Manifesto: The Mad Preacher's Call for Community

In the summer of 2006 I was 21 years old and standing on the edge of a field where the Community Supported Agriculture program I worked for grew our organic vegetables. Our farm manager, an eager and earnest young woman not much older than I, read Manifesto: A Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front to us before we started our work for the day. She wanted us, summer workers who just wanted a decent job, to feel a deep connection to the food we were growing, the land around us, and the crusty old republican farmers we sold next to at the St. Joseph Farmers Market. I loved the poem, instantly, and because this was a time before I even had a computer, to say nothing of a smartphone, after work I bicycled to the library, copied it out, and hung it on the refrigerator in my apartment. 

It has hung on many refrigerators in many apartments since then. I have carried the phrase “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.” in my heart for nearly 20 years. 

The poem hits differently now at 40 than it did at 21. Quick profits, annual raises, and vacations with pay sometimes seem desperately out of reach for my working class husband and me. If there is a window in my head, people probably see my wishing for a vast inheritance from some long estranged family member I have never heard of. Working class folks  work very hard to simply maintain a standard of living that my parents–also working class people–endured for a few years in their early 20s.

For my fellow working class folks and Millennials, our lives and the cards in their heads are probably very similar. We’ve been offered a raw economic deal, social support systems that are, frankly, laughable, and wave after wave of seemingly unprecedented world events. Much of Berry’s advice: to invest in the millennium, praise the slow growth of things, and take time to breathe in the holiness of the world around us  are trampled under the day to day grind of student debt, stagnant wages, inflation, and a dying planet. 

So why do I continue to hang this poem on my refrigerator? Better yet, why do I continue to carry it in my heart? 

I have worked for almost twenty years in community nonprofits and I spend a lot of time listening to stories of women who have endured horrific violence, children in poverty, and folks struggling with addiction. I have, on occasion, hidden in an office supply closet to cry. The longer I have spent in nonprofit the less time I have spent crying in the supply closets because of the stories themselves. I spend more time crying over the cruelty of generals and politicos Berry talks about and wealthy tax dodgers who are unnamed and the middle class folks who simply do not care because they have achieved a comfortable job and a single family home. It is heartrending and exhausting. 

I get told often that my response to things is always overblown. My tears are the reaction of ADHD overwhelm or life as an empath or the kind of personality that leads one to become a chaplain, but I think that when we say those things to ourselves and one another  we are simply falling into the very thing that Berry is cautioning us against–we have become predictable, ready to die for profit, ready to accept suffering. We have forgotten to “do something that won’t compute.” When we fall into the trap of never having enough spoons, or being too busy running the kids to soccer practice, or needing to veg out in front of whatever bingable show we’re currently watching we are hiding behind things to keep from engaging with our emotions,  our friends,  and our families. 

What profits can we expect from that sort of a life? Are they worth prophesying? 

Beloveds, I am not asking us to run ourselves ragged or become burned out trying to fix this bloody and broken world. Our economic system is slowly grinding us all to dust and yes, occasionally we do need to just get the kids where they’re going and have a few quiet moments before bed. But this is not always the case.* 

In fact I think it rarely is. Sometimes we are simply stuck in our own inertia. And I am there too. I understand the lure of scrolling tiktok and half watching a tv show, but let us consider–could we not use that time to do something that won’t compute? 

You’ve heard me preach before on the corporal works of mercy, but today I am not even asking us to take on anything that big. I am asking you to ask a trusted friend to watch your kids for a few hours while you go on a date with a spouse. To say to a family member “I am really overwhelmed this week, could you bring by dinner and I’ll bring you something next week?” 

And for those of us whose lives are not currently on fire or even currently very hectic to say yes to those requests–or to do something that will not compute. Walk the picket line with the currently striking City Park Workers, take some mail to the post office for your elderly neighbor, do a very un-Minnesotan thing and invite someone from church you do not know very well to your house for coffee. Yes, to your house, not the neighborhood coffee shop. 

Perhaps I am pushing us a bit with that last one, but beloveds, I am asking you to do these things because what else can we do in this broken world? Some of us are activists and organizers and I applaud you for that work, but we are not all cut out for it. To borrow a concept from Christianity there are many gifts but the same spirit. There are many ways to live a life that will not compute. 

And when we find those ways and break free from bingable shows and snackable media, when we begin to live lives that do not compute, something powerful happens. We can be joy despite knowing  all the facts about our economy, our political system, and our world. Joy is a powerful thing–when was the last time you felt joyful? Really, think about it. I don’t know when the last time was for me. 

My husband has teasingly called me a bit of an egghead. I spend a lot of time thinking about joy and suffering and what they mean theologically and socially. I spend a lot of time thinking about the implications of joy–that it is transformative, leads to public action, and is a radical middle finger to a world that is trying to return us to dust. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about joy and living a life that will not compute, and less time actually doing those things. When I’m not watching The Sopranos for the fourth time and  mindlessly opening and closing apps on my phone, I spend a lot of time pushing joy away from me because there is still so much to do. There is always another grant to be written, another dish to be washed, another reminder of a world coming apart at its seams. I will be joyful later, when I have fully lived a life that invests in millennium and takes care of others and only eat organic produce raised within a hundred mile radius of where I live. 

Beloveds, I have been very inattentive. 

In an attempt to live a life in line with my ethics, to love people who do not deserve it, and serve a God  whose existence I am frankly very iffy about, I have forgotten to reap the fruits of such a life. I have forgotten that this is my one chance–to live in this world and love it and its people and the God who maybe created it all. I have forgotten the pleasure of standing on the edge of a field and listening to a poem, and feeling it overwhelm me with emotion. 

I do not know what awaits us when we leave this world. What I do know is that this is our one chance to experience joy as ourselves, in this beautiful and broken world and not in an eternity we cannot even begin to fathom. We must take this opportunity. Our lives depend on it. Our community depends on it. Perhaps, even the world depends on it. 

Beloveds, may we live lives that will not compute and may we experience the joy that those lives bring us. 

Let it be so, and amen.  

Good News

The Good News

Thich Nhat Hahn

The good news

they do not print.

The good news

we do print.

We have a special edition every moment

that we need you to read.

The good news is that you are alive

and the linden tree is still there

standing firm in the harsh winter.

The good news is that you have wonderful eyes

to touch the blue sky.

The good news is that

your child is there before you,

and your arms are available.

Hugging is possible.

They print only what is wrong.

Look at each of our special editions.

We always offer the things that are not wrong.

We want you to benefit from them

and help protect them.

The dandelion is there by the sidewalk,

smiling its wondrous smile,

singing the song of eternity.

Lo! You have ears capable of hearing it.

Bow your head.

Listen to her.

Leave behind your world of sorrow

and preoccupation

and get free.

The latest good news

is that you can do it.

* * *

During the summer of 2020 I was one of many people walking laps around our city neighborhood. My husband, a city bus driver, had just gone back to work. I was frantically worried about our health, his lack of insurance, and catching COVID-19, I needed to burn off the extra anxiety.

The Good News was that I had space to do it. 

On the way back from one such walk, I noticed a dandelion growing from the brick retaining wall. I looked at it for a long time, snapped a picture, and sent it to my husband. “If this isn’t,” I said, “an admonition to thrive wherever we are planted, I do not know what is.” 

Little did I know it, but I was hearing that dandelion’s song of eternity at that moment. 

Dandelions are a remarkable plant that seems unremarkable. For example, one thing that we all know about dandelions is their ability to thrive where they are planted. We see them in pavement cracks and brick walls. We pull them from our gardens’ deep soil. They are very common and they bloom where they are planted. 

Where have we been planted? 

Beloveds, right now I feel very much like the dandelion growing out of a sidewalk or brick wall, trying to sing the song of eternity into a world filled with sirens. But while the soil here may not be deep, it is rich. The good news is that it is enriched by this spiritual community, by my friends and family, by my volunteer work and by daily my spiritual practices. 

What enriches your dirt? 

The other interesting thing about dandelions is that they are edible–flowers, greens, and roots. It’s funny to think of this ubiquitous (and for some, irritating) sign of summer, as a nutritional powerhouse, but it is high in vitamins and calcium. They’re also delicious.  

Let’s pause and consider this briefly. What we roundly consider a nuisance flower or a pest is food not only for our beloved pollinators but for us as well. 

Consider too one of the most frustrating parts of our lives today–the knowledge that we are each one person standing against a tide of special interests and a broken political system that will sell us and our children, and our children’s children down the river for a quarter of a percent increase in profits or votes. In the face of this power we, like the dandelions, are common and perhaps a little unremarkable. 

The good news is that you too can feed a community. In my Catholic childhood we called these acts of spiritual and physical feeding the corporal works of mercy. Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick & the imprisoned, and bury the dead. We know how to do these things. We can recognize them even in their less obvious forms in our community and each of these acts is a  note in the song of eternity. 

The final thing I want to say about dandelions is that they spread prolifically. Each head contains hundreds–did you know that–hundreds of seeds. Every time we make a wish on these little weeds, we ensure that they will continue to grow into the next season. 

Here we are, rooted in this church, with the ability to feed those around us, and the good news–the best news–is that these actions plant seeds of hope, love, and grace in the community around us. They ensure that our notes in this song of eternity are heard, and lead us to the next movement. 

Beloveds, may our lives be representations of the good news. May we grow here, in this soil in which we planted, provide food to others, and let our deeds carry forth into eternity. 

May it be so, and amen. 

Share Your Love with Me

 The Queen of Soul is belting it out in the apartment tonight. 

I can't decide on a specific album so I cue up the first one I ever bought: Aretha Franklin's 30 Greatest Hits. It's been a rough day at the office, so I really wanted to hear "Respect," and I'll see how I feel as the album winds on. 

I go on cooking and tidying things up until a song comes on that brings back my first marriage so vividly that I have to stop and remind myself to breathe. 

Oh how lonesome (oh how lonesome)

You must be (you must be)

It's a shame (shame, shame)

If you don't share your love with me. 

I listened to this song on an endless loop while the ex and I were breaking up. I was so lonely and I kept thinking that he must be lonely, too. 

* * *

"I think that this is what people meant by "adulting.""

I'm on a videocall with one of my dearest friends. I've been telling her about how everyone I know really seems to be going through it lately. Divorce, unemployment, issues with their health, issues with their parents health, discipline problems with their kids, it's just everything all at once. And it's hard to know when someone has enough space to hear the minor tragedies that are going on in your life. 

Community has been a buzzword for so long now that I think it has lost all of its meaning. We say that we know it is life-affirming and life-changing, but I haven't been able to build an actual community since the first few years after college. We got wrapped up in our jobs and lives and went our separate ways. I understand that life is like that. We love people for a season or a lifetime and whichever it is, it was worth loving them.

But I long for real community. 

* * *

I was laid off in December. 

It was awful. I was called into the office one day and told that the organization was 3.1M dollars in debt and that there was no way out. We were being laid off because they weren't sure they would be able to meet payroll for another week. We were laid off because of incomprehensible financial mismanagement. The people responsible for that mismanagement still had their six figure salaries and probably had a very merry Christmas watching The Christmas Carol. 

I digress. 

Getting laid off is one of those things that you can't really conceptualize until it happens. I killed it at that job. I raised our entire fundraising goal for the year in six months. I loved my boss. I loved my work. I thought that I landed at the organization where I was going to stay until I at least finished school. Having that yanked out from me was so disorienting that I took three weeks just to process it. I could not fathom going from having a good job where things were going really well to having no job, and not because of anything I had done wrong. There were very few people I could talk to about it. David bore most of the burden then and now, because my emotions have become even more volatile than normal. When I do see people I love there so much pressure to be positive about my job search, because no one wants to hear you rant about how middle management creates jobs for themselves by making the job search worse for applicants. 

Or whatever tear I'm on that week. 

* * * 

My longing for community is wrapped up with a concept I fucking despise. 

"Having enough spoons." 

I understand that sometimes we're carrying so much in our private lives that we can't carry any more. But I am also in the process of becoming an interreligious chaplain who wants to do hospice work. I know firsthand that grief and stress shared are grief and stress lightened. My favorite minister once said that "Asking for help is self care and giving help is community care."

I have never forgotten that sermon. 

I don't know if this is a me thing. Do you all feel disconnected and vaguely unhappy? Am I just unlikable and can't form the community I want? Is the community that I long for just non-existent anymore?

That's not to say that we should all be willing to take on everyone's everything all the time. Of course not. Boundaries are important. But if we can't put a card in the mail, show up unannounced with a hotdish, or offer to take someone's kids for two hours so they can go on a date, what's the point? 

* * *

I've been relistening to a lot of music I haven't heard in awhile. 

It's been a lot of what Spotify has dubbed "Millennial Post Rock." I've listened to The Crane Wife album on repeat while writing papers. I play The Postal Service and make baked ziti for David's lunch. I just sit and listen to For Emma, Forever Ago. 

This is completely embarrassing, but the reason I am revisiting all these albums is because I feel like I did in my 20s. Everything is too uncertain, all of these life experiences are new and overwhelming, and IamjusthavingtoomanyfeelingsandIcannotdeal. 

Christ, I turn 40 next year. 

In the midst of this review of the tail end of my emo years, I let David have a turn at the radio. Somewhere in his mix a cover of "Share Your Love with Me" comes up. 

I'm drawn back to those months before my divorce, but only for a moment. I keep thinking about the line "Oh how lonesome you must be." Every time I have told someone "I don't have the spoons" or had someone cry when I drop off tater tot lentil hotdish or allthefuckingfeelings of worthless and despair I have felt during unemployment come over me. 

It's a lot. It's almost too much. 

But I realize again that a lot and almost too much are exactly what I want. I want to listen to you complain about your horrible Boomer boss or the price of houses or your dog chewing up your $3,000 dental guard. I want drawings from your kids and to bring you cookies when didn't get the job you wanted. I want to be in this horrible phase of "adulting" with you. I want to share our love and grief and joy with one another. 

Maybe we can all feel a little bit less lonesome. 

Magic

David wakes me up.

It's not an unusual thing. He's usually up by 5AM and comes in to kiss me goodbye before he leaves. Usually I'll wake up just enough to have a conversation with him I'll forget by the time my alarm goes off. Sometimes I'll say something insane and make him laugh before he leaves ("Why are you putting catheters in the cats?" was one of his favorites).

This morning somewhere between telling me about taking out the garbage and doing the laundry, my eyes drift open and I grab his hand.

"I was dreaming about magic," I tell him.

* * *

"I thought you always wanted, like, a billion kids."

An old acquaintance from college likes to throw this in my face whenever she sees me reacting to a baby crying in public or a toddler having a meltdown on public transit.

I'm never reacting for the reason she thinks. 

I've tried everything I can to get her to stop talking about it, to stop making the joke. There were lots of things I wanted in my early 20s and there were lots of things I thought I wanted in my early 20s.  This is a small hurt, but an old one, and I've learned how to deal with it.

Sometimes it's easier to bear someone's unthinking cruelty than explain why it's cruel.

* * *

When I was a kid I used to fall asleep pretending that I could do magic. 

I would imagine that I was living a giant treehouse and that I was a princess of the woods. On nights when I couldn't sleep I would imagine riding on my oversized wolf, followed by my size-shifting cat. We were adventuring out to find and destroy the Tomes of Black Magic, which were scattered throughout the mundane and magical worlds. I fought every kind of monster I could think of, but those confrontations were always physical or besting the monster using my intellect. Magic was always only used when I returned to the treehouse. 

Magic was about creating.

* * *

"What are you thinking about?" 

We're waiting for the number twenty-three on our way to a movie. I've been watching a little girl walking through the twilight with her father, puttering along next to him and singing to herself. 

"I just feel a little wistful." 

He sees where I'm looking. "Yeah?" 

I nod. "It's hard, knowing that it's an experience I'm never going to have. I was once watching some friends, the ones you met last week? I remember watching them playing with their daughter and realizing that I'd never feel what they were feeling." I pause. "And I know, I know that I'm making the right decision, but sometimes I want it so badly it feels physical." 

I stop, expecting some platitude about how sometimes correct decisions aren't easy, or that there's always time to change my mind, or any of a hundred other things a dozen different people have told me. 

He just squeezes my hand. "I know."

* * *

"Here, take this," David whispers, handing me his handkerchief. 

We're seeing a play by one of my favorite theatre companies in the area. Their stuff always destroys me. It's beautiful and moving and always makes me cry. This particular show is about magic and authenticity and love and has me sobbing, loudly, during the final five minutes. 

It's also, I think, about illusions. The lies we tell ourselves to keep ourselves safe from reality. 

That's really what's making me cry.

* * *

David and I can't have kids. 

I suppose the more correct thing to say is that we can't have kids without a lot of expensive and invasive medical intervention that neither of us would want. 

I got a little weepy just writing that. 

Here's the thing. I don't know if I've ever seriously wanted a child. I agonized about it a lot in my late 20s. The logical decision, given my mental health history and income and a feelings about actually raising a child, is to not have one. It's a decision that I'm comfortable with about 90% of the time. 

I'm sure I don't have to explain the difference between making a decision and having it made for you. 

It's oddly devastating to know that we can't have something I was pretty sure I never wanted in the first place. David is the first person I would have ever considered having a baby with and it's a choice we'll never really be able to make. 

Which makes things complicated.

* * *

So here's the part where I'll be comparing motherhood and pregnancy to my feelings on magic and creation. Or having one of those uplifting moments in memoir writing where I realize that I can channel my creative impulses to writing or my work or volunteering or something. 

Yeah, no. 

Because the thing is that if suddenly ohmygodmagicisreallyreal I wouldn't magic myself a baby (I've read folklore, I know how that one ends). I also wouldn't magic myself into complete serenity about my choices and become a renowned writer. 

Well, maybe that last part. 

Now, at thirty-five instead of five I realize that magic isn't about creation. It isn't even about choice. It's about the illusion, the ability to convince yourself that you ever had any fucking option.

It's another in a series of grim but true revelations I've had in my mid-30s. But even that realization doesn't really change things. 

I still wake up dreaming of magic. 

Screw Perfect

I'm planning out my meals for the next week and crying.

I've just finished a conversation with some friends where I've confided that, right now, the act of putting food into my body is the most disgusting thing I can think of. Going out to brunch with fills me with dread. Dinner frequently looks like a handful of roasted almonds or a bowl of popcorn because I'm "too tired" to cook. I cancel a date with a guy who's a chef because I can't stand the thought of talking about food. I buy a scale and put it in front of the pantry.  

I go to my therapist when the act of chewing starts to make me gag, when I'm so anxious after eating that my stomach cramps and I feel like I have food poisoning.

The friends I've been talking to have all struggled with eating disorders at some point (I'm beginning to wonder if there are a lot of women who haven't). While my shrink was mainly worried with doing an assessment on how bad things have gotten, they offer solid advice. Plan your meals and work your plan. Keep in mind that you can't do the things you love if you're starving. Find a support group a little closer to where you live.

Remember that this is not normal. 

* * *

Mental illness is the most tedious thing in the world.

It is also the most awfully predictable thing in the world. It turns up when things are going really well. Newlywed and deeply in love with your husband? Here's a trip to the emergency room with suicidal ideation. Excelling at work? How about a depressive episode coupled with imposter syndrome so bad that you'll miss a deadline. Feeling healthy and beautiful for the first time since your marriage? Hello again, bulimia. Take a load off, you'll be here awhile.

I've been down this road so many times now that I know the drill. I reach out to my support group. I make appointments with my GP and therapist. I buy a new CBT workbook. I start meditating every day again. I snuggle my cats and drag myself out of the house to do things I used to enjoy because while I don't believe it at the moment, experience has shown that these things help.

It doesn't make doing them--or me--any less boring.

* * *

"You're in therapy?" 

I'm taken aback. 

I've been telling a story to a friend that mentioned the words "my therapist" without really considering that he doesn't know a lot about my mental health. I feel like I present as neurotic enough that everyone assumes that I'm in therapy.

Apparently that's not the case.

"Um, yeah?"

"Oh. I just . . . I never would have guessed."

If I could freeze one minute in time it would be this. This one, perfect moment where I'm passing, or have passed, as neurotypical.

As normal.   

* * *

One of the things you learn in any undergraduate writing class is that you aren't supposed to write Big or Terrible Things until you're well-removed from them. No one wants to read your grief, anger, or sadness while you're still processing it. I like that idea. It appeals to my obsessive need for perfectionism.

Unfortunately, my obsessive need for perfectionism is what keeps me from getting healthy enough to be able to write about depression and OCD and eating disorders from a place of any distance. Every couple years, like clockwork, I have a mental health episode. And while they get less intense and shorter with the passing years, they still happen. I still end up back in my shrink's office, talking to my GP about SSRIs and benzos, and leaning hard on my friends to help get me through another couple months of tedious bullshit. It's hard not to feel like a pest or a burden when I have to send another email saying "Hey guys, I'm having another episode. I could use some company."

It's exhausting and it feels like my life has always been this way. Objectively I know it hasn't, that's just the way things look to me right now. And it's frustrating enough for me to want to say "Screw perfect, just give me normal."

Here

“Oh, I use “May I be patient, may I be I be strong, may I be kind to myself” pretty often. I like the rhythm of it.”

“That’s a good one.”

“I saw you have another one written on your mirror. What was it?”

“Fear is the mind-killer. I write it on my arm when I’m doing open water swims, too.”

“Isn’t that from Dune?”

“Yup.”

“You’re a weird girl.”

* * *

Everything feels muffled.

My husband has just told me he wants a divorce. While I’m at work. Over text message.

In the coming months I’ll spend a lot of time wondering what I did to deserve this. Surely I didn’t marry the kind of person who ends a four year relationship and a two year marriage via text. I must have done something wrong. Yes, that’s it. This was my fault. I did something to deserve this.

Nearly a year out, I still don’t understand how it happened, but I know that I didn’t deserve it.

What I do understand is how at that moment I felt myself slam something down over my heart.

“No,” I told it. “We don’t have time to fall apart now.”

I don’t remember a lot about the rest of that day. It was like being deeply sleep deprived. Or drunk. I’m reasonably certain I worked out. I know I finished the project I was working on before I went home. I remember that the muffled feeling took awhile to wear off.

When it comes to brain vs. heart, my brain is almost never in control. It spends the rest of the day asserting itself in time with its own beat.

I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.

* * *

“I know it seems like a silly exercise, but for someone who is perennially hard on themselves, it’s an important one.”

I groan. “Fine. I have grit.”

“What else?”

“I’m bright. I’m articulate when I’m not nervous. I’m adventurous.”

When she asks a chirpy “Anything else?” I remind myself that I am paying to be here.

“I care. A lot. All the time, actually. About everyone.”

“Yes. Warm-hearted. And open-hearted. Neither of those are bad things.”

I think about the jar over my heart and its quiet insistence that it exists.

I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

“It doesn’t feel that way.”

* * *

In the months after the ex leaves me, I reach for everything.

I meditate. I reread my favorite books. I stop drinking and start exercising and eat more vegetables. I belt out my favorite musicals alone in my apartment. I write down things that feel like they’re helping. I consider getting them tattooed on my body and immediately put a one-year moratorium on any permanent body alteration.

Impossibly, I start dating again.

Somewhere in the midst of it, my protected heart finally breaks. And I keep it covered.

“No,” I tell it. “It doesn't matter how handsome or funny they are.We’re going to keep you here forever.”

* * *

I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe.

It’s late and I should be asleep, but I’m up texting and a dumb play on words has set me off.

Life has been like this for a little while. It came on so gradually that I didn’t realize what was happening. I’ve stopped needing to meditate for an hour before bed to fall asleep. I’ve started reading again. While I’m still working out, but not frenetically, twice a day.

I find myself up late, texting and laughing.

One of my goals for myself during my divorce was to come through it with my warm heart still intact. I made that goal even after I secreted it away and told myself no one would ever get to see it again. It sounds contradictory, but I think even as I was falling apart I knew (believed, maybe) that it would happen.

I’m still surprised by how swiftly it did. Handsome and funny with a smart mouth certainly helped, but it's been more than that. Time, likely. Good friends, too. I won't lie, a few liberal applications of gin and jazz standards probably helped me along as well.

What shocks me more than the swiftness is how ready my heart is to try again, even when I know that things probably aren't going to work. It keeps asserting itself over and over again.

I’m here.

I’m here.

I’m here.

White Rabbits

We're in a hotel somewhere outside Madison, Wisconsin. I'm talking to the fiance from the bathroom, the kind of winding-down-from-the-day conversation that doesn't require a participant, only a listener. He's reading on the couch, drinking whiskey and unwinding in his own way. When I fall into bed and ask "Are you coming?" he repiles "I have to finish something. I'll be there in a little bit." Knowing his nocturnal habits, love of whiskey, solitude, and books I turn out the light and sleep. When I wake in the morning, a small, white, origami rabbit greets me from the bedside table.

I cry so hard I wake him up.

***

The past months have been, well, shitty. 

I discovered that there's no easy way to tell your friends, your fiance, your doctors, that you've been thinking you'd be better off dead. 

No, maybe not so much dead, but wishing that you could magically stop existing. Just, *poof!* be gone from the world and its revolving door of bullshit. 

Anyway, it's a hard thing to say. 

I didn't tell my friends and fiance because I thought it was a passing thing. I didn't say anything to my therapist because I didn't want to be committed. And it wasn't like I was planning to harm myself. I just wanted to stop. 

Being not-quite-suicidal is a weird place to be It was weird when I was isolated, living alone in the North Country,  and it's even weirder now that I share my daily life with another person I love deeply. Try to imagine spending 3/4 of every day thinking "I would rather not be than be what I am right now." and then spending the remaining 1/4 of the day thinking "I can't wait to meet my new niece" or "Gosh, our first dance at our wedding is going to be great." Mix in having obsessive-compulsive disorder and a total  inability to deal with conflict in any capacity and you're off to the races. 

Eventually I say it out loud to to the fiance and the best friend. They send me off to the shrink with directions to be honest. I didn't end up institutionalized. Instead I got a lot of cheery "You're doing great! Everything will be okay! Everyone loves you and you're well supported!" I know it's her job, but Jesus Christ, lady. I'm drowning here, I don't need compliments on how well I'm doing the dead man's float. I need a fucking life preserver. The doctor is more helpful, she changes my medication, promises me that this time we've probably zeroed in on a better combination of of benzos, SSRIs, and sleeping pills. And God bless her, she does it without puking rainbows.

More helpful than therapists puking rainbows or doctors with prescription pads, the fiance is there at the end of every day. He's the one who sits and holds my hand during panic attacks and helps me slow down my breathing. He makes me dinner and takes me to my therapy appointments and snuggles me to sleep. 

I love him so much, but right now it's hard to tell him. Trying to muster the the energy to get into the shower is more than I can handle most days , being an empathetic, loving partner sometimes feels impossible. So I do what I can. I schedule massages for him. I meet him at the door with a glass of whiskey when he gets home from work. I do my best to get up off the couch and have an actual conversation. 

And I hope that it's enough. 

***

Sometime during the winter I sit with he the fiance while he plays my favorite videogame. It's a narrative RPG about a relationship. The main character's wife has a mental illness and has a hard time talking to her husband. She loves him deeply, but because of her mental illness she doesn't know how to tell him. Because she can't figure out how to tell him that she loves him, she folds him hundreds of origami rabbits over the course of their complicated relationship to say "I love you."

He doesn't understand.

The fiance and I play the ending together (me couch co-oping) and when I burst into tears at the end, he wraps his arms around me and lets me cry. I want to say that I wanted him to play the game not only because it's beautiful but because I feel like the woman in the story, and I need him to know that I love him, even when I don't know how to say it. 

But even over the winter, things are bumpy. There are panic attacks and depression. I'm still making it to the shower, but sleep most of the time I'm not at work. And I discover that I can't tell him what I'm feeling even when the moment is exactly what I've been waiting for. 

When I wake to find the white origami rabbit next to our bed somewhere outside of Madison. Wisconsin, I realize that I don't have to say it. He learned to understand my own white rabbits a long time ago

Crone Island

I storm into the living room, scoop the cat off of my fiancé’s lap and without saying a word, head back to the bedroom.

“Hey, where are you taking her?”

“We’re going to Crone Island.” I announce, imperiously and without explanation.

I slam the bedroom door.

I was first introduced to Crone Island when Kerry pointed me toward and article on Emotional Labor and its subsequent Meta Filter. Crone Island is a magical island filled with all of your best ladyfriends. There are whiskey rivers, weights without Bros monopolizing the squat rack, cats that like to snuggle, romance novel trees, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Marathons.

And unicorns. Lots of unicorns.

In real life, Crone Island is located at the intersection of my best friend’s liquor cabinet and the sympathetic, exasperated noises a group of women can make when comforting a woman whose boyfriend has just accidentally called her fat. It’s the place where you go to forget (for a time) that you’re in a relationship and have to take someone else’s feelings into account.

That’s the more innocent part of Crone Island.

The truth is that it’s also a fortified city with genetically modified alligators in the moats and She Wolves prowling the parapets. It is an emotional retreat, the place I go to when I’m too angry or frustrated or tired to engage in my relationship(s) like a grownup. Crone Island is where I don’t have to do the emotional labor of being in a relationship.

I’ve spent a lot of time in this part of Crone Island.

Which is the part of my personality that I am ashamed of, that I hide from almost everyone. Okay. We all have our quirks that we hide and goodness knows I have a tendency to overshare. Awkward dancing? Here’s the playlist! The fiancé’s flexible relationship with time? Groused about to my best friend over Saturday brunch. The terrible fight we had three months ago? Collapse on closest couple’s couch accomplished. What I rarely discuss (and probably should) is the rapidity with which I can do disconnect from our lives and our relationship. It’s a throwback to exes who weren’t very good to me, to parts of my life where it was easier to be a Vulcan than a person.

While I know that this is No Way to Live and The Number One Thing You Can Do to Make Your Partner Hate You, I still do it. Frequently. Because there is still a vocal minority in my brain that believes it is easier to be alone.

Over the past months, that vocal minority has gotten a lot louder. I find myself in one of the most challenging and stressful moments in my life and my easiest coping mechanism is flight. Since January, I’ve changed depression medications, we’ve both changed jobs. We’re planning our wedding and fundraisers and have been generally pretty busy without a lot of time alone. For two introverts it was a recipe for bickering and hurt feelings, and I found myself gathering up an indignant cat and running off to Crone Island most nights of the week.

While I was snuggling the cat behind my mental fortifications, I would worry. Constantly. About how unfair I was being to the fiancé. About how he should be able to be with someone who could actually be with him. About how fucking scary it is to be in love and spend most of my time being in love and vulnerable. I snuggled the cat closer and wondered if it would be easier just to run away with her for good. I smiled a little when I thought about how the fiancé would be angrier about losing her than me. It seemed so much easier than continuing to let him in close enough to hurt me for the rest of our lives.

Sunday morning I got up and went looking for the cat to head back to Crone Island to think. When I found her on the living room couch I realized that the cold we thought she had was more serious than we had realized. I shouted for the fiancé and we loaded her up and took her to the kitty ER and we lost her. All in about three hours.

That evening I was crying like a four year old. “I. Want. My. Kitty,” I sobbed on the fiancé’s shoulder. “I want her now. Who am I supposed to take to Crone Island?”

“Maybe you don’t have to go.”

“You’re missing the point!”

He wasn’t.

Beyond the accidentally cruel comments and small hurts that are part of any relationship, there is the deep knowledge that someday this person is going to be gone. And I know, conflating putting down the cat and thoughts of the fiancé dying sounds a bit, I don’t know, insane. But the reality is that until she died, I did not realize what Crone Island was really for. The flaws of that reality have come sharply into focus over the past week. The best-friend, whiskey river, kitty snuggle parts of Crone Island are all well and fine. The drinking tea and bitching about a flawed recycling system are okay, too. The walls and hiding from our relationship, not so much.

I’ve stayed away from the Island for the week. I’ve cried while washing up the cat’s dishes and putting away her food. I’ve laughed remembering the inopportune moments she jumped up into our bed. I’ve curled up in the fiancé’s lap and cried and told him that the thought of him dying scares me so badly that I have to fight the urge to run away from our relationship.

And while it’s not whiskey rivers and unicorns, it’s not GMO alligators and She Wolves either. It’s a quiet space where we can be loving and vulnerable, amused and annoyed, frustrated and supportive with one another. While it isn’t as punchy as Crone Island, it has its own name that I like an awful lot.

Home.

Don't Get Too Personal

"Just don't get too personal."

About two months ago I was talking to a friend of mine about the possibility of writing an Ignite Minneapolis pitch on life with OCD.  I bounced some ideas off of him and asked him to read the shitty first drafts of the pitch. One of the notes was to avoid talking about the personal aspects of OCD and approach it from a neuroscience and therapeutic perspective.

"I just don't think personal stories would appeal to the organizers or attendees."

I could see his point, kinda. I just thought that he was completely insane. One of the many reasons I'm not a scientist (terrible at math and chemistry, threw up during every biology dissection, have a slight tendency to accidentally set experiments on fire) is that I lack anything approaching objectivity. I had zero interest in (and zero qualifications to) talk about OCD from anything approaching a clinical viewpoint.

So I said a grateful "thank you" for the advice on how to talk in front of groups and for some careful editing and went ahead and wrote a pitch about what it was like to fall in holyshitreallove with significant mental health challenges.

In other words, I pitched a talk I might actually be able to give.

You know, with a lot of Xanax.

The boyfriend and I were headed up to the North Country when I got an email informing me that my talk had been accepted. After reading the congratulatory "You're Speaking!" subject line I started to hyperventilate. The boyfriend (how is he always so calm?) set the tone for the entire next month by placidly asking "Are you okay? What happened? Do I need to pull off and get you your paper bag?"

True love.

"No," I gasped. "My pitch was accepted."

Let's hit the pause button for a second on the intense social anxiety and my deep dislike for being the center of attention. What was even more terrifying was that the talk I had pitched was both intensely personal and not just about me. It was as much about the process of falling in love with the boyfriend and his reaction to finding out about my mental health issues. It's one thing to write about it here, where there's a degree of removal. It's another to talk to a large audience about our lives together.

Over the intervening month we talked a lot about the things that were okay to address in the talk. Oddly enough, I was more concerned about our privacy than he seemed to be. I wrote, edited, scrapped, and rewrote the entire talk no fewer than fifteen times. With each new incarnation of the talk I tried to keep it as aloof and third-person-y as I possibly could. I remembered the advice to "keep from getting too personal," saw the truth and the wisdom in it, and made it my mantra.

And each time I got to the final paragraph I realized I hated the entire thing and binned it.

Finally, a week before the event, twitchy and exhausted to the point where even my anti-anxiety meds were barely having an impact, I broke down on Kerry. "I can't do this. I don't know how to do this."

"What's up?"

"I can't be objective about this. I don't know how to not make this personal."

She started laughing at me. Of course, she reminded me, I couldn't be objective about this. It was my story about my mental healthy diagnosis and it would be (in her actual, scientific opinon) stupid to try to be objective about it.

"Fuck that advice." 

With her advice (she is, after all, the source and fountain of all truth) I rewrote the talk to sound more like something that would actually come out of my mouth. I gave it to the boyfriend and asked if he thought it was too personal and if he was comfortable with everything I said in it. His response was simply: "It's amazing, and you're going to kill it."

I thought he was being kind and supportive. I didn't think for a second that I would kill it. I was just hoping not to crash and burn.  Truthfully, I don't remember much of the actual five minutes I was on stage. I actually had to ask when I got off if people laughed at the jokes, because I was so terrified that I couldn't quite hear the reactions.

The part I remember was near the end, when I was talking about how the boyfriend reacted to one of the craziest thing I've ever said to him. The audience actually gave an audible "Ohhhhh" and I had an "Ohhhhh" moments myself.

The ohmygodthisismylife part of sharing stories isn't what scares the crap out of me. I do it all the time while writing or in small groups. Sharing what having OCD and falling in love has meant in our lives was scary because it made me (us, really) vulnerable. For those five minutes, my disorder and our lives were open to so much criticism that the thought of it nearly made me bail on the talk all together.

Because of the way many people have reacted when I'm in the midst of an obsessive/compulsive episode or merely anxious ("Quit worrying." "Calm down." "You're exhausting.") I am disinclined to be candid without some physical (or intellectual) distance.

Ignite made that distance impossible.

Short of saying "fuck it" and dating with mental health issues, Ignite was the scariest, hardest, most rewarding thing I've ever done (and done without anti-anxiety meds!). It made me realize that aloofness is not always a virtue. I didn't know how much I wanted to be authentic, personal, and vulnerable on a larger scale.

I certainly didn't realize how necessary it is when talking about mental health.

Now, to help the boyfriend with his pitch for Ignite 9.

Midwestern Girl

"Today," I say, pausing to take a bite out of my corndog, "is everything I wanted it to be."

"You really are a Midwestern girl at heart, aren't you?"

"What the hell does that even mean?"

We're walking around the Minnesota State Fair. I'm happily eating a corndog and drinking lemonade, on my way to see the butter sculptures of Princess Kay of the Milky Way. I've been relentlessly, ridiculously cheerful the entire time we've been here, no small feat considering I've spent most of the past week really down.

"For all your love of big coastal cities, for as much as you talk about the West Coast in particular, you're just so damn Midwestern."

"Yeah. Again. What does that mean?"

We detour into the Horticulture building so I can talk to the beekeepers and see if I can identify the queen in the display hives. I charm the beekeepers with equal parts erudite questions about bees and hives and sheer, unadulterated enthusiasm. When we get to the crop art section of the building, I literally clap my hands and jump up and down when we see a picture of Nikola Tesla made out of grain.

"That's what I mean." He answers my question from half an hour earlier.

"Exuberance is the antithesis of Midwestern." I retort.

"Nah. That's not what I mean. I mean, well, a lot of things. Mainly that when you love something, it's unironic and intense and maybe just a little bit weird. And that you love, well, Midwestern things. Corndogs. Lemonade. The sound of Canadian geese migrating. Scott Fitzgerald. Winter."

"I honestly don't know if I've been complimented or insulted, but if you really want to see me love something, we should go get some cheese curds."

We go for cheese curds. We see the Butter Princesses. We talk and laugh and get stopped by an impromptu parade and listen to a marching band arrangement of Fireworks, which prompts a long, funny story. We marvel at the paddlefish in the DNR exhibit. We eventually say goodbye and he heads one way to his moped and I walk to the transit hub and board a bus home, ruminating on something Fitzgerald wrote in Gatsby (have I mentioned how it's my favorite book?). Nick Carraway, reflecting on the summer and Gatsby writes:

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

The quote's been rattling around my brain for most of the summer. Time during which my private writing has consisted of me muttering about being discontent, distracted, and dissatisfied. There was nothing concrete to complain about, just a vague sense that settling here in the Twin Cities was, well, settling. That I've never done anything or been anywhere. Prior to now I've never lived anywhere for longer than nine months without actively scheming to go somewhere new and try something different and (trust me, I know how batshit crazy this sounds) spending this much time without being dissatisfied is making me dissatisfied. I spend a lot of time wondering about Gatsby and Nick and Daisy's subtle unadaptabilty to Eastern life, and wonder if I would be the same.

The discontent is something that I only discuss with Kerry. I spend an entire Sunday afternoon spilling my guts about how I'm worried I'm settling and that I've never done anything. My every instinct is to bolt, to pull up my stakes and head off to Boston or Seattle. When my landlord slides my lease for the next year underneath my door, I run for a paper bag. Kerry reminds me, gently (in the way of really lovely friends) that perhaps I've spent too long pulling up my roots, that staying is the uncomfortable, difficult thing for me.

So it's more likely I'll learn something if I do. 

My 20s have been about bolting, about learning to leave bad relationships, bad jobs, bad cities. Those lessons have, literally, saved my life. However, they also made me terrified, well, of things being right. I spent most of my 20s unhappy, either as a result of other people (aforementioned bad relationships) or because I was slowly going crazy. Happiness still feels a bit like walking on ice at the end of March. I'm reasonably certain that it'll support me, but it every creak and groan leaves me anxiously counting the steps until I get to the shoreline. 

I get off my bus a few blocks from the Mississippi and take the long way home, thinking about what, if anything, it means that I loved the Fair unironically. That I look forward to fresh squeezed lemonade and long, lazy summer afternoons on the boat. That I can't wait for autumn and anticipate winter with the kind of eagerness that would horrify my fellow Minnesotans (still a little shell-shocked from three Polar Vortexes).

Maybe it means I would be subtly unsuited for life on the coasts. Perhaps it doesn't mean anything. But for the time being, I'm going to trust that it means that I should be content to be content, and learn to trust the ice under my feet. 

And eat more cheese curds. It definitely means eat more cheese curds. 

Every Damn One

Somewhere during the first few weeks that he gave me a bucket.

We were still very much in that light-headed, breathless, noyouhangup period of the relationship. I've always liked that part. He swore he couldn't believe his luck. I swore that I couldn't believe I'd let him see me naked. I walked around with a permanent smile on my face. He texted me well into the early hours of the morning.

Then, the bucket.

We were dressed up and about the leave my apartment for dinner and a concert. Time had sort of slipped away from us (what can I say, I'm a real sucker for a skinny guy in a suit) during the course of that slow afternoon, so I was puzzled when he stopped me outside the car and made me close my eyes and hold out my hands.

He put a bucket into them.

"What is this?"

He smiled his crooked smile and if my hands hadn't had that bucket in them, I would have pulled him back into the house, reservations and Bach be damned.

"You know. For when you bail."

Retrospectively, it wasn't very funny.

***

"Let's move to Chicago."

It's a text I send Michelle while I'm walking home, a little drunk, extremely tired, and unbelievably maudlin. 

Mental illness is a funny thing. I just had a fantastic night. Wine, cornhole, and long conversations with friends in the backyard of someone's new house. It's dusk, it's warm, the city actually smells like jasmine and roses, and I'm walking home through my city, the place that I love beyond comprehension and I never thought I'd want to leave. 

But, in that moment, I do want to leave it. 

I send the text because at this particular moment, I'm pissed at myself. It feels like I've never taken any chances, that I've never made the kinds of stupid mistakes you're supposed to make in your 20s. I've done some interesting things, but none of them feel like the kind of knock-you-out accomplishments that I thought I would have by 30. I'm still single, I don't even have a dog, my job eats up most of my time, and I'm nowhere close to having a down payment on a house. 

That's not what has me pissed and sad. That's not why I'm texting Michelle about moving. 

***

I still haven't seen the final season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

It's not because the writing in the final seasons is less good than it was at the beginning. I didn't stop watching because I found another show I like better. God knows it isn't because I have less free time.

I don't like endings. 

***

With the exception of my first boyfriend, I've ended every one of my relationships. 

Every. Damn. One. 

And sure, I sentimentalize them when they're over. I cry, drink, listen to Patsy Cline. I gain break-up weight, run a half marathon (seriously, how do I manage to do both?), try everyone's patience. 

I still ended every damn one. 

I don't like the idea of being left, of being the one who trusted too much or loved too deeply in the relationship. As a result, the second things are less than ohmygodyou'resoperfect I take off. Then I drink. And cry. And wonder but what was wrong with me? 

As if I wasn't the one ending things.

***

The night that I text Michelle about moving to Chicago was tricky.

It was the first time I realized, really realized that my life is on the cusp of some intense changes. Friends are likely to start moving to the suburbs soon. The couples I know are planning to have kids in the next few years. The people I love are getting promotions and settling down.

They're moving on. 

And while I know (the non-lizard part of my brain, that is) that I'm not being left behind, it sure feels that way. Despite being promoted at work, crossing things off of my 30x30 list, despite the fact that I am living a life I love and in my rational moments wouldn't dream of trading, the panicky, unwell side of my brain is busy screaming:

They're going to leave you. 

So I text Michelle about leaving, about ending all these relationships before things change, before people leave me. And I walk home a little drunk, extremely tired, and unbelievably maudlin.

And when I walk in the apartment, and put my shoes in the closet, I see the bucket that ex gave me all those years ago. 

Every. Damn. One. 

Lord Have Mercy

When the alarm rings at 2:00am, I stumble out of bed towards the clothes I've left draped across the wingback chair. I'm sleepy, less than half-awake, and still recovering from string of late nights I've had recently. I can't stop shivering, which is the number one indicator that I've been up too late and have had too little sleep. I stretch and yawn and look back at my bed. It would be easy enough to take off all these clothes, turn up the heating pad, and slide back underneath the quilt.

I check my pocket to ensure that I have my keys and mobile, and step out into the freezing air, hurrying toward the Mississippi.

Getting up to see an astronomical event is, well, lonely. I'll admit that while I didn't invite anyone to stay up with me to watch tonight's eclipse (mainly because after years of asking I've discovered most people aren't interested) I thought I might run into at least one other person awake, particularly because astronomical events that you can actually see in the city are unusual.

But 2:10am finds me standing alone on a bridge over the Mississippi, looking up at the Blood Moon, feeling like the only person awake in the world.

Despite the loneliness, the eclipse is something I revel in.

***

Somewhere along the way I confused "reflecting on your sins for the sake of atoning for them" and "relishing your sins."

I'm definitely relishing.

I can't help it. I'm at the Easter Vigil with my folks and it's close to a three hour service. Three hours. Three hours of church for an atheist. On a Saturday night.

I go because it's my atonement for moving so far away and coming home so infrequently. I know that it means something to my parents to have me there with them, and I am almost never home over Easter, so I might as well do this for them. But as everyone who has ever attended a Catholic wedding knows, just because you're there doesn't mean you're paying attention. We're wrapping up Lent so there's a lot of talk about sinfulness and Christ's triumph over Original Sin and I can't help it (not that I really want to), I can't stop thinking about the past year. Oddly enough, despite twenty-six years of Catholic indoctrination, it's not the big sins that are getting to me (not to say that I'm not thinking of them. More on that in a minute). It's the little failings from the past year, times when I could have been kinder, less dismissive, worked harder, loved with fewer conditions that I'm atoning for at the moment.

The big ones though, the ones that would come off that list of seven.

Those are are things I would not repent if Jesus Christ were standing in front of me personally offering me a place in heaven.

I suspect everyone has sins like that. Mine tend to fall along the same lines, regardless of how old I get. Long boozy dinners with heaps of inappropriate jokes that leave my sides aching and head splitting the next day. Arguments where, just briefly, I let my temper get the better of me. After hours that leave me trembling and breathless and thinking I forgot it could be like that.

Like I said, things I wouldn't atone for if my (after)life depended on it.

***

When I get back into the house I am freezing. It's the kind of cold I know I won't be able to shake and that will keep me up for awhile, so I make a cup of herbal tea and wrap myself around my heating pad. Getting up this late, especially after so little sleep, was a silly idea. I'm going to be exhausted and not worth much for in the morning and I'm reasonably certain I'll be paying for this for the rest of the week. 

I don't care.

It's unusual for me to feel that way surrounding sleep (lifetime insomnia has made me hyper-aware of the beauty of a full eight hours), but when it comes to staying up late to see something incredible (especially related to space) I feel like I have to do it.  I go out in the early morning and stay up as late as a possibly can on the off chance of seeing the Aurora or the Perseids because it's my way of saying thank you to the universe. Our lives are such brief, unlikely things that I feel like I owe it to the universe to experience as much as I can.

It's a thought that will follow me to two-and-half hours into the Easter Vigil, when I'll guiltily snap back into the present. Our lives our so brief, and yeah, some things are worth atoning for, some things are worth skipping. 

And some things are meant simply to be relished. 

Dear Chicago

I am hiding in the bathroom at my own party.

One of the nicest, most understanding things someone has ever done for me was a few years ago at a Memorial Day party. My friend Kristin came up to me and pulled me into her bedroom.

"I know," she said "you have a tendency to get overwhelmed at parties and you just leave. I want you to know that if you need to come be by yourself for awhile, you can come sit in here and no one will bother you. You don't have to leave."

It was an incredibly kind gesture, one that indicated how well she knew me and how much she loved me.

Anyway, that was a few years ago. Tonight, Saturday, I'm in the bathroom at my own party, crying so hard I'm running the water so no one hears me.

***

I keep looking at apartments in Chicago. 

My browser window, at any given point in time, has between ten and fifteen tabs open to different apartment hunting websites in different cities. The majority are Chicago and Seattle, with a few token ones open for D.C., San Francisco, and Boston. 

Call it winter madness or a case of the doldrums or whatever the hell you want, but I can't stop thinking about . . . being somewhere else. 

***

My love life is a disaster. 

I'm serious. FEMA needs to be called. Religious people bearing bowls of soup need to stage an intervention. Someone should have a benefit concert because this thing is a certifiable calamity. 

The winter months have always been a little tricky for me. My past relationships have all started November-ish and run through the spring, so it's hard not to feel like I should be with someone. The weather is nasty and the thought of having someone to snuggle up and read with is, well, appealing. I am freezing from the months of October until May, so another body in the house would be deeply appreciated. 

On top of that, nearly everyone I love has gotten married in the winter. And in the face of my parents' thirty-second (thirty-second!) wedding anniversary and the prospect of going to another wedding alone I made some extremely regrettable choices (the kind that make you want to take a bath in lye). 

It's a tricky thing, wanting someone to want you. It almost never shakes out the way you hope.

***

It's the prospect of buying bookshelves that has me looking at apartments in other cities. 

A friend and I make a special trip to Ikea to look at getting me some big girl bookshelves, enough that all of my books will actually fit in my apartment. Despite the fact that I've put the money aside to purchase said bookshelves, when we get there I dither over exactly what I want (as if I didn't already research them online and come in with a shortlist and an estimated number for the square-footage I'd need to comfortably house all my books.) 

"None of these will fit in my car. But I think I've made a decision. Maybe we can come back another time?" 

I have schlepped my goddamn library across the state of Minnesota more times than I can count. Do you have any idea how much space several hundred books take up? A lot. They take up a lot of space. And I've never had enough bookshelves to house all of them. 

Buying shelves just seems like such a commitment. It's a statement that I am going to be in this apartment in this city, in this life for long enough to settle in to something. 

***

I'm in the bathroom crying because of a conversation I overheard.

I was in the kitchen doing the washing-up. Some of the party stragglers were in the other room chatting. Because my apartment is the size of a matchbox, I could hear the conversation they were having. It was about work and what projects they have going on (these are my artistic friends) and I overheared one say to the other "Yeah, I stopped doing pro-bono work, but Kel seriously needed help with this work project, and you know, she's just fantastic so I said yes." He paused "I hope that girl gets everything she wants out of life." 

I didn't hear the rest of the conversation because I'm hiding in the bathroom crying fit to beat the band. 

***

I cut and run. 

I've done it my entire life and in every aspect of my life. Work gets tough? Find a new job. Don't like a city? Move on. Relationship getting to be more work than you anticipated? Dump the guy and move on. 

I talk and write so much about my desire to unhook my safety line of self and fallfallfall for someone. But the truth is that I always have a backup line. There's always a way for me to back out when things start to last for a minute longer than I want them. It's so much easier to get wigged out by commitment and have an extremely regrettable one night stand, or to fall for people I know won't work or I won't like in two month's time than think about why I don't have the kind of relationship where we're celebrating an anniversary. It's. Just. Easier. 

I am living a life I love. I am actually surrounded by people who would do anything for me, who want to see me successful and healthy and happy and who are willing to make actual honest-to-God sacrifices to make those things happen for me. And my response is to think about moving somewhere else. 

That realization hits me with all of the force of a cast-iron skillet to the face on Saturday night, when I overhear the conversation taking place in my living room. That kind of pathological fear of commitment isn't living. It's just suicide by tiny, tiny increments. 

Naked

"Ren Fest was made for you!"

I roll my eyes. The geeky men in my life have long been on a quest to get me to attend a Ren Fest. As with their quest to get me to play D&D, I've managed to hold firm. I've heard every possible explanation of why I would love them, but this guy is reasonably charming and we're on our way back to my apartment so I decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Why would I love Ren Fest?"

Surprisingly he doesn't go for the historical reenactments, the wordplay, the unselfconscious geekiness that occurs at Ren Fests (these are all reasonable arguments people men have made to me over the years.)

Nope, instead he just goes right for it. "Because you could actually wear clothes that would look good on you."

You know the expression "my jaw dropped"? I always thought it was an exaggeration. I grew up as the Liberal Democrat child of two Tea Party Republicans. I know that when someone says something absurd your jaw doesn't drop. Your eyes roll. Your head shakes. Your feet carry you out of the room. But jaw-dropping? Doesn't happen.

Except this time it does.

Because, yeah, while I'm at home I have a slight tendency to live in leggings and a Cosby sweater. But when I'm out on a date? Trust me, I can bring it. I know exactly what to emphasize (uh, boobs).

Tonight, for example, I'm wearing a red dress that makes me feel like Joan from Mad Men. Yeah, that Joan.

But apparently while I'm going for a vibe of unselfconscious sexiness with a dash of waittillyouseewhatI'vegotonunderneath! what I'm actually projecting is more of a vibe of Wench! Get me another ale. 

***

I can count, on one hand, the number of people who have seen me naked. 

It's not because I'm a prude or because I dislike sex. 

Both of those suggestions are, in fact, laughable.

Yeah, we all know where this is going. 

I hate writing about weight and body image issues because, you know, this isn't Seventeen. I turn thirty this year and I feel like I should have this shit figured out. Or at least be able to better hide the fact that, when it comes to things like being naked in front of men I like, I'm a black hole of insecurity.

But then I go over to a friend's house to hang out with my lady friends and we spend the entire night talking about a TED talk about self-objectification. How, even among some of us who are with long-term, committed partners who adore us, we still have nights, days, weeks, where we simply cannot get out of our own heads. And instead of being able to come home and make dinner or watch a movie or have sex while taking all of our clothes off we're wondering if we should skip dinner because we had a burrito for lunch, counting the number of calories in this glass of wine and weighing it against what we did at the gym that afternoon, or chewing gum between meals because we're actually still hungry. 

Here's something sort of crazy. I can't even get worked up over the unfairness of this situation. I have zero desire to start lambasting the paradigm of patriarchal normative structure. I don't even want to bring up photoshopping in magazines or beauty standards, or whether or not BMI is just another way for us feel badly about ourselves (ugh, please). 

Let me be very clear about this. While hanging out with smart, engaged, interesting women I have zero desire to discuss feminist theory. 

The women I hang out with are tremendously capable, brilliant, confident women. They're quickly making headway in their various careers, are socially and civically engaged, are well-read and articulate and interesting. 

And about 80% of them are completely neurotic in some way when it comes to their bodies. 

The reason I can't work myself into a lather about how we got to this point is because it makes me inexpressibly sad that we are here. 

***

You know you've made significant strides in weight loss when your corset no longer fits. 

I'm standing in my closet, in front of a full-length mirror, trying on every piece of lingerie I own. It's been, um, awhile since I've had any reason to even think wearing any of this and now that I finally do I come to the sudden, startling conclusion that after losing nearly thirty pounds, none of it fits. None if it. Jesus. My bras don't even fit anymore (and cue horrifying montage of what my boobs must have looked like over the past few months) Realizing that I'm in danger of running significantly late, I start to consider calling and cancelling on the guy. That line from The Smiths song This Charming Man pops into my head. 

I would go out tonight

but I haven't got a stitch to wear. 

I am actually thinking about cancelling on this guy because there's a slight possibility that we'll end up together and that if we do, I'll be caught without my battle armor. 

For the record, I do recognize the inherent fucked-up-ness of using the phrase battle armor in any context regarding one's sex life. I mean, the only place it might be appropriate is if one has a Beowulf fetish (I don't). But the fact of the matter is that, staring down the barrel of literal (and figurative! Layers.) nakedness, I would rather spend Saturday night in the house, in my leggings and Cosby sweater, alone. 

Standing there half-dressed and completely indecisive I get a text saying "Hi. I'm outside." and realize that I've dithered too long. I quickly pull on my red dress, the one that makes me look like Joan from Mad Men and hastily put my makeup on. I'm desperately reaching for some sort of moment of public-radio insight, some triumphant moment where I'll realize something about the patriarchal normative structure and my body and I'll walk out the door with a newfound confidence in myself. 

Ha. Yeah, that only happens on This American Life. Instead I rush out the door knowing full well that if we do go home together I'll spend most of the night in my own head, trying to get out of the incessant loop of backchat and simply enjoy myself. 

At least I've got the dress. There's nothing bad he can say about it.