Sunday, October 06, 2019

The Year of More and Less

Life continues apace.

I like being in my late thirties. I have my shit roughly together. I'm more secure and confident in who I am. The existential anxieties that haunted my twenties have quietly settled down. Instead of "Who am I?" and "What is my purpose?" I'm occupied with different questions: How do I increase my impact and expand my influence? What are my focus points for growth for this year? How am I going to make my life even better?

I never saw myself reaching this point. I don't mean this as a bitter indictment of my abusive upbringing in narcissism and fundamentalist religion (although it certainly doubles as that -- I will never stop indicting that shit); I mean it very literally. I never saw myself reaching this point because "this point" was beyond my ability to conceptualize. Up until two years ago, nothing about my life had ever trained me to envision a life in fullness. Fullness was so far be yond my capacity to comprehend that I had to live it before I could imagine it. I built up to it blindly, knowing that each step was toward something better, even though I had no idea what "something better" looked or felt like.

I have a better idea now. And like Conor Oberst writes (yes, I still love Conor -- even more now than when I was a wreck; I'm fairly certain that that man's voice could bring me back from the dead), "I'm not there yet, but I'm feeling confident to build something that's sacred till the end." Still en route; always will be. But I have an inkling of my destination.

Which brings me to this, the beginning of my 38th year on this planet. The questions that occupy my mental spaces get an annual refreshment around my personal New Year. As always, I find myself asking, What do I want from this next year? What do I want to accomplish?

Thinking about these things led me to The Year of More and Less.

See, I'm great at self-improvement, but, like most humans, I'm terrible at self-regulation. Especially with ADHD.  Like -- so, so bad at self-regulation. At least when it comes to meeting concrete, overly specific, disciplined goals. I mean, people aren't good at this in general. This is why diets fail, why New Year's resolutions are a cultural joke, why people are constantly doing shit we regret later, knowing full well we'll regret it. (There are a lot of neuroscientific reaons for this, including our brains' inability to identify our future selves as our actual selves; our brain classifies our future selves as a wholly distinct and other person.) As a species, we're just shit at responsibility -- it's a capacity that got cobbled onto other existing neural systems as we evolved, and we're no better at it than we are at logic.

So in the past, when I said, "I'm going to lose 40 pounds in 6 months," or, "I'm going to exercise 150 minutes per week," or, "I'm going to get 8 hours of sleep every night," I would get a strong start, lapse into my normal modes of existence, and give up on the goal altogether. I felt guilty. I felt like a failure. I felt powerless against my own desires.

Well, fuck guilt and powerlessness. That's all bullshit. The goals are arbitrary anyway; what's to feel guilty about? (It's actually kind of hilarious, and profoundly tragic, when you think about it -- we impose these meaningless, arbitrary, completely impossible rules on ourselves and then wallow around in self-flagellating worthlessness for not following them. I meannnnnnnnn who cares.) 

So there are things this year that I want to do. But I don't want rules. I want a solid life rhythm. So I came up with More and Less. I wrote down all the things that I want for my best life (there were a lot), and narrowed the list down to the four things that will add the most to my immediate wellbeing (success in which will build the foundation to tackle a few of the other things next year). For two of those things (exercise and sleep), I will do More. For the other two (alcohol consumption and skin picking), I will do Less.

So far it's pleasingly effective. For one thing, it's almost impossible to fail. I could exercise 10 times this whole year and that's still More than what I've been doing. So there's no fear of failure, no self-loathing lurking around the corner. The question instead focuses on what it means incorporate these things into my best life. Like okay, since I can't fail, what kind of More and Less am I aiming for? And really, what I want is to build better habits. And a habit is a frame of mind. An assumption that you'll do a thing more often than you won't (or that you won't do a thing more often than you will).

So I've been taking my mindset about these four habits, accepting what my mindsets are and historically have been, and simultaneously assuming that those mindsets are already different. Exercise, for example. I haven't exercised with any regularity in, oh, at least five years. So now I'm placing an overlay on my existing no-exercise mindset, and thinking like someone who exercises regularly. Which means that I'll miss some days here and there due to reasonable circumstances -- illness, or being out of town, or just being too fucking tired. But instead of going "oh no I fell off the wagon, now I'm fucked," I think, "well today wasn't good, so let's try again tomorrow or the day after or even next week, when I'm up for it again." This way a small break in continuity doesn't lead to the train totally jumping the tracks.

I mean, I think about the habits I already have, like eating dinner while watching TV. Most days I do this, and I enjoy the hell out of it. Some days, though, I don't, because I'm eating out, or I'm talking to a friend and wind up eating while I'm on the phone because I don't want to end the conversation. I don't get upset that I didn't watch more of a favorite show; that doesn't even occur to me. My brain is already thinking, We'll do it tomorrow. (Or the next day. Or the next.) No matter what, it's going to happen again, because it's just something that I do. If I approach exercise and sleep the same way, occasional or even regular interruptions aren't that big a deal, because I'll pick it back up as soon as I can, because it's just something I do more often than not. And conversely, with drinking alcohol and picking my skin, if I gradually reduce the regularity of both, I'll be at a point where I don't do those things more often than I do them.

Any increase in exercise and sleep is good; any decrease in alcohol consumption and skin picking is good. And that's ultimately what I'm seeking: Goodness. Not perfection. Where perfection is rigid, uncompromising, disapproving, harsh and judgmental, goodness is flexible, realistic, accepting and nurturing. Balanced.

So we'll see how this plays out -- a self-help approach that eschews discipline. I'm anticipating good things. 




Sunday, August 18, 2019

gearing up

Another hot August day, sunny and humid, rasped by waves of cicada wings and the occasional gusty breeze. These are the sounds I notice, even in the heart of the city with the endless ocean roar of traffic, the punctuating barks of distant dogs, the pulse of bass and wail of car alarms. I'm a small-town girl. I hear the wind and the insects. Country sounds.

I'm sitting out on the balcony where a truly enterprising spider has constructed a web the size of a schooner sail. I used to be terrified of spiders. Through no particular design, I'm not anymore. Mostly I attribute this to science enthusiasm and being tired of fearing things I can't avoid. The web I'm looking at now is liberally sprinkled with insect corpses, and I'm raising my coffee mug in tribute to a master predator whose feeding habits benefit me.

Hopefully this is my last summer renting. Apartment life has been good to me but it's time to call the shots in my own living space. I'm sick of sharing walls with inconsiderate neighbors and putting up with laissez-faire landlords. So here I am, less than a year after declaring that I would rent until retirement, obsessively scanning listings and constructing castles in my head. My therapist says it means I'm in a healthy place: For the first time in my life, I'm putting down roots. I know he's right but mostly I'm just excited for an absence of pot smoke and dance music bleeding through my walls like the superbly shitty ectoplasm of the world's worst ghost.

When you don't have kids, I guess this is what drives the homeownership decision. Fuck everyone with their noise and their laziness. I'm buying a fort.

I'm planning on buying in Detroit. I love it here. I love watching, all around me, the neighborhoods begin to come back. It's only been two years since I moved into the city limits and the progress is astonishing. Four years ago, my realtor told me, you couldn't hire contractors in the city because no one would work here. Now you can't hire contractors because there are too many jobs. Just this summer, rehab work has begun on three derelict houses within eyeshot of my balcony.

Trauma and disaster don't last forever. Not on a wide scale. I'm lucky enough that they don't last forever on a personal scale either.

I shouldn't have survived what was done to me from birth. Certainly not with my personality intact. My therapist says there's no explanation for why I'm okay. Some deep, impossible wellspring of resilience brought me through.

I had to make hard choices to get to the other side of survival. I cut ties, cast off bonds, tore up roots, burned bridges. I obliterated my place in the world. You don't know what it is to be alone until you've cut yourself off from your family of origin. Even a shitty family is family. Even a shitty family gives you a place. I incinerated all that. With nothing to replace it. It took strength beyond strength.

And here I am, more than okay. I'm thriving. I'm free. I'm crafting my own place in the world. And one of the best things I discovered is that irrespective of trauma and depression, it is not in my nature to be miserable. My default state is happiness.

So I can sit here on the balcony of an apartment I'm tired of, enjoying a day moving toward thunderstorms, relishing the drop in temperature as I scrutinze the latest house listing to catch my eye, gearing up for the next phase in my evolution. I can savor the present even as I anticipate the future -- a balance that has heretofore eluded me. It's still a little wobbly some days, but I'm getting the hang of it. Because that's what I do.

It's starting to rain.

Life couldn't be better.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

My kingdom for some ointment

Month 3 of new cat motherhood:

Thackeray jumped on my chest and promptly started licking his ass 2 inches from my face, then spent 5 minutes kneading my tits with his claws right over the nip.

I need a shower and bandages.

Also he is frighteningly cute.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

l'hote

On an antiquing venture with my sister in PA this weekend I picked up what can best be described as a "framed owl thingie." Constructed of leaves, pine cones and papier mache, it is equal parts creepy and adorable, the kind of thing you hang in a guest room just to fuck with your guests. 

Which is precisely what I'll do when I buy a house. 


Sleep well, motherfuckers.

Monday, September 03, 2018

unbreaking

I

It's been a hot summer.

Too hot.  Irregularly, horribly hot.  All summer I have sat and sweltered in a brick oven of an apartment, choking on heat.  In the beginning I bought a freestanding air conditioner for the living room and hung heavy drapes across the scalloped edge of the wide arch into the dining room to contain the cooled air.  For the first few weeks I hid in the living room with the blinds and curtains drawn, sitting directly in the chilled current, feeling through the walls the heat pressing down on the building, pushing into the darkened room, crowding up around the mechanically moving air, sucking at my breath the moment I stood from the couch. Even working its hardest the air conditioner could never bring the room below eighty.  Eventually the dark tepidity depressed me and I dismantled the unit so that I could feel the sweat sheeting down my back in a space full of daylight and outside air.

Every summer gets hotter.  Rage, so easy to come by these days no matter how often I conclude that this cistern has been tapped, this keg has been kicked, that my body cannot possibly contain one more flash of anger, flickers up with exhausting resilience when I imagine the millions of people slowly waking to the awareness that this heat is not normal, that the nicely mild winters they've enjoyed in recent years harbor this increasingly deadly flipside of a sinister coin whose existence they've stubbornly denied, and by the time they reluctantly conclude that it's possibly our fault and that we might consider doing something, it will be too late.  It is already too late.

At least some days there's a breeze.

There's a breeze now, coming in from the balcony window, occasionally evaporating puffs of sweat from my soaked camisole, bringing a breath of relief.  By this point in the summer I'm mostly acclimated, and only notice discomfort when I'm hungover or have company, another human body radiating its energy burnoff into the room.  This, today, with open windows and a breeze stirring the thick air around the curtains with the scent of grilling meat and the chorus of cicadas rising and falling in waves, isn't too bad, if I don't think about the long-term implications of what it means.

II

My history of summer depression stretches further back than I can solidly place on a timeline.  From my childhood I remember mostly exhilarated freedom, spending my days tearing around the backyard with my sister, or staying out of our parents' way on the enclosed front porch, building worlds of my design in which we were explorers, heroes, warriors, leaping into new worlds through the jets of the oscillating sprinkler with stick swords drawn against the blaze of unexpected dragons, constructing elaborate societies with our vast collection of plastic animals who were constantly electing leaders, negotiating alliances and carrying out expansive wars with the aid of spies, heroism and magic.  (There was only one summer in which we played with dolls.  Neither of us got much out of it beyond the creative excitement of drawing and cutting from index cards the toy baby-care items we couldn't afford in three dimensions.  I have only just begun to realize the innate nonexistence of our maternal instincts, a nonexistence which we probably inherited from our parents; and to be, as I approach middle age, profoundly grateful for my unwitting escape from the culturally conditioned expectations of motherhood that I would have hated.)  Childhood summers, broadly executed apart from parental supervision, were, on the whole, fun.

Then somewhere in the mistily remembered traumas of my adolescence the summer depression began. It carried into adulthood, incubated every year by the swampy humidity and fetid heat into a miasma of mildewed listlessness.  In all my memories of the worst depressive phases of my life, it's summer.

This summer has been no exception.

It's different, though, this year.  Not in affect or duration or severity, but in context.  Possibly in purpose; I don't know.  Time, and my own interpretation of the outcome, will answer that.

Nine months ago I exited my family.  The break was instinctive, unplanned, a desperate, gasping retreat into solitude, a slamming shut on the airlock through which all my vitality was being sucked into space.  I needed rest.  I needed peace.

I had no thought of the split being anything but temporary.

III

There's always been a moment, with my abusers.  It's not always precipitated by the same event.  Sometimes the event is huge, extravagant, an emotional sonic boom.  Sometimes it's small, something incomprehensibly, absurdly mundane, a tiny violation repeated for the ten thousand and tenth time.  The day exactly six months after beginning to spend nearly every day with Andrew when, walking alone through the cavernous produce section of Meijer, I accepted that he was siphoning off my boundless emotional support with no intention of loving me.  The ordinary morning at the office three or four or five weeks into increasing stretches of silence punctuated by increasingly stilted conversations with Dustin.  The barely-dawn silence in Luke's shabby living room where I sat on the couch staring at the wall in the aftermath of the night I poured all the whiskey down the drain and he shouted at me and I threw a glass of water in his face and he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me but was too drunk to continue when I body-checked him backward with a snarled "get your FUCKING HANDS OFF ME."  The couples' therapy appointment with Chris where I listened to him explain to the therapist that he really did in fact want to buy a house with me; he was only going to look at places by himself without telling me in order to scope out the market, and he hadn't really meant it when he told me the day before that he wanted to buy a house by himself and fill it with roommates and that after two years of dating he didn't know where that left me.  The drive home to my new apartment where Steph was painting my living room, when Neil texted me "Glad you are good" after his carefully constructed cruelty of the afternoon.

It's not always the same event.  But it's always the same moment.  There's a click, somewhere deep in my being.  A sudden shift from chaos into quiet.  The emotional tumult shuts off like a radio.  Everything stills, comes into focus, instantly, without fuss or fanfare or struggle.  It's the internal experience of the eye doctor turning the phoropter in the cold silence of the exam room, and in that second the lines you've been straining to see snap into clarity.  Click.  And in that suddenly painless quiet there is only one thought, one feeling that contains everything I am:  No.

Click. 


No.

After that moment, nothing is ever the same.

IV

They never see it coming.

I do.  I see it spilling over the horizon, low and black, like a line of stormclouds building over the flat scrublands of eastern Colorado.  I deny it for as long as I can, then start to prepare as it sweeps toward me.  With varying degrees of desperation, depending on how much I've loved them, I try to warn them.  Try to impress upon them that they need to clean up their act if they want to keep me.  They never listen longer than a day or two before falling back upon my overabundant forebearance.  My skin prickles and my stomach churns in the relentlessly building pressure.  The precipitating event never fails to happen.  And from it, that breathless barometric hush.  Click.  No.  And then the break.

They never see it coming.

My parents didn't see it coming.  And this time, neither did I.  My mother had cancer, after all, from which she was successfully recovering, but still--it was cancer.  My father with his narcissistic uselessness was barely any help.  My trauma-immobilized, psychologically unavailable sister was little better.  My mother with her wide-eyed emotional greediness, even from three hundred miles away, depended heavily, daily, on me.  All that year, through a breakup and a move to a new apartment and a promotion to a far more intensive position, I mechanically pushed through my life to care constantly for my mother, and my father, and my sister in the midst of my mother's illness.  And all that year, a decade's worth of painfully constructed and ruthlessly maintained boundaries that minimized their abuse began to crumble under the strain of the old roles and the close contact.

The moment, when it happened, took me by surprise.  Its precipitating event was neither large nor small.  It was, more than anything, annoying.  A passive-aggressive punishment for failing to be adequately theatrically supportive.  A long text message from my mother containing the always unspoken expectation for me to fill my role in the family, to beg forgiveness for the sin of not sacrificing everything, and to give, give, give without reservation and without return.

It brought about the moment.  The click was less quiet, but the no was resounding.  Not fully comprehending what it was, I followed it anyway into a rest I badly needed.  I told my parents I needed some time to myself.  They ignored me.  My mother invaded my clearly stated boundaries with escalating frequency.  Gradually I snipped away at their avenues for contacting me.  Text messaging was the first to go, then phone calls, then email, then Facebook.  It took six months to recognize what had happened, to embrace the permanence of each instinctively and necessarily severed tie.  To start, with my therapist's help, to sort through the love, and the grief, and the trauma, and the guilt, and the deep, life-changing liberation.

Sometimes the liberation is the worst and hardest part.

V

This year the summer depression is a little different.  When it feels like anything, it feels like mourning, and it feels like rest.  It feels like a liminality on the verge of something new.  A convalescence.  A hibernation.

Slowly I'm emerging from the stupor.  Even in this horrible heat, I'm blinking my way into a space where I can breathe.  I can clean my house again.  I can sleep.  I can cook and play music.  I can enjoy things.  My nightmares are fewer, and characterized more and more by my dream-self's empowerment to lash out against the monsters that have always pursued me.  I'm even able to win some of the time.  My trauma is being incorporated into different kinds of spaces.  My brain is fighting back.

My emotional bandwidth is broadening.  I can care about some people again, and I can choose which people to care about, and when, and to what extent.  I can care for myself in ways I didn't know I knew.

The pain is still surprising, some days.  So is my new ability to sit with it for as long as it needs to stay.  Before, I had to muscle it back under to keep caring for the people who continued to hurt me.  Now, I can let it be, with no borders but my own wellbeing.  The freedom both grounds and dislocates me.

I'm too tired for joy yet.  More days are painful than aren't.  A lifetime of chronic trauma boils and bubbles up to the surface, as fresh as when I first sustained it.  I am overwhelmed by the simplicity of being able to accept that I am damaged, and that some of that damage will never heal; that there is neither shame nor failure in either of those things; and that I will still go on to live a good, rich, fulfilling life with wholesome, healthy, happy relationships.  None of those things cancel each other out.

I am profoundly lonely.  Old and new friendships take the edge off, but there is a yawning emptiness in my ribcage where my sense of belonging used to be.  Making a homespace inside myself for me and only me feels strange, alien, a little bit lacking.  Better, though, than what I had before.

VI

For the last ten years I have read almost entirely nonfiction.  It was a marked break from my childhood, from my adolescence and young adulthood, when story enveloped and sustained me, taught me, bolstered my resilience, and gave me friends.  I've spent ten years puzzling over why new stories no longer interested me.  The timeline of events had to be significant somehow: Ten years ago I collapsed into debilitating depression and moved back to my hometown and in with my parents; then gradually gained new mental health and lost my faith; then embarked on and ended a series of intimate relationships with terrible men, during the course of which I moved to Detroit to begin life on my own terms and changed careers several times before landing in my current (and increasingly amazing and self-determined) position.  At some point in that time span, I stopped reading fiction.  Unable to take in enough learning, I devoured books about science and history and reasoning, articles on neuroscience and psychology and politics, soaking up everything I had been forbidden to learn before at a terrifying rate, and to a terrifying depth.  It was intoxicating.  But I shied away from new encounters with fiction.  While I still enjoyed rereading favorite novels, like semiannual visits with old friends, I couldn't bring myself to broach unfamiliar stories.  Even new television shows and movies I could only approach occasionally, and with caution.

In ten years I have never been able to decide whether I've lost something, or gained something, or simply evolved into something new.  I've felt sad, but resigned.  I've thought of myself as a nonfiction person.

And then a week ago I didn't feel like picking up the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that I'm halfway through, or the survey of human history that I started, or the new speculation about the extinction of the dinosaurs that came out last year, or the critical evaluation of sexism within science that had just arrived in the mail.  Nor did I want to keep rereading Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, beloved as it is.  I felt restless, lonely.  Hungry.

It's been ten years of evolution.  Ten years of cataclysmic internal change, ten years of seismic upheaval to the core of my sense of self.

And now something new is happening.  I don't know where it's leading or what its outcome will be.  But I do know that it's happening, and it's new, and I will go along with it because painful as my many transitions have been, they have brought me farther than I had ever conceived toward something like wholeness.

So last week as I stared at Wilder's biography lying unopened in my hands, bewildered by my sudden and utter disinterest in opening to the place marked by its dust cover, acutely aware of the intensity of my loneliness, of my revulsion toward this internal barenness--even in that moment, after all the change of the last year, of the last decade, I was still surprised as I felt something shift in my stomach.  A quiet click.  

Was this no? or yes?  Maybe it was both.

I put down the biography.  I spoke aloud to no one, with a passion I haven't heard in years: I want stories. I want friends. 

In the baking heat of a fevered planet's northern summer, in a loneliness both very old and entirely new, for the first time in ten years I went and found a novel I'd never read before.

Something broke inside me, or broke open.

I started reading fiction.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

and all manner of thing shall be well

Very packed couple of months.

I'm still slogging through the worst depressive spell I've experienced in about eight years.  Getting up on weekday mornings is fucking hard.  Life has practically zero savor.  Everything feels generally sort of gray and dull and meh.  Not sad or painful, just void.

Even so, I'm doing the best I've ever done while doing this badly.  Which is pretty incredible, and pretty empowering.  (That's my theme of 2018.  Empowerment.  Because fuck powerlessness.)  While I don't fool myself that I'll conquer depression once and for all, I am highly pleased with how well I've learned to manage it.  I'm still making it to work, still kicking ass at my job.  I'm still paying my bills.  And I'm facing a whole shitload of what my therapist terms "pathologic guilt" (which is most likely the source of this depressive spell) and learning to tell it to fuck right off.

Something happened last spring, when I decided to buy in to my own life.  Something happened last summer, when I got rid of the last asshole I will ever date.  A sea change.  It spread out, crept over every single one of my relationships.  Some of those relationships were restored; others strengthened; others extinguished.

It's been hella weird.

I'm still riding out the aftermath; some of the people from whom I needed to estrange myself have made up a fundamental component of my self-conception.  (Enacting strict limits on the "daughter" and "sister" portions of my identity, when "family caretaker" has been my most basic role since my birth, is really goddamn traumatizing.  I'm still not sure how I found the strength to do it at all, much less maintain the separation; but I guess at this point I shouldn't be all that surprised at my own strength; it's a fairly defining feature of my character.)  The underlying peace, even as I've floundered in the guilt-wake of the separation, has been totally worth it.  Still, it's weird and difficult and uncomfortable, and I'm already tired.  (Of course, it seems to be these low points, when you lack resources, that drive necessary changes, because the former coping mechanisms have failed and there's nothing to do but forge new ones.)

The human brain resists change.  Even painful, self-destructive habits are comfortable because they create predictability.  It's not the first time I've taken a gamble with the unfamiliar, so at least I know that this sort of psychologically itchy discomfort, this unease with uncertainty, this faint feeling of impending badness, will ultimately pass as the new way of doing things becomes the familiar, the safe, the predictable.  I just have to give it time.

And I'm better at self-care and self-advocacy now.  I've learned a lot in the past eight years.  I've been through enough to know that I'll get through this too.  The meh factor will fade.  Life will be satisfying and good again.  It's surprisingly satisfying and good now, even in the midst of the Void of Blah.

So I'm okay in the not-okayness.

Plus too I have the darlingest kitty of all the kitties that ever kittied.  Simon is currently curled up on the ottoman next to my writing desk; never a lap cat, he still likes to keep close.

He's sixteen now.  We've been together fourteen years.  He's looking scruffier and skinnier, but he's still in excellent health, and still the sweetest little shithead in the entire world. (There's nothing more heart-warming than a generally grouchy cat that gives exactly zero fucks about anything at all except for his boundless devotion to you.)

On a side note (HAR, you'll see in a second) I am loving my new digital piano.  I went high-end for this one, because I was sick to death of shitty-sounding keyboards and craving music like oxygen or water.  It sounds breathtaking.  And it's so good to play and sing again.  That's probably about half of what's getting me through this latest slump.

So, things kinda suck a lot, but also are really great, and will eventually get even better.  I just need to self-care my way through this, which I know I'll be able to do.

I'm gonna pull through.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Monday, November 13, 2017

where your treasure is

When I was a little girl we spent a lot of time at the library.

I grew up in a small town, within walking distance of McCord Memorial (a bit of a longish walk for kiddie legs, but walking distance nonetheless).  About once a week or so Mom would take my sister and me by the hand and trek over with us to that grand, quiet repository of human thought and imagination to let us peruse the shelves and check out a few new books. 

I always loved pushing open the heavy glass doors and inhaling deeply the gorgeous library smell of endless catalogued books: dust and silence and binding glue and vast masses of paper, carrying within their pages all the secrets of the universe, gateways to new worlds: the keys to all kingdoms.  McCord was a split level at the side entrance: The wide carpeted stairs led up to the grownup sections and down to the children's library.  I liked to gaze longingly up the stairs for a few seconds before sprinting excitedly down to find a new printed friend.

As I grew from childhood to adolescence, gradually trading Come Again, Pelican and Lonesome Lester for every single Wizard of Oz book and Nancy Drew, I relied increasingly on fiction as my atlas of a difficult world.  

The moment when I found And Both Were Young was life-altering.

I only know this in retrospect; memory is a funny, patchy thing.  This profoundly influential book left surprisingly little record in my brain of its first appearance in my life.  It's like there was never a time when I wasn't intimately familiar with the forest green book tape that bound the battered spine, or the hand-written title tracking down the edge in white letters (the words uncapitalized, the title ending in a period). 

I think I had been eyeing it for a long time before I finally slipped a finger into the valley of pages between the heavy cardboard covers and tipped it backwards off the shelf.  Even then it was an old, old book, a first edition 1949 printing, the cover a dingy faded yellow, deeply worn at the edges, marked here and there in pencil, the pages darkened and brittled by the years.  It always seemed to lie quietly between my hands, self-contained and expectant.

As with most things about which I am intensely curious, and about which I have an intuition of marrow-deep change, I approached it shyly.  The handwritten spine only included the first three letters of the author's last name.  The sleeveless covers bore no synopsis on the back or in the front flap; the front cover was plain and unadorned. This scarred old book, so misfitted among the newer, tightly bound trade paperbacks that surrounded it, gave no hint of its contents beyond its title: And Both Were Young.

A pair of youth.  Lots of books were about a pair of youth.  Most of them were sad (Bridge to Terabithia, I have never recovered from you). 

Books change you.  Sometimes they heal you.  Sometimes they wreck you.  They almost always stamp you indelibly.  I must have opened it to really read it for the first time with great apprehension.

It was fucking magical.

That was the first book I read where I felt truly understood.  The main character, awkward, gangly, lonely, angry, sensitive, passionate and artistic, felt like a kindred spirit in a way no other character of the hundreds I'd met ever had before.  And the relationship she stumbled onto and then built was marked by the trust and understanding that I had always wanted.  The loveliness of this book still makes me cry -- still gives me strength and hope -- still fills me with joy.

I checked it out again and again throughout my adolescence.  That green book tape always greeted my eyes like the smile of an old friend.

Eventually it was replaced with a newer copy; the glossier, less distinctive later printing contained a few authorial revisions that I liked; but I missed the original.

Eventually I outgrew the library and moved away altogether.

Moving back home in 2008 was hard.  I was tired and broken, no longer able to withstand the weight of trauma and depression.  Returning to the place where I'd been systematically destroyed felt a little like failure, and a little like taking a deep breath and turning to face the thing that makes you afraid, when you're so tired you just want to give up and let it consume you.

I faced the things that had broken me, and I learned how to cope. 

Somewhere in the midst of all the transformations catalyzed by my act of resigned, desperate courage, I started going to the library again.  Less to check out books this time than to peruse the shelves of donated and discarded items for purchase; I had discovered, by then, the joys of book ownership, the anchors provided by favorite friends that always sit at the ready on my shelves. 

I'm not sure how long I'd been revisiting the library (still filling my lungs with the old, sweet smell that made me feel five years old and intrepid again) when I saw it.  Green book tape.  White letters.

My heart stopped, then swelled.  Tears flooded my eyes.

I bought it for a dollar.

The librarian made a face when she rang me up; I think she muttered something about its deplorable condition.  I told her, in the soft throat-swollen voice of a person trying not to weep, that it was my all-time favorite book.  I didn't tell her that it saved me through my adolescence.  I was glowing.

Last night in my new place, hundreds of miles from where I grew up, I unpacked my young adult and children's books from the boxes that have housed them in storage for two years to finally give them a home on new bookcases.  When my eyes landed on that forest green spine, my fingers slipped lovingly down its edges as I placed it carefully on the shelf. 

As I changed the sheets before bedtime, the story kept drifting through my thoughts.  Scenes that I can recall word for word, even down to the visualization of the letters' placement on the page.  Words of affection and love.  Moments of courage and sacrifice.  Before I crawled into bed to settle in for my nightly reading, I went back to the hall and drew And Both Were Young from the shelf.

Lying in bed, gently cradling one of my oldest friends, I fell half into the story, half into a reflection on the beauty of the way this humble-looking book came to lie between my hands -- hands that are older now, a bit larger and stronger, a little more scarred, a little more experienced, but still courageous, still cautiously adventurous, and always, always hungry.
 
I love that this book still saves me, still touches the deepest places of my being.  I love that it still leaves me happier, more hopeful, strengthened and whole than before I read it, every time.  I love that this old, battered copy, the same one that my adolescent fingers carefully paged through in a quiet library over twenty years ago, is mine.

The Year of More and Less

Life continues apace. I like being in my late thirties. I have my shit roughly together. I'm more secure and confident in who I am....