The Big Secret, or Sometimes You Will

The big secret they never tell you when you are young is that you will never entirely stop being your fifteen year-old self.  Sure, you will grow up and away.  But there will be moments –  small and perhaps infrequent – when you are still exactly who you were, all those years ago.

At fifteen, I exclusively wore tattered hoodies covered in safety pins.  My jeans were ripped down the side and pinned or resewn with new fabric.  Man we loved safety pins.  My hair was long and always up – a messy knot on the top of my head, spilling out from whatever rubberband or hair tie was attempting to coral it.  I wore no make up and wouldn’t for years.  I, like all teens of the 90′s, was never without headphones and a diskman (I’m old!), creating the impression that my life had a soundtrack as eclectic as my heart and thoughts – the Grateful Dead, Tom Waits, Elliot Smith, Sublime, Fugazi, John Lee Hooker, and Joan Biaz all streamed through my nights and days, seamlessly bleeding into one another as if there were nothing odd happening at all.  I read voraciously, a dog-eared book weighing down my back pocket or tucked in my sweatshirt.  I was an idealist – such an idealist – and would fight passionately for the things I believed in.

At 15, I was also deeply insecure.  But more importantly, had not yet learned it was okay to say that.  My best friends were beautiful – stunning, really – and I felt very aware of our differences.  I was the one who was funny – buddies with the guys, all of whom would come to me to talk about their crushes.  I was not those things for them and I knew it.  I felt too ashamed to admit that it bothered me – like it meant I was abandoning feminism and independence to have a crush myself.  And I suppose I was probably afraid – to admit a crush is to open one’s self to rejection and that was so terribly frightening to me.  I felt very alone in the world – abandoned and not quite worth sticking around for.  I was passionate about what I thought was right and wrong in the world – just fiery mad at injustice and always ready to go to the mat about it – but at the same time so conflict averse it would cause me intense anxiety when people yelled at one another.   I was painfully shy but did not always appear to be so and, because I had no frame-work to articulate that idea,  I thought I was broken.

Basically, I was your typical 15 year-old hot mess. 

When I was younger, I thought being grown meant not feeling those things anymore.  It meant having your shit together in some substantial way – being able to walk into a room and not feel out of place and like you had accidentally wandered into a conference room in your mom’s office.  I thought when I was older, I would always:  Always feel secure, always feel confident, always know what I was doing.

It has been a great shock, my friends, to learn that is not the case.  I spent a lot of my twenties waiting for the moment – the magic moment – when it was all going to click and I was going to feel like a real adult.

It hasn’t exactly happened  yet.

And I’m not sure it is ever going to.

We do grow up and away from our uncertainties, but not in the way we thought we would.  It is not definitive and clear the way I once imagined it would be – like someday I would get up, put on a dress and heels, go to work, and not feel a little like an imposter or like I would never feel those insecurities of being in the shadow of my beautiful friends or like I would never wonder where precisely I fit in the world.  Instead it is slow –  we grow into our new, older selves slowly, day by day, and without ever really seeing it at the time.  But then we look up, at some point, and notice we aren’t who we used to be.  Perhaps we are more cautious – we no longer jog at midnight or drive quite so fast.  We actually subscribe to the newspaper instead of stealing it from the neighbor.  The coffee-to-milk ratio slowly shifts from 40/60 to 95/5.  We stumble to a place where we possess our own bodies with a confidence we did not have in our younger years.  We only understand slang about 70% of the time.

But, for all that, sometimes I don’t feel grown at all.  Sometimes, usually in brief passing moments, I feel exactly the way I did at 15 – scared, trying to act braver than I was, uncertain I was wanted or want-able, rebellious, idealistic, and messy.  Just a hot mess.

And that is what they don’t tell you when you are younger.  That the world will not come together perfectly, in a magical moment, when suddenly you become an adult and never worry about whether your hair looks funny or if a boy likes you or if you are good enough.  They don’t tell you that you will still be you, long after you take the safety pins out of your clothes and figure out how to win the war against your hair.  But what they really don’t tell you is that it is okay – better even – that you aren’t grown in the way you once imagined you would be.  That you still laugh at really bad jokes and blush at crushes and sometimes feel shaky and sad.  That those things – messy and small – are not signs of your youth, but signs of your humanity.  And we shouldn’t lose them.  We should grow into understanding them, sure.  But not away from experiencing them.

I don’t know.  Maybe I’m wrong.  But at least you got to read some Shel Silverstein poems, eh?

 

Four Years, or The Mystery of Lonely

In four years, you can complete a college degree.

It is enough time to partner up, procreate, and maybe even train that new little person to use a toilet.

Four years can see the beginning and end of a presidential term.

It can be the home to a great number of make-ups and break-ups.

Your hair can grow two feet in length.

It is the life span of a very hearty mouse.

In four years, a lot can happen.  In the span of four years, I lived on three continents.  I went to law school.  Graduated from law school.    Took the bar exam.  Passed the bar exam.   Had my heart broken.   Broke someone’s heart.  Made friends and found communities I can’t imagine I once never knew.   Traveled.  Called at least four cities “home.”    Stood in weddings.  Held hands through divorces.  Cradled new babies.

I did a lot in four years.

And yet today, it all feels very brief.  Like no time at all has passed, really.   On Sunday, it will be four years since my dad died.  The third anniversary of Jared’s death falls just three weeks later.  Their deaths are, in somewhat inexplicable ways, tied together for me.  Perhaps it is the simple chronology – that Jared died just weeks after the first anniversary of my father’s death.  Perhaps it is that they shared profound similarities.  Or maybe it is that Jared was the person who knew – just knew – and with whom I trusted my secrets, my hopes, and my grief.   Losing him – the only person I could imagine processing such a loss with – was like losing a piece of myself and sad beyond measure.  But it was also like losing this connection – one of the last people who held this shared piece of history, who had met my father, who had been there with me when things were good, and then when they were bad, and who had watched all of this unfold.  But, regardless of why, I often feel the weight of their absence together, this compound loss of friend and father.

After so much time and so many things, it seems like I should not be so sad, not anymore.  It has been long enough that it feels like these days- the anniversarys and birthdays – should pass quietly, noted surely, but without the rawness or pain.  That is how it is most of the time, after all.  As days and years passed, I stopped missing them in the visceral way I did in the first few months.  They stopped invading my dreams only for me to be yanked back into consciousness with the physically jarring realization that they were gone.  But today it all feels fresh, fresher than it should.

But I felt their absence from the world today.  And it was sad.  It is sad.  I am sad.

It makes me feel lonely.

Which is hard to describe emotion, really.  It is a type of lonely in and of itself.  The loneliness of one’s own experience with the emotion, I suppose.  Because it is really such a terribly personal thing, this emotion with one name that takes on so many meanings it can almost feel like an empty word.  There is the lonely of being physically alone.  There is the lonely of not having someone – not being loved in a substantial way by other people.  There is the lonely of not being alone at all but feeling somehow outside – being unknown in a crowd, having a secret, or simply not quite fitting in.  There are simply so many different types of lonely it can be overwhelming.

The lonely I am experiencing is all of those things and none of those things, somehow all at once.  It is the loneliness of absence.  The loneliness of missing the people who knew you best and loved you.  The loneliness of that experiencing something that cannot quite or perfectly be understood, even by those who want to.  The loneliness of the world continuing to move when you just can’t.  It is the loneliness of loss, I suppose.

In these times, I often wonder about the cure, whether there is one and whether it should be sought.  Because, while I am desperately sad, I also cancelled plans to see people I adore.  People who I know would make me laugh, listen if I wanted to talk, or simply hang out.  It was, in some sense, the active rejection of comfort.  And I can’t quite explain it or say why, other than that it feels right.  It feels lonely, but right and safe in some sense.  Which is perhaps the explanation that in some moments we recognize such a deep need for safety that we know we can only find it in our own company.  We know, on some profound level, that no one can fill the void we currently feel and that we simply must, at least for a little while, feel it.

So I am feeling the void.  I am feeling the void of my father.  I am feeling my regret and guilt.  My deep-seated tension of somehow both wanting and fearing being just like him.  I am feeling the uncertainty of the world without him in it.  And I am feeling the void of Jared.  The absence of my friend and kindred spirit, the one person who would be safest to be near when I am in this place.  I am aching for his comfort and wisdom, his voice, and his existence.  I am missing – so deeply and painfully missing – knowing he is simply there, always.  They were these terribly similar men who played such meaningful – and sometimes painful - roles in my life.  The each, in their own way, helped form me in ways that cannot be easily explained.

I suspect I will always miss them.  Every day will not be like today.  Most days will be quieter, the calm acceptance of their very gone-ness.  But when someone changes you, you cannot help but carry a piece of that person with you, always.

I miss them today.  But I am so glad to carry the bits and pieces of them that I do.  Having known them makes me want to embody fully the very best parts of each of them.  But that doesn’t make it any less lonely without them.

Make The Things, or Look, I’m Bob Ross!

A friend recently introduced me to the shockingly simple project of making photo woodblocks.  It is one of those projects the execution of which is, in fact, so simple a not terribly bright child could pull it off.  The collection of necessary materials can be a bit (but not overly) time consuming, depending on what you have around the house.  I have slowly been collecting items for this little project over the past couple weeks and decided to give it a test run.

WHAT YOU NEED:

Photographs printed on printer paper.

I was just experimenting, so mine are kind of crap - I just grabbed a few things from my FB page, dropped them into Paint to mess around with the sizes, and printed them on a normal printer. I suspect it works better if you take a bit more care in printing and sizing.

Wood, Canvas, or Some Other Medium.

I went with two normal wood blocks (but none of my pictures were sized right, so I didn't use them), ceramic tile (made for water colors), and a strip of Balsa to use for postcards.

The video I watched only dealt with wood. I was curious what they would look like on canvas, so I decided to try that as well. Also, I have a thing for items that are extraordinarily wee. They make me laugh and I like them. Blicks sells tiny little canvases (~$3.00 for 5).

Gel Medium.

You can also buy this at Blicks or any art store. The person at the store says Modge Podge is slightly cheaper and should work, but is less transparent and will give the picture a milkier quality.

You don't need paint, but I was curious what it would look like if I painted the canvases or wood.

WHAT YOU DO:

Cut your picture to fit the medium.

Paint the Gel or Modge Podge onto the wood/canvas (or the back of the picture – I tried both and it didn’t seem to change anything).  Be careful not to get the Gel Medium on the back side of the photograph, as it will make life more difficult later on.

Press the picture down, making sure to smooth out air bubbles.

Let dry for 8-12 hours.

Feel free to use some old heavy law books to weigh things down...

Take a wet rag and gently rub the paper.  

Watch out for the edges of the photograph – it was a little tricky to not accidentally rip the image.  I also found that once the majority of the paper was removed it was easier to remove the remaining residue by hand instead of with a rag.  

And, well, that is pretty much it…

If you use Balsa, it is fairly fragile and cracks easily. I cut it when it was still slightly damp, which seemed to help prevent cracking.

I am going to turn the Balsa photos into cards and postcards.  One cool way to avoid having to write on the wood or use blah paper is to repurpose some scrap of paper from around the house and use tea to dye it. I went with the cover from a LR article (sorry Kurt).  Just leave the paper in the tea (or coffee, depending on how dark you want it) overnight.  You can either hang dry or dry in the oven, depending on the feel of paper you like.  Then go nuts!

Well friends.  That concludes Bob Ross Day.  Next up, button necklaces! (But I wouldn’t like, hold your breath or anything.)

A New Set of Days, or Getting Unlost

I will admit it: I am a sucker for the new year.  I love lists and new starts and this idea – this terribly hopeful idea – that this new sets of days can be different.  That WE can be different.  I like taking the time to reflect on who we were and what we learned in the days before, celebrate the past joys and mourn the losses, and acknowledge the passage of time.  And I like looking forward, expectantly, hopeful about what the future will hold.

As is most likely obvious, I also am a big fan of the resolution process.  And none of this “eat vegetables two times a day” nonsense for me, thank you very much!  Mine are big and long and banana-cakes – all about being and doing and experiencing.  None of which is terrifically quantifiable, frankly.  My friend HayMo would occasionally mock this little tendency of mine and just shout things like

Hope! Dream!  Dance!

In my somewhat limited defense, they are more quantifiable than that.  But not by much.

Last night I grabbed a drink with a friend – this incredible person that I am not quite sure how I was ever muddling along without – and it was like in the this haze of tumbling words and shared experience and camaraderie it seemed tremendously clear: I’m not ready to make my list for this year.  Not yet.    To move forward, at least to move forward meaningfully, you must know where you already are.  Otherwise, you are just sort of blindly launching yourself in a direction that seems, in the moment, to be quite right but really could be all kinds of wrong.

I occasionally navigate the world this way, quite honestly.  Not metaphorically, but actually.   I get hopelessly lost, like, a lot.  A truly embarrassing amount.  It’s like I never learned the lesson they teach you when you are small:  if you get lost, just stay where you are.  I don’t stay where I am, or even figure out where I am.  I just launch myself into what inevitably turns out to be A Very Long And Eventually Frustrating Walk.   I pick a direction that feels right and then just follow a completely madhouse mental map of What Seems Like It Would Make Sense.   I wander and wander, back tracking and circling, thinking it is getting me closer to my destination when in reality, with each step, I’m moving further away and making myself even more difficult to find.   Getting unlost is a whole long process because I so hopelessly entangled myself in the lost-ness.

Thinking about the new year and lists and the art of figuring out Where I Am Now reminded me of Haymo’s other great love.  In addition to sincerely enjoying the mockery of my listing and being told she is pretty (you are pretty HM!), HayMo also loves the Myers Brigg test and, at one point when we were in law school really went full on sales pitch about the whole thing.  She has, I believe, invested a fair chunk of time mucking about in the depths of Jung and the like.  I was never really sold on the idea, honestly.  I tend to think that sometimes, maybe even a great deal of the time, personality tests tell us little more than what we want to hear – we say who we would like to be and then they confirm:

Yes. This is who you would like to be.

I’ve wondered if, perhaps, it wouldn’t actually be a good deal more accurate to have someone else fill them out for us.

But that didn’t keep me from trying it out today.

I tried it out not because I don’t know who I am.  I suspect I do.  I mean,  not always and not completely, and not without certain murky grey areas.  I worry and wonder about the details of how those things play out.   But at the end of the day, on a deep, baseline level, I know who I am and who I want to be.  You probably do as well.  I think most of us do.  That said, I was curious.  I was curious what this set of questions could tell me about myself and if it could shed light on why I feel the things I feel or how to move from Here to There in a way that makes sense.  I wanted to see if it could give me some kind of map for What To Do With This Next Set Of Days.

It was all very self indulgent really.  I mean, it’s an awful lot of time to spend thinking and answering questions about yourself.

I’m not sure, quite honestly, what exactly to take from this little adventure in personality test taking.  I came up with a set of letters - INFJ, according to Myers-Brigg and the magic of the interwebz – that is supposed to be me in some substantial way.  I’m not sure if it says anything more than my horoscope or the “What Your Feet Say About You” quiz from Cosmo (no joke, that is a real Cosmo quiz people).   But there is no shortage of reading material on the topic and it is an interesting little exercise nonetheless.   And I’ll admit, there are things that sound  not untrue.  We are, apparently, a bunch of feel-y world-huggers and people-lovers who cry and beat ourselves for not being better people.  I can’t say I want to invite a bunch of us to a party or anything.  But is is pretty hard to deny the truth of that noise, really.  

According to the interwebz, INFJs are crowd of secretly shy and emotionally complex activists who are all compassionate and whatnot but only really known by a few.   We are apparently a gaggle of communicators, writers, and leaders who don’t tend to step in front of the crowd, possibly because we are stressed out and handling it by obsessing out loud and then beating ourselves up for not being better.  Oh, and sometimes we have a hard time verbalizing our emotional state in a way that makes sense to anyone else because we are all up in our heads and all over the place.  So that must be a real treat for everyone else, right?All of that to say, I’m not sure of the utility of Myers-Briggs.  It may just say what we want it to.  It may say a whole lot more.  But regardless, taking the time to really think about some of this stuff is helpful, I think.  It helps us to figure out the bigger questions of who we are – whether it is through agreeing, disagreeing, or simply questioning the results – in ways we don’t normally think about.  It helps us figure out where we are, and from that,  define where we want to go.  I’m looking forward to answering those questions.  And then making a list, damn it.

I Miss My Pants, or Grab Those Khakis!

I am wearing pants that don’t fit.

Oh that’s right.

You want to know why?

I’ll tell you.

I’m wearing pants that don’t fit because all of my pants are gone.  That’s right kids.  I lost all my pants.

So…remember how I used to live in a tent?

Yeah. That ended badly.  The tent disappeared.  Or, if we want to be all grammatically accurate, it was disappeared.  Because it did not just vanish of its own accord, I suppose.

The thing is, the camp was being evicted.  And some people were “helping” others by taking down their tents and removing their personal belongs. I have some strong feelings on this topic, so I’m just going to take one giant step to the side and move right past that little mess and jump to me getting to camp and finding the tent gone.

And it was gone-gone.  Like without a trace gone.

At the time, I had a really strong emotional reaction to it.  Mostly because I seem to have really strong emotional reactions to most things these days.  But also because it felt like this symbolic loss of something I loved and cared about and didn’t get to say goodbye to.  I hadn’t spent the night before there, at the camp, because we were going to court the next day.  So to come back from court and find it, and most of the camp with it, gone was just devastating in this totally inexplicable way.  Because I really did live there.  It felt profoundly like home, which made it feel really painful and really personal and really fucking sad.

Plus all my shit was in it.  And I felt crazy guilty because it wasn’t my tent – it was someone else’s and a bunch of his shit was in it too.

Anyway, at the time, it was really the emotional loss that hit home.  My shit was gone, yes.  But I wasn’t really concerned about that stuff.  I was sad that my journal was gone.  I was sad that a bunch of stuff I had made and couldn’t replace or re-do was gone.  Mostly I was just sad about what was happening and that we had created an environment where something like that could happen.  Because in the month that I stayed there, I never once had a real problem with safety or security.  The worst that ever happened was the occasional swiping of our front tent peg.  So it seemed just like such a tragic way to end things.  And in light of all of that, and all of the sadness of losing a physical occupation, the day to day practical stuff seemed inconsequential.

It seemed inconsequential, that is, right up until I realized I have no pants and a severe shortage of underwear.  Because you know where that stuff lived?  In the freaking tent.

So today I’m wearing pants that don’t fit right.

I don’t look great, guys.

Also, if you happen to see a few pairs of khakis strewn about the SCCC lawn, grab them.  Those are mine.

Just Admit It, or Aren’t They Right There?

My siblings and I are close in age.  Like, we are talking minutes and months apart, not years.  We grew up right on top of each other in a lot of ways.  There wasn’t a lot of privacy.  It was pretty tricky to keep secrets in our house.  No place was safe from the prying eyes of one’s siblings.  And we really weren’t always nice to each other.  It didn’t help that our family went a little banana cakes when we were teenagers.  That is just never good.  And it made us much worse people to each other than we otherwise might have been, I think.  Because honestly, we were kind of jerks to each other a lot.  I’m not sure we liked each other very much or at all, in fact, until we were much older and there was much more space between us and All Those Things That Happened when we were younger.

One thing I learned growing up in my house was that diaries were simply never safe.  They would be read.  Which I suspect is not atypical of any household with siblings.  But, likely because we were so close in age and because things were a little Nuts In General, it was a tad intense.  Your deepest secrets and thoughts and fears would not only be read, but also exposed publicly, expressly to make you look and feel small and stupid.  I learned, for many reasons, that vulnerability was something to hide (and of course, never to commit anything to paper that you didn’t plan on sharing).  When you are a teenager, and everything feels messy and raw almost all of the time because your brain is still all half formed and you just kind of want to get stoned and have sex a lot but you also have pimples in weird places and are never quite convinced that anyone likes you as much as you like them, except, of course,  when you are stoned and having sex, it can be hard to not have a safe place or way to admit just how unsure of yourself you are or that you are scared or worried or sad.

It took me a long time – well into college – to begin to be able to actually articulate my feelings on any level that approximated actual emotional honesty.  Really, it took Jared, who had this ability – this what seemed to be an amazing ability – to say these simple things, like “I feel ashamed” or “I feel lonely” for me to be able to admit those same things.  And honestly, I don’t know that I had ever said them before.  They were so terrifying to me and, because I grew up thinking that admitting these things was somehow shameful or bad in and of itself – that these were things to hide and not safe to admit – it took a long time before I actually came to understand that they were really just feelings and that it was powerful, not weak, to be able to admit them.  It took – and continues to take – me a lot of time and effort to really embrace and understand that admitting these things is what ties us, as people, together.

Lately I have been in this weird place, trying to process all of these weird things.  And that can feel really lonely and overwhelming.  Because it’s hard.  It’s hard to acknowledge the ways in which you are broken.  It’s much, much easier to Just Always Be Fine.  It’s much, much easier to just ignore or deny the ways in which we hurt ourselves and others and hope that they go away on their own, or that no one notices.  It is much easier to stay in a pattern, even a destructive one, than it is to break free of it.

I met someone recently who is one of those people who makes you feel like there is hope for you in the world – that maybe, someday, you could be like her – that your life could be that good and that meaningful,that you could have that kind of integrity and resolve.  It’s been really inspiring.   And it has just been good.  It makes me feel braver and like I’m not alone at all.  Because it scares me to deal with shit sometimes.  It scares me because sometimes dealing with shit means losing things – people you love and things you want or hope for.  And it scares me because sometimes it feels very much like pulling on a loose thread – so small and seemingly innocuous but it will unravel everything.  And it scares me because it means being honest in a way that is uncomfortable and raw and vulnerable – it requires admitting Your Real Truth.  And Your Real Truth isn’t always pretty or something you are terribly proud of or would really enjoy other people knowing.  It makes you feel all naked and not in the fun way.

But being able to admit all of those things means I feel like I can now see them more clearly.  And I can see more clearly where I am and where I want to go.  It feels like figuratively dumping your purse out on the table and then just identifying what all the crap is in there anyway.  Which is kind of exactly what some of this is – just putting all of this information out there and then slowly going through and recognizing what each bit is.  Because it isn’t always clear, is it?  Sometimes what you think is one thing is really quite another altogether.  And sometimes it takes someone else to see it with you for you to really be able to recognize that.  At least that is how it is for me.  It is like when you are looking for your keys, and you look all over, and then your roommate comes in and says

Aren’t those your keys on the table?

And then you feel like a dumbass, because how did you miss that?  They were Right There the whole time.  Sometimes you just need someone else to help you see that.  And to do that, you need to be able to tell the truth about what it is you think and feel.  Which is hard and sometimes sucks.  But also means there is hope; if you can identify it, that means you can work on changing it or embracing it or doing whatever it is that needs to be done.  And that is good, right?

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Lying: A Beginner’s Guide, or Well That’s Just Not True

I’ve been thinking about lies lately.  I like to think I’m a pretty honest person, you know, as such things go.  This is not really because I have Great Integrity so much as it is because my poker face sucks.  Like really sucks.  It’s like Joey and the raccoons you guys.  (Also, love a good Friends reference.)  Sometimes I want to lie.  Like a lot.  But that fact usually marches right across my face well before words can exit my mouth.  It’s like a little banner ad for the listener:

Watch out! Untruths Coming!

But, while I am in general a terrible liar, I’ve been hit recently with how often I (and while we are being all honest, probably you) tell little lies.  These are not the grand tall tales we were taught as children were bad and wrong, but rather the white lies that Serve A Purpose.   These are lies we learned – the lies we tell because we think maybe it is kinder, or to protect ourselves from being Too Vulnerable, or because sometimes we just aren’t really brave enough to Tell The Truth.  They are our Everyday Lies, sewn into the fabric of the way we interact with those around us.  They, at least for me, are as much habit as they are anything else.  And they are a hard habit to break.

Every!Day!Adventures!, or Good Morning Sunshine

P is for Plan, or What Thoreau Says