Soft

I lost someone close to me this week. 

Not lost in they've died but lost in the "well, that was an unforgivable betrayal of my trust" kind of way. 

I've been through so many relationship implosions over the years that it took a little while for this one to hit me. I did all the automatic stuff that I do--blocked them from my phone and social media, put away the things they've given me until I'm less emotional, activated my support group. I thought to myself "Well, that was unexpected" and went on with my day. 

We all know where this is going. 

That evening, after I held it together all day I tried to pickle myself in bourbon (it takes less now than it used to). I got into a horrible fight with David. I cried at a bus stop. I self-harmed in a more intentional way and screamed with grief and sobbed for hours. I've said it before, but going through life with big feelings is a constant fight.

Friday night I lost that fight.

* * *

My favorite Mary Oliver poem is only four lines long. 

"The Uses of Sorrow"

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness. 

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift. 

* * * 

I have fallen a little in love with most of the people I have met and liked over the years. 

What can I say? I have a lot of feelings, sloppy boundaries, and a soft heart. 

Each time someone lets me down in a big way I tell myself that this is it. This is the time that I'm going to put up taller walls, keep people at an arm's length, stop calling that one friend who never wants to hang out. 

Then the next time I meet someone with the same obscure interest, the same favorite book, hell, just someone who looks cute and smiles at me I lose myself all over again. 

I am grateful to have such a loving, supportive partner in David. Every time I get excited about some new friend (or, frankly, crush) he's patient and kind. He gently reminds me that not everyone in the world is worth my time. I laugh and say "Yeah, but this person is."

He throws up metaphorical hands and I let myself be disappointed all over again. 

* * *

I am a walking trope: 

The person who walks around with ohmygodsomuchlovetogive and who gives it to all the wrong people and ohgodsomeonejustloveme. 

Kind of. 

I'm also the person who left her divorce with the determination to keep a soft heart and I've worked really fucking hard to keep it that way. I'm also a person who believes that the more love you let into your life, the more your love grows and reflects in the world. More than that, I believe--no, I know that loving people, even the ones who do not deserve it, has made me a better person.  

So what the fuck am I supposed to do? 

* * *

It isn't until Monday morning that I can really even begin to contemplate my most recent box full of darkness. 

I spend much of the weekend in an emotional and actual hangover, tinged with just a delightful soupçon of self-recrimination and disgust. I manage to pull myself out of it long enough to spend some time with friends on Saturday and go to church on Sunday, but I make sure to make myself feel worse at every opportunity (saddest shoutout to people who use food as punishment, too).

There isn't anything special about Monday. I went outside and felt the ground under my feet and the sun on my face. I went to the park and walked the gravel paths. I observed the mallards, finally home for summer, as they fed and played. I saw a cardinal--a bird that always reminds me of David--and took a short video of its song with him later. 

The whole time I carried that box of darkness with me and thought about how fucking fragile we all are. How stupid and frustrating and maddening we can be when we're hurt and want to hurt someone else. And then I did what I always do, what I hope I will always continue to do. 

I reminded my heart to stay soft and went home.

Tidy

A year ago I was the happiest I had ever been. I was looking forward to our third anniversary as a couple and our first wedding anniversary. I was as in love as I was the first weeks we were together.

Half a year ago, the husband and I were working on some stuff. Maybe our first year together hadn’t been perfect, but I had never expected it to be. We were two people who were used to being independent, and it takes awhile to get used to a major life change. And none of that mattered, because we had the rest of our lives together to get it right.

(I now see where this is going, too)

Two months ago my husband asked me for a divorce.

My break-ups always followed more or less the same format: bourbon, sad music, crying, bitching, and about two weeks later moving on. It’s worked for every break-up from my high school boyfriend (minus the bourbon) to finding out my ex asked another woman to marry him while we were still together. I sympathized with friends going through wrenching splits, but always assumed that I was impervious. I was resilient. I had the perfect formula.

Yeah, no.

I thought I knew how to handle a break-up.

* * *

I’m standing in the kitchen of my apartment, washing the dishes and sobbing so loudly I’m certain my neighbors can hear me. It’s not the first time it’s happened in recent weeks, but it’s a new set of neighbors and I feel like I should give a damn.

I feel like I should. I don’t

I just keep washing the dishes and crying. When the dishes are done, I move onto dusting and crying. And on to sweeping and crying. And on to alphabetizing the spice rack and crying. I keep up with the doing-chores-and-crying thing until it’s time for-going-to-bed-and-crying. I don’t pour myself a drink. I don’t put on The Cure. I don’t call anyone to bitch.

I cry.

I do things that feel like forward motion.

I thought I knew how to handle moving on.

* * *

The truth is that any real grieving I’ve done has been decades ago, when childhood or the simple self-absorption of my 20s was enough to take the edge off. Sure, I’ve split with people since then, but I haven’t lost someone.

So I go into heavy-research mode. I read everything I can get my hands on about psychology and divorce and grief. I talk to my friends who have gone through the same thing about what to expect. I strategize with my therapist about empowerment. I mark days on the calendar and congratulate myself when I get to the point where grief turns a magical corner and you stop crying in public.

I cry on the bus the same day.

I start to track my moods on a daily basis. I see my friends. I throw myself into triathlon training and meditation. I go for long hikes. I switch to a primarily plant-based diet. I start practicing lock-picking and knot-tying. I get serious about paying off consumer debt and saving for a house.

I cry while having dinner with my best friend.

I make one-year, five-year, and ten-year plans—I’ve never had a problem that couldn’t be addressed by a good five-year plan! I wait for that moment of insight that’s part of every public radio piece—the moment when I realize this is when I’ll become a mountain-climber, write the Great American Novel, take a trip to Tibet and become the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

I cry in my one-to-one meeting with my boss.

I thought I knew how to handle grief.

* * *

A year ago I was the happiest I’d ever been.

I’d never met a problem I couldn’t fix. I’d throw hours of intense study, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and a good diet at my life. It wasn’t always perfect, but I had a lot of confidence life could at least be tidily organized.

My life has suddenly been dumped out of its neat boxes and I don’t even know how to start organizing. I want, so badly, to be able to fix this, to find a way to clean up this mess. Beyond the messiness of my marriage ending (and ohboy, is that a mess), everything I’ve relied on for years—exercise and a support system and research-backed therapy—isn’t helping me put anything back where it’s supposed to be. There’s no faster tri time, no Great American Novel, no spiritual insight.

I thought I knew how to handle a break-up, how to handle moving on, how to handle grief.

Turns out I don’t know a goddamn thing.

Flat

For most of my adult life, there was something about being sad that felt homey.

You know, the kind of sadness that involves old time country music, a desire for rainy days, and a bottle of bourbon. The kind of sadness you can curl up with.

I always secretly loved that kind of sadness, and it often found me after a breakup when I wasn’t particularly interested in the other person. There was something pleasant about having license to keep to myself and not need to expend any emotional energy beyond, “Wow, I’m pretty bummed right now” and then drinking like my life was a Patsy Cline song.

To be clear, I wasn't seeking the kind of emotional emptiness that finds you during a depressive episode. It was the kind of sadness that could eventually be lifted by a sunny day or a long run or an A on a paper I had written.

The self-indulgent sadness was an emotional state that I pursued and reveled in when I could get it just right. And “just right” usually meant “going through a breakup with a person I don't actually call back” or “regretting that one-night-stand with the ex who just broke my heart.”

It was the kind of sadness that was addictive.

***

The fiancé and I were in a fight that felt like the Second Labor of Hercules.

He and I fight infrequently. So infrequently, in fact, that when we were dating I wondered if our relationship wasn’t passionate enough (hey, we all have our own shit). And usually when we do fight it ends in us going to bed and waking up to have a rational conversation the next day.

This was not one of those fights.

It was the sort of fight that went on for days, and when we finally cut off one of its heads and thought we were all right, the next day would find me sobbing on the couch over something different.

There were a lot of tedious reasons it was so hard (ineffective communication, a desire to be the Right and Reasonable One in the relationship, new medications that were causing mood swings, blah blah blah). But it was hard. Harder than anything we’ve done together in the past two years.

The hardest part was I was unprepared for the intensity of my anger. There were days when I would be talking to my best friend and shaking with rage. Whether it was a function of new meds or wedding stress, or finally having feelings again after a year of depression I can’t say. And, truthfully, I didn’t examine what was going on too closely. All I knew was I was angry and one night found me angry enough  that I started packing a bag to sleep on my best friend’s couch. As I stuffed pajamas into my bag and looked for my earrings for the next day, I heard the front door open and the fiancé talking to the cats. I deflated and asked myself:

“What the hell am I doing?”

He found me sitting on our bed, crying.

***

Prior to the fiancé, all of my relationships imploded between three and five months.

Some were my fault, others weren’t. Ultimately they didn’t work out because we would fight and I would give them the finger and go sit in my home wishing for rain and listening to Hank Williams. They ended because I didn’t care enough for them to continue.

And there was something comforting about those endings. The emotions were one-dimensional and soothing in their flatness.

Now, with the fiancé, it’s never just one emotion. It’s joy with aggravation, love with happiness, anger with sadness and frustration and fourteen other feelings I can’t identify. They are confusing and crazy-making and what had me packing my bag to sleep on the best friend’s couch. I’d lived so many years with flat, straightforward emotions that I was utterly unprepared for emotional complexity, especially the kind that combines love and anger and frustration.

Unprepared actually doesn’t even scratch the surface.

The night I was packing my bag, I was angry beyond any anger I’d ever experienced. Of course I was.  I’d spent five days distilling sadness, distress, and frustration into something flat and easier to deal with. Rage is so much more comfortable than sadness. When I heard the fiancé’s voice at the door, I realized that I didn’t want to be flat anymore. When he came in and sat down next to me, I told him everything. He listened—he listened for a long time while I told him every emotion I was having and all of the ones I couldn't identify and how complicated everything was for me at the moment. We talked, and all of those stupid, complex emotions found a voice.

The funny thing is that even when I was sad and leaning waaaaaaay into it, it wasn't as satisfying as it used to be. No amount of Johnny Cash or Sam Houston whiskey brought back that feeling of pleasant self-indulgence or even the comfort that it used to bring. Rather than being a flat, understandable emotion, sadness was huge and complicated and made me feel so awful that it was hard to make it through the day without crying at my desk.

Instead, the rush of relief I was seeking came after talking and listening and apologies from both of us, when I went to bed with a glass of water, some music, and, well, him. He put his arms around me and kissed my hair and told me he loved me. One of the cats jumped into bed and headbutted me. Still a little sniffly, I closed my eyes and said out loud "Yes, this is home."

Just Another Girl

"What song is this?"

Over the sixteen odd years of our friendship, Michelle and I have come to a tacit agreement with regard to driving. Namely, I don't drive. Ever. Instead, I'm in charge of watching for deer at dusk, navigating (inexpertly), keeping an eye out for roadside attractions to take goofy pictures at, and (most importantly) am in charge of the radio.

"It's your jam!"

"Nope. No idea what this is."

"The Killers."

"Honey, my jam is Shot at the Night."

"Oh, right! This is my jam."

She shakes her head.

"Give me a break. It's been a rough couple weeks."

"Just this once, I'll let it go."

***

On the list of embarrassing places to start crying, a feminist sex shop has gotta be at the top. 

I know because over the past week I've made a list of embarrassing places to start crying, as a result of crying all over the damn city. The bathroom at work is fine as long as you can muffle it. The car is less than ideal as there's always the chance of causing an accident. The bar during trivia and the bus are also right up at the top of the list. 

And I'm not talking dignified, silent weeping. I'm talking loud, totally unanticipated sobs that make the entire establishment turn and look at you. 

It's been a pretty great week.

So crying in a feminist sex shop is awkward for a lotta reasons, not the least of which is that you're harshing everyone's dopamine high. When I start welling up in the middle of the Smitten Kitten, I reach into my purse for the packet of tissues that's been in there for the past couple days, wave my friend off (wondering for a moment if refraction is distorting the size of what's in her hand) and bolt for a bench outside. 

The woman I'm with comes out about twenty minutes later and starts rubbing my back. "Are you all right?" 

"Yeah," I manage to hiccup out. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to." 

"No, it's my fault. You said you didn't want to come. I hoped it would cheer you up."

"Yeah. It's just . . ."

"Oh, honey. I know." 

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck." I put my head in my hands. "I forgot it was like this." 

***

"I think that saying that you love someone unconditionally is idiotic."

I was prepared for a lot of things on this road trip, but this conversation was not one of them.

"Why?"

"Because no one means it. If someone murders your whole family are you still going to love them?"

"I think that might be a bit of an outlier."

"What if they spend all the money in your joint account? Screw your best friend?"

"Really, I think that people who say that they'll love someone unconditionally would accept those as, you know, extenuating circumstances."

He blows a raspberry and I start to laugh. "Why," I ask, "are you so worked up about this? Has someone claimed that they'll love you unconditionally recently?"

"No, but I'm a firm believer in saying what you actually mean."

I study his profile for moment before saying softly, "Yeah. Me too."

***

"Kels, do you think that maybe you're pushing yourself just a little bit too hard?"

I'm standing off the path, about waist-high in some bushes, dry-heaving. I shake my head. "I'll be fine in a minute." 

"I'm just saying, maybe I need to take you over by Michelle's so you can talk it out?" 

I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and emerge from the bushes. "I am so fucking sick of talking. Let's just run."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm certain." 

***

"I don't get dumped."

"Kelly, everyone gets dumped." 

"I don't. It's one of those laws of the universe, like the second law of thermodynamics or how Doctor Who is the greatest sci-fi show ever written. I am always the rejector, not the rejectee. It is known."

"Yes, well, I mean, it's really not that different is it? You'll do the same things you always do: drink a lot of bourbon and listen to a lot of Patsy Cline, eat Indian takeaway, and run until you're exhausted." 

"You forgot "Come to in four weeks with a new PR and a haircut I don't remember getting." That's always an important part." 

"See, it's not actually that different."

"It is."

"How?"

"All that serotonin, oxytocin, and dopamine made me stupid. They made me giggly and gushy and just stupid." 

"What's different? That's what happens every time with you." 

I sigh, giving my best impression of eighteen year old, emo Kelly. "I felt like I was someone special. Like this time I was more than just another girl." 

Beauty #11

I love poetry.

Like everything that I love, I love it intensely, deeply, borderline obsessively. I (would) have bookshelves devoted specifically to poetry. I try to memorize one poem a year. When I'm having a terrible day, I listen to Auden or Eliot reading their work and it, well, not cheers me right up but certainly helps me settle things into their proper perspective.

I believe (with the exception of Eliot) that poetry isn't something you should have to torture a confession out of. It should be something that you read and that--just for a moment--breaks you open. It should be something that pulls your heart out of your chest and forces you to look at it closely.

"Misgivings" by William Matthews does that to me.

Of course it does. I'm commitment-phobic. I intentionally keep people out of my life because I'm afraid of getting hurt. I only tell people about the bits of me that I think they'll like.

But. But. But.

I'll admit it quietly.

I want someone to share my life with.

William Matthews has somehow managed to reach into my brain (maybe just the brain of all slightly-neurotic young adults) and scoop out all of my apprehensions surrounding undoing the safety line and going top over teakettle for someone and put them into a poem (a poem that I have seem to have accidentally memorized). It's exactly the kind of gut-spillage that I look for in a poem, the exact kind of poem that makes me want to think about love and my life and the people who are in it.

My favorite line(s) are . . . well, wait. I don't want to spoil it. Bonus if you can correctly guess them.

***

"Misgivings"
William Matthews

Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns

for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

#21: Blog about Thirty By Thirty

Despite the fact that it's only 15 degrees outside, I am actually perspiring a little when I leave the kitchen. 

I've been making pizzas for about an hour and a half, and now that all my guests have been sated, I flop down on floor with a very large glass of wine. 

My best friend is scribbling something on a lined sheet of paper. My other friends are laughing over something she's said and I tap her on the knee and indicate that I want to see what she's working on. 

"Well, you know my birthday was yesterday?" She says before handing me the sheet of paper.

"Yup, birthday brunch tomorrow."

"Well, I'm making my thirty by thirty list." 

I start reading it and crack up. After fifteen years of friendship (at this point in our lives we've been friends for longer than we haven't) I could probably have written most of this list. I hand it back to her and pick up the thread of the conversation and lose myself in the course of the evening, laughing so hard I nearly spit out my wine a few times. After a ridiculous amount good-natured teasing (apparently my spinsterhood will involve not cats, but lynx named Gertrude, Gloria, and Tina--major points if you can guess why they're named that) I kick everyone out of the house and collapse gratefully into my bed.

The next day I head over to my running partner's house to do the most Minnesotan thing I can think of--we're heading to the U.S. Pond Hockey Tournament. As I'm pulling on all of my warm clothes, I catch sight of a lined piece of paper on the table. 

"What are you working on?"

"Well, Michelle really got me thinking about this Thirty by Thirty thing and I've got a little less than a year, but I figured I might as well give it a shot." He pauses. "I would have thought with your love of lists you would have sat down last night after we all left and made one."

***

Here are my dirty secrets. 

Despite making New Year's Resolutions every year, I think that there's only one resolution worth having. At the end of the year you should be a better person than you were the year before. 

That's it. That's the basis of all of my resolutions. 

Here's the second.

I have an absolute, fanatical, borderline religious belief in the power of quantitative data. 

I spend a not insignificant amount of time looking at 2010 Census Quickfacts for the various places I've lived in. I geek out when I get an annual report from a nonprofit I support. I track the hits on my blog, measure what kinds of entries people seem to like.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

I wear a Fitbit for Christ's sake. I track the number of hours I sleep, the number of steps I take, the minutes I exercise, and the calories I net during the course of the day. I keep lists of the books that I read, how the medications I'm taking impact my mood, and whether or not I feel more positive with more or less caffeine or processed food, or whatever.

Look, I realize how nutty and OCD this sounds, but the truth is that I believe (absolutely, fanatically, religiously) that with the right data, I can forcibly make myself a better person.

***

On Sunday morning I sat down and wrote my Thirty by Thirty list. 

It breaks down into a few broad categories--areas I know (from my obsessive data collection) need work. Those areas are: skill acquisition, financial & physical health, interpersonal relationships, and artistic/cultural growth. After I finished it, I considered posting it here, in this entry. Then I realized that it would be more interesting and a better approach to the list would be to write about the things as they're crossed out. Some of you already know all of them. Some know some. Most of you could probably guess at least half the list. 

It might be a little bigger or a more grandiose list if I had written it more than eight months out from my 30th. That's all right. The things that are on the list are things that matter to me and are actually achievable over the coming months. More than that, they're things that I feel like I'll be able to look back on in nine months and measure. In late September I'll be able to look back on the list, on the things that I've crossed off of it, and be able to say whether or not I'm starting my 30s as a better person than I was in my 20s. It is, I suppose, the last last grand experiment in a whole string of experiments of my early adulthood. Except this time I'm bothering to measure it. 

I can't wait. 

Actually, It Started

In May my friend Lauren wrote a post about God hitting her upside the head.

I started thinking about it today, right after the Universe was smacked me upside the head with its own two-by-four

***

This blog started last week when I sat down to try to write a post about moving back to Minneapolis/St. Paul. Oh right. You may not know about that because I never managed to write the fucking post.

I'm moving back to Minneapolis/St. Paul.

It scares the hell out of me.

When I moved to the North Country two years ago, I always suspected that the move was, well, probably not permanent. I liked the work I was doing well enough, but I didn't know how I felt about living in a place where it snows over eighty inches a year. And I didn't know how I felt about living hundreds of miles away from people I loved. And the longer I stayed here, the more apparent it became that I didn't quite fit in. I don't kayak or canoe. I like running, but not when I have to use YakTrax to do it. I would rather get papercuts on my corneas than go skiing in any capacity. But I stayed. I told myself I was staying because I wanted to learn to be on my own. I wanted to learn loneliness and how to live with it. My Daddy didn't raise a quitter.

And those were . . . well, they were part of the reason I stayed. The bigger reason, I suspect was because the North Country became a convenient excuse. My love life is rotten? The guys here are awful! Having a difficult time with anxiety? The sun is barely out for five hours a day in the winter! All those professional goals you have for yourself? Well, they're overly ambitious and now I can scale them back and not set myself up for disappointment!

A few weeks ago I interviewed for and was offered a new position, one for an organization I adore doing work that I love. It's a big job. It's a job that it's a big deal for me to have as early in my professional life as I am. It's a job that excites me and scares the crap out of me in (almost) equal measure.

I almost didn't take it.

My life here in the North Country, while it isn't particularly satisfying, is completely comfortable. I can be single here and not wonder if I'm not trying. I have a job I'm pretty good at, whose rhythms and quirks I understand really well. Here in the North Country, no one can see how terrible I am at adulthood. How I forget laundry in the dryer for a week, how my bathroom constantly looks like a group of frat guys spent the night.

The thing was, if I took this job in the Twin Cities it would be entirely unknown. It would be difficult and rewarding in ways I honestly could not fathom. And if I couldn't make a relationship shake out in the Twin Cities, surrounded by interested, engaging men, I wouldn't be able to make one work anywhere. And God knows a move South wouldn't magically make me into a grown-up.

In the end, I took the job.

***

Actually, this post started sometime earlier this year, when I wrote a post about writing dangerously. 

For the past--holy shit--almost a year already, I've been walking around feeling like my skin is inside out. Feeling like I have a bad sunburn and people keep poking it or making me take a scaldingly hot shower. 

It's been wonderful.

It's been terrible. 

Writing about what's going on in my head when I'm alone, writing about who I want to be and who I'm afraid I actually am, exposing all most of what's going on in my head and my heart has made me feel so vulnerable there are days when I'm afraid I won't be able to stand it. Writing about my mental health issues has convinced me that I'm never going to find a partner if they happen along this blog first. Who would want to be a part of this mess?

Writing about obsessive-compulsive disorder, writing about depression and anxiety has left me wondering ohmygodhowcanthisdoanyoneanygood? And there'snopointinselfflagellatinginpublic. Every time I write something about mental health I consider trashing the whole blog, of just deleting it straight off. Because it hurts to write these things, and it's really fucking hard to risk my family and friendships on something when I wonder what good it could possibly be doing.

This weekend I was sitting outside with some friends. I can't remember how it came up, but it came out that I write this blog. A friend had never read it, never heard of it, and I made some offhand comment about how it's mostly silly, mostly me bitching about my love life and being crazy. Rather unexpectedly Jacob sushed me and even more unexpectedly got really, really gushy about my writing. And it was uncomfortable. And it was sweet. And at first I chalked it up to sun and lawn games and beer and expected he probably wouldn't remember being quite so enthusiastic the next day. Until something tumbled out of his mouth.

"Her writing made me want to be a better writer." 

At this point I actually had to get up and go inside to refill my water glass. Because, well, shit. 

Three days later and I still can't articulate a response to that one. 

***

Actually this post started this morning, when I was up early writing and listening to the new Dessa album. 

You know where this is going.

There was that song. That song that suddenly becomes my new obsession, the song that I've listened to on repeat all day today. The song that is the perfect song for this part of my life. And, as always happens, it was the lyrics and really knocked me out.

Around here we don't like talk of big dreams

To stand out is a pride and conceit. 

To aim high is to make waves, to split seams.

But that's not what it seems like to me.

I wanna try, I wanna risk  .

And I don't wanna walk, rather swing and miss. 

And suddenly there was the Universe, wielding its two-by-four, swinging straight at my forehead. 

The only two things I have ever wanted to do are big things. I've always wanted to change the world and be a writer. And by grace or divine intervention or sheer blind luck, I am finally doing both. In two years I've raised nearly half a million dollars for organizations that are trying to improve the lives of girls and women. Over the past year, I've written some things for this blog that I'm really proud of. There are days when I leave work crying over some depressing statistics that I read or heard. There are days when I've written something that's too hard, too much of myself, and I don't want to share it. And these things are risky and have left me vulnerable and open in ways I couldn't have anticipated. But this morning, spellbound by this Dessa song I realized that these crazy, difficult, risky things I'm doing are helping be the person I've always wanted to be. And that I can either stay stagnant, stay comfortable, stay in the North Country and write small, obtuse poems that don't mean anything to anyone but me. Or I can take the risks, do the work, and possibly bite it, hard, but put something out into the world that means something. That makes someone rest a little easier, get a mental health diagnosis a little sooner. 

Who am I kidding? I made this decision a year ago , with that first post, when the Universe first started eyeing up my forehead. 

Wild & Young

"I don't know, Kel." My father and I are having our one serious conversation a year that isn't about work or John Axford's ERA.

It's a few days before Christmas, the one time of year where my father and I can have serious conversations without fighting. Every year we go out Christmas shopping for my mom together. It's one of my favorite holiday traditions, partly because my father loves Christmas. Something about the season makes it so that this trip, this one time out of the year, we can actually talk to one another. We've been shopping for his Christmas presents for Mom together ever since I was a little girl, and I've never told him, but it's the best Christmas gift I get.

This year we're talking about relationships and marriage. I tell him one of the best things about growing up with them as parents has been that my brothers and I have felt very little pressure to grow up in the conventional settle-down-have-kids-and-buy-a-house kind of way. Their attitude made it possible for me to go to school out of state, live in China, settle down here in Minnesota, get a graduate degree, move around often, and live a life of my own choosing.

He;s thoughtful "I met your mother at 24." He pauses and says to himself "I think she saved my life."

My father, particularly in his early years, is an enigma. I've heard bits and pieces of his early life, a little about how he met Mom, and snippets of stories about aunts and uncles here and there. I know that he was laid off from his job in his early twenties and lived on a beach in Belize for a few months. He would go down to the Kentucky Derby as a road trip with his friends every a year for many years. He was wild and young and making what appear to him retrospectively to be bad decisions and somehow my mother fell into his life.

She was no angel herself. A disco queen with an affinity for shoes, nail polish, and big hair she made her own youthful, rash decisions. But somehow the pair of them clicked and settled down and built a life together. I would have thought that after over thirty years of marriage, they would know all there is to know about one another. I've wondered a few times whether or not they've ever grown tired of one another's jokes and stories over the course of their marriage, if they've ever longed for the thrill that comes when you meet someone new. A few years ago Mom said something to me I've never forgotten.

"Your father," she said, looking up from her knitting, "is a very different person than the man I fell in love with."

I'm a little nervous about where this conversation is going. My mother is known for weird, slightly embarrassing non sequiturs, for instance, leaning over in the middle of Mass to ask when you last moved your bowels.

She continues, "It's like getting to fall in love with him all over again."

***

I'm driving back from Minneapolis, feeling more than a little wistful. I've spent the past three days in the company of the people I love tremendously, the people I refer to as my Minnesota family. It's always hard to leave them behind, but today on my friend Nick's birthday, a few days after he and Victoria announced their engagement, it's really difficult. I'm a weird mix of happy and sad, and I can't quite identify why I'm feeling the way I am. It's a good distance from Minneapolis to the North Country, and during the winter, night comes on quickly. By the time I start getting into town, the winter light is fading rapidly.

And it happens.

There have, for me, always been songs that are right for whatever period of my life. In high school, it was any song by the band Thursday. In college "Nobody Knows Me," by the Weepies. Graduate school was, hands down, the song "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show. Whenever those songs came on the radio, I had to listen to them all the way to the end. For whatever reason, whether teenage angst or good memories associated with them, the songs were (and still are) just right for that time in my life.

Anyway, I'm coming down the hill into my adoptive city when the song for this part of my life comes on the radio. And I realize why I have this funny wistful feeling. Regardless of what happens in the next few years, I think that this is going to be the part of my life that I always look back on with a certain fondness. Realistically, the last couple years have been challenging. God knows I've blogged enough about those challenges. But this is also the first time I can remember by life being wholly and completely my own. While I have obvious responsibilities (bills, family, work) those responsibilities are relatively minimal. I've spent the past year and a half without having to do homework or look after children or worry about whether or not my boyfriend is going to be pissed about the dishes in the sink.

I say this with utter sincerity (all the while feeling a bit hokey.) I feel like right now anything is possible. I could write a best-selling memoir and become a famous writer. Go back to school and become a noted astrophysicist. Close a million dollar gift. Make a difference in the lives of women and children. And those aspirations are good ones, they're ones I feel like I can be proud of, but even they don't encompass the whole of what I've trying to talk about.

I feel like I finally understand the gift of youth. That the dance parties we have in Victoria and Nick's basement, the long nights spent debating politics and religion over many glasses of wine, the cigars smoked while talking about art and love and life, these are all things that are possible in this way only right now, only because we're young. Of course they'll happen later in life too. One cannot surround oneself with interesting, intelligent, engaged people and expect them to become less so just because they get married, buy houses, have children. But whether it's the new year or number of engagements that have happened recently or confronting the mortality of someone I love, these recent months feel blessed in a way I neither anticipated nor recognized until now. It's as though something clicked in the past year or so and I've finally given myself permission to commit all of those youthful indiscretions I feel like I've missed.

***

Since their children have moved out of the house, Mom and Daddy have taken some amazing trips. Somewhere around their 25th wedding anniversary, my father bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and my parents have taken to taking cross-country motorcycle trips to listen to blues, eat BBQ, and generally act like young adults. They called me once at 2 am after a Springsteen concert, waking me up with the screaming and noise of motorcycles in the background. They are as lovey-dovey as a pair teenagers, which is simultaneously sweet and gross. 

I wonder what my parents would have thought of one another if Daddy hadn't lived like a drifter for a few months, if Mom had gone out a little less. It would be reductionist to say that they wouldn't have fallen in love and I wouldn't have been born and wocca wocca wocca. But I can't help but wonder if my mother would have asserted so firmly that she has continued falling in love with my father throughout the years if he hadn't started out a much different person than the man he's become. 

The gift my parents have started giving me as I've gotten older is more profound than they'll ever realize. The stories of their youthful indiscretions, of the mistakes they made, of the chances they took are a revelation. These stories are, whether they realize it or not, reinforcing that while my own story, my own youthful indiscretions may not lead to finding my one true love or settling anywhere close to their home, they're worth experiencing regardless. 

And they're teaching me that even when you get older, even when you've been in a committed relationship for 30+ years, have raised children, struggled through adulthood, and do all of the things that I dread, perhaps you still don't have to give up those memories of when you were wild and young.

Pineapple

It's the night before my loved one goes in for a cancer biopsy. I am functioning at my absolute lowest level, which is to say hardly functioning at all. I'm drinking tea, playing Tetris, and trying to avoid talking to anyone when my phone rings. It's my best friend of fourteen years and I know why she's calling. She's worried about how I'm dealing. I don't particularly want to talk, but answer to let her know I'm, you know, not crawling into a bottle of bourbon. We chat for a bit and when I get ready to say goodbye, she says "Hang on, I still have something to say to you."

She offers me a free plane ticket to New Orleans. For three days from now.

I turn her down.

I intimated in one of my earlier posts that the past couple months have been chaotic at best. In the interest of full disclosure, I will now say that November-December have been the worst fucking months of my life.

Someone I love has cancer and I am literally just waiting to find out of it's the horrible, contemplate-life-without-them kind of scary or the more easily treatable but still unwelcome kind of scary. I've never been as busy at work as I am right now. I can't get my own mental health shit under control and have had panic attacks on an average of two per day for the past three weeks. I haven't had a full night's sleep since late October. Due to all of the stress and madness going on right now, I can't seem to get physically well. I haven't seen my mom since August and I miss her so much that it's hard to breathe.

Also, have I mentioned that it won't stop snowing in Minnesota?

In a recent email to a friend I described myself using Jane Austen's characters. "In my mind, I'm Elizabeth Bennett. In real life, I'm probably more of a Fanny Price."

Fanny Price, for those of you who aren't Janeites, is the main character of Mansfield Park. She's reserved and deeply, painfully shy. She also happens to be an incredible listener (we introverts tend to be) and as a result the people in her life pour their guts out to her.

Like Fanny, I spend a lot of time listening. I try to avoid giving advice because I never feel like I'm getting the entire story. Additionally, I ate a cookie for breakfast this morning. I have no business giving advice about jobs or weddings or relationships to anyone. So I spend a lot of time listening and making empathetic noises. Chiming in when someone makes an utterly irrational claim and trying to steer them back on the path. It's a nice arrangement. The vast majority of my friends are external processors and are people with a lot of, um, emotions. They get someone to vent to and I get to feel like I'm actually being helpful.

Being the quiet, reasonable, available one has its drawbacks. I seem to find myself as the go-between for breakups more often than I would like. There are people in my life who are so emotional that I find myself absolutely, completely unable to sympathize with them in any meaningful way. As a result, I've become an obsessive call-screener.

To digress, I recognize that my own personal brand of repression and avoidance isn't the best case scenario. However. I don't really do crying unless someone has died or your marriage is heading towards divorce or your dissertation advisory committee has just torpedoed you or you've just watched David Tennant's final episode of Doctor Who.

The final and at present most difficult drawback is that when people are used to confiding in you it can be challenging to create your own emotional space. As I've been struggling to sort out my own emotions surrounding this cancer diagnosis, people are still confiding in me and it's not that I think what they're dealing with, be it a breakup or a fender bender, isn't important. It's that I have zero emotional energy to invest in anyone else right now. It's frustrating because I never developed the ability to say "I don't have time for you right now." I had sort of hoped that saying "I'm waiting to hear if someone close to me is going to have to go in chemo and radiation therapy" would do the trick, but we can all be a little self-involved at times. For God's sake, I write a blog. In first person. I know what it's like to be self-obsessed.

The worst part of all of this is that my reactions to other people have been so skewed. I am viciously angry when someone I've confided it about the details of this illness and the person suffering from it asks me how I'm doing, but when someone else asks to to proofread a graduate school paper or help them write a grant, things that objectively take more time and energy, I'm fine. It isn't rational. None of these emotions are rational. This illness this person is suffering from isn't rational.

When my best friend called with her Oprah moment my immediate, instinctive response was rational. I have a ton of work to do, I'm unlikely to be good company, I can't take Monday off at the last moment, I already made plans with other people for the weekend, Christmas is in just over a week and I have a million and six things to do before I can take off for the holidays, I should be spending hotel money on Christmas presents, etc. I made a rational decision not to take her up on her offer of a free plane ticket.

Shortly before Michelle called I had a long conversation with a very good friend, someone who is, if anything, taking up negative emotional space in my life right now. What I mean is despite living hundreds of miles away, she's helping me deal with all my shit in amazing, supportive ways. She is a very level-headed girl and knows how wrapped up I can get in my own head. She understands how I need facts to deal with anxiety and how I want the world to make sense forever and always. She also saw a loved one through their cancer diagnosis, treatments, and recovery, so she's got a good handle on what I'm feeling. As we were talking I broached the fact that I'm Fanny Price and that I listen to everyone else's problems without talking about my own. And I rambled on for a long time about all of this shitty emotional stuff that's going on and how ill-equipped I feel to deal with it.

When I finally wound down she said something that cut through all of the fear and anger and apprehension I was feeling.

You're now in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple. Rationality can't touch this.  

After I hung up on Michelle I saw my chat box with her flashing in the corner of the screen. I mulled over the second part of that phrase "Rationality can't touch this." She's right, of course. Over the past two months I've started to live in a universe were rationality and rational responses to things are, well, they're still options, but maybe not the best options.

It takes about eighteen minutes of struggling with my inner control freak before I can pick up the phone again.

"I'm an idiot," are the first words out of my mouth.
"I'll see you on Friday. The weather in New Orleans is supposed to be in the low 70s."

If I have to live in a universe where 1+3=a pineapple, where I'm losing control over my emotions and blowing up at people when they try to confide in me, where illness and death and uncertainty are constantly on my mind, I might as well also accept that I'm living in a universe where I'm willing to jump on a plane with my best friend at the drop of a hat.