Make Good Art.

-Neil Gaiman

Monday, December 29, 2014

Plural

"Well, I mean, Kelly is plural now and we have to start taking that into account."

I start laughing and end up with beer up my nose. It's been a really long week, and I'm--we're, I suppose--hanging out and having pizza and beer with one of my old roommates. She's tired and a little frazzled, talking to her husband about how we need to see one another more often and the difficulty of coordinating schedules.

After coughing the carbonation out of my lungs I say: "What a funny way of thinking about it."

She shrugs. "I always thought it was kind of nice."

***

I'm going to be sad to see 2014 go.

It feels like a selfish sentiment, given the general fucked up-ness of the past twelve months. But the truth is that grim global realities aside, 2014 has been the best year of my life. 

Independent of the whole ohmygodLOVE thing, this year has been fantastic. I celebrated a year in the Twin Cities, packed suitcases, took cross-country flights, and crossed finish lines and things off my  my 30x30 list.

This has been a great year. 

Here's the funny thing. 

All of those things felt really good. I love marking things off of to-do lists and travel is always deeply satisfying. 

That's not what made this year wonderful. 

During the course of the past year I've felt less and less like I was waiting for the bottom to drop out on me. Work has felt manageable, my family is healthy, I live in a city I love surrounded by people I cherish. Things feel more stable now than they have in a long time. Until this weekend, I had a really hard time pinning down what, exactly, was so different about 2014.

***

I'm happy. 

That's it. There are no qualifiers or addendum to the statement. That's what changed in 2014, and it's such a simple thing, I feel like I should be embarrassed that it took me so long to figure out. But I spent so long with depression and anxiety that I forgot what it felt like to live without them. And even in the process of getting better things were still kind of bad. But over the course of the past year, my worst days have become roughly equivalent to what my best days used to be. 

Happiness has stopped feeling tenuous. 

Partly, I expect, from therapy and sorting out any number of things that I had repressed for awhile. Partly from learning triggers and healthy coping mechanisms and any number of the other tedious grown-up things you learn to do in therapy. Partly from falling in love.

Being plural has a lot to do with it. 

Not just the simple being plural of being in a couple, but the complicated, beautiful, crazy feeling of having a group of people who love you and have your well-being in mind, people who bring you pho when you're sick, let you cry on their couch when you're sad, celebrate your successes and milestones and let you be a part of theirs.  

They make happiness feel like maybe, this year, it might be permanent. 

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Grace 2.0

The theological gears in my brain have started spinning again.

It was sort of inevitable after the weekend. We went to go see a play called The Whale on Friday night. I spent most of the week looking forward to it. The boyfriend told me that it was a beautiful show, and he hadn't missed with a recommendation.

Most of the time I know what (and how to avoid) things that I find profoundly upsetting. I flatly refuse to see shows or movies with sexual violence. Ditto domestic violence. Actually, I consume very little violent media, at all. My favorite video games are puzzle based games rather than first-person shooters.

Aside from violence, I tend to do pretty well.

The Whale, though.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I spent most of the play crying. Or that it impacted my mood through much of the weekend. I went to bed sad on Friday, teared up a few times thinking about it Saturday, and spent a solid chunk of today writing and thinking about it.

One of the most interesting parts of the show completely opposite ways the boyfriend and I saw it. For me, it was a show about watching someone commit suicide by tiny increments. For the boyfriend it was a show about redemption and the ability to see grace and kindness in other people, even when they are verifiably rotten.

Either way, the show was a lot to process.

In theology, when we talk about grace, we talk about God breaking into the course of human events. For Christians, the major example would be the Incarnation, but also through sacraments and the liturgy.

One of the things I loved best about my theological education (especially graduate school) was the idea that moments of grace would break into our daily lives, without the sacraments, without liturgy, we could find these little moments of God's love in the everydayness. But more than the in-breaking-of-the-Divine-into-the-world, what appealed to me most was the idea that everyday grace could be transformative. 

The accessibility of God in those moments, or the idea of it, always appealed to me. 

It's been . . . awhile since I've thought about anything even tangentially related to theology. But our differing reactions to a play that was about depression, loss, and redemption, has me thinking about grace throughout the weekend. 

Relationships are such grace-filled things. 

Not in the big born-of-a-virgin or the slightly-less-big-consecration-of-the-Eucharist kind of way, but in the everyday way that has always meant more to me. The chance to see yourself in a different way is no small thing. Particularly when seeing yourself in that different way makes you want, quite simply, to be a better version of yourself. More than that, it's the other person's ability to look past who you are in your worst moments and say "I believe in the person you want to be and want to help you get there." 

That kind of unflappable belief in another person and the transformative power of grace is, I think, what The Whale was about. And it's something I would have missed, had I not had someone there to help me see something that wasn't colored by my own experience. 

Like I said, perhaps not the Incarnation, but in my worst moments, it doesn't feel any less miraculous. 


Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Drama

Here, in no particular order, are some things I always thought I wanted:
  • Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.
  • Huge, romantic gestures. 
  • Huge, dramatic fights followed by some ridiculous making up including both of the above. 

Needless to say, my adult relationships have all been kind of rocky. 

Someone twice my age? Well, it worked for Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon, why is my life any different? Living half a continent away from one another and communicating mainly by once-a-week letters because our schedules are at odds? It has a faint tang of Jane Austen, does it not? An emotionally abusive genius I can't stand unless I'm wasted? If the waifish Zelda Fitzgerald can do it, why can't I?

Yeah, I know

I bought into all of ohmygodtruelovehastobeallconsuming bullshit, the idea that in order for Love To Be Real it had to be Passionate. And I equated Passion with really specific things. Let's get real. I conflated Passion with Sex and Drama. As if eating one another alive was the measure of the seriousness of a relationship. 

We all know how that story ends. Francesca spending eternity in a whirlwind, Cleopatra with an asp at her breast, Catherine locked in her rooms at Thrushcross Grange.

Me, crying in a feminist sex shop in Minneapolis. 

As established, I am a colossal fucking idiot when it comes to relationships. 

Here, in no particular order, are some things I never knew I wanted:
  • Texts during the middle of the day simply to ask "How's your day going?" 
  • 96 (continuous!) hours in another person's company. 
  • A major holiday dinner with a family that isn't related to me. 
  • A cat to like me. Well. At least not actively despise me. 
  • Flowers. 
  • My spare set of keys with someone who would make use of them. 
  • The bed to smell like someone else. 
  • Sleeping wrapped up in someone's arms. 

These things, these quiet, day-to-day, being an actual part of one another's lives blow my mind almost every day. I am actually amazed by the extent to which I enjoy family dinners, evenings in with the cat, drinking champagne and cheering so loudly during superhero movies that the neighbors start knocking on the living room wall. It feels completely natural in a way I've never experienced before.

I'm astounded by how being a part of someone's life can expose the depth and breadth of their heart, of their capacity to love.

And all of those things, the having-of-the-spare-keys and sleeping-with-his-shirt-under-the-pillow doesn't mean that the other stuff is missing. It turns out your neighbors can hate you because you cheer during Captain America: The Winter Soldier and for the other reasons people hate sharing thin-walled apartments with couples.

Drama, it turns out, is overrated.

Thank God.