelet, so naturally that connected us, even though neither of us knew the Kabbalah from a hole in the ground and neither were we Chinese.

I was a complete and well-rounded, hyper-educated idiot of a disaster area.

Because the truth is that I was waiting for you to come home. I was believing stupidly against all clear evidence that you would finish this part of your dream and come back, because you had to, because the construct and all that was right with the world (my world) demanded it. And what I was doing that whole sad time was spread-eagling on the train tracks while whistles blew and hobos scattered and, deaf and blind fool I was, I got run over time and time again. And then like the crazy clown punching doll my grandmother had for us to kick around when we were little, I'd pop up again to hope another day.

At least I'm resilient. Stupid, maybe, but the resilient kind of stupid that people make reality shows about sometimes and pat on the head. I may have survived on the Mayflower, not to insult the pilgrims.

And even though I don't want to, because I honestly don't like you, and I hate everything you did and have reached a calm, bizarre ambivalence about your existence on this planet wherever you may be, I need to forgive you for letting me do all of that.

I need to forgive you for asking me to help you long after you should have, for pinging me with links  and words of the day and stupid jokes, resumes to edit and songs to listen to and scary questions in the middle of the night.

I need to forgive you for not respecting the power you had to break my heart, over and over again, for not ending all communication as soon as you knew that with me was not where you wanted to be for the long haul.

I need to forgive you for continuing to look into pitiful eyes like mine looked at you and keeping that poor dumb soul hoping. I still don't know how you could do it, honestly, but I need to forgive you for it.

I need to forgive you for telling me that I was the one who was broken, the one with the problem, who loved too hard and gave too much, that it was always my choice to come back so it must have been okay by me and the consequences? They were what they were. Because you had told me. You had told me.

I need to forgive you because even though it's long since gone and my life is pretty good, I know for a fact that I carry the garbage you dumped on my heart with me daily, and with it I've crafted a plastic bag eggshell shrine to my own failure to love, to connect, to be enough.

Because if I couldn't make it with you? I couldn't do that with anyone. But really it's that I just never wanted to. 

And even now that I can mildly envision opening up again, sadly I still believe that. I have not turned that corner, in spite of hope and work and positive self-talk, in spite of the good words of my friends and the deaths of people who meant more to me than you ever possibly could have.

I need to forgive you, most of all, for going on about what great friend we were and trashing me like no true friend ever could. For the part you played in wasting my very limited and entirely precious time, for being my one truest, saddest regret, and for taking advantage of my love given with a clear and well-intentioned heart until it got twisted by fear and rejection, because no one, I have since learned, should do that to anyone, for any reason.

They should walk away immediately, is what they should do. They should have the courage to set the other person free.

And while this might seem strange and untimely, it is entirely punctual and necessary for the person I am being and becoming. And it's essential for these words to live in a space where I spent two years anonymously talking to you, until you stopped reading and went on with things, finally allowing me to do so too. Two years later, I'm finally ready, on my own schedule, on my own dime. And I believe somehow that if I send this wish on the wind on the last day of what was in some ways the most disappointing year of a decade consumed by loving, losing and recovering from you, I'll have done the part that I needed to do a long time ago.

I honestly, finally believe that I can finally offer it up, that I can finally -- in my heart, where it matters, whether I should have done it years ago or never -- forgive. For me.

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This accidentally turned into Day Three.

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

Reverb10 -- December 1

December 1 One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

2010 is confusion. I don't remember the beginning of the year, really, but I remember how things fell apart in the spring for real and never really got back on track. Things were upended that had been stable on the surface for a long time. And even though I did some smart things in response, I didn't exactly grab the combined chaos and opportunity of a certain Chinese symbol and run with it.

There were good times this year. I know how to function with a certain level of insanity and I made gold out of straw on a number of occasions so I could be with people I cared about in places I cared about being. I wouldn't trade beers on Sarah's patio in the summer or Marcus's wedding or the M3 festival or the beach with my family or BlogHer in New York or the the Creative Alliance in Ojai. I have such good friends and time with them saved me -- a vegan dinner with Elisa on the Upper West Side, an amazing California day with Sue and Deb and then Erin and her family, Ian and Claudia knocking on a borrowed door to come over and see what was going on when I was in their neighborhood, so many good times with Sarah. These are times I'll wish back in later years when I've lost people and things that are an essential part of now.

Yet, I sit here in December unsure of everything -- where to live, where to go, what to do, who to be, who to be with, who to become. I cannot sit calmly anywhere. I am always freaked out. I feel like I'm running out of time to do things and I don't know what those things are. I'm surrounded by calendars with half-filled in pages and scribbled-on bills and a scale that's reading up and up and up no matter that I'm sweating my ass off multiple times a week in a 90-degree room full of people doing difficult yoga.

I am unsure of everything.

One year from today? I want "fulfillment" to capture 2011. I don't know what it will look like. I don't really care where I'll be. I can't describe air or other things I can't yet rightly see. I don't even know if I could identify it anymore from this space I'm in. I'm not sure I've ever had it. But I'm hoping that whatever this is that has reached into my life and shook it like a snowglobe for real this year settles down, and that on the other side I have a clearer path, a calmer heart and a sense that the place I'm in and the direction in which I'm going are good and right and true.

I want to feel good about and resolute in my life, my work, my relationships and my goals.

I don't expect magic. I expect focus and intention, two things I'm already working on in the midst of chaos and confusion, to help me achieve this. I know that what I'm doing now -- the sorting out, the repairing, the throwing away, the acknowledgement of places I've screwed up so I can fix them -- is essential. I know to value the quiet spaces where I'm sketching out what I need to do so I have a long moment's peace. So that even if it isn't perfect in a year -- because when is it ever, really? -- that it is so much better. That it feels like a place I can inhabit without extreme agitation or fear, without the sense that any life would be better, every day.

It's possible, I suppose.

I'm going to try to do this every day in December.

Imaginary Ocean

My two-hour Thanksgiving yoga class ended with a half-hour shivassana/meditation. I love this part because I'm a fan of lying down quietly, especially after an hour and a half of feeling like I'm going to die in a series of rapidly shifting positions that have me holding up my own considerable body weight and trying to balance on my legs or my arms -- neither my strong suit. This kind of flow yoga is really helping me get out of my head and into my body in a productive way, but it's harder than what I'm used to.

Meditating can be difficult for me. My brain never shuts off with the chatter, no matter what kind of music is on or how tired I am. So today when the teacher started leading the meditation (with a gong for accompaniment. I'm still not sure how I feel about the gong. What's wrong with Enya? Chanting? Anyway.) I was surprised that my mind went as blank as it can get.

Sadly, usually when I'm in a quiet place and maybe someone is reading some guided imagery prompts, I'm making shopping lists or mentally reviewing tasks, listing off everything I haven't done that I should do to justify my existence. I'm basically a one-woman band of meditative insanity, volleying between "Look to the LIGHT! See the golden aura!" and "Oh shit, I forgot to buy bread crumbs. OF COURSE I DID."

So it was really remarkable that this time in the quiet I just...went to the beach. I saw myself in the ocean. I put myself in the best place I know to be, when it's late in the day and the water is warm and relatively quiet. I could see the sun and the waves, the water coming up and over me. I could see the exact stretch of sand I love the most in all the world, the place I would rather be at all times than anywhere.

And in the distance on the shoreline, I saw my grandmother, come to visit me from wherever it is that she is these days.

I miss her today. I miss her more than usual on every holiday, but I don't talk about it much. I think that's partly because I don't even actively think about how I feel about it very often. We talk about my grandparents a lot on holidays because they defined these events and a big part of our lives for a very long time and telling the same stories to each other about everything over and over again has turned into a family ritual.

But when it comes to my own personal pain about her absence, I think it's just been tucked away for self-preservation. It's so big, I had to make it malleable so that I could put it away where it wouldn't hurt me on a daily basis.

Regardless, today there she was, on this beach. My mind bounced around between images of her face and a weirdly specific mental tour of our old house. I was amazed at how I could remember things in such detail -- the cigarette burning on the kitchen counter, the turkey on a platter, the scuffed-up cigar box of crayons, the sound of the door slamming on the coffee table where all of the games and books were kept, the horrible shag carpet up the steep stairs, to the point that I could feel its loops between my fingers as I used to when I picked at them, talking on the phone or hiding on the stairs from my expanding brain and shaky grip on growing up.

I went upstairs and saw the plug on a chain that kept the water in the tub, the pink tile and the twin beds, the monstrosity of my accountant grandfather's adding machine, the fake wood paneling on the back addition.

She appeared in my mind in a series of regular situations -- carrying the laundry out to hang on the line, making coffee, lying on the couch watching basketball, eating cookies. She yelled at one kid or another on the porch and let her tiny Boston Terrier Bonnie out in the yard. I sat in my memory under the clothesline, looking up between the sheets, aging from a pre-schooler singing songs around the huge oak tree to a depressed 15-year-old girl loved beyond reason by a woman who -- only knowing what it was to parent sons -- made early crooked stabs at barrettes and ponytails.

I heard her voice in a typical conversation, let her presence come into my mind and body like it has not in two years, technically, but in many ways way longer than that. My time-traveling mind's eye saw her not at 89, the year she died, ten years after a stroke wasted her body and stole her physical capabilities and independence -- the things that made her her. I saw her strong, laughing and fussing at all of us on her two feet, making mashed potatoes for this dinner that has never once been the same since 1997 because she didn't do that one simple thing that she did better than anybody else.

Again in the imaginary ocean this insane grief came to life again, a realization of how it defines how I've walked through the world since she inevitably got sick and died, how much of my childhood and my perceptions of family and duty and life and love were defined by my daily interactions with her.  And more sadly, clarity came of how I haven't transitioned very well -- because I didn't really want to. Because I didn't know how. Because my life is a little unstable and the magnitude of that relationship makes losing it harder, and there is no guidebook for any of this but some self-help literature and a flawed and distractible human brain. 

At her viewing I was the last one in the room at the end and my uncle said I had to leave her sometime. And of course it was true but I dragged my feet away from her body like I'd be back tomorrow. I never knew how I was going to live in a world without her. The thought of her eventual absence was so dreadful through my life that I could never wrap my mind around it and in many ways I still can't. I realized that as much as I can gracefully let her go on the surface, and sometimes even in my heart, that the primal connection never goes away and it hasn't integrated with now, in this case, whatever that even means, however you even do that.

When my meditation was rudely interrupted by a class assistant who apparently thought I needed a leg adjustiment I hadn't asked for and that I immediately resisted, I lost the invisible thread. Irritated, I shut my eyes again and tried to get her back, silently, frantically imagining the ocean that I'd been in minutes before. It almost worked, although not quite as well. Somehow I was back in the water, she was on the shore, in the wheelchair that was her hated transportation for so many years. My mind let her age again, to gently take on her eventual frailer form. I integrated her selves, somehow, in a way I really haven't since she began to physically fail -- the most difficult transformation I've ever witnessed.

I sat by her on the sand. We talked. I tried to imagine her forgiving me for all that I didn't do in the years that she was sick -- all of the time I wasted on a man who would do nothing but find me inadequate and break my heart, and friends who in spite of varying value would never mean as much to me as she did.

She reached out her hand and told me to stop. She would never acknowledge my need for her forgiveness. She absolved me everything, never thinking she had to absolve me anything.

So instead I opened up the box in my mind where I put my inability to forgive myself, where I put what I know about what I did and didn't do for her. I waited a beat, knew I wasn't ready to turn the corner for that yet, no matter what she said. I thanked her again, a daily unconscious practice, honestly. I told her that I missed her, and she said, as she always does when I imagine her in my mind, that it was a real shame she couldn't stay. I pushed her with considerable effort through the sand, and that was that.

Off the mat and walking to my car, my mind blown, I said "I'll be damned" out loud because I really had gotten just what I needed in spite of myself, however painful, however bizarre. Amazing that she somehow showed up on Thanksgiving to help me deal, to recognize that grief isn't over and that's okay, that sometimes you have to let it in to let it go.

Brains are amazing. Life is very strange.

And although it will never be enough for my selfish soul, I took some comfort knowing that some bonds work their magic regardless -- that beyond death and the things we can't hold back with our human hands, that we -- she and I and whatever it meant -- still walk through the wet sand together in the only way we can.

 

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This accidentally turned into Day Three.

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

Head Like a Hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not really. Just flare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drafted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my God, they are so super lucky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Okay to Be Unstable

Someone is reading my archives. 

I don't look at TypePad stats, ever, but now that there's this "follow" business in TypePad and one of the other blogs I write for is on TypePad I go to pages I don't usually go to. It turns out there ARE pages besides this frightening one with the blank text box into which I typically type like five sentences or so and then erase because I only play this writer person as a tripped out alter ego every now and then. 

So anyway, last night I was clicked by the stats page and noticed someone was clicking methodically through May, 2005. And I died. And this morning I noticed they move on to July. Slightly better, but still awkward. 

This blog will be five years old in a couple of weeks. I wrote way more consistently back then, but I also messed around with more weird stuff as I am prone to doing when I start anything out. Some of my posts are entire riffs on off-the-wall links that I look at now and can't believe I found interesting. Others are in green font, or teeny font, because I'd try to change things to see what TypePad could do and then I wouldn't be able to change it back. Others are me writing in an affected voice that has very little relevance to how I tend to express myself in writing these days. 

You know what they say about finding your voice. They say a lot. A lot of it is crap, but some of it is true. 

I love reading archives, by month and by category. I've gotten to know new friends from going back and reading theirs and I honestly think it's nice that someone would take the time around here to do that at all. That said, I hope they skip up a few years because while 2005 was a particular vintage, it is one I'd send mostly back to the barrel room for a variety of reasons. 

Of course being the good little masochist that I am, I skimmed July myself this morning, and this is one post I liked. I'm reprinting it because I can, but mostly because I like knowing that I was capable of humor at all then, in a really unhappy time. (I also fixed the font. I understand some things way better now.) I may do a few more of these leading up to the overwhelming excitement of the 5th anniversary. Maybe not. I'm not much of a planner. 

It's Okay To Be Unstable

So I was a reader in my cousin's wedding weekend before last, which is fine. I am the go-to wedding reader. I'm not sure why, but it's something that I always get asked to do. If I hired myself out to do this, it would probably be very lucrative. Hmmm. There's an idea - especially as one can be ordained in the Universal Life Church for 50 bucks. It really couldn't be simpler.

But it probably helps to actually be on time if you're going to run around marrying people. I arrived in Delaware too late on Friday for the rehearsal, but not the dinner. My ability to arrive on time for dinner is legendary. In this case, the beach traffic just sucked and I was lucky I made it as early as I did. 

After dinner, my cousin announced that the priest - who is married, which in my lapsed but still oddly traditional Catholic mind does NOT allow him to be a priest, but whatever he wants to call himeslf is fine with me - wanted to talk to me about my reading situation. "I don't know what he's worried about," she said. "I told him you're an educated person and you know what you're doing." Have her fooled, don't I? So I took my apple crumble dessert over to his table and talked to him.

He was sitting at the table with his wife. Together, they looked like a couple you might see on the Carnival Cruise commercials - middle-aged, disposable income, tanned, but not too perfect. At least that was my first take. 

"Hello. And thank you for taking part in this event," he said. "Have you read in public?"

"Yes, a million times," I answered, which amounted to lying to a priest but hoping that the fact that this was clearly hyperbole would only make it an exaggeration and not a total untruth.

"She has," my aunt added. "She reads at weddings, family funerals, pretty much anywhere."

The way it was all sounding, I had visions of myself screaming out scripture and poetry on the Metro, in elevators, at the 4th of July fireworks. "Hold me back - I'm a READER!"

He implored me to speak slowly - always a challenge - and warned me that the wind and the water (she was getting married outside by the bay) would "impede the flow and projection" of my voice. I assured him that anything short of a monsoon is rendered powerless by the flow and projection of this voice. Volume is just. not. a. problem. Then the conversation got odder.

"I just want you to know that if you need to express emotion, it's okay," he said.

"Okay," I said. "I think I'll be fine. I'm pretty comfortable reading in front of people."

"No," he said. "I mean, if you feel like you're going to break down, just go with it. It's better to express it than to repress it."

"Thank you," I said. "That's very reassuring."

Break down? Would he be shooting us with pepper spray? Was someone on deck to speak now, not willing to forever hold his piece? Who knew? I mean, I'm a cryer, that's for sure, but he had no way of knowing this, and I knew my cousin hadn't told him. I've been known to tear up while reading, but I've never had a problem working through it. And this was a first reading from the Old Testament, the one about God making Eve from Adam's rib, which I was fairly sure, at this point in my life, would cause no emotional reaction to at all. Besides, I was very, very chill this weekend. I was ice. cold. I was Andre 3000.

He continued staring soulfully at me.

"Seriously. I just need you to know that it's okay if you're unstable."

I thanked him for being the only person in my life who has ever said that to me and meant it. And then I took my apple crumble and backed slowly, slowly away.

(PS My cousin's wedding was gorgeous and I'll have everyone know that the girl who read AFTER me cried. Not me. I was, quite simply, chill. Chill and loud. Score!)

Dressing Room Texts and What Really Matters

Cross-posted at BlogHer. I'm fond of this one so I'll put it here too. It's a good thing I have people around who give me stuff to write about. May you have similarly inspiring friends. 

There is so much I wanted to tell you, my friend, when you texted me from the dressing room.

Everything I wanted to say was way more than my phone could hold, it turns out, and more than I could at the time because I happened to be in a meeting that was way less important than you are.

I wanted to tell you that bridesmaid dresses are instruments of torture in a rainbow of colors and that their sizes are lies. I'd add that spaghetti straps are pointless and possibly even worse than strapless in some cases, and I'd like to have a word with whoever decided these are strong design choices for most of us, anyway. Really, I mean this especially on marathon days of dancing and drinking and endless photos, climbing into and out of limos we almost never ride in otherwise and standing in awkward positions defying physics to help our best friends go to the ladies room in complicated formal wear.

I would like to tell you that I consider wearing one of these get-ups and also telling someone that she doesn't have to and can stand up for you on one of the most important days of your life in a garment of her choosing to be equal and opposite acts of love.

And I want you to know that I know that no amount of telling you this may matter when the 14 won't zip, when you think like you do and like I do, too. Positive reinforcement and empathy do little to contend with a roll of fat at the waist or one that pokes out from where sleeves would normally be. And yes, the numbers suck, these inflated sizes ingrained in our mind as assessments of self-worth rather than seemingly random measurements made by some pre-fab mass-producers. It was not a banner day for me when -- at my most solid 14 at all other stores in the universe -- I had to pay 20 extra dollars for an 18 dress in bridesmaid land.

Most of these dresses aren't really made for you.

They surely aren't made for me.

I don't know who they are made for -- in terms of personal style and cost alone -- but in size, too.

And even though I know it may not have mattered at the moment you texted, it's just true that where you see flaws, I only see one of the best people I know. Someone who would tell me the same things, someone for whom I want self-forgiveness almost as much as I want it for myself. The parts of your sum are what they are, and you will rip them to shreds as many of us have learned to do -- but I won't, because I can't, and because I won't. That's not why I'm here. It's my job as your friend to do the opposite of that, and it turns out that that job is really easy.

It's not like I can lie, though. Back fat is real. Rolls are real, sure. I look at my arms sideways in sleeveless things and you'd think I'd committed a felony, the trash I talk about myself in my head. We are the sizes we are for whatever confluence of genetics and lifestyle we represent. Sometimes it's upsetting if it doesn't match up with our expectations or the woman standing next to us or the pretty dress we really hoped would fit (especially if there is a bridal store saleswoman or a friend-of-a-friend or an in-law outside the door asking, maddeningly, "How does it look?") but instead, unfortunately, does not. And there are worse problems, yes. I'm under no illusion that this is a life-or-death situation, the ticking up of a size or three in ridiculous formal wear anything less than a first-world problem, but the self-loathing it can cause is insidious and saying that it shouldn't exist doesn't make it any less real. When it relates to the body we carry with us every day, it's really damaging, and I don't want that for you. I don't want it for me. I don't want it for any well-meaning woman trying nothing more than to do the right things.

I especially don't want it because it circles back to the beauty and the curse in the design that you can technically do what you want to in response. Control is implied. Diet. Eat with abandon. Exercise. Drink. End up where a lot of us do who have been on this train for many years and find no sense of balance or moderation between deprivation and overindulgence, self-righteousness and self-hatred. But at some point you have to decide -- for the hundredth or maybe even the final time -- what you can take in order to look like you think you may want to look.

How much it's worth to fit into this or that dress.

And I'll support you in that, too, as long as you aren't hurting yourself, because I can't support that at all. Not when what I really hope, what I really want is at some point for you to stop kicking your own ass, because I know how much it hurts, what a misuse of energy it is.

And this is why we need each other, why we need friends, because left to our own devices we face a lifetime of being alone in small, harshly-lit rooms with too many hangers and three-way mirrors and also our most raging insecurities and self-hatred. In the dressing room, we feel it more than we feel it in most places. We should never have to be in places like that alone. We should always have someone there, just outside, anyway, who loves us, who will tell us the truth, who knows that spaghetti straps can be really, really wrong and that strapless -- on many of us -- makes no sense.

That is why the next time -- any time -- you are in there, more than anything it's important that you know that you can call me or text me and tell me it sucks all over again, if you're having that kind of experience. And I won't think you're crazy or neurotic (well, maybe a little, but who can help it?) or vain, because I know you're (mostly) not, and I understand. Because I've been in there, too.

Really all that's important I tell you in the end is the usual: I love you, you're great and real, true things should matter most. And in this case, size isn't one of those things even when it sucks when clothes don't fit. And regardless of numbers, when the time comes to put whatever on that you choose or is chosen for you, you will be beautiful. Because you always are, no matter what anyone thinks. Especially you.

BlogHer Voices Of the Year - Community Keynote 2010

BlogHer changed my life. The BlogHer Community Keynote changed my life some more.

In 2005, BlogHer helped me find my voice as a writer again and a place in a community of people who were doing the same thing. In 2008, this community gave me the chance to stand on a stage at a very low personal point in front of hundreds of people and read words that I had written.

This really has always been about the story and the need to tell it, for me. The other stuff came later and even though it takes awhile sometimes and I'm easily distracted it's always circled back around to the words and what they turn into in the end, like it or not.

I did everything about writing the post I was going to enter in the wrong way, as usual. I sat down on the afternoon of the submission deadline and pounded it out with the desperation only a writer who is as truly, equally inspired by and terrified of a deadline as I am knows. 

A number of weeks after I wrote and hastily submitted the post in the Letter to My Body category for the Community Keynote, I received an e-mail that I'm sure I still have somewhere saying that I had been chosen to read it at the BlogHer conference in San Francisco in July.

I managed to do it without incident, with the help of a relatively high threshold for constant anxiety and a very kind and supportive roommate. It was one of the most terrifying and important days of my life. I was certain I would not be able to do it but I did. I stood backstage with people who I knew were incredible writers, people who would be my good friends shortly thereafter, at least one person who brought out the fangirl at the time, and others who I was sure were light years ahead of me in terms of confidence and certainly popularity, whatever that means.

It didn't really matter, it turns out. It doesn't. I mean, it did matter, being backstage with those people. That was the best part of this experience, in many ways.But it didn't matter, what they were that I was not and vice versa.

I unfortunately was also not at all comfortable with my body at the time, as much as it was my face that was the focus of the letter and not the rest of me. I was at the highest weight I'd been in years. I skipped the afternoon panel in a panic to go to H&M up the street to buy a dress an hour before show time, suddenly deciding that nothing in my wardrobe was sufficient, that nothing would make me look good - which nothing really will in my eyes, when I feel like that. In the aftermath of reading, I was obsessed with obsessing about how bad I looked in the pictures. I still can't watch the video.

(That's me with Mochamomma on the left and Clair, whose link I will find and post shortly because my land I have got to post this and get out of here but I care, I really do, on the right at the MightyHaus party afterwards. I can finally post this one and not hide it on old Flickr sets. Woo! /Sarcasm.)

Hey, this is why I was in the Letter To My Body category and not humor, people.

This is the daily part of this being me business. It is never easy. But what I can say is that it turned out that getting up and reading the post I'm about to re-post below (with some pronoun edits to fix some aspects of it that have bothered me for two years.) was a very important thing to do. It is important to me to know that I can say "yes" to things that scare me to death. It is important to me to participate when I'm asked. It was an honor, really, and those don't come along every day, or sometimes even every year.

This is all to say that I am so happy to be one of the curators for the Design category of this year's 2010 Voices of the Year Community Keynote, announced today. I get to do this with Karen Walrond, who came into my life with her book and notepad and yes, of course, her camera last year as a result, she said, of hearing me read the year before. She has inspired me more than she knows, to examine my negative observations of myself and to consider how I consider myself different and whether or not I'm ready to say that that's beautiful.

She makes you work hard, that one, on important things, and I'm okay with responding honestly. And in the process she has taken my picture and become my friend.

Sometimes I can't believe how this all fits together, but when I look back over the past five years, it really has.

Anyway, this is what I stood on that stage and read:

Body: n. The entire material or physical structure of an organism, especially of a human or  animal.

I keep getting stuck on this letter, with this idea of addressing my whole body. It's overwhelming - too much, I think. There are so many things I could focus on, but I keep coming back to my face. It deserves a letter. It has physical and psychic seniority over the extra 40 pounds, the wonky ankle, the aggravating stretch marks – especially so because there aren’t even any babies to attribute them too, just cheeseburgers. All of those things, as hard as they’ve been to face, along with all of the things about this form that I celebrate…well, they’re chump change compared to my face.

So my face, it gets the letter, although just writing "Dear Face" feels too awkward, so it's more of an address in its general direction, which I hope will do. It gets it because it’s worked overtime from that random genetic moment in the womb – about four weeks in, so I understand – where it didn’t fully fuse, leaving me shooting out into the world with a split lip and palate, to its daily grind since then.  It, unlike any other part of this body, takes the really sharp turns. It reads the road signs and knows which line at the grocery store is better, right out of the gate. It picks the winners, or tries to. It finds the empty parking spaces and answers the tough questions. The arms and legs, they just fall in line.

There are no photos before the day at six weeks of age when I went into surgery for the first time, when my hippie plastic surgeon in the American flag t-shirt sewed my lip together. Hospitals didn’t take many if any photos of babies with facial differences then, although my mother said she wanted one. A nurse cried over her in her bed, for me, for my problems, giving birth to a rage in my mother that she told me she had trouble – at 20 years of age – understanding, much less responding to. This was still, she said, her baby, her baby's face. But in the days before digital cameras and immediate records, before blogs and communities where people could inevitably find someone to share their story, and more importantly, before differences were more acceptable, it was better to wait until I was – almost – whole to start snapping.

My face fends off strange looks when people notice the irregularities, the scar at the midline of the lip and nose, the asymmetry that little kids can see when they look up from beneath. It’s responsible for eye contact, important when you want people to see you for you, for the words you can say and the thoughts you think, and not focus on the scar tissue from a genetic fluke that really, when it comes down to it, is completely manageable. It doesn’t affect intellect, or humor, or skill of any sort. It just makes me snore pretty loud, which isn’t fun, and it also makes me whistle occasionally when I talk, which can be jarring, because I can't do it in tune.

It’s not easy being at the front of the pack when you look different from the average in this super looks-obsessed culture, according to the maddening scale that changes depending on location, time of day and who you’re talking to. Bars in college weren’t so fun. Just like fifth grade, remember? Except in fifth grade men weren’t yet coming up to me to ask for my best friend’s number, because surely it was my life’s dream to hook my girls up with unworthy partners.

My face still watches and hears people call it a cleft lip, call it a facial difference, praying they don’t call it a harelip, because that still sounds so ugly. It’s not politically correct – it’s just an old word, a word that doesn’t fit anymore, at least not for me. 

My face became, anyway, a big talker, a hyper-verbal life of the party. For someone who didn’t like people looking at it much, it blabbed on and on from the time I could talk, encouraged by indulgent adults to share my thoughts, which didn’t need any help coming out in the first place. And only when a keyboard got involved did the flow of words pipe down just a bit.

As much as it - as I- talked, though, it listened, paid attention, watched for the oncoming cars, for the people who didn’t know better and for the many angels who’ve helped us along the road. It holds my head up every time I’ve turned it to the ground to avoid a straightaway glance – for the times I’ve begged silently for someone to just look me in my big brown eyes, anywhere but at my mouth. It watches people – subconsciously, I’m sure – trace their fingers over their upper lip absentmindedly while they’re talking to me, something that makes me smile now after years of self-consciousness. It likes half and half and red wine and has an unhealthy preoccupation with olives and brie.

It has trouble still sometimes, after all these years, working with my brain to respond, to defend, to fight back or to clarify.

When a friend recently asked if I knew that Joaquin Phoenix was rumored to have a cleft lip and put the subject out there, I should have felt more solid than I did in saying that it was just a thing, a personal thing, and more power to him for making it in a looks-driven industry, guarding his decision to talk about it or not, even if he is famous.

When the girl I worked with in college asked me "why in the world I wasn’t going to have more work done” I  shouldn’t have felt like I needed to make an appointment with a plastic surgeon immediately. Instead, I should have told her the truth – that I was tired of being cut into and reshaped, that anesthetic terrified me, that I needed nothing more than to relax into myself and love (or at least not hate) the face I already had.

Instead, I probably went in the back and smoked a couple of cigarettes and cried in the car on the way home.  19, you know.

When the client in graduate school – schizoaffective, no social filter, but still – walked up to me and said, “You had that THING. On your FACE,” I’m sorry. I didn’t really know what to say. Schizoaffective. No social filter. I reached out to her and calmed her because I knew she didn’t understand and was actually crying for me. But still…would everyone say it, if they didn’t know it wasn’t okay?

And when Connie said on the drive to Columbus that that young nurse who took care of her husband “had that problem” I had, so she married the first guy who asked, who turned out to be an alcoholic and wasn’t that terrible, but still? She had that problem? So she’d better marry the first guy who asked? Right?

I didn’t.

And when the man who loved me and who I loved back, years later, told me that he wasn’t sure at first that he could date me because he had a thing for symmetry, and my face, it really didn’t fit that bill, I maybe shouldn’t have been so understanding. I maybe should have gotten up off the couch and left the room, left the apartment and the state. But I didn’t. I cared too much and knew he did too, that he was trying really hard to put truth out there and it was time to either grab hold of it or stay stuck. So I put it in the bag I kept such things in inside, and instead made it an important conversation that somehow built a tenuous bridge between him and me, and managed somehow not to hate what I looked like and what I had to offer - much.

These experiences and the thoughts and feelings they cause aren’t so much carry-on baggage at this point as they are cargo for my body, my face and me, are they?

Say it with me: harelip. And then throw it away, that terrible, ugly, made-up word, that label, just like we throw away the other stuff, the worries about the pounds and the knee and the ankle. Just like we embrace the fact that we can stretch to the sky, we can move ourselves wholesale out of an old house and into a new one. We can walk the beach for miles. We can travel across a country 8000 miles from home and tell stories, even though there this face is still a bit more shocking than it is at home, something we can tell by the way eyes linger longer, why questions are asked more pointedly there than they are here. We can use our ears to hear foreign languages and try to reach across cultures anyway. We can answer questions that aren’t whispered and try to help people understand what it’s like for a little girl to go under repeatedly, be wheeled into operating rooms with her mom and dad just beyond the big green doors, where even though the kind reconstructive surgeon played classical music and sang to her while she went to sleep, it was still a lot like dying every time.

We can put all this aside and still get out there every day and try, at least try, to look people in the eye. We can smile, even if it’s a little crooked. We can use the mouth that's still so big even though it's long since been sewn together to yell when things aren't right, to speak the truth, and more frequently than ever these days, to defend principles and other people along with our own fragile selves.

And if I can never embrace it fully, this blip on the genetic screen that caused this problem for me, for my body and my face, I can still hold people in my arms and in my heart like at one point I pushed them away with equal force. I can try not to be angry as a matter of course and try instead to be nice. I can thank the stars for every shallow person a facial scar sent away, and thank them for every minute in the deep end with good people who don't just see the surface. I can be a little better about knowing when to talk and when to shut up. I'm so strong now that if anybody says “that which doesn’t kill you…” it’s just sort of comical, and I can tell them that my face and I have had enough, that it had better be all sunshine and roses from now on.

And always, always, completely on purpose, I will wear fabulous lipstick. 

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

If you feel that your work fits one of this year's categories, and you are going to be at the sold-out-with-a-waitlist BlogHer in New York Fucking City in August, please submit something. Take a chance. I promise you it will be entirely, terrifyingly worth it. Everyone can't win, sure, but it's a guarantee that no one has a shot at hearing you if you don't speak up. This may be the year that 2008 was for you, the year that things were supposed to really start to change.

And I promise that I will be there to applaud you. I'm a good applauder, and I usually come with wine, or the beverage of your choice. True story.

Tell yours.

And if by chance, that special place

Self-love is okay, even if that's not what they told me in school. In fact I'm quite certain it was strongly discouraged where I started out, but I graduated, baby.

Hilly designates Valentines Day as Self-Love Day over at her blog and encourages people to do the same. I've been blog slacking lately - long story, this week's version involves a crapload of snow and general inertia. I was not one of the ones liveblogging this shit, I'll just leave it at that - so it seems like a good way to jump back in.

Again.

Seriously, I am the queen of blog breaks.

ANYWAY, this is not about what is wrong with me, supposedly. That's for every OTHER day. This is about love. Self-love. The Jesus-legal kind.

See?

...is the greatest love of all. You thought that, didn't you? At least some of you did? I hope so, because I'd like to at least still be friends.

I DECIDED LONG AGO NEVER TO WALK IN ANYONE'S SHADOW.

I feel the need to yell that line, sorry. Whitney could sing that song and make me forget I hated it. Such was her voice then. Annndddd I'm distracted. (I typed "distractored" accidentally. I think that's a much better word.)

Anyway. What do I love about myself? I'm supposed to pick one thing.

I am not proficient at this task. In? At?

See?

Okay. You know what I think I love? I keep showing up. I don't know what I'm doing or why. I have no idea, honestly. I don't have anything I thought I'd have, I'm not doing anything I really thought I'd be doing. I am certainly not where I have ever dreamed of being. I have hard days and devastating hours. I feel incompetent a lot, like I let people down and say the wrong things and can never remember all of the bills on the right days and never click on all of the right links or fill out the right forms or return all of the e-mails. I am kind of a mess.

But I keep showing up. I am persistent in this trying-to-figure-it-out in spite of not knowing thing, in doing what I can only perceive with all of the facts and intuitive flashes that I have at hand to be the next right thing. And I really do try. Even when I look like I'm not trying I'm usually at least mentally trying really hard. I can be an excellent person to have around in the clinch, really, because I more or less live there.

I'd be a pretty good goalie, I think, is what I'm trying to say. It all somehow comes back to hockey. Funny, that.

And that is what I like about myself, right now, this day.

You are supposed to say something nice about me now. That's Hilly's rule, not mine. Her words, exactly:

Ask or beg your readers to post one thing that they too love about you!!! If your blog friends are nice, you shouldn’t have to beg…much.

I guess that means in the comments? That's the embarrassing part and the part that I'm really not good at. I am not a good begger. I don't even get a lot of comments but all three of you who are here can play along or not.

And then I will say nice things about you, so really, as is not the case at the Olympic Games that you may have heard a thing or two about where some people will win and some people will indeed brutally lose and cry their way through the smoke of the snowboarders back to their Olympic Village bunk (I would totally want to be friends with the snowboarders, of course) we all win.

Really. We do.

This feels really awkward.

I mean really awkward.

Graphic courtesy of Aimee and I guess I should go over and tell Chris I read his blog too. :)

You, if you're there, and never comment (or even if you do, because good Lord a post like this with no comments would send me straight to the oven with my head) are supposed to comment.

I feel like I should give you an assignment, a prompt, if you will, but maybe that's just my teacher brain.

I'm also really resisting the urge to call out specific locations I see and am intrigued by in my Sitemeter and demanding that you tell me who you are but that would just be really, really weird.

So just tell me something, anything. Something nice. Your favorite song of the aughts, maybe. Or is that too cliche?  

Actually, since I'm a photographer, you should maybe share a link to your favorite picture if you've got it. In FACT, you can visit my lonely Flickr stream and comment there. That would be fantastic. I'm re-thinking this whole thing.

Eh, whatever. Tell me anything. I'm easy like that.

Here, I'll even go back and put in a stupid picture of myself so it's kind of like you're saying hello to a real person. Which you totally are, anyway, but whatever.

    

 Bonus points if you know where I am and why I look so freaking tired.

And for a lot of you these really should be easy bonus points. I'm just sayin.

Now I guess I should go comment on some other blogs on which I never comment. Stupid Twitter.