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.

remedy of the quotidian

Man, I could use more weekends like that.

I did not leave the house.  I LOVE weekends where I don't leave the house.  The door closes behind me on Friday night and doesn't open again until I leave for work on Monday morning.  I slept for eleven hours every night.  I stayed in my pajamas all day.

It was WONDERFUL.

And, happily, I did, as I'd planned, get lots of writing done (10 more pages of my new work of fiction; if I can average 10 pages a week, I can produce a 400-page novel in under a year, which would be spectacular).  Normally with fiction I have a difficult time sticking to the linear unfolding of a plot; my brain keeps skipping to the more exciting scenes I'd rather write, and the narrative gets bogged down and peters out altogether.  This time, though, I'm finding that I prefer the unfolding, because I adore my characters.  They are SO MUCH FUN to write, and so much fun to get to know, which I can really only do by following them through the story and seeing how they develop (there's a life lesson in here somewhere, harumph).  And I love how a little incidental detail that pops out in the tale-telling winds up bearing enormous character-defining significance later on.

Writing fiction is discovery as much as creativity.  I've always known that, of course; it's just been so long since I've experienced it that it's practically a fresh and new lesson.

And this is the first time I've written something that I really enjoy.  I've taken a lot of pride in past fictive ventures, but this is the first time I've had fun with it.  (What is even happening to me.)

And I did, as I'd planned, get started on the library.  Part of what has held me back, in addition to sheer existential exhaustion, is a space problem that has persistently defied resolution.  The dimensions of the room present something of a challenge to accommodating a number of bookshelves, a pair of overstuffed chairs, and a writing table.  So I've let the problem sit for several months -- another lesson I'm learning in my thirties: Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to sit with it for awhile and let it solve itself -- and when I stepped into the room on Saturday to survey the space, threading my precarious way through haphazard towers of boxes in various stages of collapse, and trying on several different visualizations, the solution suddenly came clear.  Yesterday I performed the necessary rearrangements, with the result that I managed to fit two more bookcases into the room and still make it look more open and inviting.  (Ah, the blissful buzz of the successfully problem-solving brain.) 

The unpacking of the books will take some time yet, but I put all the shelves in place, and I can SEE what it will look like when I've finished, which provides just enough motivation to keep me going for the "sooner" rather than the "later." 

So in short, a quiet, productive weekend. 

I need a few more like it.

I love how the ordinary takes on an almost spiritual quality when all is well with the world.  The bane of existence in depression becomes the balm of existence in health.  With a demanding job, an outside world gone to chaos and a lot of recuperation ahead of me yet from the last three years, taking refuge in the quiet of the mundane at home restores a lot of peace. 

I just wish the weekends were half again as long.  I never feel quite ready for Monday.  

Dispensary of Wisdom from a Thirty-Something, #1

Two very important lessons I have learned in adulthood:

1. Don't kill a centipede with a flyswatter.
2. Don't put your travel mug half-full of coffee and milk into your rain boot and forget about it for a week. 




(There are explosions.)

flotsam and jetsam

Thank god for Friday, and a weekend at home with no external plans.  I'm hoping to get lots and lots of writing done, and maybe start to unpack the library. 

This last move in particular drove home (quite literally) how much STUFF I have.  For the last decade, while I've moved around a lot (seven times in ten years, holy shit), I have never been in an adequate position to go through all of my belongings and discard the detritus.  (Anyone who says that moving is the perfect time to do so has clearly never had a lot of stuff, moved in a hurry, moved alone, moved with crippling depression, or had to reason their way through their own pack rat tendencies.)  Most of the time I have had just enough energy to desperately shove things into boxes and load them on a truck, with no resources to perform the executive decision-making required of a sentimental person who grew up poor to part with beloved or potentially useful possessions.

I think I have finally reached a good time to do some sorting, however.  Life has stabilized, and I really don't want my next move to be as strenuous as my last one (Steph laughed at me for planning for my next move while I was still executing my current one, but an apartment-dwelling pioneer with an eye for adventure knows that she'll never be in one place for all that long).  I have an approximate metric fuck-ton of boxes sitting up in the attic of my building waiting for me to go through them one at a time on rainy days; they can sit there for awhile yet.  I'm going to start with my books.  I have accumulated around 2,000 of them, and while that number fills my bibliophilic heart with wild elation, it's a damn lot of books to transport every time I move, and a bunch of them I know I will never read, or read again (Disputing Evolution and The Discipline of Grace, I'm looking at you).  So...time to slim down.

And I can't wait to have my library all set up and decorated, so that I can read books, listen to jazz, and write of an evening in a room filled with big overstuffed chairs and my grandmother's drop-leaf cherry table and my colorful mismatched lamps and best of all my books, my dearest friends, my wayfaring companions, my portals to every part of every real and imagined world, filling my shelves with their neat straight lines and lovely colors, artfully situated among my favorite travel mementos and collected flotsam and jetsam -- a room of stillness that testifies to a life of motion.

Oh, it's going to be glorious.

a life of one's own

This isn't the life I was supposed to have.

My life was mapped out in pretty clear lines from the moment of my birth: a very simple and straightforward template that fell instantly into place because I was born a girl into an evangelical Christian family.  My upbringing trained me to meekness, compliance, modesty and submission to male authority.  I was expected to go to college, find a nice Christian man to be my spiritual leader, marry young and produce children (the number was up to me but it was understood that I was supposed to have more than one) that I would raise as evangelical Christians to be warriors in God's army against the gathering darkness of liberalism and secularism.  I would stay at home with my kids and devote my life to wifely submission, motherhood, and the church family.  That was my life's purpose: to be a woman in all the ways that white Christianity defines womanhood.

None of this was ever explicitly stated, that I can recall.  My parents never told me that I had to get married and have lots of babies, or that I shouldn't have a career.  It was all indirect, cultural, and constant -- particularly the emphasis on gender roles, packaged up as God's Will.  Men are leaders.  Men are providers.  Men are protectors.  Women are followers.  Women are nurturers.  Women are not aggressive.  Women need to be protected and guided. 

And I embraced these roles wholeheartedly.  I never wanted a career.  I wanted a husband who would lead our family, I wanted to stay home with my children and maybe even homeschool them, I wanted all the security that came with upholding the godly status quo. 

The trouble is, I'm smart.  It wasn't that being smart itself was frowned upon; quite the contrary.  In the evangelical church a smart woman is seen as a tremendous asset as long as she directs her intellect along prescripted lines and uses it to support the church's agenda and her husband's opinions.  And for awhile I did what I was supposed to do with my intellect, memorizing Scripture and skillfully twisting logic to argue against evolution in biology class and against feminism in social studies.  (Blessed is the evangelical woman who declaims feminism, for she enforces her own subjugation.)  But I'm also a thinker.  I ask questions.  I follow the truth wherever it leads.  And my questions became dangerous.

The other trouble is, I'm imaginative and strong-willed and have a mind of my own.  I grew tired of men far less intelligent than I insisting that they held authority over me because they had a dick.  (In college one douche informed me that I had to submit to his authority in some time-wasting "ministry group" because he was a man, and I retorted, "I'm smarter than you."  His mouth fell open speechlessly, reinforcing my point.  I quit the group on the spot.)  I grew tired of others telling me what I should think and do and be and want.  I could not continue in meekness and live with myself, so I shed it like old skin and started scaring people with my intensity and my questions and my vehemence and my opinions.

I'm trying to pinpoint where exactly I went wrong in terms of the destiny I was born to.  (When did I start disappointing my parents?)  These kinds of deviations from cultural expectation never boil down to one moment, however; rather, thousands of little moments gradually coalesce into a sea change.
 

So here I am approaching the middle way (twenty years not even a little bit wasted, thank god), and my life couldn't be more opposite from my youthful expectations.  I have never been married.  I have never given birth.  I am decidedly unvirginal.  I have built a rising career.  I possess not even the tiniest spark of religious faith.  I am not meek.  I am not compliant.  I lead, protect, and provide for myself.

Even by secular standards I am terrifyingly independent.  If I was expecting greater empowerment outside the church, I was sharply disappointed.  Sure, no one bitches about me having *a job* but my ambitions to increase my own power and leadership aren't exactly lauded by the general public.  And I'm still supposed to get married and have children (or at least be really really sad if I don't).  I'm still supposed to be "nice."  I'm still assumed to be an object of men's pleasure, and an object of men's will.  Turns out that systemic misogyny is all-pervasive.  Evangelical Christianity is a bastion of some of the Western tradition's worst and oldest traits, but those traits have not yet faded from the more progressive culture that evolved from it. 

It sucks when you realize that even if you get out of the maximum security prison, your only option is the minimum security one. 

Fortunately (?) I was a transgressive woman in the far more restrictive subculture for long enough, and, thanks to knowing my own mind, I've been single for long enough, that I can transgress against mainstream expectations with fewer cataclysms.  But it's taxing.  It took awhile to realize what was happening, because it IS less restrictive out here, and because the misogyny in mainstream culture is much more subtle and therefore exponentially harder to combat.  Everything is a power struggle as a woman.  Everything.  The clothes you put on.  The state of your body under your clothes.  The food you eat.  Walking down the fucking street.  Your interactions with literally everyone you encounter.  Being powerful is exhausting when you're up against the entire social infrastructure.  (And I'm white, and cisgender, and mostly heterosexual; I have it comparatively easy.  And it's still fucking exhausting.)  At the end of every day I feel so drained I can barely drag my ass into my apartment and make myself a meal.  Especially now, in the Age of Trump, being a woman is hard.   

And it's got me thinking.  In a society where all women labor under strict expectations regarding their role and their worth, irrespective of worldview, how does a woman determine herself?  How does she live and move and have her being without reference to anyone else?

I belong to a group of secular women who supported Hillary Clinton from the start of the 2016 campaign, and who still support her now.  On a "self-care thread" the other day most of these strong, amazing, powerful, wonderful women were expressing exhaustion and despair.  They're barely keeping their heads above water.  And I felt both deeply grateful and profoundly guilty because in spite of the exhaustion and anger in which I live daily, I am quietly thriving in a time when thriving is extremely difficult.  (Again. I am white, and cis, and mostly heterosexual, and am by these traits, for which I can take no credit, shielded from the worst of what is happening in our country.  I am lucky that thriving is remotely possible for me.)  The main difference between me and most of the depleted, despondent women in the group?  They have families to tend.

The title of this post is, of course, a reference to Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own," wherein she asserts that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a space, an actual room, that she can call her own, on which no obligation can encroach.  Being female, she said, one hundred goddamn years ago, eats up all a woman's time and attention by virtue of her duties to marriage and childrearing.  In order to make something more of yourself, you have to seize a physical space in which to do it.  Now that women are expected to be fully engaged in the workforce in addition to continuing to perform all the physical, mental and emotional labor of maintaining the home, we have less time and space than ever.  And it's astronomically difficult to correct the inherent power imbalances in nearly all heterosexual relationships because even if you're living with a good "woke" man, he still operates under the blindness and naivete of his own privilege, and it's so much goddamn work to shift it.

For most of my adult life I have grieved my single status.  I want love, I want companionship, I want a partner in this crazy thing called life.  (That grief, in combination with the horrible model I grew up with in which the woman does ALL OF THE WORK and celebrates as a victory every minor reduction in the man's narcissistic behavior, led me to try really hard to make it work with some really unsuitable men.)  But lately, realizing the kind of relationship that I want, and watching the struggles of my good friends and acquaintances to empower themselves as women in their committed long-term relationships, I have begun to realize how much more self-determined I am able to be, simply because I have no one to care for but myself. 

Naturally the instinctive reaction to even saying that is to feel that celebrating my freedom amounts to selfishness.  Women are supposed to sacrifice their ambitions and their needs for their mates and children.  Women are supposed to find time to be themselves on top of that sacrifice.  That is a woman's job.  That is noble.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I call bullshit.

Not that kids aren't worth it.  If I'd gotten married and had kids in the evangelical church when I was supposed to, I'd probably have worked my way to this point eventually (I've always known my own mind), and I would, like the other amazing women I know, find ways to empower myself even with family responsibilities.  But it's no accident that I didn't get married or have kids.  I've had opportunities.  I rejected them all (with varying degrees of sorrow and disappointment -- and, lately, sheer glee) because they didn't fit what I wanted.  (Also, in the interest of technical clarity, one opportunity rejected me, and at this point I have to feel grateful that at least I didn't come to liberal secularism while ensconced in a Christian marriage and family, which would in all likelihood have devastated both.)  Part of why I don't have to make any difficult choices between family and freedom, or between family and fulfillment, or between fulfillment in social roles and fulfillment in myself, is because I already made them. 

It's kind of weird, considering myself lucky that I have not yet gotten what I always dreamed of.  But my liberation and agency have become my highest priorities, and I am profoundly grateful that they currently have no obstacle at home.  Also that, going forward, any relationship on which I embark will start off where I am now, empowered, self-valuing, self-determining, aware, and with non-negotiable expectations for a fully equal partnership in which I am fully my own person (in short, what everyone should have, regardless of gender). 

I have a life of my own.  I would never have considered this in political terms before, but when you're a woman, every aspect of your life is political, not because you choose it to be, but because the entire culture has politicized it before you were born.  There are laws about what I can and can't do with my body.  There are laws that protect, and/or do not prosecute, those who do things to my body and my psyche without my consent.  I still do not have equal protection under the law in any state in this nation.  I am told what is acceptable for my appearance, for my personality, for my career choices.  I am told how I am permitted to behave in relationships.  It's all political.  Every last part of my life.  So yes, having a life of my own is an inherently political position.  It's transgressive.  It's not what I thought I was choosing, but it's the culmination of my choices.  It's caused me a lot of heartache over the years -- but far less heartache than participating in my own powerlessness.  And now it's bringing me unexpected joy and strength right alongside its unexpected freedom and power, in a time when it's nearly impossible for women to find any of those things.

Liberation.  Agency.  Independence.  The ability to choose exactly how I spend all of my time and where I invest all of my mental, physical and emotional resources.  That's a motherfucking gift.  And I unwittingly gave it to myself, when I extricated myself from unsatisfactory relationships and learned how to navigate the world on my own terms.

A life of my own.  I found it by accident, and I'm keeping it on purpose.  I hope more women do too.

nostalgia

For the last several days I have been listening obsessively to Josh Ritter's "Homecoming."

The album that contains it (Sermon on the Rocks) came out just before Meg and I went to see him in concert in Detroit in 2016 (omg like a year and a half ago already, damn has a lot happened since then), but for various reasons I didn't get around to listening to it until this past weekend, when the album arrived on my doorstep (yes, I still listen to CDs) just in time for my road trip to go camping with Meg and Phillip (road trips are my favorite time to listen to new music, for the full-surround effect and uninterrupted listening time).

I was not prepared for "Homecoming."

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.  Listening to the vitality and joy in memory that pounds through the piece stirred the wellspring of nostalgia in my own breast.  Five days later I'm still dancing in the car to it, wrapped in that beautiful sense of longing.

The funny part is, I'm not sure what I'm nostalgic for.  I like my hometown, but I don't feel any sense of belonging to it.  I left it as soon as I could upon graduating college, and only returned to it reluctantly years later, feeling like an alien but disciplining myself to settling there for five years before striking out excitedly for Detroit.  I have stronger home-ties to South Bend, the place where I first began to come into my own, and now to Detroit, where I am finally thriving, than I do to the place where I was born.  I left my heart in New Mexico a few years ago, and every once in awhile a longing for the desert mountains and lush river valley of Taos pierces me with breathlessness -- I want to retire there.  But mostly my nostalgia isn't tied to a sense of place.  I don't think it ever will be.  I love Detroit, love my sketchy city neighborhood, love the skyscrapers and the architecture and the history and the people.  Will I be here forever?  Probably not.  For the time being I'm happy to stay here long term, but you never know what life is going to bring you, and there's a lot of world to see, and a lot of places to live.  "Home" to me is the whole damn planet.  "Home" is something I carry inside myself wherever I go. I will love living in Detroit for as long as I'm here; but if and when I leave it, I won't wish I could come back, because I'll love the next place just as much.  (Probably.  Unless it's Kansas or southern Illinois or something.)

So nostalgia for me doesn't connect to a sense of place; and it also doesn't really connect to a sense of time.  Or at least, not a past time.  High school?  Nooooope.  College?  Sometimes.  I do feel a certain fondness for that first taste of freedom, for afternoons sprawled under trees poring over the tissue-thin pages of a new semester's tomish Norton anthology, for the pocket of idyllic quiet that was the little town of Grove City.  But I don't want to go back.  My twenties?  Oh hell no.  (I've been consoling mid-twenty-somethings lately with the simple reassurance that the twenties suck.  They all look at me with huge eyes and breathe a sigh of relief.  Yeah, kid, it's going to be okay.  The twenties are the worst.  They'll pass.)  No time that came before is better than where I am now.  I love where I am now. 

I have habitually shaken the dust from my sandals every time I leave one phase of life and embark on another.  Not just because most of my phases of life, exclusive of the present, have been marked by suffering -- I don't think of things in mournful terms anymore, for the most part, and those times of suffering precipitated enormous growth, so I made them count.  I think it's more that I've always longed for what's to come far more than for what came before.  I'm always looking to the next adventure.  The nostalgia I feel is for all that I haven't experienced yet. 

Which isn't to say that I don't love the adventures I've already had.  I've done some really cool shit, and had some really cool experiences.  Even the shitty experiences aren't so shitty because of my resilience and strength, and I can smile like hell about everything I've overcome.  I keep those memories in a jar in my mind and periodically pour them out and turn them over in my hands, smiling.  I suppose that's technically nostalgia, although it doesn't fill me with longing so much as satisfaction and gladness and excitement for whatever's to come next.

There's no time or place in my past that I'd return to.  There's a person or two I would love to be able to reconnect with, but I wouldn't want to reconnect with them as I was when I knew them last; I'd want to reconnect with them as we are now.  The past can't be changed; the present is better; I'm better, so much more myself; and everything really does tend to work out for the best, so there's nothing I wish I could go back and fix so much as there are things that I wish I could do going forward.  Always forward.

Life always and only gets better.  Every year is better than the year that preceded it.  Even when tragedy strikes, even when shit is really hard, I'm always in a state of becoming, and as the arrow of time moves forward, I move and grow and change with it.  The future is full of new adventures, better relationships, a more evolved self, all building on one another until at the end of my (hopefully very long) life I will have amassed a treasure-trove of experiences that have shaped me, and add up to a human being who has crafted a profound fulfillment through a life of liberated self-determination.   Living well is an art.  I hope to master it.

So when I hear songs of nostalgia, I don't think back to happier times.  I think forward to them.  (With, these days, a healthy sense of joy in the immediate present.  My sense of homecoming is everywhere I go.)  I've led a really cool life so far, and always, the best is yet to come.

My homecoming is now, and my homecoming ever shall be.  (World without end. Amen.) 

And I still can't stop listening to that song, and smiling. 

placeholder

Okay okay I'm still here! I'm still here.

My blogging (for all of my reader out there who have been worried, and no, I did not forget a pluralization) has stalled out the last week and a half for two reasons: 1.) Holy shit that three-week cold kicked my ass and drained my will to live (but not my sinuses), and 2.) Since I started feeling better over the weekend I have focused feverishly on my fiction. 

Oh my god it feels amazing to write again.  I find myself living in this story I'm crafting any time my mind has a free moment.  I love my characters.  (Meg would say it's because I love myself lol. She's not wrong.)  I can't stop writing.  And I have finally figured out how to work with my quick-shifting attention span as a writer and adapt it into a narrative style that allows me to keep writing without getting bored. 

Meg and I were talking earlier today about writing and creativity.  I told her some of what my therapist Frank and I have been talking about, regarding writing (I'll come back to Frank in a minute, he's seriously the best): How timing is everything, how this is the first time in my life I've been in a position to write something that could turn into a finished product (I'm actually writing this for publication -- first time I've ever written anything with a publication goal beyond hitting the "publish" button on a blog post): I have a stable life and career; I have finally started to write from healthiness and not from trauma; at thirty-six I now have a tiny bit more life experience than I did in my 20s so I have a little more that is worthwhile to say, at least in terms of resilience and thriving; and now that life has evened out and I'm a fully-fledged adult, I'm also realizing that this is life, and it will never get any less busy or any less complex, and if I'm ever going to do what I've always wanted to do, I have to figure out ways to work it in, right fucking now, because life is really, really short, and if I don't do this now, it might never happen.  This is -- maturity, maybe?  (Perish the thought.)  Also, alongside the idea of having more life experience is having more self-knowledge, and figuring out how to write what I LIKE, not just what I know. 

In short, it's all starting to come together, and I think I have a staying power now that I lacked when I was struggling under the crushing ocean-depth of depression.  (Fuck you, depression.  I don't live in you anymore.)  I think this newest project can actually go somewhere.

All of which is en-joy-ing.  (Enjoy. Literally, to fill with joy.)

Last night at therapy I was telling Frank how fucking heartbreaking and how fucking enraging and how fucking exhausting sexism is.  Like many Hillary supporters, I hit a point after the very personal slap in the face that was the 2016 election where I was just fucking done.  Just done.  Sexism can kiss my ass.  I have no time or patience for it when it rears its stupid misogynistic head, and I have stopped being nice about it. 

But it's exhausting.  Humans weren't built to be angry all the time.  And I have been angry so much of the time.

So after I run out of rant and just sit on the couch looking tiredly at Frank, he asks, very simply, "When was the last time you went shooting?"

"Oh fuck, it's been years," I said.

"That's your assignment," he said.

And I perked up like a Sarah who has just smelled coffee in the morning.  I asked him some questions about good ranges to visit around here, and where to buy ammo, and then said, "Awesome. I'll have to teach myself how to clean my gun" (thinking of YouTube, that bastion of self-help), when Frank said, "Bring it next week and I'll teach you."

So my therapy next week will consist of learning how to clean my gun.  That's some pretty badass therapy.

Writing and shooting (I'm a pretty textbook liberal in so many respects, and I fervently support stringent gun control, but baby, I do like target shooting, and my girl Dirty Harriet is a bad. ass. bitch).  Not a bad week so far.

To California

To everyone in California as it burns: I'm thinking about you. I hope you are safe.

Please be safe.

the personal is political

Some day, somewhere, somehow, I will live in a world where I don't wake up hacking up a lung every morning, and where I don't continue to hack up a lung throughout the day.  It'll happen.  I have faith like that.

In the meantime, aside from growing increasingly grumpier, life progresses at a happy pace.  Work has entered a slow patch, which means I fill my days with catching up on all the shit I had to throw to the side in the breakneck race of summer, to try to at least come up even when the next frenzy hits.  Coming up even is an impossible dream in the legal field, but everyone needs their castle in the air to keep them going, and catching up at work is mine.

Something lovely, something incredible and fierce, is happening, these days, a phoenix from the ashes of the hopes that died when a minority of Americans elected a lunatic head of a lunatic party and started to dismantle our democracy.  Women are done.  We are done with being assaulted.  We are done with being disbelieved.  We are done with being belittled, discriminated against and talked down to.  We are done with being silenced.  We are done with being boxed in.  We are done with being powerless.  I am watching a transformation happening in which I take a sort of exhausted, enraged pride.  It would have been so much better under Hillary.  But we're still making it happen.  Even under these increasingly inauspicious circumstances.

The personal empowerment is exhilarating.  I am seizing everything I can, without compromise.  For the first time in my life, I would rather be single than give up one modicum of my agency and personal power.

The personal is political.

Sunday mornings

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? 
What is divinity if it can come 
Only in silent shadows and in dreams? 
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, 
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else 
In any balm or beauty of the earth, 
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? 
Divinity must live within herself: 
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; 
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued 
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty 
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; 
All pleasures and all pains, remembering 
The bough of summer and the winter branch. 
These are the measures destined for her soul. 

~Wallace Stevens, from "Sunday Morning"

I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.

I never particularly enjoyed church.  As a kid I got some fun out of it, since the '80s evangelical Baptist church in which I spent my childhood Sundays met in the local YMCA, and the small lawless horde of us roamed freely throughout the fitness club climbing on forbidden equipment and belly-flopping onto the small square heavy equipment dollies to see how far we could roll across the basketball court, racing the stumping feet and yelling voice of Martie, self-appointed behavioral enforcer who charged around the "Y" trying to corral us.  (Whenever I imagine her purposeful stocky figure and short, severely parted steel-gray hair and face twisted into a permanent "I'm going to get you kids" scowl, forever in my memory looming over me like a heavy-breasted giant, my adult self still feels a thrill of childlike daring: RUN.)  But as the church relocated, and I grew out of my scampering and scraped-knee days, and we changed churches altogether to find one both closer to home and (as it turned out) less plagued by adultery, I stopped enjoying anything about the Sunday morning ritual.  The frenetic rush to arrive on time.  Boring, predictable sermons.  Troweled-on guilt.  Also -- as the grandiose, orchestrally synthesized, heavy-drummed '80s worship music petered into the two-chord, endlessly repetitious, ham-fistedly emotional love whining of the '90s and early 2000s -- murderously dull music.  And forced association with people I couldn't stand.

Still, as I embarked on my learning career at the tiny, conservative Christian Grove City College, I thought that would all change.  So many Christians in one place!  Surely there would be some amazing church out there.

Nope.

The megachurches with their seas of identical, vapid people and identical, vapid worship services and identical, vapid sermons.  The tiny small-town chapels with their intense participation pressure and strong smells of mildew and varnish, trying to keep up with the times through loud faulty sound systems and electric guitars.  Everyone smiling and grasping, trying to pull you in.

I resisted.  I hate volunteering.  The people were weird.  The songs lost all grammatical, musical and theological integrity, gradually collapsing into tacky pornographic husks of self-indulgence.  The sermons pissed me off, with their rising anti-multicultural, anti-gay, anti-sex, anti-liberal hysteria.  I've never been a morning person, so the early services were sheer torture, and the later services ate up too much of the afternoon.  I didn't fit in -- everyone at these churches effortlessly curled themselves into a bland, safe, prescripted white Christian mold, lots of long skirts and khaki pants and bake sales and saccharine smiles and pearl-clutching and unquestioning obedience to the subcultural dictates, with the absolute assumption that I wanted that mold too.  Sundays began to feel like a whole day spent crammed into the itchy, tiny, short-waisted, uncomfortably hot sweater that the women's honorary society I was inducted into my sophomore year forced me to wear for volunteering events which I detested nearly as much as I detested church.  A whole day wasted.

For awhile I continued to attend church solely for the opportunity to brunch afterward with my churchgoing friends, but as I remained relentlessly single while most of them paired off into careful, restrained, joyless Stepford couples, I began opting to sleep in.  The guilt was worth it, to wake up at 10:00 on a Sunday morning, drink my coffee in a blissfully deserted cafeteria, and stroll the loveliness of the autumnal campus alone soaking in the vibrant hues and the wet-leaf, dry-leaf smells and the creeksong while everyone else shifted uncomfortably on hard pews and dutifully sang their colorless worship to a God I no longer found in a building, a steeple, a sepulchre -- or a people.  I waved off my friends' urgent concerns for my spiritual health.  This was better.  This gave me a deeper communion than any wafer chips and thimblefuls of juice.  This restored my soul.

With my post-graduate relocation to South Bend, however, I heaved a sigh and renewed the search for a "church home."  As I launched a new chapter of my life in a new place far from home, my upbringing told me that finding a good church ensured my social belonging and shored up my faithful lifestyle.

I did try.  I tried a variety of denominations, from Baptist to non-denominational to Unitarian to Methodist to Presbyterian; I tried a variety of sizes, from megachurches whose stadium domes stretched over multitudes to microchurches whose twenty aging congregants flecked the sparse pews like scattered breadcrumbs.  I picked one or two churches and gamely attempted regular attendance.  I went to 20-something Sunday school classes.  I participated in discussions.  I went to brunches and Bible studies.

I hated all of them.  Everything felt as shallow and glassy as a reflecting pool.  Nothing fit, nothing stuck.  I had no shared sympathy with any of the people.  As my theology expanded beyond the confines of evangelicalism, and then Protestantism, the old stuffed-sweater feeling intensified.  It itched, it cut off my circulation, it bulged in weird places.  Finally I went full Catholic, in part because for a time I sincerely believed in the catechism, but also because Catholicism held room within its vastness for the odd liberal, heterodox, academically inclined philosopher, and because in a Catholic church nobody gives a shit about trying to get you to fit in.  They don't assault you every week with creepy welcomes and brightly intrusive personal questions and perky invitations to gatherings that broaden a network but never flower into real friendships.  You go in, sit down, participate in the liturgy, and leave.  I joined the list of cantors, which was perfect because there was never any practice and all the singing was solo.  Best of all, I could go to church on Saturday afternoons and have Sunday mornings to myself.

By the time I realized that I really just hate organized gatherings and regular time commitments beyond work, I no longer had to give any further thought to practicing religion.  Relinquishing an already-dead faith came as both a joy and a profound relief for a number of reasons, not least of which being that I could finally give up church without regret.  While my parents grieved (I was living with them when they found out; it was not our best moment), I moved forward into faithlessness with a quiet exultation.  For the first time in my life, I was totally free, and absolutely everything was unwritten, including how I passed my weekends.

I haven't been a believer in anything supernatural for over six years.  And even now, every week I wake to Sunday with the gladness I never knew in faith.  This day is mine.  This time is mine.  I can spend it as I choose, and I mostly spend it in simple, quiet rest, sleeping in as late as I please, performing mundane tasks around the house, enjoying my solitude and my Simon.  Instead of washing a conscience that is now always clean, I wash my clothes and dishes.  Instead of the Bible I read science books and light fiction.  Science podcasts and jazz albums have layered over the places where I once listened to sermons and worship music, and the spaces previously occupied by crackers and juice have expanded to accommodate homemade bread and a wide variety of wine.  My day.  My body.  My blood.  My time, my mind, my memories: The divinity that lives within myself, the better measures destined for my soul, the bounty I bestow upon this life. This life, this self, and no other.

I will never stop being grateful for Sundays.

finitus

Well I had planned to write a nice reflective post about autumnal nostalgia for the days of reading poetry under trees in my college Octobers, but everything about today pissed me off.  I think I'm mostly just really really tired of being sick and it's making me cranky as hell.  Every driver on the road did something stupid or rude.  Work presented giant irritations that to be fair probably would irk me on even a good day, but today was not a good day so I quietly clamped down on my temper and fumed to myself (another benefit of long-term singleness and living-aloneness is getting really good at all forms of self-care, including being that person for yourself who says, reasonably, "I know it's a shit day, and you're also not feeling well, and things are bothering you more than they ordinarily would, so take a few deep breaths, keep your temper, keep your head, keep your cool, you got this").  My doctor proved he has gone full woo when he told me that diet soda causes cancer (I mean, after his "wine is more natural" and "join my wife's JuicePlus group" shit earlier this year I really didn't have that many doubts left, but this takes the fucking cake.  Forty years of insanely robust research that says absolutely otherwise, and "artificial sweeteners are the most dangerous thing you can put in your body."  Oh please.  Next it'll be GMOs and organic and oh my god I just fucking can't.  Time to find a new doctor).  And then yet another seemingly intelligent white male left a series of unbelievably sexist comments on a social media post of mine which skyrocketed my general annoyance to stratospheric rage (I. am. done. with. sexism) and the only good moment of my day, though it accompanied great disappointment in yet another dude, was absolutely shutting him down. (I shut him down so hard he deleted all his comments and blocked me. Yessss.  I'm sad that my comments in reply to his got deleted too though.  That was an epic takedown.)

Like, I'm not even having these arguments anymore.  I'm not playing along.  I'm not making nice.  I'm not performing the myriad acts of emotional labor expected of women even when they're being talked down to by an intellectual inferior.  Fuck your privilege, dude.  Fuck your feelings.  Fuck your sense of self-worth that is rooted in the simultaneous invalidation of and validation by women.  Not this woman.  Not today.

I've been a scary feminist for a long time.  I was the ONLY feminist on my college campus (which is where my feminism was born), and I've only gotten more and more aware as time has gone on.  But since the election, I am fucking done with sexism.  I am angry.  I have no time or patience for taking it, tolerating it, or supporting it.

God it feels good to just unleash.  To call out bullshit in a matter-of-fact tone that doesn't even need to go ad hominem to trigger a narcissistic injury in these fragile bros.  And not to worry even a little bit if I hurt their feelings because for once their feelings aren't the point and don't matter.

But can I not be sick anymore?  I just really want to not be sick anymore.

reservoir

I'm not gonna lie, it's a little discouraging how quickly my reserves run out these days.  One malingering cold is enough to deflate all my buoyant spirits and soaring optimism into a flaccid, rubbery lump of exhaustion and mundanity.  

I'm just so tired.  The last few days in particular have taken all my glazed-eyed, zombified will just to get through until I can drag myself home and into bed.  

On the drive home from work this afternoon (I really love not having to be a Woman In Public on the bus anymore) I realized that most of the reason I don't want friends right now is that I don't have the energy to make them.  I can muster enough to hang out with people who've known me forever (namely Steph and Meg), but that's it.  Making new friends?  Forget it.  That costs more than I have in the bank right now.

Gradually the reservoir will fill up again.  My spring is coming.  Everything keeps going so well that I know the overall trend inclines upward.  But like any convalescent, I have to remember to take it easy.  Getting exercise and writing back set me aglow; I forgot how fragile so precious a newly resurrected thing can be.  It doesn't take much to tap out my enthusiasm (I would say "my strength" instead of "my enthusiasm," but I've never yet come to the end of my strength, which after this summer honestly frightens me a little.  Like what the hell am I.  How do I still manage to find the wherewithal not only to keep going but to thrive?  Alone?  Because make no mistake, I am very much alone right now.  My support system contains a few people at the periphery, and my therapist, and me.  Mostly me.  And I have never yet reached the end of my strength.  Just the end of my enthusiasm), so it's important to remember to go slowly, ease up, savor each moment of delight as it comes (such as realizing that the return of my writing skills seems to have reanimated in kind my quick, intuitive ear for harmony even with unfamiliar songs; ye gods, I have missed that) and rest, rest, rest.

So, I'll counsel myself to patience.  And of course it's a little lonely.  But I've felt much, much worse, and since I have little to bring to the social table right now, I might as well relax into the solitude and enjoy my own company (and that of an owl-eyed, whiskery inky black kittyboy).  

And get lots and lots and lots of sleep.

these are a few of my

Almost every day I gloat about something in my new apartment.  (I still haven't decided on its name.  So far it's just The Homestead.)  This cold is still kicking my ass, so rather than compose something thoughtful and deep I'll just list off the things that make me feel smug and happy AF about living here.

1. My snaketongue (the succulent, you perv. No, the PLANT.  The DESERT PLANT. Arrrgh forget it).  That thing has decided it loves life in its new location high up on the bathroom shelf.  I was worried that the lack of direct sunlight would hurt it, but evidently shade is its thang, because it's put out like ten new blades in the last two months, and the old raggedy shriveled blades that droop over the mirror are beginning to fill out.

2.  My bathroom window.  Ooooo it's so pretty.  The shower stall is done all in big desert-colored tiles, and the window, comprised of cubes of wavy glass, is set in the middle of the shower stall, with a broad tiled ledge at about (my) waist height where I arranged two potted succulents (hilariously, the tiny little fingerling plants I bought for two bucks a pop at Aldi are thriving far more luxuriantly than anything I bought at far higher prices at The Home Depot) on either end, with a carved stone lizard, a stained-glass piece, two huge hunks of glass (one in bottle green, one in pale beach blue), and a bright blue glass vase of bath salts (the legal kind).  Once the shower curtain has aired out, I pull it off to the side so the light from the window can light up the glass pieces; the effect is glorious.

3.  My dishwasher.  Is. So. Quiet.

4.  My mantel.  The huge fireplace isn't functional, but I have an electric heater that looks like a cast-iron stove that fits perfectly in the grate.  When I moved in the fireplace bricks were painted this hideous glossy maroon; the walls were a shiny industrial gray that always just looked...sweaty.  Steph came to visit the day after I moved in and we spent a week painting the walls throughout the apartment varying shades of green.  We turned the living room this amazing dark Victorian arsenic green; I painted the fireplace white.  It looks perfect.  Just before I moved out of the old shithole, someone at that complex had thrown away an enormous bedroom suite, and I salvaged the mammoth dresser mirror from the dumpster, painted it the same white as the fireplace, and installed it above the mantel.  It's stunning.  On either end of the mantel (seriously this fireplace is fucking gargantuan) I perched my mismatched pair of favorite lamps, one a tall tapering ridged ceramic in avocado green with a drum shade wrapped in strips of burlap; the other a squat glass in rich deep orange -- they look strangely good together.  In between the lamps range my favorite cobalt blue vases, interspersed with slender green daffodil-stemmed vases, and the Depression-era ruby wine glasses that my grandmother gave me.  The whole thing is finished off by a riot of pothos vines that start behind the lamps and twine throughout the glass pieces and over the lamps and mirror.  I just like staring at it.

5.  My I CAN'T SEE ANYTHING AT ALL darkened bedroom.  Back when I lived in The Eyrie I became obsessed with the idea of sleeping in pitch darkness and embarked on a quest to kill all light entering the room (I am become Satan, destroyer of light.  Shit we might experience nuclear war soon.  That reference wasn't funny.  Dammit).  Not content with the blackout curtains one can buy at Wal-Mart, I purchased real blackout fabric and sewed it to the backs of the curtains, then hung additional blackout curtains over the door (impermeable to light; permeable to Simon).  It was the best sleep I've ever had.  I never cared about the Placeholder (that's what I'm calling my previous dwelling, I think -- a shitty senselessly split-level condo built in the 60s with absolutely no soundproofing between the first and second floors), so it wasn't worth my time to try to light-proof that bedroom, but once I moved into the Homestead and realized the landlord wasn't kidding when he said his security lights illuminate the building like a miniature sun, I tunneled through my piles of boxes until I found the blackout curtains.

I love it.  When you turn out the lights you can't even see your hand in front of your face.  Once again I sleep the beautiful deep uninterrupted sleep of the entombed, and it's amazing.

6.  My galley kitchen with oodles of counterspace.  So easy to cook in.

7.  My microwave that doesn't require you to press a button before you set the cook time.  (I HATE having to press "cook time" before punching in the cook time.)

8.  My neighbors. Are so quiet.

9.  I HAVE A BALCONY.

10.  The size and the silence.

Still gonna take me awhile to settle in -- probably most of the winter.  I'm still tired and taking it easy.  But I already love living here.  One day soon I'll write about the story of finding this place.  It's not a bad tale.  In the meantime, I wake up every morning happy and grateful for where I live.

in the darkness

As he bent his head toward the neck of the guitar, the audience fell appreciatively silent, vibrant with anticipation.  I sat four rows back in the intimate little Ann Arbor theater, so close to him I could read his facial expressions, holding my breath.  The last time I'd seen Josh Ritter in concert, Meg and I had crowded close to each other in the Royal Oak Music Theater in Detroit, watching him perform with the Royal City Band.  That concert was amazing, not least because of the absolute joy that Josh radiates as he plays.  This one was a solo show -- just Josh and his upright bass player.

I had seen it on Facebook several weeks prior and bought a ticket without a second's hesitation.  (Josh playing solo?  Fuck yes I'm there.)  N. had seen that I was going and jealously bought himself a ticket, insisting on accompanying me, although I had planned to ask Meg.  Fortunately the relationship fell apart before the concert (I was sad about it, but more tired than anything else), and Meg had bought his ticket; but then car troubles prevented her from going, so I went by myself.  It was the second concert I'd attended alone in a month, and I found myself strangely liberated by the experience.  The opening numbers were great.  Josh Ritter is a joy to watch, a joy to hear, and so delighted by the audience's delight, as if he can't believe that other people like listening to him.

And then his fingers began picking out the chords to "Thunderbolt's Goodnight," the song I'd longed with all my being to hear that night, and I clapped my hands to my mouth while the tears started pouring silently down my face.

I didn't know the name of the song at that point; the album on which he finally included it wouldn't be released for another three months.  All I knew was the debt I owed him for that song.  The first time I'd heard it, packed into the Royal Oak Music Theater next to Meg, I was exhausted and sad.  Things with Chris weren't going well -- hadn't been for the bulk of the relationship.  He kept insisting he wanted the relationship to work.  I was trying so hard.  But I felt lonely, all the time, especially when we were together; his thoughts were always anywhere but with me.  There was no intimacy.  We never talked.  About anything, ever.  I still thought we could make it work -- I thought I had to try.

Until I heard that song.  When I heard Josh Ritter sing "Thunderbolt's Goodnight" for the first time, I knew that I would break up with Chris.  Because I knew that I would never have with him the things I needed.  I knew that he had never felt that way about me, and never would.  And I knew that in the art of losing, what seemed like disaster would turn out to be something else.  

And all my life

Before I met you

When I was trying hard in love

I thought the sun

Was going down

But the sun was coming up

My relationship with Chris ended a few weeks after I heard that song.  Now, having just ended my relationship with N., I listened to it for the second time, and, weeping, knew that I'd done the right thing.  (I'm sure the poor people on either side of me thought I was a lunatic; I was crying so hard I couldn't keep the gulpy hitches in my breath altogether quiet.)  It was the kind of weeping that heals -- an outpouring of grief that resolves into hope.  In that dark, exquisitely intimate little theater, I fixed my swollen eyes on Josh and let the chords wash over me.  The sun was coming up.  I didn't know how or when, but I knew it would.

For all my rage over the ways in which systemic sexism impedes women in relationships, for all my disappointments over past relationship failures, for all my determination to do things differently going forward, and for all my fierce delight in my current single state, I have never given up hope.  I know exactly what I'm looking for -- I always have; that hasn't changed -- and now I think I finally have a clear understanding of what it looks like, and an even clearer resolve to settle for nothing less.  Every relationship that I have voluntarily shed, I have shed because the relationship could go no further -- and because of my hope for the better things to come.  

I'm not trying so hard, now.  I'm okay on my own.  I'm still resting.  But the life I have founded here in Detroit, once I've emerged from hibernation, is the life in which I'll finally be in a good place to have the relationship I've always wanted.  Maybe I won't find it; I want what I had the only time I ever really deeply connected with someone, and I don't know how likely it is that I'll find that again.  It's so rare, and so precious.  And if I don't find it a second time, that's okay; I will always make the best life possible for myself, and I enjoy my own company.  And if I do -- well.  That will be amazing.  

It's likely that I would still be sitting here writing about this if I hadn't attended those concerts and heard Josh sing that simple, aching song.  But in his hands and from his mouth that longing, that hope, that profound gratitude crystallized into a sense of purpose for me, both times, and drove me forward, so that after the solo concert, I drove back to Detroit in the late-night darkness with the fragrance of June pouring through the windows, and I felt light, and free, and washed clean.

tired

Oh man I hate being sick.

This Monday was just malicious.  Nothing awful happened in my day (I admit I'm cashing in on my privilege when I write these blog posts about my personal life that don't have anything to do with the national news, but Jesus Christ, I can only take so much of wrestling with the obvious descent of our democracy into an irredeemable dystopian hell), but it dragged.  All I could do was feel horribly sad and angry about yet another mass shooting committed by a seemingly law-abiding white man while all the good patriots proclaim his god-given right to carry an assault weapon that can snuff out or directly harmfully impact 550+ human lives so that nothing will ever change, while wishing I could kick the day in the ass to get it to move a little faster.

When shit like this happens (WHY THE FUCK IS IT THE REALITY THAT I CAN SAY "WHEN" SHIT LIKE THIS HAPPENS), I keep flashing back to one of the memorable moments in my short-lived teaching career.

I taught eleventh-grade English in one of the worst high schools in Detroit for six months.  A majority of my students had criminal records and parole officers.  Multiple fights broke out daily all over the school, necessitating a full-time security team.  The year before I joined the staff a teacher had been fired for breaking up a fight with a broom; she later won her suit against the district because it was ruled that she had no other options to keep the rest of her students safe.  One of the classrooms still bore bloodstains on the walls from when the police beat the shit out of a kid.  Every day I interacted with students whom the entire social infrastructure has failed since their grandparents' conception.  A few of them maintained hope -- hope that they could succeed, hope that they could get out, hope that they could earn safe and prosperous lives for themselves.  A number of them wanted to succeed but had no idea how and couldn't connect good grades with hard work.  An equal number of them didn't see the point of playing along to a system that had already set them up to fail.  A few were openly hostile.  Every fucking day, they broke my goddamn heart.

And I couldn't help them.  The memorable moments were mostly the things that they taught me (as if a white woman's lessons were more important than the ones I tried to plan for them).  Like the unit I did on mass shootings after yet another shooting while an actual leader still ran our country.

I opened up the unit with a poll.  I had them write down, individually, whether they thought that guns should be made illegal.

I don't know what I expected.  Most of these kids possessed firearms aplenty; a number of them had used them in the acts that earned them their criminal records.

And out of all of my 100 students, 98 of them said that no one should be allowed to own a gun.  Ever.  And the two that argued in favor of guns argued that people need to protect their families.

These are kids that don't walk outside to their cars at night because of the violence in their neighborhoods.  Kids you might expect to think that guns were a necessity of life.

And they hate guns.  All of them.  Even the ones that use them.  They fucking hate guns.

And when poor black kids from the 'hood in goddamn Detroit can agree on something like this -- goddammit, America.  Fucking listen.  I stood there listening to their opinions and their stories and their passionate arguments against the legality of gun ownership, and it was one of those moments that took my upbringing in white supremacy and rewrote my entire understanding of reality.

We need to do better by our country.  We need to do better by our kids.  Maybe mass shootings are difficult to prevent, but a lot of gun violence isn't.

I used to be an emphatic supporter of "the Second Amendment."  I still don't have a problem with individuals owning a handgun or a shotgun or a hunting rifle -- in theory.  But I would give up my right to own a gun tomorrow if it meant that we could stop seeing these horrifying stories of toddlers shooting each other and women getting murdered by their partners and exes (I just realized yesterday that in the last few months I have astronomically reduced the odds that I'll be raped, assaulted and/or murdered.  By being single.  Let that sink in for a minute.  Seriously, just let that sink in. Because statistically it's the simple truth) and kids killing each other in the inner cities.  Or possibly angry white dudes deciding to murder a huge number of people just because they're angry.

I love marksmanship.  I enjoy target and skeet shooting.  I'm not half-bad at it.  But I no longer think my interest in a particular skill set outweighs other people's right to life and safety.

I have the luxury of feeling tired when I read one more news story about a mass shooting.  Other people will never have the luxury of feeling tired again.  And the people that conflate a right to self-defense with a right to own a full military arsenal need to pull their heads out of their asses and find wherever they stashed their sense of empathy and social responsibility.

This shit needs to stop.

friendless

My original weekend itinerary never came to fruition on account of my lingering cold.  I had planned to attend a couple of bat conservation events and get a lot of writing done; instead I sat on the couch all weekend binge-re-watching How I Met Your Mother (my enjoyment of which I cannot possibly defend, and will not try.  It is a show that centers around white male cisgender heteronormative supremacy. I spend more than half of my time watching it cursing it out.  I stay for the friendships), with a few breaks to use the bread machine (Italian herb bread with garlic, onion, parsley, basil, rosemary and thyme, omg), do laundry, run to the grocery store for necessities like milk and wine and vegetables, and make my nuclear garlic hummus (vampires beware).

My life right now is socially isolated.  I don't hang out with people outside of work, except for the monthly happy hours I instituted, or the times when I get together with Meg or Steph, which also occurs roughly monthly, or the occasions when one of my neighbors invites me over for a brunch.  I enjoy those times -- the happy hours and brunches are great because I get to turn on my powerful charisma (an acquaintance of mine, himself highly socially aware, many years ago said of me to one of my friends, "She's one of those people who draws all the energy in a room") and I derive a lot of satisfaction from those artful performances; but as a person who possesses an extrovert magma surrounding an introvert core, I can only throw those performances at significant cost, and so I don't do them often.  And the times with my deepest, truest, best friends are treasures that feed my soul for months.  The rest of the time?  I spend pretty much alone.

And I fucking love it.

I don't have to be by myself all the time.  I know plenty of people at work who would like to get to know me better, who would readily hang out if I extended an invitation.  And eventually I probably will.  But right now I'm in a state of suspended social animation while I rest and recuperate from the last three years.

It is so, so, so, so nice.  Just to live alone.  Just to come home to my lovely, quiet apartment in my lovely city neighborhood and spend time with myself and Simon.  Not to have to go anywhere or entertain anyone.  To have no demands on my time.

I have never spent more time by myself.  And I have never been less lonely in my life.

a time of fullness

IT'S FINALLY COOL ENOUGH TO WEAR PANTS. (Not that I ever wear pants at work; I'm solidly a skirt person.  But at home I like my schluffy exercise pants and it's been too fucking hot to wear much of anything at all.  I hate you, human-caused global climate change.  I weep for you, planet dying of fever.  I welcome you, fall temperatures.)  Glory hallelujah.  Amen and amen.

Also holy shit this Sudafed is no joke.  (I generally keep myself well stocked with various medicines, Gatorades, ginger ales and chicken soups, because having lived half my entire life alone, I know how to prepare to care for myself during illness.  Side bar: I don't even feel sad right now that there's no one to take care of me while I'm sick, which has always been the hallmark of my I-hate-being-single mourning/whining.  Now I'm like "aw fuck yeah I can sleep in a quiet house without anyone bothering me."  I think I was so seriously miserable in my last burning circus of a relationship that I broke through the other side of even giving a shit.)  I bought the really good stuff -- the kind you have to show like four different forms of ID to even look at.  The kind you have to sign in blood for.  The kind you only have to take once a day.  Thanks to this marvel of modern medicine I have spent the last two days blazing through my work hours in a giddy spaciness that sort of vibrates at the edges.  I looked it up today to figure out why the fuck I've been so over-the-moon happy (I mean, I'm in a pretty good mood generally, especially now that I'm in a voluntary seclusion and better rested, but this soaring glee is a bit unusual), and it looks like pseudoephedrine has an impact on norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake, which is what my antidepressant does, so I guess I'm like double the happy.  Don't get me wrong, it's awesome; it's just gotta be weird for the people who have to work with a giggly, beaming goofball when they're used to professional and no-nonsense.  This is all-nonsense.

Oh well.  I am a many-faceted being.  They might as well see the sillier side of Sarah now as later.

So having got that amphetamine-addled preamble off my chest, here's the post I have intended to write since this morning.
___________________________________

This is a time of fullness.

As with most metamorphoses, it took profound upheaval to reach it.  I don't subscribe to the philosophy that growth must come from pain; but growth certainly comes from change, and change, to the human brain, however ultimately good, is nonetheless tumultuous and stressful.  In the last four months, I:

1. Learned that my mother has ovarian cancer and went through a summer of travel across states to help where I could (Note: I will not be writing much about this topic for the foreseeable future.  At the moment Mom's treatment is going great, and I am unspeakably grateful, and that is all I can say about it);
2. Ended another terrible relationship;
3. Moved to a new apartment; and
4. Moved office locations and accepted a promotion.

The changes encompassed every facet of my life: family, personal life, home, work.  All in flux at once.  It was the most exhausted I've ever been.

But again, the changes themselves, with the exception of my mother's illness, weren't painful so much as stressful.  The breakup was both brilliantly done on my part, and deeply liberating (I really have broken through some ceiling that I've never been able to breach before; this level of satisfaction and happiness with my own life, on its own terms, is something I never dreamed I could achieve); the move was holy-shit-so-exhausting but I love my new habitat as dearly as I hated my old one, and the closer location to work cuts my daily commute from 2.5 hours to less than one; and the promotion has catapulted me along my chosen trajectory of enacting much-needed reforms in my office.  Undertaking all these changes at once definitely tapped out my reserves (I've been a pretty dry cistern for the last three years, so I didn't have much to draw on to begin with), but even in the middle of the irruption I knew I just had to get through a few months of insanity before everything evened out and coalesced into a beautiful sea change.

Which it has.  I can say without hesitation or qualification that this is the happiest I have ever been.  Which happened when I finished all the change-events, and allowed myself over the last couple of months to do nothing but rest.  And suddenly: joy.  So much joy.  My apartment is still a hectic jumble of boxes; there's still so much to do at work; but everything feels peaceful and unhurried.  And I love my quiet, solitary hours at home.

It is from this joy and fulfillment and happiness that I am starting to write again.  It's been a long, long time since I've considered myself a writer.  You can basically track my writing by my blog posting, which has been essentially defunct since 2009.  Eight years in the desert.

I thought I lost it.  I would sit and try to write something, but it was all stilted, forced, shriveled.  I thought that was it, for me.  It hurt me, but I couldn't fix it.  It just wasn't there.

Undoubtedly there are many reasons for all of it.  I lost my favorite blog reader and blogging after that felt weird; my first Great Change launched around that time as well and my internal perspective was shifting so fucking rapidly that I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone process it, let alone write about it; and then I didn't know how to write about it, because I found myself in a new emotional landscape that I wasn't equipped to describe; and then I embarked on a series of shitty relationships (my taste in romantic partners, with two exceptions, has trended toward the abysmal, although, I think, for no longer) and stretches of in-between recovery time that took over my life and left no room for writing.  Those were all factors.  But primarily, I think, now that the words keep welling up within my metaphorical soul and spilling out and I can't stop writing (yesterday I blogged, and worked on my new piece of fiction (!), and journalled): I had only known how to write from a place of pain, and not a place of wholeness, and it's taken this long, and this much rest and repletion and joy and fulfillment, to arrive in a space where I can be creative again.

It's a really good lesson to absorb.  I need to protect my peace and my wholeness, so that I can write.

This feeling -- this feeling of being myself -- this is amazing.  I am almost wholly Sarah.

And from this place of fullness, I can create.  I can turn my hands and my brain and my entire sense of being to my best-loved, and best-suited, craft.

It is so, so good.

a teeny bit about my job

I can't believe how much I love my job.

It's been a combination of luck and the force of my personality, to be honest.  Luck that the job opened up just when I gave up on teaching and started casting around for something new, and luck that the attorneys I was initially assigned to assist are all fantastic people to work for; then luck that I got to know people who are, or who became, people of influence in the firm.  The rest is personality and will.

Part of what I love about my job is finally working in a place that's big enough for my ambitions.  I've taken my initial position of "legal secretary" and added management and policy development, with an eye far up the ladder over time.  I am well respected in an environment that does not yield itself to a great deal of respect.  I am well respected because I do good work, I am friendly and outgoing, I am smart and competent, I am firm and decisive, I speak my mind, and I don't tolerate bullshit.  It's a role I've grown into, and quickly.  I've only been at the firm a year and half and I've already earned a promotion and started a policy-making focus group within my department.

It's weird, realizing that I'm good at politics.  (I've come a long, long way since my rawboned fledgling days at the homeless center all those years ago.)  I do politics my own way (that is to say, with sincerity and openness), but I know how to make and leverage connections, I know the right things to say, the right arguments to make.  I know how to set a goal and gather support for it.  I know how to get what I want.  I know how not to give a shit when people don't like me.  I know how to use all that for good.

It's pretty fucking great.

I could rave all day about how much I love my attorneys.  I assist three at present; there have been some secretarial reassignments since I came on board, so of the three I initially started with, I've retained two, S. and B. (one of which I kept because I went to my supervisors and demanded to keep him--sometimes when I think about all the brassy, ballsy things I've done at this job I just sit and giggle, I can't believe they've all worked, and also, since that appears to be all it takes to make shit happen, why haven't I thought to just make demands all along); the third (D.) I knew I wanted to assist from my first week on the job, and about six months ago he went to my supervisor and told her he wanted to be assigned to me, and it was done (M.'s recounting to me later made my heart swell with pride, because the people at the top know who I am).  My attorneys are all vastly different personalities, with vastly different positions in the firm hierarchy, and I get along with all of them splendidly, and have really solid working relationships with them.  B. and I are work-spouses who are mostly incredibly nice to each other, occasionally grump each other out, and frequently spend long minutes on the phone together muttering absently to ourselves before realizing we don't need to be talking to each other.  S. and I are old-school-style boss-and-secretary (except that he thinks me a magical computer wizard), with a lot of benevolent cordiality and occasional political commiserations.  D. and I are still figuring each other out, but there's a lot of mutual liking and respect there, and working with him is teaching me to be even more assertive and personally powerful, which I appreciate the hell out of.

And that's not even bringing the management and policy-making aspects into it.

I fucking love my job.  For the first time ever.  I've turned it into a career, and I have a clear vision of where I want to take it.  And I can get there.

The last eight years have seen a few distinctive shifts in my personal development.  2009-2010 saw me burst out of a chrysalis of trauma and depression into healing and coping and joy and freedom.  2017 has been the year of real blooming.  (So I'm a butterfly and a flower.  A butterflower.  Don't mind me, I have a cold right now and this is the Sudafed talking.)  It's been a damn hard year, in places -- completely exhausting.  But this is the most, and most marked and permanent-feeling, growth that I've undergone in a long time.

I've always learned and grown in my own time.  Often that's been later than I would have expected, or than others have expected.  But it's better and deeper for taking so long.

I still have a long way to go, with a lot of things.  But I'm getting there; and even better, I love where I am right now -- not just where I plan to be.

Also?  I love writing again.

sorry, not sorry

We have no intention of having children, and have a dog and cat who are clearly the only kids we want. 

I grinned as I re-read that delightful sentence from my childhood best friend with whom I recently reconnected after at least twenty years (Facebook may have unforgivably cost us the election, but damn it's great for connecting with people).  Aside from marrying young, J. and I followed similar life paths, including shedding our faith (god I love talking with fellow ex-pats from religious fundamentalism; when you run into someone who comes from the same strange subculture as you did, you can swap stories without having to translate anything, which is refreshing), and not having children.

It wasn't the outcome I expected (and as people never tire of reminding me, kids could still happen); since very early childhood I have always dreamed of love and marriage and children--ambitions which eclipsed all others.  I planned to marry right out of college and devote myself full-time to my husband and our three or four children.  While I reserved small dreams to myself--I always intended on writing--I never planned seriously for any career; employment, to my college-aged mind, would serve merely as a placeholder until I could meet Mr. Right and settle down to my real life of wife- and motherhood.

Thank gawd none of that came to pass.

Looking back on that cultural brainwashing infuriates me.  I have clawed my way up to an amazing career, but it took me until my mid-thirties to even really get started.  Everything that came before this was haphazard and accidental; if my talents and ambitions had been fostered, if I'd been taught that my goals for what I wanted with my own life as a sovereign human being should always come first, if I'd been encouraged to plan for a future that holds no guarantee of domestic partnership, if I'd been told, as men are told, that it was imperative to plan for my career because a profession is both necessary and fulfilling, it might not have taken me as long to get here.

And that enculturation runs deep.  Long after I gave up my faith, I maintained the assumption that what I wanted most was love and family.  It led to many years of lonely grief as my short-lived relationships all failed one after the other, and the years of singleness overwhelmed the scale.  It's only been within the last few months that I've started to question whether family is something I really want.  Love and marriage--yes, I still want those.  Not as badly as I once did, because I'm realizing with increasing clarity what a gift this time is that I have all to myself, and what a glorious life I am capable of building on my own.  But someday, once I'm established, once I've built a foundation that limerence cannot shake, once I've met someone who is truly what I want, I would like a life companion.

Kids though.  I cannot decide where I land when it comes to kids.  I have moments where I wish I could kiss a sweaty, tangled little forehead goodnight, plan a magical Christmas, watch a little person become a bigger person, help someone find their way in a big daunting exciting world.  I have moments when it hurts me to realize that the likelihood of any of that happening is decreasing every day.  I always thought I'd be a good mom, and it's weird to think that such a lifelong assumption will most likely go unproven.  

But then I think about all the things I don't have to deal with.  Diapers.  Teething.  Fevers.  Tantrums.  The noise and the mess.  Giving up prioritizing your own schedule and wellbeing pretty much forever.  The sharp drop in marital happiness and personal fulfillment that nearly all parents experience.  All that sleeplessness.  The horrors of pregnancy and labor and post-partum depression.  Homework and sports.  Endless complications.  Middle school.  Constant financial crisis.  The weird culty mentality that most parents I've met subscribe to the instant they have kids.

Yeah, I'm really glad I haven't had to experience any of that. 

So when I read J.'s "we definitely don't want kids" statement (from the tone it sounds like she's had to defend her decision to far too many people with zero actual stakes in but plenty of opinions regarding her life) my response was...interesting, to me.  I wanted to give her a giddy high five.  

Maybe I don't want kids.  (Hahaha since the window is gradually closing I'm thinking that's maybe a happier conclusion to reach than "I wish I'd had them when I was twenty-five.")  I'm cool with that, if that's the case.   

Of course, when you reach your mid-thirties and are thinking about the possibility of dating again sometime in the next 15 years, you have to weigh whether you'd take a partner with pre-existing kids.  I've dated guys with kids before; it was enough to make me realize real quick that I wasn't in any hurry to go popping little people out of my own vagina.  Parts of it were great; I had a really strong bond with one child in particular, and I loved the little routines we built together, the songs he liked me to sing to him at bedtime, the books he liked me to read--and the milestones we reached together, like teaching him to shower and get his own breakfast--and the goals we set together, like helping him deal with his extreme emotions.  But a lot of it sucked, including the stark reality that my relationship with my significant other would never come first, and the realization that I had to set myself aside for the sake of children that I hadn't signed up for.  And even though the kids were the reason I stayed in that relationship so long, I emerged from it realizing a lot more than I had before about exactly what having kids entails, and it gave me serious pause.

Would I date a guy with kids again (or a woman with kids)?  I guess that would depend on the guy (or woman)--and the kids.  It wouldn't be my first choice.  Sort of like having kids at all.  But I could be persuaded, I think, with the right person (the right people).

Just not right this second.  People my age now have mostly younger kids, and younger kids aren't my jam.  Since I'm not really seeing myself taking up dating again in the immediately foreseeable future, there's not a whole lot of worry on that score.  I have shit to do right now, and dating doesn't really fit in with my plans, so kids are a moot consideration at the moment in any case (I will consider fostering, farrrrr down the road, when I'm established; but I'll be damned if I take up single parenting that starts at the kid's infancy.  Nope nope nope).  

One long rambling blog post later...in short, I'm not 100% solid on the kids conclusion, but I'm definitely over 80% on not wanting kids.  That last 20% is confusing; I hate that I can't really tell how much of my residual possible desire for kids is an internalized cultural expectation, and how much of it is genuine, and how much of it is simply a willingness to be open to the best life as it comes.  I tend to know myself very, very well ("Know Thyself" is sort of my life's pursuit), and not knowing this drives me fucking nuts.  

It doesn't help that underlying this margin of uncertainty is a suspicion that some dude could come along and try to talk me into something I don't really want and I might give in because women are also trained from birth never to trust ourselves.  I'm tired of men telling me what I want, tired of female uncertainty being interpreted as an invitation (or a need) for male direction/interjection/interference.  Uncertainty is not the absence of agency, thank you very much.  And then there's the highly enculturated neurosis of the "ticking biological clock" (which intellectually I reject; I have genes that would benefit the human gene pool to pass on like intelligence and resilience, but also genes that I'm just as happy not to inflict on a child like crippling depression; further, there's no inherent merit in having biological children, and arguably there's quite a bit of non-merit in insisting on producing biological children on a frighteningly overpopulated planet with shrinking resources and millions of orphaned, homeless, and unwanted children in need of a good home).  A number of people who advocate for having kids put forth the bullshit argument that you're never really ready anyway and parenthood is something you can't possibly plan for emotionally until you just do it, which is both absurdly egotistical and ludicrously self-righteous, not to mention founded on laughably specious logic.  (Like, no one says that about getting a pet.  You know you'll have to spend money and time caring for a dependent living being, which factors heavily into a responsible person's decision whether or not to adopt one.  "You can't know until you commit irrevocably to it by doing it" is the same nonsense put forth by the Catholic Church regarding the Eucharist; I converted to Catholicism before jumping the religious ship altogether and confirmed that the Eucharist is exactly what you make of it, which is what I thought to begin with.)  My uncertainty is plagued by nefarious cultural factors that I don't trust at all, and which make me narrow my eyes a bit at the remaining 20% of myself that whispers that I might want kids.  Do I?  Do I really?

I suppose where I'm really landing is my own agency.  I'm not entirely certain what I want, and that's perfectly okay; there's no hurry to figure it out, and there's certainly no need to have someone else around to help me decide.  In the meantime, I'm deeply happy that I have kicked off my thirty-sixth year in my present circumstances.  This isn't the life I had envisioned.  But in more ways than one, it's so much better than anything I even knew to wish for myself.  And that includes (for the time being, at least) being single, and child-free.

singleness rocks, part 1

So, I'm not going to lie.  Singleness is awesome.

It's taken a long time to get to this FUCK YEAH point.  But several lousy relationships and nearly a decade after my regular blogging days, I'm pretty thrilled to be where I am.

It's funny, the things that hit you.  Yesterday I was reflecting on the privacy.  Or rather, the complete irrelevance of privacy.  I can shit with the bathroom door open or stride around the apartment naked or belt out random snippets of songs or fart in bed without worrying about my dignity or anyone else's sensibilities.  It's great.

Just now I was mowing down some hummus (homemade; I'm starting to do things around the house again in a way I haven't had the energy for in at least three--but more realistically eight or more--years) and trying to remember who it was I knew who wouldn't eat hummus because they didn't like the texture, and I sat bolt upright on the couch elated by the realization that I don't have to tolerate anyone's weird food habits anymore.  All of my exes had weird food habits.  More than one of them hated tomatoes.  One wouldn't eat vegetables.  One wouldn't eat meat.  This one didn't like foreign food; that one didn't like cucumbers; that one hated hummus and yogurt and pudding and anything else that was neither definitively solid nor liquid.  This other one hated olives.  Another one hated coffee.  Lettuce.  Wine.  Fish.  Bananas.  I can't keep all their stupid idiosyncrasies sorted in my head anymore, and thank god for that--trying to keep that shit straight when I wanted to cook was fucking maddening.  It was like dating a class of adult kindergartners.  JUST EAT THE DAMN TOMATO OHMYGOD.

Not having to mentally juggle someone else's endless lists of food-hatreds while planning a menu and trying to balance it with what I like?  That's gold.

I was reading recently about how women are responsible for the vast majority of the mental labor that goes into running a household, so that even when men offer to help, the men are just thinking in terms of helping with the execution of a task, while women remain solely responsible for planning not only one task, but every accompanying and related task for every part of what makes the household function.  All day.  Every day.  And when you're planning the kids' lunches and getting them up and dressed in the morning and timing their schedules so they all get enough sleep but still get showered and out the door to school on time; then planning throughout the day all the errands you have to run that night, and what menus you should plan out and shop for based on what's on sale, and what special events are coming up, and when to start dinner and how much to prepare and how long all the prep work will take, and whether or not you have enough time to do some laundry while dinner is cooking...well, when you have the massive events-planning of two or more lives constantly running through your head, someone half-heartedly asking "What can I do to help?" is more a hindrance than a help just for asking rather than stepping in to try to take on some of that mental planning.

My own planning is fun for me.  It still occupies a lot of my mental space, but it's all by me, for me, of me, and the reduction in planning that I deal with just for being single is pretty damn sweet.

Also I can eat whatever I want without someone else whining about how they don't like perfectly normal and delicious food.

Like this amazing hummus.