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.