I’ve known all along that divinity is equipped with a sense of humor. We have news. Fake news, bluster, advertising, propaganda, lies. Falsehoods. Not the damned truth by any means. Every resume’, every job application, every interview is filled with images of self that probably originated in the carnival house of mirrors. Putting your best foot forward, presenting with a winning attitude. Believe in yourself, don’t hide your light under a bushel. Don’t sell yourself short.
Whether I am selling myself short or not, I truly prefer not to be offered for sale in any fashion. Let’ face it, the only reason one needs to be hired for a job is to gain ready capital for survival in a capitalist economy, and the only way to truly advance in a capitalist economy is by brokering the labor of others. We are all opportunistic infections on the landscape, no more and no less. My Mother told me so, and I do not doubt Her.
We have infected a thriving biosphere and modified it for our own comfort and short-sighted vision. I’m not sure that’s how we see it, but it is what it is. We’re racing headlong into the end of planetary integrity, and we seem to care very little. I’m not big environmentalist, and in these times I truthfully consider all that low on my list of urgent concerns. I’m just trying to survive out here, and pretty much on my own in that endeavor.
And what of those who have gone before me? Is it simply a fantasy that ancestors and progenitors are still part of my present reality, or had their time passed? I remember many of the lessons taught, but as I also remember – you won’t understand those lessons until you are ready. It’s one of those little gotchas that have been mixed in for us to navigate. The Divine has a sense of humor, and sometimes we are the butt of all the jokes (whose bright idea was it to invent mammals that have live births followed by a parade of hormones and societal expectations thereafter. Society is a killer, and so are its expectations.
The past is immovable, although our memories and perceptions of it can be manipulated very easily and our psyches are fragile. We don’t get a do-over or a rerun, don’t get a dress rehearsal for anything but stage plays. Why does it taunt us so? If we knew then what we know now, would that cancel out the experience. If we knew now what we learned then, I suspect we might bore ourselves to death. Nobody likes an orderly growth spurt or predictable surge in consciousness.
Collectively and individually, we’re a messy non-stop jangle of contradictions complete nonsense, but it seems to work for us. Well, it kind of works if you don’t count the wars and long periods of creative stagnation, but I suppose nobody’s perfect. I just find that we’re a bit behind in defining our purpose. Instead, we’re stuck in our heads worrying about centuries old books and denying history. That’s productive. (Not.)
Why are we here, and what do we want? I know what I don’t want far more than I know what I do want, and I’m not sure if that’s how it’s supposed to go. Regardless, that’s where I find myself the vast majority of the time, saying no rather than yes. No fascism! No authoritarianism! But what, then? Well, democracy of course. Right? But what exactly is that? It’s an oversimplification to say that democracy is the absolute ideal for an equitable and just way to share a rock hurtling through space with 12 billion of your closest friends. We’re more complicated than that, and with each passing day we discover more complicating factors that we do not understand. It was kind of a kicker to be given brains that cannot keep pace with our hormones, with our insatiable (and self-defeating) need to control just about everything. (Bless our hearts, y’all.)
I have to wonder if the Divine is actually sentient in such a way as we might be able to comprehend. That’s what most of us are taught, that Divinity is kind of a superhuman and otherworldly force of nature as we know it. That’s what we call God is humanoid, in some cases with blue eyes and gentle eyes (though that is but one of God’s persona). I truly believe that we lack the scope of intellect and experience necessary to actually see divinity in its true form. Accordingly, we have created a body of mythology to comfort us in our unknowing, but comically we engage in playground conflicts about whose vision of divinity is the best one. Christians get the prize for conceiving of the most complicated design, incorporating three aspects of deity into one package, with one of the persona consisting of a non-human form. The holy trinity is a test of faith and blind obedience, if nothing else.
Most ancient civilizations dreamt of non-human powers greater than themselves, in multiplicity. The Greeks and Romans had a hierarchical staff of gods, goddesses, complete with offspring and even family pets. The Egyptians got creative and came up with superhuman/animal chimera – dogs with a human body, humans with the head of a bird, and so on. India came up with deities sporting multiple arms, legs, and in some cases the principal parts of animals like elephants. Forest dwellers had trees and fairies, and humans had special powers that were inherent (not super-natural). Africa had warrior goddesses, and wars. All of them had creation stories and stories that depicted some cataclysm that separated humans from the gods, from the source energy. I believe that’s where we’re living now, in the void that separates us from the divine. That’s probably what our true purpose is, to make our way back to our start, our origination point. Not a bad quest, although I’m not sure we’ll ever be successful in understanding it.
We are wayward, we are prodigal, we are flawed and incomplete, but we are here. We screw up a lot, and we repeat ourselves a lot. We also have short memories, and we’re very impatient. Our vibratory energy is rather low, and we need to have complex things run by us more than once. Our biggest enemy is our arrogance, and our biggest asset is our compassion and kindness. On any given day, we stray from both and make things more difficult than they have to be. I believe we ultimately want peace, but we’re doing a fine job of blocking that on a collective level.
If only someone could return from the “other side”, just to let us know if we’re on the right track or need to do immediate and drastic course correction. If we knew which of us had the right answers for those really big questions, like whether the light bulb stays on in the refrigerator after the door is closed. Unfortunately, the joke is on us, because if someone did return from the “other side”, we’d most likely continue to argue about their validity and engage in serious conflict over their ability to present a clear and unbiased picture of what they had experienced. What is truth worth if you can’t have a war over it and bludgeon others into accepting your view of it? What indeed is truth worth?
I just posted something I wrote in the middle of the night on March 28th. It was one of those weird nights when I couldn’t sleep if my life had depended on it, and I had no idea why. Something was trying to get out of me, and I wasn’t allowed to rest until it had been fully liberated. I have no idea if what came out that night was all of it or not, but so be it. Maybe I will never get all of it out, but I’m not in the same place I was when I wrote that.
Depression is one of those maladies that is different for every person who claims it, and remains invisible to others. It’s not something I asked for, or something I brought on. It’s something that is as much a part of me as my toenails. It hides from me while steadily gaining ground in my psyche, telling me scary stories about how I am the biggest loser and will always be such. Some of that was given to me, I think but some of it has built on itself and created a new darkness. It’s a guest that will not leave, a never-ending trough of misery.
If you’ve never had major depression, you won’t understand how what you see of me does not always match what is going on inside of me. I love to joke, love to solve puzzles, love to make music, and incite my small dog to near hysteria but that doesn’t translate to happiness for me. I’m not sure I know what happiness really is, or how I might go about attaining it.
I don’t need your Google searches around the topic of depression, and I could really not care less about what a depressed brain looks like on an MRI. I don’t need to know that you believe you understand, because your ex-husband was depressed after your divorce, and you have a friend who never got over her son’s death. I want you to know you don’t understand what it’s like to walk through the world with a rain cloud over your head that only you know is there, and sometimes it storms but mostly it just drips and blocks out the sun. It’s always there, and so it seems quite normal to seek protection whenever you venture out into the world. Because it was normalcy for me to feel that way, it never occurred to me that everybody didn’t feel that way.
Depression has been a powerful force in my life since I was at least 11. That was the year my grandmother, my original hero and original angel, died. I was the only grandchild at that time, and I took my job as royalty quite seriously. After she died, there was nothing special about me, I was just a garden variety 11-year old who seemed to be a bit odd. Everyone else was busy managing their own grief, and I was left to my own devices. I felt mostly nothing, not anger, not sadness but I did feel trapped and terribly unhappy. But there was no one to wipe my tears or really understand what I had lost. Worst of all, there was nothing to replace it. I had to figure out how to make it on my own, how to go back to school and know how to behave and how to be respectful and do what was expected.
I remember getting in trouble more and more after my grandmother had died. Anger was always ready to explode from just under my skin, but good girls don’t have that kind of anger. Good girls always do what they are told, are not overeaters, and do not talk back to their mothers. Good girls were not supposed to be angry – you have all that you need to be a brightly shining star so what’s the problem? The explanation you are given for your increasingly errant behavior is that you have no respect, that you are spoiled, that it’s just growing pains. You are told to suck it in, get over it, do what everyone else is doing. You don’t see them acting out, but you are doing a bang-up job of embarrassing yourself and everyone else with your ridiculous antics. What are you crying for? You’re too big to be doing that, but if you want something to cry about just keep it up and you’ll get something to cry about.
So, yeah, those are messages that are spit out to many a sensitive child, but I wasn’t just any sensitive child. I had issues, I had questions, I didn’t understand the rules but was punished for breaking them. I felt trapped in some world that was not my own. I repeatedly tried to prove that I was adopted, or from some other place. Later I became somewhat convinced that I was an alien, and I just needed evidence. I was looking for some way to explain the growing disconnect between myself and everything else. I did not relate to my family, I did not relate to my school mates, I did not relate to anyone. Any connections I had were superficial and aimed solely at maintaining an image that depicted someone just like everybody else. But I wasn’t just like everybody else. I knew it, and everybody else knew it. i may as well have been the proverbial flying purple people eater.
To my way of thinking then, and well into adulthood, there had never been anybody that was more unattractive, more awkward, more stupid than me. I got lots of reinforcement for that from my parents. My father didn’t much talk about too much, but my mother was constantly sounding off about my weight, my nappy hair, my sassy mouth, my stupidity. There was very little that I could do right, at least not at home. Bizarrely, I was elevated to near mythical status in public by the same people who neglected me. I did not understand, and became convinced that I had somehow screwed up my reality, ruined it. That was because I was such a loser, such a screwup, such a disappointment to everyone.
It’s no wonder that I began to feel very sorry for myself, always wanting to be someone that I was not. I wanted to be a jock, but that’s not where my skill set was. I wanted to be a musician, but while I had some talent I wasn’t going to be performing in Carnegie Hall anytime soon. I wanted to have good hair, like my classmates, but couldn’t do much about my genetics. Nothing was going to change, mainly because I had screwed it up so grandly. I think I gave up trying to be like everybody else, gave up trying to fit in, gave up trying to pretend I knew what the hell I was doing. In actuality, I just wanted people to stop kicking me in the gut and telling me that if I just behaved better, that wouldn’t happen. In my mind, I was simply defective and it must be true that I would never amount to anything.
At some point, I took on responsibility for my mother’s emotional well-being. That wasn’t my job, but I remember telling myself that it was. I told myself that I had to make sure she thought well of herself, that I wasn’t doing anything to bring shame or dishonor to her, that she knew she was smart and capable and that anyone who thought differently was an asshole. I performed spectacularly at that job, even when I had to literally punch myself and repeat to myself that what I wanted didn’t matter. That was just how it was, and she was right about everything and I should just suck it in, accept it, deal with it. If I was lucky I’d get out alive.
My personal rain cloud lasted through adolescence, through college, through my 20s and 30s, my 40s and 50s. I did not know any other way to be. I had come to accept that people you loved died, or left, and that was just the way it was. Usually, I wove into that narrative that I’d been the cause of them leaving, that if I’d been better or doing more of what I was supposed to be doing, they probably would not have left. I understood that my grandmother had died, but my father,,,he chose to leave. Chose to leave me AND her. She made very clear to me that was how I should look at it. Thanks, mother dear. I’ve got that loud and clear. She apologized to me much later for having said that, but I couldn’t hear her.
Depression made me not recognize myself in the mirror. I saw a hideous creature that must have been painful for others to see. I saw a disappointment, a fool who didn’t know the most basic things about good manners or social conventions. I saw something that would be better off dead and put out of its misery. It’s hard to keep up a professional appearance when out in public with all that boiling in your head. But to everyone else, I looked like a sullen fat girl with a bad attitude. I suppose that is the self image I had as well, and then I began to do everything I could to perfect it. It did not go well.
All of my relationships were contentious, or so false as to be maddening. I always felt like the beggar at the door of other peoples’ homes. In many ways, I suppose that is exactly what I was. People called me needy, and I could not deny it. They did not understand, nor did I, what they could provide that would fulfill some of that deep need. I gave up trying to communicate that and decided it was fine to simply get lost in the bottle. It helped me to be more numb to those continuing kicks to the gut, the never-ending disappointment of being who I was. Let’s have another round. At some point, it will do its job and make alll of the hurt go away. But that’s not what happened.
I got sober at 28, but that didn’t make the pain go away. At least I was no longer adding to it, or making things exponentially worse for myself. I understood the process of reclaiming my life up to a point, but the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous had never encountered a force so powerful as my mother. I managed to make a strong stand in sobriety, however, and was able to dispense with quite a bit of the shame of it all. I had treated people very badly, but they didn’t know what I knew, that I was only re-enacting what I had experienced. To this day, I still do not handle rejection well, but that’s another story.
It was good that I was no longer sabotaging my life, but there was still quite a lot missing. There was no such thing as happiness, or joy for all those years drinking or for all the years since then. Apparently there was an instruction book for how to achieve that, but I did not have a copy. Eight-year old kids knew better than I how to live like an adult. I shut down all of my systems that were concerned with partnering or, god forbid, sex. Too complicated. Ain’t nobody got time for that, and besides, the outcome is always the same – one plus one makes 2 for a time but then one leaves and the other one is less than zero. Same story, different day so why bother.
No amount of making myself invisible to the public at large kept me as isolated as I wanted to be. It was raining inside my head, and I needed to stay inside. And so I did, for a number of years. I have friends, some very close, but the rain still beats against my windows and shuts out the light. I have come to embrace that, make it my own. Nobody understands how deep I have to dig for pieces of my heart that had been torn off in one betrayal after another, another disappointment, more closed doors. I presumed it would always be raining in my head, and somehow I had faith in that. It was a constant that I needed for a long time, one that somehow reassured me that I was still in here and that I knew what the hell was going on. It was normal, and I stopped questioning it long ago.
Even though I took myself out of a lot of social circulation, there was apparently some part of me that knew my life was not as it was meant to be. After my mother died, I attributed the emotional flatness to grief. After I got fired from the awful job I had (they called it a layoff but we all knew the truth), I attributed it to anger and wounds from the past. At some point, though, I knew that how I was living was simply inadequate. I have been in cognitive therapy for many years, because I have always known that sometimes I will have to pay for someone objective to listen to me. I am usually prepared for them pointing out the river of depression and its associated tributaries of lack of focus, lack of follow-through, and chronic half-assed performance. I was not, however, prepared for more than one of my care team characterizing this as “treatment resistant major depression”. Hm.
My mother probably had major depressive disorder, as did my father. My father medicated his with alcohol and philandering. My mother treated hers with staunch refusal to explore professional help or medication and her faith in God. She left big messes for everyone else to clean up. Somewhere in there I decided that I didn’t want to follow either parent’s example of how to deal with depression. So, I said I would try this esketamine treatment. I was skeptical about the outcome, but what the hell else do I have to do?
The esketamine treatment consists of a nasal inhalant, closely monitored by professionals. I don’t get to take it home and experiment with dosage, or change my mind. It’s been very interesting, to say the least. After getting the dosage on board, I literally go into what feels like the old trips I used to take on blotter acid. I get to leave my body behind and connect all kinds of dots, make realizations that can only be made when my mind is cruising free. I rather enjoy the sensation, like I enjoyed nitrous oxide at the dentist. I know that it is temporary, and I do not have the option to extend it. No actual hallucinations, but lots of visualization and I get to keep the progress I’ve made with the puzzle I’ve been trying to complete for years.
Since I’ve been receiving that treatment, I have been sleeping better and writing like crazy. Some things are now connected, and other things are more understood than ever before. I am getting a lot of guidance from the ether about how to let some of this toxic crap go, how to reclaim more of the missing pieces of my life and of my soul. That’s a good thing. My little addict brain loves the high of the trip, but knows better than to manipulate the process in hopes of extending that. Over the past 72 hours, I’ve had two days when I woke up to a feeling that all is well. I navigated those days without the impending sense of doom that has become so much a part of my landscape. There was no terror of another shoe about to drop. It has been much easier to tell myself that I will be OK, much easier to have a smile for people, and far easier to give a shit about them. For the first time, I can see where it is that I have a choice about the raincloud, that I can actually take another route and disconnect from it. That is a very good thing, and truthfully I did not believe it was even vaguely possible. I am choosing not to question it, choosing not to jinx it, and choosing not to engage in negative self-talk that says this won’t last.
At this moment, as I am gearing down for sleep, all I can think is…bring it on. I am feeling stronger over the past few days, both physically and emotionally. My dog still shits inside, but I am going to get back to those days of wearing her chubby butt out with long walks. I still have money problems, but as I said before, it’s easier to tell myself that it will be OK. I have accepted the fact that a part-time job is probably in my future, but it will get me out of the apartment. So be it. Life on life’s terms is a phenomenal concept, and I believe I am fully committed to it. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.
I spent many nights wondering whether love was the original sin.
So when it all blew up, all the way to hell and back,
Leaving bloody ashes and fading embers on the bar,
My world fell in on itself like a dying star.
Once blazing and brilliant, now wasted and spent,
Sucking everything into its dying heart.
Black as the night, no light, no sound, just an everyday black hole.
But there’s an explosion waiting to happen –
The prodigal daughter wants to come home again,
Or at least to the place home used to be.
Only now there’s no song to sing, only a piano with keys and broken strings.
There’s no teacher to teach, no lessons to learn.
But you can’t look me in the eye
Because I’ve waited so long just to say goodbye.
I guess we were saying goodbye from the moment we said hello.
This started out as a dream that could never be a nightmare
Because I always believed in miracles and Santa Claus
And happy endings, in spite of it all, or maybe because of it all.
But there’s no tearful soliloquy, no hopeful final notes.
I just can’t understand
Why I’m still standing when everything else is gone.
Not a survivor but the one who is left,
Left to tell the story, left to figure out
Why even the depths of hell didn’t want me,
Spitting me out undone, half baked, raw.
Back to the light, still blind as a newborn
With eyes that do not see but a heart that sees all.
A heart that hurts less and less these days
But still bleeds as though it was wounded only seconds ago.
There’s a numbness, and there’s going to be a scar
To remind me that I was here.
For now, I cannot see past the sadness
Of the place we used to be, or the place before that
Where only love used to be, pure and unburdened.
Now you can’t look me in the eye
Because you’ve waited so long, so long, just to say goodbye.
Was that about my mother, or about some silly woman I thought I loved? Some silly woman I thought would fill heart with music and song and the sentimentality of a Hallmark card. Was that a realistic expectation? Apparently not, because I concluded long ago that what I envisioned in either mother or lover does not exist.
I believe now that my mother did the best she could. She had a few cards stacked against her, but she never folded until the very end. Maybe the end wasn’t entirely her choice, or maybe she felt that it was her duty to come when called. Who knows, but it was, indeed, a long strange trip…without which I would not be who I am sitting here and writing these words.
I keep trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to be doing, whether I have what it takes to do whatever that is. People say I’m strong, but I say I’m just too stupid to lie down. That may sound harsh, but it’s more true than not – I didn’t know it was an option to throw my hands up and quit entirely,
So, yeah, when you’re a little kid people say things about you, like judge and jury. They will say that you are articulate and speak very well when you are 3, but when you are 4 you are sassy and have a big mouth. When you are 5 they are determined to silence you, but only at certain times that you’re supposed to know without being told. When you are 6, they work in concert with strangers to silence you entirely, to force you into a state of meaningless obedience, to pride themselves on your conformity. After that, it’s all out war for the conquest of your spirit, and you try very hard to survive.
Who was I before they told me who I am? I have been pondering the essence of that question long before I heard it articulated on a meditation video. It’s such a profound question, in my not so humble opinion, and one that I cannot readily answer. I believe that I may have been more a free spirit, one who believed she could and would do just about anything, one who enjoyed making sounds and seeing colors and was at peace with herself. That’s not a bad thing, until it became a very badthing, until it became a battle for my identity and my heart. My heart held the all the torn and frayed fibers of my being in a sealed vault, locked with a key that I had put in a safe place, a secret place, a place that could not be accessed easily. I did a very good job of that, so good a job that I could not find it later, when I thought it might be safe. After a while, I forgot where I had put it and what was inside stayed locked away very tightly, but safe…with only minimal amounts of sustenance or joy, no moments of wild abandon. Safe, but nearly dead.
Safety is one of those things not as simple as it sounds. If you are going for a walk, it’s probably not safe to do that alone in an unfamiliar place where the hazards are unknown. It’s not safe to go for a mountain height without ensuring that you have the necessary tools, like maybe some extra socks, a blanket, a flashlight, and maybe a compass. It gets cold in the hills after dark, so it’s best to be prepared. Even so, you can only be proactive about dangers you’ve heard about, or read about, or imagine. You are probably not safe from uncommon occurrences like unmapped cliffs and being attacked by creatures whose very existence is denied. Safety at the price of curiosity, and sacrificing desire to have experience simply for the sake of experience, seems to go far wide of the goal.
There are many keys lost, many locks broken, many locks that remain sealed. When a vault has been violated, the lock may be savagely broken along with the treasure it protects. Thieves and demons enjoy forcing entry into places they do not belong, rationalizing that if there was nothing important there a lock would not have been necessary. Conformists, seemingly benign, are compelled to violate spaces not meant for their presence, usually in order to maintain the semblance of control. When you limit the questions, you always know the answers. There’s no challenge there, and no surprises, or so you think.
Demons, or destuctors, may be the worst. . They will destroy the sacred rest of every spirit they encounter, just for the hell of it. They are simply malevolent, often disguising that with success at some base endeavor,like the supremacy of their wealth. Whoever dies with the most toys wins, but whoever dies with the most money controls everyone else (or so they think). There is no spiritual sustenance there, no higher good, no universal synergy. These are conflict driven and restless spirits that have forgotten who they are, and have been separated from the Light. There may be no salvation for these, not because it’s withheld by a higher source, only because they deny they are in need of it, even deny its very existence.
People often believe me to be shut down, closed off, not open to love. That may be true, but it is understandable. People who professed their love to me have done the most damage in my life, sometimes out of ignorance and other times out of their own inadequacy. I have always said that I attract narcissists, who are usually cleverly hidden sociopaths, like flies are attracted to dung and rotting food. I don’t like telling people no, and have proven to be a sucker for attention and compliments. That is my shortcoming, but I came by it honestly – that’s what I was taught and shown from a very early age, and I am only now realizing that I can’t go home to that again.
All of this to say…what? I’m not sure. Perhaps I simply needed to get that all out in a virtual reality that feels more real to me than most of what I can touch. Reality has always been subjective and fluid, and in my case confusing enough to want to end it. Hypocrisy has always been the most disconcerting and devastating thing to discover about people. That has been the case since I was a kid, but now it’s enhanced by the devastating presence of denied truth. It’s one thing to say one thing and do another in reference to soft concepts or certain idealisms or biases, but it’s quite another to simply alter the facts, or even the reality, of those things for your own comfort. Telling me that you love me and wish me peace while robbing me blind is one thing, but telling me that you’re not robbing me is another. It’s my fault, somehow, that bad things happen and I should just try harder to be better somehow to avoid that?
This is the mess that causes personalities to fracture, psyches to unravel, and hearts to shatter into a million pieces that cannot be restored. There is a rock in the road, and I can touch it. If I stomp it with my foot, it will not move and I am likely to have a sore foot. All of my bodily senses make that a realistic truth. There are some, however, who encourage me to deny the rock is there, deny that my foot hurts, deny there’s an obstacle. This causes such a disconcerting lack of confidence in my ability to navigate the world that I often feel that I should not try.
When I was a kid, I was the dependable one, the smart one, the precocious sprite who was the light of many eyes. Now I am a fat, old woman with an autoimmune disease and whose spirit has been battered and bruised for too many decades. An old woman who has to summon all manner of ethereal forces to make it through any given day. An old woman who does not feel wise, who does not feel as though she has much to contribute for the betterment of anything or anybody. Perhaps that is her pre-dementia brain talking, or perhaps it is true. If I could live somewhat comfortably in a mountain cave that had internet service, I would choose that. Sometimes I just don’t feel as though I have anything to keep me here except spite.
So, how do I keep myself safe without snuffing my own spark? Safe from the spiritual destruction of the well meaning, of the ones who say they love me (and probably do) but see my value only in terms of compliance, safe from the many perils and footfalls foretold by others who are nothing like me? I do not have any rational answer for that. At this point in the twilight of my life, I can only say that it’s hit or miss with finding the lost key. Not to worry, though, because I’ve finally realized the damned cage was open to begin with.
I’ll come back to this conversation with myself at some point, but for this day, it’s enough. My recovery program promises me that if I accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can, and have the wisdom to know the difference I will no longer regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it, that I will know peace. I have no frame of reference for that, so maybe that’s all true for me now and this is just how life goes in a human body that lives on a big rock that spins somewhere out in the middle of space. Maybe. But I’m still gonna try and find where the bathrooms are, some decent Thai food and a cold drink, and then call it a day.
I had some bizarre words pop into my head earlier today: “You are doing things to me that you don’t do to anyone else.” Where in the world did THAT come from? I am not entirely sure who I was addressing that to, if anyone. Was I trying to lay that on a Creator’s desk? Or maybe it was a sticky note for Mother Earth. Maybe it was directed to myself, which is rather strange but very intriguing to unpack.
My mind is a dangerous neighborhood, and I shouldn’t go in there alone.
It is not difficult for me to feel victimized these days. I am suing an implant dentist who breached his contract with me. I had paid him $40k in advance for a detailed treatment plan that included implants, and his license was revoked less than two weeks later. When I spoke to the state dental board about this, they first explained there was nothing they could do since they had no further jurisdiction over him now that his license was revoked. They also said they had “been after him for 20 years.” There was no indication of pending action against him or even customer complaints on their website, so nobody knew he was a mostly incompetent and negligent provider. There are more than 20 former patients who are left in the cold, awaiting refunds of large sums of money like my own, and finding that we have no choice but to pursue legal action independently. Class action is not an option because we each had unique treatment plans that were breached in different ways. Some patients had implants that were incorrectly installed, some had prosthetic devices that failed, some (like me) paid money for work that was never done. There is something wrong with a system that intervenes only after grievous wrongdoing has occurred, but that’s another story.
This whole thing feels mostly like shit, and my first sentiment was to blame myself or having trusted this man. Once his license revocation had been announced publicly, with news coverage, I remained in the dark because I was not indulging in broadcast news; the presidential campaigns were going strong and the talking heads were in rare form. Watching the news or reading the newspaper was like salt on an open wound, and I chose to keep my blood pressure low. Surely this underscores what I knew all along, that I was a trusting idiot who hid under the covers instead of putting on the big girl panties and dealing with business like an adult.
Be all that as it may, I am not sure the dental nightmare is all that’s disturbing me at this point. My lower GI system has turned on me, and X-rays have confirmed what I have been told since I was about 8 years old, that I am full of shit. I am not drinking enough water, or moving enough. I had been told to increase my fiber intake a few months ago, and that’s where all the problems began. From what I understand, this is common amongst aging adults. Lovely. I have joined the ranks of people walking around in people suits that serve only to mask huge reserves of excrement.
Is this the beginning of the end for me? I do seriously wonder if that’s not what is happening at this point. Memory is sometimes an issue, and I am as unfit as I have ever been. The X-rays that showed I am holding on to far too much old shit also revealed that I have mild arthritis in my lower lumbar region. I’ve got to make a last stand, I think, seeing as I’ve only got about 20 years left on this earthly plane (by my calculations). I am officially tired of adulting. It has done me no good so far, and has proven only the human body has many design flaws that simply get worse over time. I’m going to need to speak with the management about that after this leg of the journey is behind me.
I am hovering between telling myself that everything is going to be OK, and seeing myself living in my truck under a bridge somewhere. I am literally all I’ve got, and that’s a little frightening. This is not how it was supposed to be, but then I have no idea how it was supposed to be. My non-recovered Christian mind says this is the payback for my sins, this is the inevitable result of my prodigal youth. Whatever it is, it’s happening now, live and up to the minute, not a dress rehearsal. The here and now is is a bit daunting.
There are many reasons for me to be grateful in the present moment. There are also many reasons for me to fear the present moment, and thereafter. The Presidential inauguration is days away, and my sense of dread grows. I have no confidence that a second administration of this President will be anything but an exercise in easy-bake inequity and intolerance. That will not be sustainable, of course, but much damage may be done while the new administration has control of policy and people’s lives. I’m still not watching broadcast news, but do find it somewhat amusing that Inauguration Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day are the same. Who says the Divine doesn’t have a sense of humor?
A mistake is not a sin unless you knew it was wrong before you did it, at least that’s how I think about it. We make a lot of mistakes, and we commit a lot of sins.
Sins of the father are borne by the sons, and daughters, of a world trying desperately to keep its balance in spite of us. Spite is a powerful motivation, but not always a sound one. There is nothing we do that does not bear a cost, or a consequence, whether we see it or not. We lie, we cheat, we steal because it is our nature, and it is difficult to not indulge it. Perhaps it is true that suffering is a requisite in our collective journey, and maybe that’s true but who exactly suffers? Perhaps it is the least of us who bear the largest share of the angst and pain of powerlessness, but I have to wonder.
When you have no money, you struggle to get it, begging or borrowing or stealing for your own survival. When you have a lot of money, you struggle to keep it, begging or borrowing or stealing to increase and maintain your share. Some would say that is merely greed, often looking very much like unconscionable usury, taking more than one’s fair share or taking advantage of those with less. This is nothing new, nor is our fascination with the concept of victors deserving spoils, or winner taking all. Our need for battle is strong, and we are extraordinarily competitive gladiators. We choose to battle on large and small scales, the least consequential of which is the sports arena.
Unfortunately, victory requires individual achievement, and there are perhaps too many of us now to avoid the attractive simplicity of supremacy, and its sibling greed. When is enough enough? For some of us, there is no end to the quest for winning and having more – more victories, more accolades. It often seems that accolades are the prize most valued, but that’s another story. For others, it seems that praise of the victor is what is most valued; we need a hero, a savior, and I suppose deliverance from a set of unpleasant, or at least undesirable, circumstances that we believe we can’t improve without help. There are tolls on either end of this scale between victory and defeat, between supremacy and subordination, but we frequently do not explore the cost of travel.
What furrows my brow most in all of this, is considering there has been no consideration of questions such as where does justice live? Does it take a backseat to the common good, or the good of those at the top of the cultural hierarchy? Where do equity and fair play take center stage? It often seems there is no place for the subjectivity of how we place valur on any of these; one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor, as the old adage goes. For the greater numeric majority of human beings on this planet, however, justice is a pipe dream and equity is summarily misunderstood. How can equity be realized when 98% of the human beings on the planet have less choice, less material gain, less comfort than the remaining 2%? How does the caste of class and ethnicity even begin to demonstrate justice?
These are the questions that wrinkle my brow and disturb my sleep. There are other questions, but I can answer many of them when considering our undying need for victory by whatever means necessary. Our genome seems to be hard wired for that binary, which at its least obtrusive generates money but at its worst gives rise to war. Neither is morally superior or even practically better than the other. In no case do we engage in serious contemplation of the moral cost in continuing our unbridled quest for more of everything, for superiority, for supremacy, for hero status. I suppose the best we can do is consider whether more egalitarian choices might be possible, whether choices can be made that offer the least amount of suffering, the least amount of inequity, the least amount of injustice. Can we sacrifice a bit of what is comfortable for us in pursuit of a level playing field in the human experience? I’m not sure, but our track record so far says no, and that is very sad.
Still reeling just a bit from this disease progression, and kicking myself in the arse for having been so stupid about taking care of things. The right foot is now consistently burning, and I definitely need the cane for balance. I don’t want this. I never wanted this. My teaching says this is the answer to some prayer I made. I say fuck all that.
I am still grateful the disease has not progressed to paralysis of any appendage, but my cynical self wonders if that is simply inevitable at this point. I can get through this, of course, but do I even want to get through yet another challenge. There is such a huge part of me that says why bother, throw in the towel, check out. There is always such a huge hesitancy to commit to checking out, though. A hesitancy that is dominated by the singular thought of…what if I’m wrong. What if leaving the scene of the recent unpleasantness does nothing to relieve the pain? What if it becomes worse in some other incarnation? I believe I have more or less committed to staying, but damn – I cannot seem to catch a break.
Perhaps I am not entitled to a break. Perhaps this is what I deserve. My spiritual self says get away from the old binary of sin/punishment. I made a mistake and so I should be prepared for the inevitable ass-kicking. My somewhat rational self says that is not how things work. My spiritual self counters with a repeated query of how and why did I call this to myself. Good lord, this could keep me wound up in perpetual analysis for quite some time, and I don’t have that to give.
With every day that goes by, I am more and more consumed with thoughts of my own death (and not at my hands). My mother died at 82-1/2, and so did her sister. My grandmother died well before that marker because she had cancer, but her sisters and brother died somewhere in their 80s. My father died at 68, and his siblings died in their 80s I believe. His father got hit by a car in his 70s, so he doesn’t figure into the trend of dying somewhere around the 80-year-old mark.
So, all that to say, I figure I have about 20 years left to figure out what the FUCK I am doing down here, and how to reconcile with it all. Do I have unfinished business here, I wonder. Perhaps, or maybe I just have a plethora of things stuck in my proverbial craw that beg for vengeance, or forgiveness. Will it be that my time here ends without ever having been in a loving capital-R Relationship? It seems that way, but what does that matter in the long run? Or the short run.
So many questions, so few answers. Time is linear, or is it? Can one truly manifest a desired reality, or are we just stuck with the hand we’ve been dealt? The just seems to be out on that, but again, does it really matter? If it doesn’t matter, I hope someone can direct me to what DOES matter. Oh, wait – I’m supposed to do that for myself. Hang on, that’s going to take a minute.
I don’t know what I am supposed to be doing, where I’m supposed to be doing it, how I’m supposed to be doing it, or…why. My 12-step training tells me why is not as important as how. Can I stand in my own integrity? Am I treating people in some positive and even useful way? Some days I am not sure about any of that. Integrity seems to be a dying art these days, and I generally ask myself about it too late. Once the heart is involved, once the emotions gallop through me, I am often lost. Lost and hurting people, lost and scared, lost and frozen in fear.
Pain is not relative, and as someone told me a long time ago, it’s major when it’s happening to me and minor when it’s happening to you. Unless you are grotesquely malformed by codependency and addition. I often feel like the most gruesome and disfigured person on the planet, and I suppose that informs who I roll. These days I don’t see myself as rolling at all, however, just standing in the same place and wondering what in the hell I’m doing here.
I have never particularly cared for things that are linear. I have always preferred curves and spheres and what not so that I can squeeze myself into the dynamic spaces between. Never the same position twice, no assurance of the space available. Molding myself to fit in, in between, amidst and among but never presenting a solid form to the world around me. I don’t know if that’s bad or good, if that works or not, but I am thinking it is what it is. I’m just a squishy blob that slides in and out of established structures and more static arrangements. The only problem is that sometimes I go *splat*, and that’s a mess to clean up.
Today, I am contemplative and my thoughts are bouncing off the walls. I’m in a depressed state, but not willing to assume responsibility for it. I have chemicals that are screwed up in my brain, some of which appear to have crossed the blood-brain barrier to cause me other problems. Can I change that? Some would say yes, but I am skeptical. Since I have not been able to change any of it, I wonder if I am just inept. Or maybe just not where I’m supposed to be. I am here and now, so maybe that’s enough.
My life has consisted of moments of great brilliance, followed by long spans of incredible stupidity. I always thought I could do anything, until I began trying to do that and bombed miserably. I’ve always figured if I could visualize it, I could do it, but reality gets in the way of that simplistic notion. I understand perfectly well how a basketball player dunks the ball to score, but that’s not something I can do. Athletic skill and far more height might help, but I can see exactly how it’s done. That and a few bucks will get me groceries but not a contract with a WNBA team. I’m supposed to be at peace with that, but frequently I am not. Maybe that’s just about the money and the adulation. But I coulda been a contenduh, you see. I’m a legend in my own mind, it would seem.
Whether I have a life partner or not, whether I ever leave this apartment or not, whether I ever have a paycheck again, time is moving on with or without me. We are all going through that together, whether we like our fellow travelers or not. I was told to wear life like a loose garment, but I find that it still doesn’t fit. Maybe I’ve outgrown it, or maybe I should abandon the notion of a perfect fit. I’ve never been much of a fashionista anyway, but I’d rather not be on the journey nekkid. Sometimes that is exactly how I feel – exposed and vulnerable to anything and everything around me. I was told to lay down my armor, but I say please, stop shooting at me.
Maybe it’s not too late to do this thing right. I’m not sure, but since I’m here I have to make the effort. Maybe that’s all I’m here to do – make the effort. Somehow that seems woefully inadequate, but I do still have the wherewithall to try, so try I must. Onward. The long strange trip continues, and the colors are amazing. It will be OK. I have to believe that it will be OK. If and when it’s not OK, I guess it will be time to do something else.
…and that is not even a vague relation to “oops, i did it again”, although maybe the sentiment is about the same, How. HOW? Did i wind up in yet another situation that is harmful, or at least not in my best interest, AGAIN. By my own poor choices, my own insistence on hiding my head in the sand and leaving my ample nether regions ripe for kicking by even the most miniscule of perpetrators. This time, it was not me giving my power to other people, hoping they would just please, please like me…in that special way…in that more than just a friend way. No, this time it was me alone sabotaging my physical condition and continuing to make excuses for it, even once the consequences began to show. What the fucking FUCK is that all about.
After falling all over the place for the past couple of weeks, and having the inability to walk upright for more than a few hundred steps for at least the past month, I finally had to admit that the medical degree conferred upon my by Mr. Google might not be entirely adequate to self-diagnose the cause of this. I still consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person, but continue to acquiesce to fear and stupidity as dampers to whatever navigational abilities I might have.
So…my right hip has been bothering me for more than 10 years. Mostly this was a small and very minor complication, and despite knowing that I have a progressive neurological disease, I was quick to brush that huge red flag warning and attribute the pain to obesity, back problems, incorrect sleep habits, leaning on one side too much when using the laptop in bed, and…aging. One would think that after more than a decade of this bother, I would take that to my neurologist and at least say ‘what up?. No. I struggled and finally began to suffer with the reality of the situation until finally it began to interfere with daily tasks, like walking the dog and avoiding a fecal catastrophe in my living space.
Not unrelated to this fiasco, I have been a very, very – VERY – bad girl over the course of the past year, or more, regarding said medical reality. I have not seen my neurologist in all that time because, well, ummmm, she seemed to be quite upset with me at the last visit because (my story) I had gained back all of the weight I had lost previously. So, it’s her fault that I was too scared to go back when I became symptomatic again. Yup, that’s the ticket. Blame somebody else. Well, but then there was the insurance mess…and the depression mess…and the generic Ann mess. Let’s blame anything but my lack of prioritization of an issue related to my wellbeing, my quality of life, and maybe even my life itself. So all together, I made the incoherent choice to simply stop taking the disease modifying medication that was prescribed. Mr. Google said that sometimes these situations prove to be so minor they need not be addressed over time. And I have a friend who is only slightly older than I who is no longer taking any medication at all. So there. All solved for me, right? NOT.
A few nights ago, while I was still mulling the rudiments of this analysis in my feeble brain, it occurred to me that I have never fully accepted this neurological disease and lived as though I have a disability, And it is a disability, not by my own estimation, but by the established standards of the medical and insurance industries. But of course, I am smarter than all that. I can make it, I can do it, don’t need any help. Same as it ever was.
But it’s not the same as it ever was. There are cellular processes going on inside my body that I can neither fully understand nor control, and denying that reality doesn’t change the fact that I am wholly out of control of these circumstances. And still I continued to make excuses for myself – if I just lost weight, got more into shape, went back to my exercise routines, took another supplement this would all be reversed. Not so quick, missy.
This last acute patch of difficulty that started about a month ago when I started having back pain so severe that I was bent over like a semi-colon after walking more than a hundred paces. This was interfering with the canine relief project, but also with just walking short paces anywhere. So, when I crashed to the ground at the Fellowship several days ago – and couldn’t get up – I was a little befuddled but still not willing to admit it could be anything to do with my central nervous system. Just typical kluttz behavior, of course. Fortunately someone came out of a room nearby and helped me to right my ample arse, and so I went on without further issue. Well mostly…I had to make sure I was intentionally compensating for any unsteadiness and imbalance by chanting ‘heel-toe’ for every step to make sure I was walking correctly. That worked for a short time.
After winding up on my buttocks, in the grass fortunately, I was beginning to get the impression that my way of dealing with this was not working. It was not going away, it was not improving, and it was becoming dangerous. As I said previously, I had not seen the neurologist for almost 2 years, and when I came clean about what was happening to my therapist, she did everything but come through the video call and threaten my life if I did not call the neurologist. So I did.
Unfortunately, it has probably been too long since I’ve been there to be treated as an existing patient, so I was given an appointment more than 5 months away. I requested to be put on the list that would be taken first if there were appointment cancellations, and so I wait. It’s nearly Halloween, and this is definitely trick and not treat. In between chastising myself (well, actually bludgeoning myself internally) for letting this get so unnecessarily out of hand, the symptomology ramped up just a bit and I found that I could add neuropathy to the list of realities. My right foot and ankle began to go to sleep during a meeting, where I was seated, and progressed to mild numbness in the foot. OK, that got my attention, but the notification wasn’t complete. I was still able to walk mostly normally to leave the meeting, but after starting my truck I realized that not only was there numbness in the foot and ankle, but on the bottom of the foot. That was actually a huge problem, since I quickly realized that I could not fee the brake pedal and stop appropriately. That was definitely not good.
I panicked when I got home (safely, but with maximum effort), and began seeing a future of having to take the short transit buss everywhere, if not being locked into the ivory tower of a 3rd floor apartment (on which I had just renewed my lease). This is it. This is where my worst nightmare comes true – I fall down in the apartment, can’t get up, and die there. When I am finally discovered, the dog has eaten my nose and it’s entirely…unpretty. Not good.
So, back to Mr. Google for continued education, I nosed around, rejecting certain things, thinking my way through certain others. Finally, FINALLY, as in finally Dorothy realizes it was all just a dream, I ran across a search result that mentioned hip pain and neuropathy as a symptom of central nervous system damage. When I dug into that topic only a few inches, there it was. It was totally related, and I wasn’t going to fix that by ignoring it, or willing it to improve, or just staying in bed for days at a time. And the dog wasn’t going to get outside by any of those ineffective means.
So, I grabbed the cheap foldable cane I’d purchased a few years ago and rarely used, and took it with me to walk the dog. I didn’t use it, because somebody might see me (*gasp*), but after the pain in my back began to amplify I was beaten into submission. Once I used the cane to walk to the dog fecal elimination area, There. Was. No. Back. Pain. Are you kidding me? That was all it took, a relaxation of the ego chains to use the cane? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus but Ann refused to let him enter the house and give gifts. The new practice has not entirely eliminated the grumbling hip pain, or the nagging numbness in my right foot and ankle, but it was entirely resolved the issue of walking ben over at the waist in excruciating back pain. The numbness in the foot is neuropathy, and I can live with it if there’s nothing to be done about it. There may be, but maybe this time I will take a medical professional’s advice before trusting my own diagnosis and prognosis.
OK, so a solution only took a decade and much denial to come to fruition. In my defense, I do still have a lot on my plate – the asshole dentist who owes me $40k, running out of money sometime soon, applying for social security months too early to ensure maximum benefits, feeling incompetent about everything. But at least I am not 100% assured that I’ll wind up on the ground after walking 200 steps. Or less.
This relieves the abject panic, but does not resolve the entire situation. It has, however, given me a bit of hope that I can remain primarily independent and maintain a maximum of autonomy and bodily agency. I will come clean with the neurologist, and act like a big girl if she remains snarky with me about my weight or my poor decision making. I hope they call soon to schedule me sooner than April, but even if not, I know that I can make it with the cane. I will just have to suck it up and deal with letting people know that I am having some difficulty. I am still not comfortable in telling them all of the intimate details of the neurological disease, but I can truthfully say that I am having back issues and the cane helps to relieve the symptoms. Maybe I am getting close to telling people the truth about everything, but not yet. Maybe, however, I have made the necessary progress in telling myself the truth. It is what is is, and that’s all that it is. My conscious self and ego are just not in control of how this whole thing plays out, and I just have to accept that. I also need to accept the fear that made acceptance so daunting. Nothing about my current health situation deprives me of the right to be a human who makes mistakes. Sometimes big mistakes. Sometimes ridiculous, idiotic mistakes. But, I can be forgiven and I can learn and keep going. There was getting to be a lot of feeling that I couldn’t go on in any kind of tolerable status. Not any more.
So yes, there is still gratitude in this set of affairs. I can make this work, I do not have to clench my teeth and suffer. There is a solution. I have to believe that, or be ready to give up hope of anything turning out right, or equitable. There is much that is right, and more than enough that is equitable. I don’t have to sulk over not deserving this. As we say in 12-step recovery, if we got everything we deserved based on our behavior prior to recovery, most of us would be pushing up daisies.
So. I am still my mother’s savage daughter, who will not cut her hair or lower her voice. There is still hope for happiness. Everything is as it should be, including me.
I never really knew how to live. Not enough information, no instruction manual. Always knew I was different but attributed it to being slightly crazy, really stupid, very weird, and an eternal misfit. I knew what I was feeling but my people called it “funny”. They’d say, “Isn’t Johnny Mathis a brilliant singer? It’s too bad he’s “funny”. And I knew that wasn’t a good thing.
Everybody else seemed to know what to do with life. When it came time for boys and pairing up I was sitting on the sidelines trying to find something to do, looking down at the ground, learning about ant colonies from the new World Book Encyclopedia we’d just gotten at home. I wasn’t the least bit interested in boys except to play football or shoot marbles until they told me to stop doing that. They said when it was time to start dating the boys wouldn’t ask me because they’d think I was one of them. I didn’t quite understand that, and I didn’t see it as a bad thing but I played along and pretended I understood.
I didn’t understand.
In college I got a LOT more information, and I understood what to call it, had words for what I was feeling about girls. But I was still an outcast, a misfit, a tongue-tied nitwit because I couldn’t reconcile what I had been taught with what I knew was possible. I knew my people would be so disappointed that I was “funny”, so I tried really hard not to be anything.
Until the queens showed up. They showed me how to live, apologizing to no one, how to be proud, how to know that I was OK. Cleveland, and Yul, and David, and Jeffrey. They tinkled when they walked and they did not suffer fools gladly. They were talented and gallant and funny, in a good way. David had no family because they had thrown him out for being gay. Cleveland and Yul were the first Black gay men I knew, and they were fabulously devoid of worry, even when the jocks taunted them. They were amazingly well adjusted for all they had been through, the bullying, the beatings, the shunning . They adopted me, and showed me how to not give a shit about the hate, how to walk like the world belonged to me, how to make glitter a fucking sacrament.
And then there was dear, sweet Jeffrey – a tiny, perfect man child with clear blue eyes and the face of an angel. Tinker Bell in the flesh, still open hearted in spite of the hate thrown at him daily. He loved me into being who I was, and I don’t think I would have survived college without him. They were all my tribe, my prime time players, my family. There were no limits during that charmed time, when every day was Mardi Gras and Tara burned every night.
We graduated and tossed our tassels in 1982, just as what would come to be known as AIDS was spreading across Europe and making its way across the ocean to Fire Island New York. It was still a mystery, but healthy gay men were being cut down in their prime and nobody could explain it. Tongues wagged, the clerics bowed and prayed, the old ones shook their heads and muttered about sex. We had no idea what was in store. None of us did.
Years later, life got away from me. I got away from me, and I lost touch with those guys. We all went back to our little corners of the country, and tried to get on with life. For my part, I tried to drink myself into some new reality but failed miserably. When I got sober it was 1988, and the AIDS crisis was in full swing. I had another troupe of queens sashay their way into my life in sobriety, Louis and Rick and others who befriended me and gave me the space to find myself, and be myself, like the others had done. They loved me until I could love myself, and I loved them. I came to the conclusion that everyone should have queens in their life, if for nothing else than how to pull off a perfect Z-snap and how to make a full length ball gown (with bustier) out of construction tape.
At some point in my early sobriety, we started to lose them. I saw Jeffrey’s obituary in a gay rag, and Yul’s. I never found out what happened to Cleveland or David, but I’m pretty sure they’re no longer with us. The AA Fellowship rallied around Louis and Rick, and we said goodbye as best we could, shaking our fists at the sky in anger and pride as we realized they died sober. And life went on, albeit with a dearth of joy and merriment and, of course, glitter.
We were angry, angry at the politics, angry at the prejudice, angry at God. So many had died before they stopped calling it GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and coined the more correct term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. But they were still dying, no matter what you called it. They were dying of weird things like Kaposi’s Sarcoma and toxoplasmosis, and insurance companies were playing games with the lifetime maximum benefits they could claim. Once policy holders started filling prescriptions for anti-retrovirals, the insurance lifetime maximum bottomed out to ludicrously low totals. Early AIDS medications were ridiculously expensive, and could exhaust those finite limits in 90 days or less, squeezing the life out of these beautifully creative and talented young men who had done nothing wrong except try to live in a world that was too afraid to accept them.
When it was revealed that Rock Hudson had died of AIDS, there was some change in the judgment and stigma, but for the average gay man without a multimillion-dollar estate, not much was different. America damned its gay men to die on the streets in many cases, without a hand to hold or a kind word as they took their last breaths. Land of the free, home of the brave but only if you put your penis on the right side of glory.
Those were dark days for so many of us. The CDC warned there would be a second wave to the virus, and it would more than likely descend on heterosexual women. The ill-informed denied that, and refused to take precautions, but it happened exactly as predicted. And then it went giddily wild all over the world, because men in particular were careless and didn’t care where they deposited their see. Suggesting safer sex to men of color might result in a beating, or worse, and so it spread rampantly.
Gay men taught me how to live my life as an unapologetic lesbian. Without them I probably wouldn’t be here, and that’s a debt I may never be able to repay. My old college friends, who prided themselves on maximum flamboyance at every turn, would be distressed that drag story hours are the target of so much hostility. They would be delighted to see the concept take shape, and would be amazed to see the hesitating acceptance of transgender people. Some of them would smirk at how many letters have been added to the gay-lesbian moniker, but they’d be so welcoming of the inclusivity. And believe me they would be stars.
Walking the path implies walking. Movement. Not destination, but journey. Who was I before they told me who I was? I was curious, I was confident, I was safe. Who am I now? I am curious, I am more cautious, I am less safe.
Caution is not entirely mine – it was given to me. Does it serve me well? It is useful up to a point, but the obsession with safety and prudence is not entirely my way. Risk is inherent in growth, at least it has been for me. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Sometimes you get ripped off, taken for a ride that goes nowhere. Sometimes you would be wise to exhibit caution in walking through a bad neighborhood or investing in a startup business. The world is a dangerous place these days.
But sometimes, you hit it big, and score the jackpot. My experience, however, is this too shall pass. Victory nor defeat last forever. It’s a wheel of fortune, not a box. There is nothing in universal law that says good fortune nor bad is permanent, and taking note of gratitude proves that. Some days the only thing for which I am grateful is that I am mostly vertical and above ground. Other days, even that seems dubious and the bar is a lot lower, down to gratitude for the ability to spell the word gratitude.
The old people always said, “Some days it just be like this.” And some days, that is exactly what it is. It is what it is has become the mantra of a generation, but it serves us well to accept what we cannot change. A cheap version of the Serentiy Prayer if ever there was one. Some days are harder than others, some days I feel more like a drunk than others, some days I feel more disabled than others, some days I feel more like someone with mental illness than others.
Those are the days for which I may be most grateful, at least in retrospect, because those are the days I am most aware that I am alive. Numbness is not the desired goal, because you can’t feel an injury in progress until it’s too late. When I’m depressed and questioning why I’m here, I’m feeling something, feeling discontent, feeling pain on some level. Otherwise, life is holding me hostage and I’m not living.
Life is fickle, and variable, and unpredictable. Certainty is a function of control, and control is essentially a delusion. There is only control when the people, places, or things you seek to control cooperate. When they don’t, you’re basically screwed if control is your only tool. The universal law of success is really compromise – to get where I want to go, I have to give up something, have to yield somehow. Most often, what I have to yield to is imperfection, either mine or that of others. It’s hard for me to do that when I’m dealing with a narcissist or someone who refuses to play by the rules. But it is what it is, and that’s really all it will ever be. Anything less would be delusion and non-reality.
I cannot change reality, but I can change how I deal with it. Reality says there are walls, and no amount of wishing there are no walls will not change that. If I drive my truck into a real wall, my vehicle (and possibly my body) will suffer real damage. To avoid the damage, I have to find a different way to proceed, either drive around the wall or take another route entirely. Either of the alternatives may be less convenient than going directly through the wall, but will incur less damage. That seems very simple, but as humans, we contest that reality metaphorically on a daily basis. Bless our hearts.
The Sound Hole 