The Things I Know For Sure: #1 - Everything Changes

You don't get to hold onto very much with certainty.  The first time I really learned this was at 12 years old, when I was inundated with uninvited depression and suicidal thoughts and began several years of hospitalizations and psychiatric medication trials.  The second time was at 13 years old, when my dad, after a year of sobriety, left my mom and our house to start a different life none of us knew he had been considering.  The third was at 14 years old, when someone very close to me started a years-long battle with anorexia and attempted suicide by taking over 100 pills in our high school bathroom after school.

All of these things broke my heart and left me feeling like I was stepping off the edge of a canyon.  There was NOTHING to hold onto.  There was no guidebook for how to process those events.  I lost my trust in the world because it wasn't playing fair.

The bittersweet silver lining, which I was to learn, is that everything changes, even the bad stuff.  I have emerged from my depression every time I have sunk into it.  My dad stabilized his life and found space in it for growth and love.  The dear one who was stuck in starvation and darkness is now getting her Ph.D. in clinical psychology and helping others with their own emotional pain.

Two years ago, I was going through a scary and all-energy-consuming physical issue.  It came out of nowhere and shook my body with such consistency that I couldn't sleep normally, couldn't eat properly, and couldn't exercise.  Focusing my mind at work was impossible and I had no energy to socialize or do more than the bare minimum amount of self care.  So many of the tools that I NEEDED in order to cope were taken away from me.

I called up my dear one, the one who had been through an eating disorder, depression, chronic pain, and so many other things herself, and tearfully pled with her to tell me that I was going to be okay.  This is what she told me with absolute confidence in her voice:  You are going to be okay.  Either you will get better or you will learn to deal with it better.  

It's was so simple and yet it meant the world to me.  It meant that no matter how shitty I felt or what I was going through, either the issue would resolve or I would learn the strategies and shortcuts I needed to adapt to my altered life.  And this wisdom came from a person who I KNEW had lived it herself - as Ranier Maria Rilke would put it, had live the questions and gradually lived her way through to the answers .

These are the things that I remember to tell myself now:  You're learning how to hold everything you treasure in an open palm rather than a death grip, and you'll never learn it perfectly, and that's okay because you're human.  Even if you can't predict what the world will throw at you or embrace you with, you know on your best days that you've got to live in the moment and savor the fleeting beauty crammed into it.  On your worst days, you can hold onto the knowledge (or ask your dear ones to remind you) that you've made it this far and that it's damn near impossible (like neurobiogically impossible) that you will feel EXACTLY THE SAME every day for the rest of your life.  Let go, breathe, say YES to it all.

My Neverending Love Triangle

Good morning, world!

I've got a pretty obnoxious cold at the moment, the kind that makes it hard to interface with the world because you're either stuck with that perpetual painfully-about-to-sneeze-face or sticking wads of tusk-like tissues up your nose and groaning like a snotty walrus.

My partner in inertia, who also seems to have the snifflies this morning

One of the silver linings of this head full of gunk is the guilt-free rest period.  I kind of worship guilt-free rest.  I'm grateful to live a life that has room for it and, as far as I can tell, I offer it to myself more often than a large amount of the frenetic, fast-paced culture I live in.  In fact, I've always kind of been in love with those times in the day when there's nothing that has to be done.  Those moments on those awesome evenings when the items that are left on your to-do list are more-or-less optional.  Car commutes when you physically cannot move your body in productive ways so you can instead absorb a podcast or sing songs in whatever vocal style suits you (I love being Sara Bareilles or Hozier for a few songs in a row).  Minutes of waiting room time when you can gulp down a few more pages of a book.

Full disclosure, I have a very flexible worked schedule, I don't have any children, and I just (like in the last two weeks) exited a three-year relationship that, for reasons both universal and specific, took most of my energy to maintain.  I am finding myself with TIME, with that question that poet Mary Oliver put so beautifully, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?".  And the truth is that right now I am having that internal battle between building myself a new, independent, necessary amount of structure (you know, regular sleep times and healthy meals and exercise and life-organizing, goal-shaped stuff) and reveling in the way that the doors of my life have just been flung open and I can run into the hills all Sound of Music-style and forget my responsibilities and routines.

Routine and Leisure and I have quite the love triangle. I fall for Routine when life gets out of hand and I'm looking for a rescuer, a partner with a backbone and sincerity and good intentions and principles to hang his hat on. But boy does he bore me sometimes, taking quite a bit of my energy and not always giving me those in-the-moment assurances that the actions I'm putting my energy into are worthwhile. Cook a healthy breakfast, he says, encouragingly when we're having a good week and demandingly when we're going through a rough patch. Wake up the same time every day, go to the gym, stay away from dairy - sleep, diet, exercise, sleep, diet, exercise, he reminds me paternally, paternalistically, insufferably sometimes. And when I agree, comply, he cheerfully says, You see?? Don't you feel great?? I want to hug him and punch him and thank him and do a good old-fashioned eyeball roll all at the same time.

Leisure is sexy in that way that you can't get enough of ... for the first two days.  You deserve this, he assures you when you sleep in on the weekends, when you stay up late watching YouTube videos and adding to your wishlist on Etsy.  He knows how to curl around you and purr like a cat, affectionate and at-ease.  We can do whatever we want, he reminds me.  We make the rules.  It OUR life.  Eventually he gets insufferable too. He doesn't help you with the monotonous daily tasks and you can only watch TV on the couch with him for so many hours before your brain and your ass hurt from all the doing nothing.  He talks a lot about freedom and possibility but not so much about who's going to pay the rent and make the phone calls and work the hours to put all that possibility to good use.

I resent them both sometimes, but the thing is, I think they're both loving dudes deep down. Routine really wants to see me shine and thrive. He knows the confidence and deep, solid wisdom that comes from hard work and setting goals so that you can then achieve them. Leisure loves to see my joy and hear me sing and watch as the adrenaline and cortisol drain from my body at the end of the day. Leisure just wants to be hugged and snuggled and adored, like a puppy. He knows the effortless warmth of smiles and affection.

They BOTH adore my friends and like spending time with them. Sometimes Routine is a little whiny, reminding me that we have other things to do, and sometimes Leisure is feeling reeeeeally lazy and hates the idea of having to put on pants and make our hair presentable. But on the drive home from meeting a friend at coffee, they are both quiet and smiling, nodding their heads, glad and grateful for the gift of companions and connection. It never truly feels like wasted time and it never feels like too much effort. This is why we are starting to figure out that we want to tell our stories and share our passion for connection with the wider world. It's something, we agree, that fills us all.

Mmm, autumn hikes, another activity we can all agree on

Every once in a while, I kind of get the idea in my head that maybe the three of us can be one happy family, that Routine and Leisure can get along. I mean, they do share SOME of the same interests, right? They're both into reading (Routine wants something useful to read, maybe some social justice oriented non-fiction or a clean-eating cookbook. Leisure prefers adventure memoirs or horror stories or supernatural teen romances). We all definitely enjoy doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in the mornings with our coffee (although even together we've never been able to complete a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday puzzle without calling in back-up from friends). Routine acquiesces to those podcasts in the car (realizing that we can't do anything else anyway) and then realizes he actually feels like he got a brain workout from it. Leisure always drags in getting ready to go to the gym, but he's pretty damn enamored with Zumba.

This is perhaps a silly exercise in trying to understand myself, and I KNOW how obnoxious it must be to read about someone pondering their romance with leisure time, especially if you have much less of it than you would wish (#firstworldproblems, amIright?).  And my habits need not be compared to men, nor do I think any person - male, female, both, or neither - is as one or two-dimensional as my internal caricatures.  I just have this romantic sensibility that inclines me to use characters and relationships as metaphorical stand-ins for all of the other things I am in love with in life.  And I'm in love with quite a lot of things, so it kind of makes it sound/feel like I'm polyamorous.  Which love(s) do I follow?  What is it I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?

This blog is one of the ways that I plan to both ask and answer those questions.  For now I will snort and sniffle and love the peach tea I am comforting myself with and the soft tissue tusks hanging out of my nose and feel gratitude for the time and space to type these little words into existence using a free service in a small corner of the internet.

Happy weekend!