Scars

I have a tendency toward keloid scars. Keloids are, for those of you uninitiated into the realm of gross-but-non-lethal-things-that-can-go-wrong-with-the-human-body, enthusiastic scar tissue (Of course I'd end up with enthusiastic scar tissue. Jesus.). Keloids are scars that don't know when they're supposed to stop growing. As a result the scar tissue keeps growing past the point of the original injury.

It sounds very sci-fi doesn't it?

But like I said, non-lethal. But non-lethal doesn't necessarily mean that they're not painful. They itch, especially after showers. They're ugly and they're deeply embarrassing and I have three of them and I hate them with all of the intensity of a supernova.

Two of them are visible. One, on the top of my right breast, is from some small childhood injury. It's the one that makes me most self-conscious because it's not just visible, it's incredibly visible (Thanks, giant rack, no real way to draw attention away from the red lump on the top of you when you're calling so much attention to yourself). The second is on my left knee and is the result of a cycling accident a few years ago. That one I mind a little bit less because it's easily covered by tights, long(er) skirts, or crossing my legs. The third one, on the side of my right breast is, thankfully, always covered. That one comes from one of those particularly scary ohshiti'manadultandineedtofigurethissituationout moments.

I don't like when people ask about them (because people always do) not because of any particularly traumatic experience surrounding them, but because I hate being reminded of these small imperfections. I don't like to acknowledge them, to say Yes, these are a part of my past. I'd prefer to gloss over them, pretend they don't exist. 

While in graduate school, I spent several thousand dollars that I did not have for steroid injections into the scars in the hope that they would flatten out and fade.

It didn't seem to work. 

***

"Yeah, you got very huggy last night."

Michelle and I are out to breakfast the day after my birthday party. I'm a little rough around the edges, feeling like I should be wearing my sunglasses indoors and wishing to the gods that I could take all of the fucking silverware away from the child the next table over so maybe he'll just keep shrieking instead of shrieking and banging on the table with everything he can reach.

"What do you mean very huggy? I'm almost always flying in someone else's Soviet Airspace."

The kid at the next table over has now gotten out of his seat and is running around the table shouting "Pow! Pow! Pow!" I'm looking for the waiter. It feels like 200 years since we ordered coffee and if I don't get my biscuits and gravy (pepper gravy being well known for its healing properties) I may literally die. My organs will just give up the ghost.

"Yeah, it was worse than normal."

"Oh Christ."

The kid trips and starts screaming. I put my head on the table.

"Wake me up when the coffee gets here. Or I die."

"Sounds good."

***

 I've been weird about physical intimacy lately. 

Once again, I am emphatically not talking about sex. I'm talking about the back rubs, the hugs, the sitting-super-close-to-people-on-the-couch, the sleeping next to people intimacy that I love(d). I've been like this since . . .June? I can't figure out what the hell is going on with me. It's unsettling. And it's not that I don't want to be as close as I've always been with people, it's just that something's holding me back. 

I've been weird lately.

***

I'm on a dating time-out. 

It's been probably a month since I've gone out with Blah. We went to a sports bar to watch a baseball game sometime in . . . August? Afterward I pulled the fade-away, something I hate doing, but I just couldn't muster the emotional energy that conversation would have taken.  

I'm trying to figure out when and how you tell a guy that you're seeing "Oh, hey, so a year ago I had a nervous breakdown. I spent some time under a psychiatrist's care for OCD, anxiety, and depression. Sometimes I still have flare-ups, but for the most part I think I'm waaaaaaaaaaaay saner than I used to be. Who's your favorite Firefly character?" 

I haven't been playing well with others lately, and it seemed like an appropriate moment to put myself on a time out and figure out what I want and who I want and how the hell I'm going to drop what feels like an atom bomb on some poor unsuspecting schmuck. 

***

I want to start a relationship a month and a half to two months in. 

I want to skip all of the stupid, unfun getting to know you parts. The career summary without talking about the parts that interest either of us. The sibling listing. The "where did you grow up?" 

I want to fast-forward t the part where seeing their name pop up on your mobile makes you dizzy. The part where you gross out all of your friends with the dopey look on your face. The part where you know one another well enough to plan dates that are actually interesting and fun and engaging. The part where you go fifteen rounds over something you're both passionate about and then take forty-five minutes to say goodnight while you're parked in fifteen minute parking. The part where you can't keep your hands off of one another. 

I want to start a relationship there. 

***

During one of my rare moments of honesty with myself, I admit that my desire to go on a dating time-out and my lack of interest in physical intimacy are part and parcel of my unwillingness to let other people see my scars and my desire to start a relationship partway in.

I am petrified of getting hurt.

The idea of any kind of vulnerability--physical, emotional, whatever--is scary enough that I'd rather just sit it out. I'm ridiculously, deliriously happy with my life right now, and letting someone else in is just going to fuck it all up. Or rather, it feels like it's just going to fuck it all up. I know. I know. The right person won't care about your stupid scar tissue. Maybe they won't notice. And you're not as crazy as you used to be, and hell everyone's a little crazy anyway, you'll probably be one of the more normal girls he's dated.

Trust me. I know. I did go through therapy. I can do the pep talk.

But opening up means acknowledging the scars, letting someone see them, saying "Hey, I've gotta tell you something about the person I used to be." Instead it's just so much easier to keep injecting the steroids and hoping this time will smooth everything out.

Though, that doesn't seem to be working. 

Settle Down

I've gotta be one of the few people in the world whose closest friends gives her advice based on early 19th century literature.

I've sent one of my two best friends a loooooooong, feelings-heavy email. The length and email content are not unusual for us. She's one of the few people I confide in on a regular basis. She'd be delighted and horrified to know that I think of her as my Mother Confessor. Oh well. One of the best things about our relationship is that she's always let me communicate the things that are hard for me to talk about through text, and I'll always be grateful to her for it.

I feel like an asshole.

That's the rising action and the denouement. I feel like, and am, an asshole.

The bit in the middle is the complicated bit (isn't it always). It's the part of the email I rewrite seven times trying to find a better way to say that I feel blah about Blah.

The fact that my short name for a guy that I've been out with a few times, a guy who is genuinely interested in me, who returns my phone calls and texts with surprising promptness, who has a good, steady job, who owns his own house (in a part of the city I love). and pays all his bills ahead of time, Blah, concerns me.

It's--security, stability, niceness--what I'm supposed to want, right?

The email becomes less of an email and more of a journal entry on why dating Blah feels like settling. He is confused by the motion I make that means my heart is exploding. Like, actually doesn't understand the emotional intensity that I'm trying to signify. When I recite (Recite, people, there's no book involved) one of my favorite poems, for him he looks at me blankly and says "Oh, you like poetry?" He has asked me more than once to describe what I mean when I say seeing jazz live switches me on and makes my head buzz. When we go out we talk about work and baseball, sometimes about American History and I just feel . . .

blah.

***

I settle. 

My therapist knew it. My friends all know it. My mother regularly reminds me of it. 

It's easy to defend, especially as a woman. We get so many messages about how holding out for the exact right guy is going to leave us old, embittered spinsters. How there's no such thing as Prince Charming (as if the women who espouse settling never figured out Self-Rescuing Princess). How no one will ever be perfect and ohmygodyourjunkisgoingbad and you might as well just cut a few of those dealbreakers off of your list.

Do guys feel the same pressure?

I settle.

I regularly punch in a weight class that's justalittle beneath me. I date men who can't keep up with me intellectually, or who don't find arguing about Art and Fiction and Whether or Not Women Self-Select Out of Scientific Careers to be a turn-on. I date men who would rather meet me at Brothers after I've spent the night at the Artists' Quarter and who aren't curious or engaged in anything beyond work-family-home-sports. 

Look, I know how this sounds. Unless someone can finish the Sunday New York Times crossword in ten minutes or fewer I'm going to kick them out of bed. I am the worst person in the world because if you can't appreciate the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Concertmaster's solos on Mozart's Serenades I'm going to like you justalittlebit less. 

I know. Pretentious to the Nth degree. 

Go to hell. 

Most of the time the men I'm dating meet none of these criteria. None. And most of the time I end up miserable and hurt and disgusted with myself. But it's just so much easier to settle. It's easier to tell myself "Oh, these things aren't actually important. I don't actually need to be stimulated by someone's mind or passions or what moves them. I can handle football and happy hours and talking incessantly about cars." 

It's so much easier to settle, to drop a weight class than it is to try for the guys I actually want to date. I'm terrified that the men I want to be with--the brainiacs with weird passions, the Picard-types, the types of guys who can explain quantum mechanics or game theory to me--will be settling by dating me. 

I don't want to be the person someone settles for. 

***

The email that I get back from my confessor regarding Blah is characteristically sweet and funny. It's nice to have surrounded myself with loving, interesting people who genuinely care about me. 

The advice I get is based, on all things, Gone with the Wind. "Don't settle. Don't even think about settling. You will not be happy. The other person will not be happy. This is what I learned from Gone with the Wind. Nothing else needs to be said about that."

She's right, of course. I've got to break it off with Blah. The truth is that when we're together I find myself trying to switch off, trying to settle down because he finds my constant exuberance and enthusiasm odd. (And not charmingly odd, which seems to be the best I can hope for.) The problem, of course, is that once I'm switched on--about art or jazz or the book I'm reading or the food I've just made--it's really hard for me to switch it back off. 

And I don't want to switch it back off. 

The way, of course, to be able to live the kind of switched-on craziness that I crave is to stop settling. I've got to stop worrying that my beloved brainiacs are going to feel like they're settling because I require a simple(r) explanation of coronal ejections or irrational numbers. I mean, there's gotta be one out there who doesn't mind doing so if it means he gets his own walking database of poetry and fiction, philosophy and world religion, right? 

Right?

Blah. 

Stories

Ford's Theater really gets to me. 

Ford's Theater gets to me in a surprising way, but then again, the entire weekend has been surprising.

It'll take me hours to work out exactly why it gets to me, but when I leave I'm feeling funny--just a little bit off--and I don't quite know why. 

I'm wandering around the museum reading a story I already know and know well. It's the story of John Wilkes Booth's escape from D.C. after he shot President Lincoln. I'm familiar with the details, the places he stopped, his co-conspirators, how has plot changed after the Confederacy's surrender. What surprises me the most, what really worms its way under my skin, isn't Lincoln's assassination. It's not standing in the room where he passed, it's not even reading his second inaugural address later (my favorite piece of non-fiction word-smithing ever) at the Memorial.

Although, Jesus. That was incredible.

It isn't until I'm finished with Ford's Theater and the Lincoln Memorial and am sitting on the steps eating a PB&J that I realize what's upsetting me. It's Booth, unequivocally one of the greatest villains in American history that I feel sorry for. More than that, I feel like I understand Booth. At least, understand a little bit more about him than I expected.

Like I said, the entire weekend has been surprising.

***

A few years ago, on a road trip with a friend from graduate school, I started to tell stories about my childhood. 

I was driving and couldn't see the reaction the woman next to me was having, but I probably could have guessed. 

After about fifteen minutes, she reached across the car, put a hand on my arm and said "Kel, this is the most I've ever head you talk about yourself at one time and you're talking about feelings and what you think about things that aren't God and space and poetry. She paused and then continued. "I really want to affirm you in what you're doing right now. I think it's wonderful." 

When she was finished, I cleared my throat and asked about her thesis. Things were quiet for the next fifty miles. 

***

I spend too much time in my own head.

My graduate school friends would tease me about it. I could, apparently, intellectually eviscerate someone in class without much pause (a fact I attribute less to intelligence and more to writing in books and a good long-term memory) but the second someone said something that hurt or upset me on a personal level I'd get quiet and polite, leave the situation as soon as possible, and then resurface a few weeks later ready to talk.

I don't know how to fix this.

I don't know if it needs to be fixed.

I suspect it does.

***

The first time my friend accuses me (accuses, really, Kelly?) me of  "weirdly in touch with my emotions" I accuse him of being out of his head. 

It strikes me as a stupid thing to say, especially as the conversation that we've just had is about how it takes me the aforementioned two weeks to consider how I feel about, well, whatever. Sure, I can articulate immediate reactions to things "Your argument is specious." "I love jazz!" "Citation needed." "Everyone's I.Q. just dropped ten points based on overhearing that comment." But anything deeper than intellectual disgust or anger or sheer mind-blowing joy takes me longer to sort out. 

He takes a pull from his pint an insists. "Weirdly. In touch. With your emotions." 

It's a recurring fight we'll have for years, the sort of threadbare, comfortable argument that you good-naturedly bicker about without really caring about citations or I.Q. points but just need something comfortable and familiar. 

***

Anyway, I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, looking over notes and journal entries from the past few days when I turn to something I scribbled sometime in the past twenty-four hours, but I can't particularly remember where.

The problem with creating your own narrative is that it doesn't require peer review.

It sounds like the sort of thing I'd flip on the bedside light to note to myself (sleepily convinced of my own brilliance) or would pause to in front of an exhibit to write. Either way, I don't remember when I put it down, but when I read it I feel like someone has yanked my head back.

If you know anything about the history of the Lincoln Assassination it's that John Wilkes Booth was completely, utterly convinced that people would applaud him for assassinating Lincoln. For God's sake, he saw himself as an American Brutus, going so far as to shout sic semper tyrannis after he shot Lincoln.

Although, taking a moment for brief historical commentary. The suspension of habeas corpus? Dick move, Lincoln.

Back on topic, John Wilkes Booth spent a lot of time in his own head. He constructed an entire narrative in which he was the hero, where the somewhat controversial head of a nation was not merely controversial  but tyrannical.

This is what's sparking the strange feelings of . . . not empathy. Not understanding. Pity, probably (ask me again in a week) for Booth that I'm feeling.

The stories we tell--no, that's not quite right. The stories I tell about myself matter. The things I decide to air out, the places where I air them out, those are all reflections of how I view the world and my place in it. The fact that I can only say some things via text or when the lights are out, that it takes me weeks to be able to say how something impacted me matters. They're real life, edited and portrayed through the filter of a woman who struggles to spend time outside of her own head, who feels things (and feels them deeply) without being able to explain what she's feeling. And it's problematic, because there's no process for peer-review in these stories, the narrative that I construct is just that--the narrative I construct. The based upon a true story version of the world with which I interact every day.

While I'm certainly (I mean, I hope I'm not) engaging in narrative self-deception at the same scale as John Wilkes Booth, the possibility that I feel like I have even this much in common with him is deeply, profoundly disturbing.

At least, I think it is. Ask me in another two weeks and I'll be able to tell you for sure.

Rock Me

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

Every sweet song that comes on the radio is about me. Rather than walk through my neighborhood in the gathering dusk, I dance. I skip. I sing. Twice in the past week you could have driven down Marshall at around 7:40 and seen me pirouetting, for Christ's sake. I'm so frustratingly gooey and ridiculous that there are soberer, quiet moments where I think:

Oh my god. I hate myself.  

I can't help it. I haven't felt like this in ages.

***

I wake up sometime in the middle of the night. I'm cuddled up on the couch, wrapped in a cottony, fluffy blanket. There's a woodstove at my feet and the sound of rain on the roof. The entire room is lit by twinkly white lights and candles. I am warm. I am happy. I am loved. 

I've woken up to the sound of a cello, a guitar, and a three part harmony on one of my favorite songs. I sing along (quietly enough that I don't disturb the delicate balance of the other voices) and smile to myself. 

Wagon Wheel was my introduction to bluegrass. It's the song that inevitably is played whenever my musical friends get together. It's a song I can remember hearing for the first time with the kind of crystalline clarity that makes me suspect it's actually a false memory. It's a song that I have to hear to the end whenever it's started. It's the song I sing in the shower and we sang on my 25th birthday sitting on the floor of my shitty, mouse-infested graduate school apartment. 

Yikes. I suddenly realize how gross that floor was and by extension, how  gross sitting on it was. 

When I was attending a Benedictine college I heard a lot of chatter about the values of hospitality and community. I did not realize how deeply those values would impact my life until full of risotto and wine and conversation, I would stay up late having marathon conversations about God and Love and Truth and Children. Conversations where things that had influenced my life abstractly as a theologian (Faith, Love, Charity) were brought to bear on the life I was living and the decisions I was making about community, kindness, and sustainability. 

Somehow everything was always proceeded or followed by music. Huge, angry intellectual sparring matches devolved into harmonies and melodies. Hurt feelings were soothed away by familiar choruses and even if we didn't all believe in an afterlife, we sure as hell loved to sing about it.

And always (usually at my request) came Wagon Wheel. It's been such a part of my life that I can remember each of the specific instances in which we sang it as a group and why those days were important and what they meant in my developing adulthood. I smile when I think about the future times we'll sing it and wonder what those occasions will mean and how they will shape me the way all those past late nights have. I can't help but feel like the song has wormed its way into my DNA. That, should I ever actually have kids, loving it will be passed down through the generations until a 100 years from now some descendant of mine will be around a campfire asking "Hey, does anyone know that old song . . ."

***

The past ten years of my adult life have been a series of experiments on how to (and please forgive the douchiness of what I'm about to say) live authentically. I've learned how community grows organically and what I can do to help that community thrive (Pro tip: live nearby). I've failed in building that community and authenticity in some places (the North Country) but have laid down deep roots in others (who knew that Stearns, Hennepin, and Ramsey counties could all occupy the same space in my heart? Jesus, who knew that I would fall in love with Stearns County?). Growing up has been a process of deciding that I want to live a life where community, charity, patience, and kindness are not just things I think about on holidays or when someone shows me some small example of them, but are things that I want to influence my daily life and work. 

And before I sound too ohmygodi'mtotallyselfactualized here, I need to say that these things are really difficult for me. They're well, virtues I guess, that I don't have. At all. Anyone who has had the misfortune to drive with me through a traffic jam or catch me when I'm late can attest to how quickly I lose my cool. I'm not particularly good at being attentive to the present, when I'm tired or hungry I have a razor-sharp tongue, and nine times out of ten I would love to tell community to just sod off already. 

***

I am completely, annoyingly, breath-stoppingly in love.

I'm so in love that it makes me giddy.

Have I mentioned that I'm so in love that it makes me completely fucking annoying? 

God help the entire world when I actually fall in love with someone rather than something.

For the time being, I'm somewhat chagrined to admit that what I'm in love with is the life that I am slowly, agonizingly building for myself. A life where special occasions are where frustration and kindness, community and solitude, silence and harmonies all co-exist.

So rock me, momma like a wagon wheel. 

Love and Rockets

Might as well turn on some TNG.

It's the thought that runs through my head when my eyes pop open at 11:00 on Friday night. I was asleep, deeply, for about an hour before a nightmare woke me up. It was one of those nightmares that requires me to switch on the bedside lamp and put my feet on the floor. I know this kind of post-nightmare awake. I'm not going to get back to sleep for another hour at least, and I still have that last season of The Next Generation to get through, so I might as well watch an episode or two. I am entirely annoyed because I wanted to get back into the swing of things with this Saturday. I was going to get back into my North Country schedule of working out and errands and a logical, orderly Saturday. Grumbling, I crawl out of bed and head to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

I flip over my phone to check the time and realize I have a string of messages from a friend. He's awake, he stayed up to watch a rocket launch, and is jazzed about it. There's also a hilarious not-entirely-subtext of one-upmanship about the messages that's also not, well, exactly unwarranted. He's been on the receiving side of a bunch of gushy messages about how much I love my new city and how happy I am with my life and the magical course my summer has taken. (Should I revisit? Biked 150 miles in two days, Dessa, Gaiman, St. Louis wedding, family vacation, Milwaukee road trip, moving to my favorite city, swimming underneath the stars in Northern Minnesota, pause for breath, phew.) But despite the fact that I've had a remarkable summer and have been extremely ohmygodmylifeissowonderfulandiloveeveryoneandeverythinginit I am still so jealous that he got to see this rocket launch that I could spit. And I don't hesitate to tell him. The conversation (d)evolves over the next few hours and after dwelling briefly on love and how we fall in love differently and if we're to blame for being (a little bit) crazy, we wrap up with Christina Hendricks (seriously) and the next thing I know it's 2:00 am and I never did get around to those Trek episodes

***

Realizing that you've been dead wrong in how you perceive yourself is a completely humiliating experience.

Last fall, right around this time of year, I wrote about how I suspected that I might be part Vulcan. It was partly the fault of graduate school, where I was among the least outwardly emotional people there (unless you dissed Karl Rahner in some capacity). My friends joked that I was a cyborg and that they weren't certain what to do with me.

When I wrote that post last year, it felt right. It felt like "This is what I've going through. This is how I've always been. This is how I will always be."  

It felt true.

But the course of the past twelve months has consisted of slowly pulling my heart out of the glass jar where I was keeping it hidden away (all of which has been, of course, painstakingly documented here) and discovering how to engage with my emotions appropriately again.

And it's been complicated and difficult and blah blah blah. And I absolutely do no trust the person I am these days. And I need permission to be happy. And I largely expect that this whole grand experiment is about a day and a half away from crashing down around my head.

But the fact of the matter is that I was never part Vulcan. Or I was, but it was because I did some kind of crazy mind-meld with an equally crazy bitch who then took over my life for ohidon'tknow FIVE YEARS. That person was never actually me.

Part of the reason I finally realized this is because I've recently(ish) met people who actively turn off their emotions. They choose not to feel things, I suspect in the same way I decided that I was going to turn over the reins to the other woman living in my head for all those years. Granted they don't seem depressed, anxious, or angry, but they do just choose not to feel things.

Sounds a bit sociopath, doesn't it?

***

Inevitably after three hours of talking about love and rockets, I can't get to sleep. I make a second cup of lavender tea and pick up my book about the Victorians and the invention of modern crime (I wonder why I'm an insomniac who's prone to nightmares.) I should, if anything, be even more annoyed at myself for staying up so late, for allowing myself to get drawn into a conversation that would keep me awake and just bitch my Saturday plans. I shouldn't be the type of woman who makes such illogical decisions. 

When I finish my tea and snap off the light, I mentally rearrange my next day. I cast aside the workout in favor of an afternoon nap and hopefully catching up with one of my best friends, who is in town for the day. I leave myself some time for reading and push away any thoughts of how I made the wrong decision. Because for as illogical as it is to toss aside a lovely, planned Saturday morning with lots of crossing things off to-do lists (which would, objectively, be delightful) I think that this is the person I actually want to be, the person I was once, the kind of girl who's kept awake thinking about love and rockets.