September, 2020
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justice
I had an entire blog post outlined in my head. Last night, hubs and I had a date night at Movie Tavern (only one of my favorite places ever!). Hubs picked the film (his criteria was that it was something we hadn’t seen before because it’s new – otherwise I don’t think he would have chosen what we saw). I left floating on a cloud of happiness and deep empathy for my twenty-something self.
But today, justice was not served in our country in the case of Breonna Taylor. And it enrages me, it galvanizes me, and it illustrates the deep, ingrained racism in our country and our justice & legal system. I don’t have much to say other than I am once again appalled at my country and what is proclaimed by some to be justice. It is not justice. It is an abomination. A woman, asleep in her bed, shot multiple times by police who entered her home without cause, or a warrant or even a knock. Police officers who shot her multiple times and still have their jobs. They are stlll entrusted to represent safety and protection of this country’s citizens. And her family mourns the loss of a young woman who did nothing wrong.
I don’t feel safe. And I have white skin. And live in an affluent county. I feel betrayed. Again.
That’s all I have to say right now.
who makes the rules
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my social media bio line. I proclaim that we should all “Love the Life You Live.” Which seems … preposterously positive and conversely, painfully problematic.
Because, of course, in theory, we should all love the lives we are living. Right? I mean, that makes sense. But … how exactly can we make sure we are loving the life we are living? How can we break free of the rules that have been dictated and set in stone of how one achieves happiness, and what steps must be taken in order to get there?
What if … and just bear with me for a minute … but what if what is expected of me, as a human wandering Earth, isn’t what makes me inherently joyful? And then, what if I recognize that simple fact, but have trouble gauging my life becaue all the milestones, all the accomplishments, all the ‘you’ve been successful’ marks have been set by someone with different ideals than me?
What am I to do? How am I to ‘Love the Life I Live’ if the rules tell me that the choices I’m going to make are the wrong ones? Even if the rules stipulate that what I’m supposed to do, to earn the recognition of a ‘life well lived’ is in direct oppostion to what makes me happy?
It’s a conundrum.
I just took a little time out to get sweaty on my bike. I needed a minute to try to re-frame my thoughts. Lemme get specific rather than generic.
The rules –> go to college, get a good job (we’ll get back to good/bad etc but for now, I’m leaving it), marry a good man (because I was born with female genetalia), have children. Learn to cook and clean and contribute to society by being a wife & mother.
Where I’m at –> I went to college. Eh. I got … a job that paid me money. I married … a man, then quickly got divorced. I did not have children. I do not contibute to society as a wife & mother. I got re-married. I still didn’t have children. I got diagnosed with an incurable auto-immune disease. I left my job that paid me money. My husband does 80% of the cooking. I am lost. Maybe.
I also turned forty and then the whole world flipped upside down. So that’s been … interesting.
College sucked for me. I didn’t love it, I don’t know that I learned amazing things, and the things I did learn, I don’t use. Ever. Then I felt pressure to go back and get *another* degree — something higher, to prove my self-worth. I felt pressure … subliminal, haunting pressure — to prove myself with a degree. Because that’s quantifiable. If I am a lawyer, if I’ve earned my Masters, then I’m clearly valuable. There are a lot of starts in my life to higher education. And no finishes.
I got married the first time because … well, it was both complicated and super simple. I wanted companionship, I wanted an ally (all stemming from lots of crazy family dynamic bulls*t if I’m honest) and he wanted a green card. I think maybe he liked me for a minute. I told myself that to make the catastrophic end of things more bearable. But we were incredibly different people, and just because he wasn’t as abusive as the myriad of men I’d dated before him, didn’t make him the right match for me. It just made him … less abusive than all the men I’d dated before him. (Low self-esteem is a bitch sometimes).
When my marriage fell apart, and my resume was a giant list of waitressing jobs, that was rock bottom. Why? Because society told me so. Because waitressing was bad, not respectable, not challenging, something people who weren’t smart did. And failed marriages … that meant you’d failed at being a human. And obviously, that was bad.
People offered encouragement, direction, tough love. Get your life together, figure it out, find a direction. Which meant, find a direction that’s acceptable for a person of your social standing, skin color and perceived ‘potential.’
When you hit rock bottom, the rules stop meaning anything. You’ve withdrawn from the race, you’ve scratched at the Kentucky Derby. Your parents (the ones who hopefully were betting on you) have lost a chunk of change. They have a dud. (Cue guilt). But a lot of it stops mattering. And I guess I could have fallen into a hole of self-pitty (I did, for a minute) and complete worthlessness (ditto). But somehow, I managed to emerge on the other side. I managed to pick up the pieces.
It started when my Dad handed me a newspaper (yeah, I’m that old) and told me it was time I got a job. I don’t think he cared what kind of job, but just something to get me off their couch eating potato chips with sour cream and out of my sweatpants.
When you hit rock bottom, you claw your way back up anyway you know how. And you leave all the heavy stuff — the expectations, the guilt, the judgement — down at the bottom because they are too heavy to keep carrying.
I clawed my way out and ended up with a nice enough job, with enough prestige and with a fancy sounding title. I *did* marry a good man (whew! did it!). I did all the things, I checked all the boxes. And after it all, after I left that job and dealt with MS (on-going) and the shape of my world changed when my mother died … I looked around and wondered again … what am I doing?
Life is about survival, and somewhere along the way, the checklist of how to achieve survival was written, and then amended as the world changed. But the basis remained the same. Do the things you need to do to survive and continue the species.
I have been thinking though, that I want to change that narrative for myself because otherwise, I’m going to keep feeling as though I am failing, and I don’t think I am.
Comparison is the thief of joy. So I want to stop comparing my track record to anyone elses. What I ‘should’ have versus what I ‘do’ have. I want to live in my skin and in my world feeling ease about who I am, what I believe, what I fight for, how I spend my time. Because those things, those choices I make, bring me joy. Not because in some race that I’m unaware of and un-privy to the standings, I’m falling behind.
I guess that’s how I Love the Life I Live.
xo, g
love languages
I don’t know what my love language is, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say language. Words. Certain turns of phrase create such vivid images in my mind and I carry them with me, revisiting them occasionally and smiling, just for myself. I feel the best, most authentic way to show the people in my life whom I love how I feel is with words. I find comfort in them. Reading them, writing them. Understanding them.
I love wondering how writers decided on phrasing or word choice – how clever and tight screen plays can be, how lyric some prose, and harsh others.
I’m amazed by my sister-in-law’s mastery of not one, but two languages. How she translates and manipulates words in her brain to make sense of things, to express herself.
If language does not define us, what does?
**
I feel as though I’ve spent much of this year on the edge of a cliff, teetering so close to slipping over the edge. I’m tired; more tired than usual, and I am in pain; more often than usual. I am wrung out with stress, my jaw and my shoulders and my back. My joints. My muscles are spasming regularly, a twitching heartbeat of the unrest.
I mourn life passing by as I sit and watch, unable to move, unable to participate. I mourn my health, I mourn the rhythm of life before everything changed. I worry about Lucy’s surgical site and her need to sleep/inability to rest. I go to sleep tired, and wake up tired. I wish for the raging pain in my head to subside.
My good days used to vastly outnumber my bad ones. Now it’s hard to keep track. I am afraid and ambivalent. I am searching for something in which to drown myself – another story of a different time. I am struggling with all the things I believe and how to act properly, how to be part of a solution while still needing to advocate and care for myself (which can be all-consuming and is absolute f*cking exhausting). I am wrestling with the tremendous guilt.
I feel lost. I miss my mother.
I miss my mother.
Xox, g
thursdays
By the time Thursday dawns (and this is true most weeks) I’m so exhausted I often want to cry. Not for any particular reason but because my body is so full of so many emotions, the only logical way to feel any release is to cry.
I don’t know who said it, but Elizabeth Gilbert is where I heard it ~ “Salt water is the cure for almost anything: the sea, sweat & tears.”
I’ve been making my way through the ‘Modern Love’ episodes on Amazon Prime. Yesterday I watched Anne Hathaway’s modern love story involving bi-polar disorder and the power of friendship. I do not have bi-polar, but I could relate, down to the very essense of my being, with so many moments in that episode. It made me long to get back to my therapist, long to have more yoga classes to go to, long for a loooong sleep. Even though I will never wake up refreshed.
I’m so tired today. But I do the things anyway. I do the work, I ride the bike, I take the shower. Tonight I have a dinner that I’m looking forward to and tomorrow I have medicine. And then the weekend and John, and coffee dates and movies and walks with Lucy and no work for me or for hubs. Just … almost … within sight. But …
Thursdays are rough, man.
xox, g
attachment
Last summer I was driving home from a hair appointment, listening to a podcast. It was a truly beautiful day and a beautiful ride, as I used to drive all the way to my old hometown for my hair and the roads between here and there are fairly beautiful ~ winding through green, lush countryside.
The podcast was Goop (obviously). I am a big fan of Elise Loehnan’s guests and the conversations and she was speaking with a Swami … something-or-other. I apologize for my ignorance but I can’t seem to find the information anywhere. What I know is that what he said has stayed with me since, drifting in and out of my conscious mind. Lingering in the shadows of my emotions, my reactions, my life choices. Quarantine and COVID were incredibly challenging (and continue to be so) and something that this wise man said in his conversation with Elise (I believe at one of the In Goop Health summits) has grounded me when I’ve felt like I was on the edge of a cliff.
It was about the idea of attachment. And that our human unhappiness and dissatisfaction is always linked back to attachment. Attachment to things, yes, but also to ideas, philosophies, traditions, the ‘way things have always been.’
It hurts and is uncomfortable to grow. To expand. As humans we cling to familiarity, but also with known quantities. We describe most things in terms of other things … such as, my MS is like feeling really really tired, times ten million, all the time. I am using the notion of fatigue as the basis for my description. Assuming that everyone has a rudimentary understanding of being tired. But what if that was taken away from me? How would I describe it then?
In this year of global reckoning and (hopefully) growth, I believe humanity has routinely found itself uncomfortable. Clinging to the known quantities. Unwilling to expand and try a new perspective, or a new level of understanding because too much was changing, there were too many moving parts. We (the collective we) chose to cling to ideas of safety, of ‘the good ole days’ because that nostalgia gave us peace, comfort. Instead of acknowledging that our comfort in those times perpetuated other’s discomfort. Yes, that acknowledgement hurts. And it’s hard.
We are attached to ideas. We are attached to memories, or things that we have put our faith in, built our personality on; the building blocks of who we believe we are.
I am attached to the idea of equality. But does my definition of equality include everyone? If I do a self-examination of (white) women’s quest for female empowerment, am I willing to concede that it did so on the backs of BIPOC and didn’t fight for the equality of all women, but merely white women?
I am attached to a notion of family, but does my family reflect that? Have I based my ideas on reality and am I holding people to standards that are unfair? Am I judging others on qualities that only exist in my own idea of family, rather than the reality of what my family actually is? Flawed, human, different than me …. How can I hold others accountable for unspoken expectations? For wishes and dreams? How can I be angry or disappointed if they don’t live up to what I’ve built in my mind? … I can’t.
My mother used to say “It’s all just stuff.” It’s simple and direct and can be interpreted a million ways. But I think of it like this ~ what we choose to carry with us, to define ourselves, to create our foundation … it’s all just stuff. The ideas, the belief system, the popasahn chair. It’s stuff. And we can be as attached as we want to be. We can cling to things, we can be immoveable. Or we can be fluid, we can be open to change. I vacillate between the extremes, trying to force myself to be as open-minded and thoughtful as possible.
I don’t always succeed. But I’ll keep on trying.
xox, g
D5 Creation