The interview with the Blackboard recruiter went well enough that my resume is being passed on to the hiring manager. This is because I stayed up all night trying to prepare, because there are so many things I’ve forgotten in the last six months. I reviewed everything I could possibly think of that might be asked, and the most helpful was going to Blackboard listservs hosted at universities that use it. If they required a user name and password, I just moved on. Enough were open that I was able to learn a lot in 21 hours and two minutes. It’s actually not that different from WebCT, the LMS (learning management system) I helped set up at University of Houston. WebCT was bought out by Blackboard, so some of the same technologies still exist. This is a more technical position than I’m used to, so I’m hoping that if I don’t get this job, I’ll be considered for another position in the customer service department. I’m not afraid of working on the backend, but I’m also much better on the phone with inexperienced users. As I put in every cover letter, I am great at translating “geek to English.”

In any case, I’m not going to give up on Blackboard. I’m going to give this opportunity everything I’ve got, and keep applying until I annoy them enough to hire me for something. I am too talented at academic technology to let this opportunity (or any others with the company) slip through my fingers. I’ve also applied at lots of universities who have distance education programs, because generally full-time positions come with tuition waivers. I’d really like to end up at Howard, because I could go straight through the last of my undergrad into the MDiv program, which is my ultimate goal, anyway. However, I cannot tell if my resume is being ignored, or if it’s just a case of university bureaucracy. Getting hired at University of Houston was no small feat, but once I got there, I was promoted every year. It was getting my foot in the door that was the hard part.

I’ve also applied to schools that would be out of my league in terms of trying to get in, but with tuition waivers from working there, I could bypass the application process. I’ve sent resumes to both Georgetown and American, and have considered James Madison, UVa, and Tech. The only reason I’ve considered them without actually applying is that I’m still debating on whether I’d want to move out of the DC area. It’s not like it’s far… maybe a couple of hours, but enough to take me out of where I really want to be. For instance, I can’t take the Metro. I’m also a little gunshy about moving to a place I’ve never been. The whole idea of living in DC was that I’ve lived here before. It wasn’t a stretch to come back, getting into my normal routines here & expanding my friendship circle.

I wish I lived a little closer to Alexandria, where most of my friends are, but Silver Spring has been so good to me that I can’t imagine leaving, even just to go across the river.

The shooting that happened yesterday (in the Del Rey neighborhood of Alexandria) rattled me, because it happened where my friends, Thomas, Autumn, and Dan, and my cousin, Nathan, all live. Dan actually heard it happen, and thought it was fireworks.

There was a neighborhood walk last night called “Hate is Not Welcome Here,” which was heartening because it shows that when violence happens, we will not back down. We will show up with our non-violent responses and try to make a difference.

I so admire people who have jobs and children and other enormous responsibilities that still go the extra mile to put themselves out there in terms of political activism. I am slowly easing myself into getting back into the swing of things, but I’m not there yet. DC will be ready when I am. There are marches all the time, if not every day… we have to believe that resistance is not futile.

In a lot of ways, I am ashamed of the way I’ve handled myself since my mother died, because I did not expect to fold into myself as hardcore as I did. I knew that I would be sad for the rest of my life, but I didn’t expect to absolutely lose my snot. I didn’t expect my whole life to crater into nothing as at first, I could not get out of bed, and I am still reticent to leave my house. Applying for jobs is busywork which still allows my mind to wander while I’m doing it. I know that there is no right and wrong way to grieve, and I shouldn’t beat myself up so hard, but I don’t think I’ve ever been good at not beating myself up. I’ve shamed myself for moving out of Houston, I’ve shamed myself for not spending more time with my mother while I was in Houston, and I’ve really shamed myself for counting on the fact that my mother would live so much longer than she did.

My mother and I were not close for a lot of my life, having pushed each other away because we didn’t really understand one another. Therefore, my grief and guilt is centered around the loss of the future I didn’t get, because we made a lot of progress in a very short time, especially when she came to DC alone and we had so much time to ourselves to rekindle our relationship. She didn’t get a hotel room, she stayed with me, and slept in my bed for the first time in probably 35 years. I was still in deep grief over losing Dana, and those few nights with my mom lying next to me were the best sleep I’d gotten in ages.

In retrospect, thinking about these things has rendered me a zombie, walking through life here… but not present. I am slowly trying to change these things about myself, and each victory, no matter how small, is glorious because it was so hard won. For instance, I slept well and made coffee this morning. I am excited to see Pri-Diddy this evening. I am excited about going to Dan’s game night tomorrow. Excitement is not an emotion I’ve felt a whole lot lately, because excitement requires energy.

Most of the time, I feel like my “get up and go just got up and left.”

Yesterday, I treated myself to a haircut and relaxed into the woman’s hands as she washed my hair… possibly the first time I’ve been touched in weeks. It was a simple thing, but so important. Another victory to add to my list.

Another thing I have noticed is that in my writing, I can turn nearly any entry into talking about grief. No matter what topic I start with, it invariably whittles down into “God, I am so sad.” But that is my life right now. Everything does come down to that. There’s no one I wanted to call more after my interview than my mother… so, even though I don’t believe that she’s watching me, I talked to her, anyway. Just because you don’t get a response means your words are less important.

But not getting a response is just one more thing I have to get used to- along with the many other things that are different now.

But hey… I made coffee today.

When I woke up and looked at my phone yesterday, it didn’t say “Carolyn Baker’s birthday is today.” It said, “you have a notification from Carolyn Baker.” I nearly jumped out of my skin. Of course it was the birthday thing, but the wording set me off. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep, I was in full-on panic mode. I took my psych meds, including Klonopin for anxiety, but grief this deep is not something that psych meds can touch… the relief is that I wasn’t feeling the physical effects that anxiety brings, such as shortness of breath, brain and heart race, cortisol pulsing through my body so that I am feeling like a wet cat backed into a corner, claws extended.

My original plan for my mother and Dana’s birthday was to go to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s house, because that’s the trip that my mother and I had planned for this summer. I was about to get into the shower when I got a call from my sister that my dad had a heart attack. That was my official “fuck this shit” moment. I waffled between dropping everything and driving down to Houston so that I would have my car once I got there… and getting into bed, possibly under it. My dad and sister chatted with me on Google Hangouts so that I could see that my dad was okay, and told me not to come. So, I did what any self-respecting depressed person would do… I got into bed and alternated between staring at the ceiling, overthinking about it, and zoning out to videos on my laptop (I started Orange is the New Black, because I found out last season that if I didn’t watch it butt-quick, there were going to be spoilers on Facebook that I didn’t want to see… for instance, I found out through an AD that Samira Wiley had gotten a new job…).

I would overthink and overworry until I couldn’t take it anymore, then take a break, then overthink and overworry some more.

My dad has now been given the all-clear, and will possibly go home from the hospital today.

In other news, I’ve got a job interview with Blackboard tomorrow for a Client Support Engineer position. I am very excited about this possibility, because I have been in academic technology for a large part of my career. Digital pedagogy is a passion of mine, and I love Sherry Turkle, the premier expert in the field. She does a great job of advocating for online education, but balancing it with in-person conversation. She personifies an Anne Lamott quote which is that “almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” I have made it a goal in life to meet her, and I can’t imagine she doesn’t come to DC once in a while for book readings, etc. I will just make it a point not to yell at her or give her a hug while harboring an infection… things which I lovingly refer to as “dumbass attacks.”

I am so tired of hearing bad news that tears came to my eyes when the Blackboard recruiter e-mailed me. It was just for a short phone interview, but it’s the first step toward achieving a major goal. When I wrote him back to tell him of my availability, you cannot imagine how hard it was not to say “oh dear God you cannot imagine how much I needed this today my mother died my grandmother died my father had a heart attack and I am one step away from crawling under my bed.” There’s no punctuation because in my head it was a huge run-on sentence with no breath whatsoever.

I need this job. I really need this job. While it will be nice to get paid for something I love, it has been hell on earth not to have any distractions at all from thinking about everything that’s been going on since October. The one saving grace about having that time to myself is that I really dug deep into my feelings and dealt with them right away. I read a story in the news that Prince Harry is just now getting counseling over Princess Diana’s death, having stuffed it down for 20 years.

I have been able to sit in deep grief since it happened, so that going forward, it will be a more shallow well of pain. When you lose a parent, grief never goes away… it just changes. I’ve been amazed at how much it has changed just in the last few months. Progress is happening, albeit slowly, but every journey begins slowly until there’s a little momentum behind it. I feel that the regular routine of having somewhere to be every day is that inertia. Maybe I’ll be able to laugh a little more and cry a little less. Maybe going out into public won’t be so scary. Being on a team again sounds like a hug from Jesus.

I also don’t know what the salary range is for the position, but if it’s anywhere close to what I’ve made in the past, I’ll be able to go back to school shortly. The possibly of working for Blackboard and going to school on Blackboard is hilarious to me… the haha for my day. I have to savor them, because of course in deep grief you don’t get all that many.

I am also going to dinner with Pri Diddy on Thursday and possibly to a Game Night at Dan’s this weekend. Look at me! I have plans for leaving the house TWICE!

I ask for your prayers, and if you are not a God person, your presence tomorrow at 11:00 AM… and by presence, I do not want you to show up at my house. 😛 Hold space for me, keep me in your mind, send positive energy, say your own special kind of black magic prayer. I’ll take it.

And now I have to let you go. I only have 21 hours and two minutes to get ready.

This morning I made a concerted effort to take care of myself. I took a long bath, shaved my legs, slathered myself in sunscreen, and put on shorts for possibly the first time this season. And, look at me, I am wearing sandals. My room is next, because Marie Kondo lies. She says that if you clean your room, you’ll never go back to it looking like a disaster area because you’ll be so proud of yourself.

Unfortunately, not so much. Maybe this advice is for regular people, who don’t have the type depression I feel, which a lot of the time centers around “nothing matters.” I don’t feel happy, I don’t feel sad, I just feel empty inside with nothing to fill it. Also, I think there’s something psychological about having everything I need within immediate reach. My house burned down when I was 11, and I think it triggered something in my brain that I need to be able to see all my stuff at once, because you never know when you won’t have it anymore. Additionally, even though it feels good to me (at times, anyway… maybe a nap), I won’t sleep naked, either… because what am I going to do if the fire alarm goes off? I don’t have time to look for pants. I suppose that is one advantage to being male. I’d only have to look for pants… otherwise, I’d be running down the stairs, as Dana & Counselor coined, “tatas akimbo.”

[Editor’s Note: Happy birthday, Counselor. I hope you get lots of cake and presents…. but mostly cake.]

For Dana, who I don’t think has seen it, “tatas akimbo” reminds me of a villain on Freakazoid! called “Arms Akimbo.” I can’t think of one without the other. For those of you not in the know, it’s still one of my favorite Amblin Entertainment cartoons ever.

It’s about a teenager named Dexter Douglas who gets trapped in the Internet and the electricity turns him into a comic superhero. The humor is MUCH like The Tick and Venture Brothers, but of course the Internet angle speaks to me… as well as the double personality that goes along with being a mild-mannered nerd at home and an ADHD spazz when he “freaks out.” I suppose Dexter is kind of like Clark Kent, if Kent was constantly glued to a computer terminal alone in his room.

It’s voiced by the usual Amblin crew (meaning also on Animaniacs and Histeria!), like Tress MacNeille, Paul Rugg, and Maurice LaMarche- but adds guests that are equally hilarious, like Ed Asner, Ricardo Montalbán, and Craig Ferguson. I am still sort of bitter that F! only got two seasons, because every single episode is fall-down funny, particularly a standalone episode regarding a British “superhero” named “Lord Bravery…” conceived as an homage to John Cleese. He wants to call himself “Lord Bravery,” but quickly finds out it’s a copyright infringement. Hilarity ensues.

You can buy both seasons of F! on YouTube for $40.00, or $2.00 per episode. I am hoping that because Animaniacs is now on Netflix that they’ll add Freakazoid! and Histeria! as well, but I’m not holding my breath.

Histeria! is the least known of all the Amblin Entertainment cartoons, but it combines real historical events with extremely smart comedy… such as information about President Taft to the theme of Shaft. It was conceived as an animated version of Saturday Night Live, more a cartoon sketch show that met the WB network’s policies on education for  children… and, like all Amblin shows, built with jokes that go right over the kids’ heads and make adults fall on the floor. For instance, with the Taft thing, I highly doubt that the children watching would know the movie being parodied.

You know, this entry started out with me talking about taking care of myself, and it’s amazing how much my mood has lifted by talking about all this comedy… for instance, thinking about Dexter Douglas again, which I haven’t in years, reminds me of me. For all practical intents and purposes, Dexter and I are the same person… particularly when I get into Linux command line mode. Not so much with DOS. I haven’t used it since fifth grade, so I have to Google everything I need to do with it. I also hate that the commands are just different enough that it wastes my time. For example, in DOS it’s ipconfig. In Linux, it’s ifconfig. I am so lucky that the amount of time I have to use DOS is negligible. Otherwise, I think I’d be tearing my hair out on a daily basis.

Now, just because I’ve said this, my punishment will be that in my next job, my Microsoft operating system will be installed without a graphical user interface and coworkers who say, how did you make it this long in IT without learning DOS, n00b? It evens out. Most Microsoft people are terrified of Linux and won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. My entrance into Dexter Douglas-land started in college, when I had, as my friend Leslie so aptly put it, an idealistic Red Hat phase. One of my close friends was a Linux system administrator, and I was hooked from day one. I started using Debian-based distributions when they progressed beyond Slackware, which, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just take it on faith that it is a lesson in gut-wrenching pain… unless you really know what you’re doing.

I did not.

With most operating systems, if there are pieces of software that you need to get another piece of software to run, it will tell you… like having to install the Dot Net framework to run Quicken. With Slackware, you had to find all the dependencies yourself, and most of the time, compile software from source code rather than it coming in a .deb executable (equal to a Windows .exe). I only knew one person in college that preferred Slackware because it was so difficult, because it gave her bragging rights. I would just sigh and rub my temple with my middle finger when it came up.

Joe, the aforementioned Linux system administrator, set up a web server for my friend Luke and me, and that’s how I really got started with the command line. That was in 1997, and I haven’t looked back… although I knew UNIX a little bit from just being in college, period. In those days, UH e-mail was hosted on either a UNIX or VAX/VAX box, depending on which one you were assigned, with pine as your client. Moving up in the world to Outlook and/or Entourage was a big damn deal.

We also had staff and students that used a popular e-mail client called Eudora. One of the funniest support calls I ever took was a lady who called up and asked how to configure her “Endora” account. I had to mute the phone I was laughing so hard. When I recovered, I said, “do you mean your Eudora account? I think Endora was the grandmother on Bewitched.” It’s been so long that I don’t remember whether she laughed or was peeved, but I certainly remember how quickly I started shaking with laughter, willing no sound to come out.

And now that we’re on the subject of computer support calls, here are my top “favorites:”

• A man called up and said that his computer wouldn’t turn on. I knew to check physical connections first, so I asked him if it was plugged in. We go back and forth for way too long, because he insists that it is. I am moments away from telling him that his power supply is toast when I hear, “wait.” It was plugged in, but he had plugged the power strip into itself instead of into the wall.
• At the UH Helpdesk, like most others, when you first call in you get a list of network outages (if there are any that day). When I pick up the phone, she says, “I just heard the network was down and my monitor is blinking on and off. Are those two things related? Again, it was all I could do not to fall apart laughing, so on the verge of tears running down my face, I said, “ma’am, I hope not.”
• It is simply amazing just how many people think you can help them solve their computer problems while their computer is at home and they are driving.
• And finally, through no fault of their own (because why would you know this if you weren’t a computer person?), there were so many people who called in with their theses erased, their PhotoShop projects ruined, etc. because they didn’t know that a magnet would erase the data on a floppy drive and would stick them to the side of their CPUs or on the refrigerator in order not to forget them. And of course there weren’t any backups. Why would that be important?
  • As a side note, even though USB drives are more stable than floppies, please just put copies of files on them. Mobile drives are prone to errors, loss, theft, etc. With errors, sometimes they can be fixed, and sometimes the drive is bricked. Please, for the love of God, don’t let that bricked USB stick contain your only copy of your doctoral research. I used to be wary of cloud storage, but I got over it. Now, if I have sensitive documents I password protect them, zip them, and then add a second password to the zip file. I do very little with Google Docs, Office Live, etc. and just download my files to whichever computer I’m using at the time… including my phone and iPad.
    • I also use LastPass to keep track of all my passwords in an encrypted vault. The only password I need to know from memory is the one for my e-mail, and the rest are complicated random strings. For instance, my bank and blog passwords are 25 characters. In terms of hacking, your best bet at security is to make passwords so long that it takes years to crack them. It won’t stop a hacker if he/she is that dedicated, but most will move on to the people who still think Password123 is a valid option. LastPass is available for all browsers and mobile devices, and on my Android, works with my fingerprint reader (don’t know about iOS).

The bottom line is that there are very few computer problems I haven’t encountered in the 20 years I’ve been doing this… and in 20 years, those problems haven’t changed. There are still people who write down their passwords in a notebook and keep it either on top of their desks or in an unlocked drawer. There are still people who put their network credentials on a Post-It note and stick it to the bottom of their keyboards…. that way, no one has to hack your network at all. You’ve just let them in the front door……………….

Which is kind of like having to run out of a burning house, tatas akimbo.

I mentioned yesterday that my grief presents as lack of motivation in most areas of my life. The one area it doesn’t affect is looking for a job, because especially since I passed my ITIL exam, I have a much better chance of getting an interview than I did before, because I’m still working on my Bachelor’s. In technology, the degree won’t matter much because it’s not in Computer Science (degree plan is BA in Political “Science”), but most companies want to make sure you can make it through college, anyway. It is a long, long, long story as to why I’m not finished yet- one for another day. As a result, I think my resume is getting kicked out of the automatic readers on principle, so that hiring managers aren’t getting to look at my resume at all. Basically the ITIL certification allows me to run a helpdesk rather than just being a part of one, but I’d work my way up if I got my foot in the door. For all the money I spent on it ($1,000), I don’t understand why I’m being kept in the dark. I am a computer badass, and I wish more people knew it.

However, I only put that stuff on my resume. When I introduce myself and people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a writer. Of course it’s not my career. I think if it was, I wouldn’t have anything to write about. But at the same time, it defines me more aptly than computer badass ever will. Even when I am working full time, writing is a second full-time job because I don’t slow down on the blog, either. I write at lunch or after work, and just hope that people keep listening… but even more important than that, wanting to be a better writer tomorrow than I am today for all the tomorrows of my life.

If I’d had any kind of forethought, I might have used that money to enroll at UMD instead. I could finish quicker at University of Houston, using (ironically enough) the distance education tools I first helped set up from 1999-2000. However, now that I have in-state tuition, I would rather go to class in the flesh if I can swing it. I am positive that Blackboard would work well for me… after all, I am a writer and my thoughts come out clearly that way. But in political science, part of the fun is arguing in person.

There’s also a few classes I could take at community college that were full when I tried to enroll as a freshman/sophomore… or would work better online than others. For instance, I need a literature requirement, and I was dropped from Intro to Poetry when I got sick and missed three classes in summer school. There are few times in my life that I’ve been more angry, because as it was explained to me, it didn’t matter how sick I was. Rules were rules. The day I was dropped, I had an A+ in the class. I think it was because I never had to write poetry, just essays explaining what other poets meant. I, like most teenagers, had notebooks full of angsty, awful poetry… and I don’t think I’ve ever progressed beyond them. But Freshman Comp 1 & 2 were both Mickey Mouse classes for me, so I guess I’ve found my genre. Not every writer can be good at all of them.

I also need a math requirement, and I’ll have to check with UMD, but at University of Houston, you could sub Music Theory and Logic for things like Algebra and Calculus. I never took the SAT/ACT, but if I had, I assure you that my results would have been somewhere along the lines of verbal wizard and maths potted plant. How did I get out of taking placement tests, you ask? I missed three weeks of school, when both of them were being administered, due to migraine headaches that wouldn’t go away and was hospitalized. I had several spinal taps, so for a long time I couldn’t even keep my head up. I just took the entrance exams for community college and skipped standardized testing rites of passage altogether.

In terms of the hours I already have, at UH I’m a second-semester junior. My minor is in psychology, and all of those hours are finished… thank God. One of my friends made me laugh (because it wasn’t really a joke) by saying, “could you change your major? We’re tired of you trying to diagnose us all.” So, I waited until I had enough hours to complete my minor and changed my major to political science after having been bitten by the bug. When you want to get involved with social justice and governmental change, there’s no better place to be… although where Trump is concerned, I’m really glad I took Abnormal Psych and aced it.

At first, I chose psychology as a major because I didn’t want to be a therapist myself… I thought I would end up as a professor or something, because I didn’t want to unleash a crazy person on my poor patients. Lots and LOTS of people go into private practice because they got interested in psych when they were diagnosed with something themselves. I just preferred learning the theories, from William James to Sigmund Freud to Erik Erikson to Jean Piaget. I am interested in the way your core personality is set by the age of six, and further development has more to do with behavior modification rather than changing who you are.

For instance, I am a writer, and I have been since kindergarten. It is literally who I am, and not something I picked up along the way.

I picked up computers in the ’90s, and when I did, boy were they heavy. You haven’t lived until you’ve crushed your feet with a 21-inch CRT monitor, or cracked your head on a desk trying to hide cable.

It has been a blessing to see wi-fi, Bluetooth, and flat screens develop…. not to mention laptops with docking stations.

Being a geek has gotten easier, while writing has stayed the same amount of gut-wrenching difficulty. I carry these words with me all the time, given to me by a friend and they’ve just stuck………… “looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.”

But to be fair, neither is teaching a little old lady how to e-mail picture attachments.

There are so many books out there on how to deal with grief, but it is as individual as a fingerprint. No one grieves the same way, and there is no right or wrong answer. I am writing this to share my own process in hopes that it might be helpful to someone else… but again, my experience is going to be different from yours.

In some cases, the person you’re grieving might still be alive. In others, the process of your loved one dying might be so protracted that you will absolutely get a chance to wrap up loose ends and say goodbye. Lastly, some of you will lose loved ones in an instant, because tomorrow is never promised.

I have probably said this before, but I fall into the last category. At 65, after just retiring the last May, my mother broke her foot and kept it elevated so much that an embolism developed in late September. When it blew, it killed her instantly on October 2nd… not even really enough time to enjoy being retired. Because none of her doctors knew it was there, they could not have removed it while it was still in place. It was no one’s fault, because the best surgeon in the world, had he or she been standing right next to her, could not have saved her. She was in the midst of reinventing herself, because teaching had defined her for so long, and I would have loved to see the person she would have become…. especially since, selfishly, she would have had a lot more time to come and visit me. 😛

In those first few days, my sense of loss included lack of control… as if the most experienced surgeon couldn’t have saved her, but somehow, I could’ve. Eventually, it went away as I internalized what had really happened, but I still felt guilty that in the two weeks before, I’d thought about driving back to Houston to visit my father as he went through multiple surgeries to remove the cancer on his nose, and when I told my mother that I wanted to do so, she told me that she thought it was a bad idea. The guilt was that I had plenty of money in the bank to stay in a hotel, that my car gets 40 mpg so fuel wouldn’t have been expensive, and I could have been there to visit my mother in her last days, as well as been there for Lindsay when it happened had I stayed in town long enough. I still was, because I rushed to Houston immediately when I heard the news, but it wasn’t the same. I had to let go of those feelings as well, because I did the best I could with the information I had.

My grief process started out the way every emergency in my life ever has… make sure everyone else is okay, and break down later. What emotions I couldn’t stuff down naturally, I took anti-anxiety medication so nothing rattled me. In a sense, my natural response coupled with the meds made me feel as if I was having an out-of-body experience, as if this were happening to someone else. I needed it to be that way, though, because otherwise I would not have been able to function. The visitation and funeral would have been too much, and not because my mother died. Because I am not big on crowds of people I do not know, and though my family was in attendance, including my dad, it was a small number of people with which I was comfortable. My medication allowed me to rise above, and in most cases, return to the “show mode” of my PK upbringing. I was polite, my breathing deep and even, though I was screaming obscenities inside (come on… we’ve met). I felt sympathy for everyone who lost her, because it wasn’t just Lindsay and me. It was our stepsisters and their families, her first family, my dad (not only were they married for 23 years, they’d been friends since elementary school), and a whole host of friends, former students, and their parents as well. As an empath, it was hard not to pick up on all the pain in the room… but perhaps it was for the best, because it was another tool to keep me functioning. Again, I could break down later. I felt that in the moment, my best bet was to be strong for everyone else. Plus, I gave a short eulogy at the funeral, and I had to be able to make it through without falling apart so that I could be understood.

However, not everyone understood that about me. For some, I didn’t seem sad enough. They wondered why I didn’t cry.

When I got back to DC, the floodgates unleashed and I came undone…. just not in front of all the people that probably needed to see that I was grieving, too. Of course I was, just not in the same way. Part of the reason I was so incredibly calm was that I was in shock. I think I’ve said this before, but it was akin to the high you feel when you break a bone and adrenaline kicks in so hard that you really don’t feel the pain until it wears off. Even seeing my mother’s body at the visitation didn’t allow the shock to wear off, which was entirely surprising because in the beginning, I was convinced that I would believe she was dead when I could see it.

Not so much.

Again, the shock didn’t wear off until days later, in, strangely, the bathtub of all places. In retrospect, perhaps it was being naked physically that allowed me to be naked emotionally. I was reading a book and one line broke the dam. Before that, I was my own best dike (literally, although it’s okay with me if that makes you laugh. It made me laugh, too.).

So, in no particular order, here are the feelings I’ve had and the actions I’ve taken over the past few months… the things I’ve learned about grief that I didn’t think I’d have to learn quite so young:

• I am so angry at the time I view as “stolen from me.” I thought I would have 15 or more years with my mother.
• I am so jealous that I have friends much older than I am whose mothers are still alive.
• I am irrationally filled with rage every time someone says to me that this was God’s will, she’s in a better place, or it would have been so much harder for me had I lost my father rather than my mother, as if I was happier I lost my left arm than my right. I also wear an ichthus necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint etched into the silver, and people have commented that it’s creepy because they’re focused on how said fingerprint was acquired at the funeral home.
• I am ashamed of all that rage because I know that they have no idea that they’re saying the wrong things and only meaning to be kind… except for the necklace comments. That’s just mean, and it’s been said to me more than once.
• My cost of living is very, very low and I had a lot of savings in the bank. I used that money to be able to completely fall apart, and in retrospect, it was the wrong thing to do because I didn’t have a routine to allow me to return to some semblance of normalcy.
• Alternatively, no one had to see me in the stage of my grief where I was metaphorically tearing my clothes and literally unable to take care of myself… even with medication, I was still completely undone.
• Now that months have passed, I am able to take care of myself, but rarely amenable to leaving the house, for two reasons. The first is that I still have anxiety attacks and I don’t want anyone to see them. The second is that when the subject of my mother dying comes up, people start to treat me differently. If you don’t know what I mean, it is such things as pushing me away, treating me with kid gloves, and asking how I am every five minutes when the way I feel hasn’t changed in months, much less between the coffee being served and the bacon & eggs arriving.
• I have empathy for the people who push me away, because they’re not doing it on purpose. They simply don’t know what to say, and view saying nothing as “better.”
• If you are reading this and have never lost anyone close to you, please know that you don’t have to say anything. I would much rather have touches- a hug, a cheek kiss, an arm around my shoulder, and you not minding if in the middle of that hug, I start to cry and you get tears (and possibly snot) on your shirt.
• Also, do not say “call me if you need anything.” I will not call you under normal circumstances, and I need a lot of things. I just don’t know what they are and guessing is a losing battle. If I wrap my brain around something that I think will make me feel better, it won’t five minutes later.
• Do not listen to anyone who says “everything will be okay,” because it won’t be for a long time. That’s a piece of advice I got from a friend, which I have extrapolated into nothing will ever be okay again. I will get moments of extreme joy, and life will go on, but there’s never going to be an event in which I don’t wish my mother was there. I will grieve in some measure for the rest of my life.
• I’ve pushed away people I really love, and have come to regret it immensely. At first, I just wanted to be left alone. Now, I’m more careful what I wish for.
• My grief also presents as not eating and then EATING ALL THE THINGS when I get hungry enough. I thought about setting alarms on my phone for meal times, but discarded the idea when I realized that I couldn’t force myself to eat, either.
• I have little motivation for my dreams, because again, my mother is not there to witness them materialize. I find myself willing to settle in all areas of my life. I have no doubt that the motivation will eventually return as I get a sense of “the new normal,” but right now I would be just as happy working at Taco Bell as I would starting a new church plant…. because What. Is. The. Point?
• I am realizing more and more that I can’t wait until grief is over and my mood changes. I am in charge of changing my own mood, but sometimes I don’t have the motivation. I want to sit in my sadness, because thinking about and grieving my mother is all I have left of her. When I don’t want to sit in sadness, I play happy music, like Aqua, and go for a walk. There is room in my life for both.
• I am a lot more scatterbrained than normal, a brain fog that will not lift. Just a small example… I’ve told many people that I’m watching Wentworth. I’m watching Westworld.
• I read books on grief in small doses, because I am determined to finish them, but I can’t take it all in one sitting. I would rather escape into novels that have nothing to do with my current situation.
• Alternatively, over the past few months I’ve also escaped into TV shows where people come back to life, fantasy I wish was reality, such as:
  • Santa Clarita Diet
  • iZombie
  • The Returned
  • Deadbeat
• There have been so many things I perceive I’ve done wrong during this transition, and just have to hope that they were right for me. I am jealous of people that are able to achieve post-traumatic growth quickly, as if it is a flaw in my character. Again, I’ve only done the best I could with the information I have.

Grief is so weird and terrible, but it also teaches you, in some measure, who you are. It will separate out who you were before and who you are now. It will shatter all of your illusions of what you thought life meant…. in some cases, allowing for a greater purpose. In others, shutting you down into the smallest version of yourself. Sometimes, both ideas present all in one day.

I never knew until last October that the smallest version of myself is I miss my mommy. The process is how not to get stuck there, because there will always be moments.

Getting “bigger” hasn’t happened all at once, because there are moments where I feel six feet tall and bulletproof, then a movie will run across my mind and I am paralyzed with fear… mostly the fear that I’ll never feel better than I do in that moment.

And then another great moment comes along, a bulwark against the storm…. because grief often feels like being pushed overboard into terrifying water- you can’t see land. And if you could, it wouldn’t be a beach you recognize.

The first time I tried Cafe Bustelo,™ I had a 16 oz mug and I thought I could smell numbers. It’s an espresso roast (which I didn’t know at the time), and left in the basket as long as coffee will not only put hair on your chest, but delusions of grandeur in your brain. You know, like, “I can DO ALL THE THINGS!”

I can, for short bursts. Grief, as Sheryl Sandberg points out, is a demanding companion, and it has settled into my muscles so that everything takes longer- even with the miracle of caffeine. My mission is how to move faster.

Logically, I know it’s time to move on. It may seem cruel to say, but I don’t mean forgetting that my mother died altogether. I mean truly internalizing that there’s no going back. There’s no relationship with which to move into the future, nothing I can do or say to get my mother to come visit. I have had little post-traumatic growth because logic and emotion are two different things.

The other day (because I have no sense of time passing) my sister and I went to get our nails done at a salon in DC, and the whole time, the music overhead was solo piano. After an hour of it, I was panicking internally. Shortness of breath, brain race, anger, the whole bit. I had so little Klonopin on board that I could have taken another one, but because my nails were wet, I couldn’t exactly get up and get one. I just had to breathe through it, not dissimilar to Lamaze.

Logic went out the window as the night my mother died played in my head, as if it was happening right the fuck now instead of last October. Hearing the panic in Lindsay’s voice as she told me over the phone. Knowing I could borrow some of her clothes or just buy new ones when I landed in Houston. Frantically packing up my backpack with just my iPad, iPhone (with just wireless), keyboard, wallet, and phone. I don’t know why I packed both my iPhone and my Android, but I didn’t know what I needed in that moment and electronics were the thing that made me feel comfortable. I also brought my Kindle because it had a note from Argo in it that I knew I’d need to survive the next few days. When I felt the most afraid of what was going to happen next, I’d read her words of assurance and for a moment, the storm would calm.

My iPhone came in handy later because I was at a gas station and tripped on the sidewalk, smashing my Android into a million pieces because it was in my pocket and I landed on it… coming absolutely unglued because it was just the shitty icing on the burnt cake stuck to the tin pan.

At the time, I was trying to stuff down every emotion I had so that I could function until the funeral was over. The Android was a birthday present from my dad, and it was less than a month later and I’d already ruined it. If I hadn’t been in public, I would have screamed loud enough to be heard for three blocks.

When I was less anxious, I went to AT&T and activated my iPhone so at least I’d have navigation. Houston is my hometown, and I still don’t know where anything is, even when in complete control of my faculties.

If there’s anything that defined those first few days for me, it was lack of control. There’s nothing I could have done that would have saved her, or even made any difference at all.

Which is what brings me back around to the futility of continuing to grieve in the same way. “Snap out of it” is always derogatory to a depressed/anxious person, but it’s definitely how I feel about myself at times. It is in those moments that I realize I’m being extraordinarily hard on myself, which I generally am, anyway….. but still. I remind myself of the scene in The Matrix where Trinity is running from agents and rolls hard to the bottom of a flight of stairs, momentarily frozen in place and says to herself, “get up, Trinity. GET. UP.”

Spoiler alert… she does, by sheer force of will.

Frozen at the bottom of a flight of stairs is an apt description of my mindset, because as hard as I’m trying to force myself to get up, spoiler alert….. I haven’t.

I do all the necessary things to keep myself going, but I am not making room for fun or laughter most days. In fact, because everything I need to do is tied to the Internet, I rarely leave my house. To be here is to be comforted in a safety net of my own choosing, and no one is kicking me out of my nest…. or even trying to pull. Right now my best friend is the cashier at Safeway… and not because we really know each other. Because she’s the one I talk to the most during any given week.

For some people, this would seem sad and depressing. For me, it is comforting and safe. I am always lost in several books at once, have podcasts going as I work, and when I have time, there’s a few TV shows I enjoy. In a lot of ways, my life hasn’t changed any since I was married, but people tend to think that you’re isolating when you do this on your own, and, in a word, not when you’re doing the exact same thing with someone else. The stigma is that cocooning with a spouse is right and natural. Cocooning with yourself means you probably need medication.

They say that everything happens for a reason, and if there has been anything that’s been good to come out of getting divorced, it has been that time to myself where I didn’t have to care about anyone else’s feelings, because I just wasn’t capable. I would have been a horrible wife because Dana would have no frame of reference as to what I was going through, and at first I couldn’t stand anyone around me whose parents were still alive. I would have been angry and jealous WITH HER, something she wouldn’t have deserved, but would have happened, anyway.

I only wanted friends who’d been through the same thing, because only someone who’s been through it can comprehend the ups and downs. They also don’t say EXTREMELY STUPID SHIT…. the main reason I avoided everyone for a while. I just couldn’t handle it. Cortisol and rage raced through my body as I would just get irrationally angry, because these people meant no harm. They just didn’t know what they didn’t know, and wouldn’t until it happened to them.

The people who showed up for me weren’t the people I expected. People I’d been extremely close to retreated and people I hadn’t heard from in years rushed in… along with people I only knew virtually. Facebook was excellent for this, because it allowed all my friends (in the cloud and on the ground) to know at once what was happening. This blog was also a great help, because I could express what was going through my mind the entire way through those first few days.

But now, my entries are starting to sound repetitive, even to me. Missing my mom, Dana, Argo, blah blah blah… have a Kleenex and get on with it, kid.

I’m hoping that now I recognize this, kicking the shit out of Option B will become a reality, rather than being mired in the past. Not only is it time to let go, it is time to “get up, Leslie. GET. UP.”

I used to write short stories all the time. In fact, I won an award from The Houston Chronicle for one of them. That memory reminded me to try again.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

-Jean-Paul Sartre

The thought that keeps running through my mind is that I have to get it done. There’s no way out, only through. I find a couch that’s seen better days, and sit down. The smell of burning crack fills the air, an aroma that unless you’ve experienced firsthand is hard to explain… close to putting baking soda under the broiler and just as loud.

There’s a black man sitting next to me who has also seen better days. He’s got missing teeth, white hair and beard, shirt off with ribs showing- the perfect picture of years and years of neglect. Within minutes, he hands over a pipe, small and industrial, already loaded and waiting for fire. He’s not beautiful, but at least he’s generous.

The flame comes at me, a symbolic inch of salvation, and I inhale deeply. I don’t feel anything, and take another deep drag. This time, I feel even less of nothing, and decide that is the point. I don’t want to feel anything, anyway. If I did, I wouldn’t have started the evening with two watermelon Four Lokos, the national system of doing dangerous shit faster. But what I’m doing isn’t dangerous. It’s necessary. Alcohol, caffeine, and crack are just tools.

As my heart beats faster and faster, I notice that I am the only white person in the room, which isn’t a big deal except that I know I’m being watched… not that I’m in danger. A curiosity, like a chicken playing chess. I close my eyes and lean back into the haze of smoke, my extremities glued in place.

The high is magnificent, because I’m not thinking about anything except how good I feel. I can’t and won’t do this again. It’s too powerful… better than love, better than family… it would take over my whole life if I let it, because who wouldn’t want to live in this? Who wouldn’t want the universe to open up and say you’ll never feel pain again?

And that’s when I realize I’ll never do it again, anyway.

When I open my eyes, there’s a rape in progress, so close I can feel it happening… that poor girl, whomever she is. I sit up straight, the hair on my arms standing at attention. How could I not know, not feel that what I saw was actually happening to me?

Everything fades to black as I realize I don’t care about anything, much less this. Just one more thing that’s gone wrong in my bottomless shithole of a life.

I feel a light slap on my face, a different man trying to wake me up. I was already awake, daydreaming with my eyes closed. He wasn’t there to help, just to make sure I wasn’t dead.

I wasn’t.

I just dissociate and close my eyes again. This literal clusterfuck will be over soon or it won’t. Nobody cares. As despicable as the experience will seem later, it’s still an orgasm before I die. I know I will. I can feel it. I’ve been locked into the warehouse while they decide what to do with me. Even in a dream state, I hear the doors close and the padlock click. If they’d had guns, I doubt there would be discussion at all.

I still don’t care.

I have to get it done.

It’s logical, really. I’ve stolen documents from a three letter agency. There’s nowhere in the world I’m off the grid. I’ll be chased my whole life, which won’t be too long if I’m lucky.

I am not. The doors are pushed open, I’m helped to my feet, and sent on my way. I hear a man say “she’s so high she’s not going to remember any of this.”

I get into the backseat of my car and my teeth start to clench. I’m coming down, and the withdrawal is so fierce I’d do anything for another hit… but I made a promise to myself. It was going to be a once in a lifetime thing, something to ensure my comfort on the way out.

What I didn’t count on was what would happen if the plan failed.

Last evening I had one problem… how to get off the grid. This morning, I have two. I wasn’t high enough to forget anything. The situation, for all its horror, has its amusing moments. As my teeth grit more and more tightly, I figure out why lollipops must be popular among this particular crowd.

As morning slowly becomes evening, the smell and the withdrawal abate… but not the regret. I have flashbacks to the old ratty couch, the feeling of my spirit flying high above my body, looking down at the woman I never thought I’d become.

Or perhaps the person I’ve always been… the one whose missions always fail.

I couldn’t even achieve death on my own terms.

The prison is cold, unforgiving… waiting for someone else to finish what I could not. I do not fear death. I fear even one more day behind the even tighter security of my mind. They could let me go, and it wouldn’t matter. I’d still never be free.

There’s no exit.

There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not obsessed with becoming the person I want to be instead of the person I am. I think that’s a good obsession rather than a bad one, because it drives me forward in order to achieve my version of success. Of course I want to have financial success, but for an INFJ, money is never how success is defined. It’s becoming who they want to be in interpersonal relationships, often leading others to wholeness through “commanding from the back.” I’d like to think that it’s what defines this web site. I lay out all my flaws and failures first, and if others find comfort in knowing they’re not alone, I’ve done my job for that day.

For me, success is defined as looking at my regrets in order to make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones. This is because I can never strive for perfection, but excellence is an achievable goal. I have come a long way with this, because my pattern is to give up on something if I can’t do it perfectly. For me, there has never been such a thing as it’s good enough. Honestly, it wasn’t until I started blogging this time around that I began to change my focus away from everything being perfect, because I realized that if I wanted everything to be perfect, I’d never publish anything. I look at my old entries and see tense changes, typos (which drive me ntus), and any number of grammatical errors because formal writing in blogging is not the goal. If it was, I would have hired an editor long ago. I often read entries after I’ve hit “Publish” because I began to realize that over-focusing on tiny things made it where I didn’t have enough courage to put my writing out there.

I decided to just write like I talk, and that in and of itself was good enough………..

However, even that didn’t dawn on me until I looked at my stats over a year in 2014 and every country in the world was represented. Every. Country. In. The. World.

When I told my friends that, they said “prove it.” So, I used the WordPress app on my phone and showed them the breakdown. There wasn’t a single one of them that didn’t say something to the effect of “holy shit, Batman.” And this was after “you don’t have UAE… oh, there it is.” “You don’t have Angola… oh, there it is.” “You don’t have Liechtenstein…. oh, there it is.” Etc. Etc. Etc.

I am most popular in the US, because that’s where my friends live… but Australia and the UK are catching up fast.

That’s the part that makes me the happiest, because there is nothing better than putting out my words and having so many people read them that have no horse in the race. They can listen objectively because they don’t know anyone I’m talking about, and can’t even guess.

I also really like being a part of the WordPress community, because I read a lot of other writers that are much better than I am, upping my own game. Of course I still read Dooce and The Bloggess and all the other insanely popular blogs because they are insanely popular for a reason. Plus, she’s not exactly a blogger, but Anne Lamott has started writing really long Facebook statuses that sustain me- part humorist, part theologian- all grace.

I’ve actually met Anne- she did a reading at Powell’s Books in Portland and I was so sick I thought I might be dying…. but unless I was actually dead, there was no way I was going to miss it. I had a dumbass attack during the Q & A when I said, “my only question is ‘can I give you a hug?'” She said, “of course!” And afterwards, I thought, “oh my God. I hope I didn’t just kill her, metaphorically speaking.” If I remember right, it was tonsilitis.

So now you know my stories with both of my writing heroes, which are humorous and memorable because I am a master at tripping over my own feet in the presence of greatness…. and cuteness, apparently…. but what lesbian can avoid walking into a closed door in the presence of cuteness? I haven’t met one yet. ;P

Technically, I was opening the door and banged my own face on it. I can laugh about it now, but oh my fuck did it hurt. Dana never would have let me live it down had my nose started bleeding. I miss sharing girl-watching with her, because it was always understood that we could look at the menu, but we couldn’t order.

And we damn near always looked at the same menu. ;P

I don’t do girl-watching these days, because I’d rather put my energy into self-improvement…. with my writing, with my job-hunting, with my hopes and dreams for the future. But they’re funny memories nonetheless.

Although one woman did write to me recently based on my OkCupid profile that said, “your blog reads like the inside of my head.” Good Lord. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone…. same with a friend that said “I’ll live vicariously through you.” I’m sorry, I wouldn’t wish that on a dog I didn’t like…. I actually love dogs, it’s just a NE Texas saying that hasn’t gone away. You can take the girl out of Texas, etc.

My other favorite is, “she can’t help it that she’s ugly, but she could stay home.” Or from Molly Ivins…. “you wouldn’t say he was dumb, but you might want to stop by and water him three times a week, bless his heart.”

It is a trueism in Texas that you can say just about anything mean about anyone as long as you follow it up with “bless their hearts.” I suppose this is because it is meant to convey insincere compassion for their maladies.

It is especially prevalent in a small town where, in the words of the movie Doc Hollywood, “you cain’t take a shit in this town without everybody knowing what color it is.” Everybody knows everything because the grapevine is tall and strong.

It was both a relief and a hardship to get out of Texas all the times that I have, because of course I miss my family, and at the same time, I enjoy finding out who I am outside of who they are. Although part of moving so much is ingrained from being a preacher’s kid. We never stayed anywhere longer than five years, and it instilled wanderlust in me, as opposed to wanting to stay in the same place for once.

I did put down strong roots in Portland, where I’ve lived the longest (so far), but even then I still went back and forth. It’s a strange feeling when no place feels like home. Now that I’m back in DC, though, I can’t imagine living anywhere else. The wanderlust is now internalized to exploring my own city, because I could see a new thing every day for the rest of my life and still not see everything DC has to offer. A few days ago, I downloaded a hiking app that has all the trails in the entire country mapped out and driving directions to the trailheads. There are several right in the city, and even more in Maryland and Virginia.

I need to get on it, because one of the things that’s truly important for people post-PTSD and/or grieving is getting back into your body, because pain settles into the muscles as easily as it settles into the brain.

I go to therapy for my mind, and I need to exercise, even if it’s just walking a beginner trail. It’s also about two miles from my house to the Metro, and that is just enough time to really think while mobile. I just need a bit better weather. Right now it is 63 and cloudy, with rain predicted for later, and I absolutely hate getting caught in the rain as I’m walking when it’s cold out…. or, cold for me, anyway. When it’s 80 or 90, getting caught in the rain is delicious, even when it’s not Portland spitting and Maryland downpour.

I really should rethink the whole umbrella thing, because the reason you don’t have to carry a bumbershoot in Portland is that it hardly EVER rains hard. Here, the skies open up without warning and you can get soaked to the skin in a matter of seconds. But here’s my take on umbrellas in that situation. I tend to get soaked to the skin, anyway, because the rain blows sideways. And in fact, the last time I actually owned an umbrella, it was raining so hard that my umbrella bent backwards and was rendered unusuable about five seconds into my fifteen minute wait for the bus.

Granted, the umbrella was kind of flimsy, but there’s no way in hell I would have been willing to carry a heavy golf umbrella in addition to my loaded down backpack. There were so many days that my back was ripped to shreds because I have a corkscrew scoliosis and my backpack rubbed the skin on top of those vertebrae raw and bleeding…. even with a bandage, because even then, there wasn’t enough padding.

I tried honey, I tried Neosporin, I tried carrying a different bag, and nothing worked. So I just had to grin and bear it, often gnashing my teeth in pain.

Getting a car solved all that, but it has also made me a bit complacent. Walking was good for me, especially home from therapy. I could have taken the bus, but I didn’t unless I got tired. I generally walked everywhere I went. I remember the exact moment I broke down. I was trying to get to SuperCuts out in East Jesus Nowhere because I couldn’t find one closer (didn’t know about local salons yet). When I got there, Google Maps was wrong and it wasn’t there. It was such a long trip with so much walking (about six miles all told) that I just sat down on the pavement and cried until I remembered I could create an Uber account. Just please, God, come and pick me up. Stick a fork in me, I’m friggin’ done.

And then there was the time that I found a SuperCuts on Wisconsin Ave., and the route home was through Rock Creek Park in the pitch black. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. Until I found a salon in Silver Spring, I wouldn’t drive there. I took the Metro every time, because I didn’t know how to get home without navigation, so there was no way to avoid having to creep along in the park, still blind even with headlights on because the trees are oppressive in those hours. Now I go to the mall in downtown Silver Spring, another place to which I can walk and often don’t.

But I should. Self-improvement comes easier when I am comfortable in my own skin, and walking alone, thinking and listening to music that lifts my mood, is the fastest way I know to get there.

I have a friend who says she doesn’t believe in God, but does believe in running. Now I know what she means. Perhaps my prayer should be that I start running, too… just not away from anything. There is no way out, only through.

Now that I’ve exhausted nearly every topic of which I can think, it’s time to get going. I have a few errands to “run,” but unfortunately, today’s just not the day to take it literally. Perhaps it will be sunny tomorrow. I am sure I can make up an excuse to walk to the Metro, even if I don’t actually get on the train. Sometimes the destination isn’t the important part, anyway.

This morning I listened to one of my housemates on the phone with her mom, making all the universal daughter sounds. Classic highlights include yes, I remember from the first time you told me and maybe we should go ask dad. Now, if there is anything I remember at all from my parents being married to each other, it is that dad does not want to get in the middle between a mother and daughter. It is a losing battle, might as well raise the white flag now….

The conversation made me so sick for my own mother that I had to go upstairs and cry for a few minutes. I would say “homesick,” except that I lived away from my mother for far more years than I lived with her, so most of our conversations were on the phone, because she didn’t like to be on video, either. When I was married and settled, I thought my life was boring in a good way, so I wouldn’t talk all that much about myself. I would listen to her prattle on about her school programs and her classes, and I related to it inasmuch as I could.

I’d give anything to let her go on (and on, and on, and on) again. I could relate to the music, though. If she’d been a math teacher, I doubt I could have followed the conversation at all.

If I was at her house, we’d sing together because she needed someone to do the melody while she learned the accompaniment…. the one thing that we couldn’t do over the phone, and something that made our “face time” together all the more special because it didn’t happen all that often. Our relationship made more sense the older I got, because she never tried to tell me to do anything or say anything with which I wasn’t comfortable. It was as if she knew her parenting job was over, and her response to it was just to try and become my friend. It worked, because nothing ever came across as judgmental or harsh. I could, slowly but surely, be myself around her, warts and all.

So, when people tell me that my mother wouldn’t have wanted me to do or say something, I feel it is a moot point. My mother would have rolled with anything I had to say, and if she disagreed with me, it wasn’t coming across as a parent, but as a concerned friend with my best interests at heart, never pulling the I’m your mother and I know best card…. because truthfully, she didn’t know me all that well. She knew as much as I was comfortable telling her, but the schism that occurred during my teenage years convinced her that just being my friend was her best bet at staying close. And, of course, I didn’t tell her for many years just how much damage that chasm between us cost me. I kick myself for the time in which I couldn’t, wouldn’t open up…. tight-lipped and silent because I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble and I didn’t want to admit that whether she liked it or not, I was choosing this emotionally turbulent relationship over the easy lightness of being we had together.

It took years to convince her that I was indeed gay, because I loved Ryan so much and had been somewhat boy-crazy from childhood to eighth grade. I can explain. That boy-crazy lasted until my young adult hormones kicked in. Before that, I was just like every girl in my class. I struggled with my sexuality the entire time I was with Ryan, because I loved him so much and I didn’t want to hurt him. As it turned out, I didn’t hurt him so much as he thought he hurt me. I was wrecked that he’d kissed another girl at summer camp, and when I got that letter, I cried for hours. But at the same time, it was also a relief, because I knew as time went on that I couldn’t give him what he needed, which was someone who knew they were attracted to men and could see keeping up the attraction for years on end.

I ended up dating a man as an adult, but not because I was in love with him. It was because he was the anti-Kathleen, a great escape from my divorce decimating me and wanting to get as far away from that pain as life would allow. Now, please don’t get me wrong. I loved him as much as I could, but I couldn’t see a future with him, either. I never thought I was doing anything wrong, because we both knew that there were problems in our relationship on each side of the equation. He told me that he wasn’t equipped to be a boyfriend, and I believed him. I also believed that a friend crush was turning into more, and I wanted to see where that went… not wanting to hurt him, but realizing our relationship had run its course. However, I will never forget that in the aftermath of divorce, he saved me from so much emotional damage. He was trained in reiki, and on the nights we were together, I’d curl up under his arm and he’d do his best to release all my negative energy before I fell asleep. It worked beautifully, and I went on to be successful in all the right ways. I also learned that you’re not supposed to make a lifetime commitment to everyone you date. Sometimes you try each other on, and it’s just not a good fit for always, but it is a good fit for that time in your life.

I identify as bisexual because even though the majority of my relationships have been with women, I never want to make the men in my life feel that they didn’t matter to me… that I was just using them when in reality, I needed and wanted them. I’ve just floated more and more toward a six on the Kinsey scale as I’ve gotten older (and wiser), because it is not a good idea for me to date people in which I cannot see a future, and I don’t like breaking up. It’s never fun, no matter what the reason, even if it’s outstandingly reasonable…. and in a less important, but no less valid reason for not dating men, I got a taste of heterosexual privilege and when I learned about it, it sucked and I cried. Because I knew it was there, but I’d never experienced it head on.

Knowing what I know, I could never fall for a man again. It’s unconscionable, even when the man knows you’re bisexual, because from day one it creates the insecurity of “you’re just going to leave me for a woman… eventually….” especially when that insecurity is completely valid.

I talked a big game about dating to get over Dana, but as it turns out, it was only that. Words that meant nothing to me as I took to my room and am only now beginning to think that I could love someone else. Two years is probably enough time to get over an almost eight-year relationship… or not. I still have my moments when I think, Dana was the love of my life and I’ll never find anyone that fulfills me that way so why even bother? I love my independence, but I also love interdependence, and those two ideas wrestle within me because the life plan I thought I had for myself is gone.

It’s just another Option B situation, in which I have to find new ideas and new people to engage me after all I’ve lost. I do know for sure, at this point, anyway, that I do not want to get married again. That may change, or it may not. I just don’t want to give up everything I’ve gained in becoming dependent on myself to make my own decisions and not have to worry about what anyone else thinks. Of course in a relationship, I can make allowances, but what I’ve learned is that when I am enmeshed, I tend to give up my power and think that my worth is tied up in what the other person thinks of me.

I can’t. I just can’t anymore. It’s too hard and it hurts too much, because once I’ve agreed to give up my power, I’ll never get it back…. and not because I can’t (in most cases). It’s because my personality won’t let me, yet another thing I need to discuss with my therapist because it’s no way to live.

I tend to go for these strong, ball-breaking women in whom I feel we can be giants together, and slowly get steamrolled as I refuse to stand up for myself. I am tired of begging, appeasement….. something I do not have in my single life and allows me to be my own person at all times. Perhaps it’s not so much getting over Dana as it is not wanting to create that dynamic again.

For better or for worse, I also had that dynamic with Argo, because I couldn’t face losing her. I have gotten on my knees and begged for that safe space again, but it hasn’t returned and probably won’t. I can’t predict what time will tell, can’t even begin to guess. But what I know for sure is that our dynamic is broken, and because so much of it was at my own hand, I can’t imagine wanting to be my friend…. and begging for her friendship just makes me seem desperate and needy, when that is the last thing on my mind. I just have a lot for which to atone, and that can’t happen in a vacuum. All I can do is say that I tried my best, and reach out to people who do want to show up.

It should make me feel lighter that there are people out there I can lean on, that do value me, that do want to be my friend…. and it does, most days. On others, I can’t stop crying because the weight of grief on me is now enormous. Between Dana, Argo, and my mother, it feels as if grief doesn’t lift. It just changes…. and never as fast as one would like.

They were all so beautiful, inside and out.

I am only now starting to believe that I am, too.

When Lindsay, Forbes, and Matt went to the cemetery on Mother’s Day, they found that my mother’s headstone had been placed, and it turned out beautifully. The music staff, for those that don’t read music and/or can’t see it clearly, is Amazing Grace. At first, I thought the opening interval was wrong, and I had to check it to make sure. You cannot imagine my relief that it’s right….. hey, it’s in a different key in the hymnal, and I couldn’t abide a pianist with a headstone that sort of played something. Besides, placing the staff was my idea in the first place, originally a James Avery™ ring that is now discontinued. I thought it was appropriate given that my mother wore a James Avery ring my entire life, just not that one. It had an eighth note charm that fell off a lot, so every few years she’d either get it put back on or have to buy a new one, depending on whether she could find said charm again.

I wish I had been there in person, but eventually, I will be. I will sit under “Fred,” the tree I named after no one in particular, and by then it will be taller and more full than it was when we buried her. The grass will have grown back so perhaps I can lie on it and look up at the sky. Sorry if that seems morbid. I don’t have a fear of cemeteries. I find them soothing and peaceful- the perfect place for a picnic whether it is Dia de los Muertos or not.

It led me down the path of thinking about last year’s Mother’s Day, when Mom and Lindsay used FaceTime to call me. I hate video calls and rarely agree to them because I am shy about being on camera… well, video cameras, anyway. Pictures? No problem. Video? I’d almost rather have a root canal. I am so self conscious because of my cerebral palsy and my strabismus. If I’m not worried that I’m moving funny, I’m worried that my “lazy eye” is showing. At least now that my eyesight is so poor in my left eye, I at least know which one it is…. I enjoy wearing glasses because they hide so much. I mean, they correct the drift most of the time, but they also draw attention away from it altogether. #blessed

With my family, it’s mostly ok. Everyone else? Not so much. The only person I’ve ever offered to video call outside my family is Argo, because I wanted her to meet Dana and me in person. To my great relief, it did not happen. My goofy moves are so much more adorable in person…. I think. You tell me. I don’t get to watch me that often…. also, I hate that video does not pick up the bass in my voice, so that in 3D I sound like a normal person and on video I sound like SpongeBob…. I think. You tell me. Maybe the bass in my voice is only bone conduction in my head and I always sound like SpongeBob. Oh, dear God…. please, no.

Anyway, here is the last Mother’s Day picture I’ll ever have of my mother, about which I feel nothing but regret and yet, cannot forget that I didn’t know it was going to be the last one at the time…. Does that seriously look like a woman old enough to die? As I hit 40 in September, I am realizing more and more just how young 65 actually is. Today I heard The Moth’s Mother’s Day special, in which the host interviewed his own mother, nearly 90. When his mother dies, there’s not going to be a single person that says, “dear God, they took her too soon.” I feel like I am slowly coming back to life after just wanting to crawl into a hole and never come back out because nothing was the same, nothing made sense, nothing filled the deep hole of regret inside me that I didn’t walk in the light while I had it…. or at the very least, not as much as I would have wanted.

Grief being different for everyone keeps me sane. Knowing that there’s never a right or a wrong way to feel emotional pain is very freeing. I handle things as they come up, and try not to bottle anything, even though in some ways, compartmentalization might help. If I could just stuff down some of my emotions, maybe I wouldn’t be such a walking raw nerve.

I am doing my best to change my own mood. Yesterday, it was jamming out to Eminem and laughing hysterically at the lyrics to Love Game. Be forewarned, if you are offended easily, it is absolutely the dirtiest song I’ve ever heard in my entire life, bar none. And yet, by the time Kendrick Lamar gets to “have a blessed day,” I am shaking without sound and tears are running down my face trying to keep my housemates from thinking a cat is dying upstairs.

Life goes on… interestingly enough, the only song I absolutely hate in The Beatles catalogue.

But maybe my soulmate is Polythene Pam.

I’m not going to video call her to find out, though.

This is the first Mother’s Day without my actual mother available to take a call. I’m trying to change it to revolve around the friends I have who are mothers, because they are even more special to me now that my own mother is gone. Their mother love and mother wisdom sustains me, whether I am talking to them in person or watching their funny kid pictures scroll across my Facebook feed. More than one mother has told me that they’re making up that “mother wisdom” as they go along and hoping it actually turns out to be wisdom…. in some ways, I think that’s the best part. You have no idea what will stick with your kids and what won’t.

Here’s what’s stuck with me about my own mother:

• She was so, so funny because she did not have either my dry-witted sense of humor or Lindsay’s ability for physical comedy, so when she was funny, it was often unintentional or uproarious because you couldn’t see it coming. She always got great big laughs because she was not the person you expected to say it.
• She was more kind than me, something to which I aspire and often fall short.
• She always gave away more than she took.
• Having disagreements with me never overshadowed her overwhelming love for me, and in my later years, pride in my bravery and writing accomplishments.
• I took out a loan from her and every time I paid some of it back, she wanted to make sure I knew that those payments were still available to me, that she was just going to keep them in her checking account for safekeeping in case I ever needed them back. She refused to charge me interest, but I paid it that way, anyway… The fact that she thought of being paid back as just a safety net for me says so much about her ability to give, and being somewhat embarrassed because she didn’t want to take my money at all…. and she died before I was finished paying it off, which horrifies me to this day, because being able to pay back her kindness was a sense of accomplishment for me. I was trying to get it done as quickly as possible, paying 10% of the loan every month, not because I didn’t owe more to my medical debt, but because she was the most important and deserved to be paid back first. I never wanted her to think that I’d forgotten the huge gift she gave me, her recognition that everyone needs help now and again. I just have to focus on the fact that I was able to pay as much as I could, as fast as I could, and for her, that was enough.
• I am ashamed that I’ve lost out on all the mother wisdom she had to give me, because I didn’t show up. Even when I was in front of her, I was always lost in my own head.
• My favorite memory of her is that she always assumed that if it plugged into the wall, as an IT person I knew how to fix it. She called me when her printer was broken, her cable box was on the fritz, she needed help setting the timer on her VCR, she needed her router locked down and help connecting to wi-fi, she needed help with her fancy new alarm clock. The reason this is uproariously funny is that she also thought I could do these things over the phone from 1835 miles away. The miracle is that most of the time, I could.
• She always sent me clothes that looked ridiculous on me that I only wore in front of her. She got an A for effort, and as I got older, she picked out more and more things I actually liked, because she was listening.
• She would regale me with stories of my childhood, and every year on my birthday she would call me at 9:59 AM and tell me the story of my birth. I knew it by heart, and we’d tell it together. The funniest part was her disdain at all the women who were screaming. She thought it was better to bite her pillow to grin and bear it, so that she did not become one of the women you could hear down the hallway.
• It became a recurring theme, waging cold war with quiet charm. There was never a time in which she wasn’t Southern and polite, even when she was seething inside.
• For instance, when she was mad at me for cutting up at church, she would pinch my hand until there were tears coming down my face and I stopped laughing butt-quick, because when something funny happened at church, because it was inappropriate and I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. I would just lose it and not be able to get it back together because again, if it was inappropriate to laugh, it made me laugh even harder.
• There was never a time in my life that I wasn’t grateful I became a soprano and she was an alto, because once that happened, her pinches couldn’t reach me. That began a series of looks that could’ve killed. Her heart was in the right place, that all eyes were on me and I needed to act the part.
• I was spanked as a child, and it was a victory when I got too big to spank, wriggling out of it to the tune of you just wait until your father gets home.
• She never gave me a curfew when I was an older teenager, figuring that since all my friends had curfews, I’d just get bored and come home. She was never wrong.
• She didn’t always agree with the gay thing, but that didn’t stop her from giving Kathleen and Dana as big of a present as she gave me…. with birthdays as well, especially considering that she shared a birthday with Dana and it was easy to remember.
• She was messy for Lindsay’s and my entire childhood, and we thought it was hilarious the way that when people were coming over, it was a series of stuffing everything into closets and under the bed. I have kept up this tradition, for better or for worse. When she moved in with Forbes, there was never anything out of place, and one time Lindsay made me double over with laughter to the point I almost didn’t recover… we were on the phone and she said, “remember when mom was messy?” I literally thought I was going to die of laughter, because asphyxiation is no joke.
• The only time I remember her losing it like that was when we went to see Beaches at the tiny theater in Daingerfield, TX. There was this woman who was crying so hard that she was literally honking into her Kleenex, and she couldn’t keep it together. The last thing she wanted to do was embarrass this poor lady, so again, it was a biting a pillow sort of situation. I, however, was shaking with tears and snot pouring down my face and shaking uncontrollably trying to keep sound from coming out. It did not work.
• The most profound thing I learned from her was while we were working together. I’d get stage fright and skip a measure or something, and she’d skip it right with me, always giving me the feeling that no matter how bad things got, she’d be there to catch me.
• My grandmother had a series of strokes that left her with dementia, and one of the things that her physical therapist recommended was music to get the different parts of her neurons to reconnect. She watched one of these sessions, and came to me with tears in her eyes, saying, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard my mother sing.
• Mother’s Day was always loaded for her, too, because my grandfather died that weekend, and it got worse when her own mother died. I tried the best I could to be extraordinarily compassionate, but at the same time, had no frame of reference for her pain. This year, I am bathed in it.
• I honestly thought I would be a mother by now, able to appreciate her sacrifices with my own frames of reference. If it ever happens, which I am slowly starting to doubt, but it’s not impossible, I’ll just have to take all I learned from her… and at the same time, having tiny moments of what’s the point in having children if she’s not there to see them? In my best moments, I think that having children is another one of those “kicking the shit out of Option B” moments that Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant said I’d get. I also learned from her that biology doesn’t matter in the slightest, but I am still very sorry that she didn’t get to see a grandchild that had her own features, parts of her personality…. perhaps the ability to get lost under any circumstances, even with a GPS.
• There was never a time in my life that she wasn’t up for a manicure, because even when I am dressed in my favorite “cute boy” clothes, I still wanted strong, smooth nails with either outrageous colors or airbrush designs. For Mother’s Day one year, I got my nails painted black and had the white piano keys airbrushed over the top.
• I was always her page turner, a job that made me feel very important… well, right up until I turned two pages at once and had to scramble to get her to the right place during the two measures she had memorized.
• She didn’t like coffee until she was 45, and with that palate change came many trips to Starbucks…. and technically, she liked making coffee at home and buying enough mocha peppermint powdered creamer at Christmas to last her the whole year. She mostly went to Starbucks because it was one of my favorite places and not hers…. just another example of how she made me feel important.
• She taught me how to find all the good stuff at Dollar Tree, and where it was important to splurge. I have never departed from this advice. For instance, it was where I bought all my Martini glasses, because I had a knack for knocking them over and exploding them into a thousand pieces. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I have spilled more Martinis than I’ve drunk.
• Speaking of drinks, our thing was discussing sodas. She didn’t like alcohol that much, and not because of any moral obligation to be sober. She just didn’t like the taste of it. We were over the moon about Dr Pepper 10, because she was a fanatic about her diet. It was a sad day for me when she switched from Diet Coke to Coke Zero, because you cannot imagine how many Diet Cokes we’d shared together over the years. I believe it is the official drink of all musicians, particularly sopranos.
  • How many sopranos does it take to change a light bulb? Two- one to drink the Diet Coke and one to go get the accompanist to do it.
  • That joke works on so many levels because I’m a soprano and my mother WAS my accompanist. This link is to the concerto movement I played my ninth grade year for Solo & Ensemble. I don’t think I’ve ever been better than that…. I never made it to being able to play the whole thing. 🙂

I can only hope that the children that come after me have a better appreciation of how important it is to show up for their moms the way they show up for you. I could have been a much better daughter than I actually was, but the thing is that we were starting to become that mother/daughter team when her life was cut short. I can be grateful that we started the process and angry it wasn’t finished at the same time. Believe me that the possibility of losing your mother in an instant is real, the thing you never expect because there was still so much to live through together.

So, if I have any advice for which you did not ask, remember that tomorrow is never promised. You will not all get the time to prepare that you need. There are those of you that will grieve loss and possibility all at the same time…. picking up the pieces of the life you thought you’d have and trying to turn them into the life you will.

Option B, for all the miracles it holds, will at least for a time render you speechless, walking through the haze of not being able to remember even the simplest things. For me, at least right now, it shows itself in chores. Something will be incredibly dirty, and miraculously clean without having any idea where you were while it was happening. What seems like a moment lost in your own head could, in reality, be hours on end.

It also happens with driving. I use my GPS even in my own neighborhood, because if I get lost in thought, I will either end up in a familiar place with no idea how I got there, or forgetting where I was going altogether. “Recalculating” is a common theme of my life, in all areas…. but literally missing a turn and having to wind my way back around to where I need to go.

Figuratively, I think this is self-explanatory.

It was a bright, sunny Sunday morning the first time I realized I had feelings for women. I was about 12 or 13, and I’d made a friend who was older and also a lesbian (but I didn’t know it at the time… there were rumors). In my infinite wisdom at that age, I decided to call her on it. I told her that people had confronted me and told me that she was gay. She looked at me straight on, angrily, thoughtfully, and said, “how would you like it if people said that about you one day?”

In that moment, I knew they would.

I was too young to know what I was getting myself into. How hard it would be, how alienating it already was, because when I came out to myself, I didn’t have any peers. I just felt like a freak-of-nature seventh grader with no one to tell that was my own age. I had to walk this path by myself, and hope that it would work out. Maybe by the time I got to college, I’d be ok.

I didn’t want to tell my parents, but that was a lost cause, because they could see it. It’s not like I went to great lengths to hide it, because I couldn’t. It was the equivalent of a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail… “How do you know she’s a lesbian?” “SHE LOOKS LIKE ONE!”

Interestingly enough, though, I went on to date boys just like all the other girls I knew. The other girls, though, didn’t have as cool a boyfriend as I did. As far as 7th and 8th grade boys go, he was the absolute cream of the crop. Tall, handsome, athletic, full of life and hilariously funny. I called his parents “mom” and “dad,” and he called mine that, too. If it hadn’t been for the whole lesbian thing, which I see as a flaw in a heterosexual relationship, I would have married that boy in fifteen minutes. It would have been a great story- meeting at 7th grade band camp and ending up together for the rest of our lives.

All this is to say that I didn’t get my love of women from my hatred of men, which was a common stereotype back in those days. I was also never molested as a child, another wildly inaccurate stereotype. However, I can’t really be mad about that. When I was growing up, not many people knew a whole lot about being gay. A LOT of people thought that if you said you were gay, that was admitting you were going to grow up to be a pedophile. Even more people thought that being gay was an illness. It has been a long time in the making that so few people in our society think that now.

(As an aside, I suppose it finally clicked for most people that you can’t catch the gay like a common cold.)

High school was a nightmare, all four years. For starters, I couldn’t pay attention worth a damn. I was lost in my own head, thinking about what it would take to make myself feel normal. I didn’t mean that I wanted to be straight. I meant that I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin. Because I wasn’t, I was teased a lot.

There was a guy in orchestra that tormented me by standing behind the kettle drums and holding up Playboy centerfolds.

There was a girl who, when I told her I had a crush on her, threw up.

There was a group of kids who marched out to where I was sitting at lunch and screamed Bible verses at me.

Here’s the kicker. My first two years of high school were at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I know, right? You’d think that I would have gotten a little more tolerance. The flip side of the coin is that I’m not sure they were making fun of me because I was gay. I think they were making fun of me because I was a very easy target- I was so scared. If I’d had the guts, I probably could have stopped have stopped the bullying with a well-placed “yeah, I’m gay. What’s it to you? F@#$ off.” But I didn’t. I never stood up for myself, because again, I felt like it was all my fault. I was a freak-of-nature ninth grader now.

My luck changed when we moved to the ‘burbs. I know, I know. How is that even possible? I went back into a very large closet, and didn’t say anything to anyone. I had a friend named Gary who would pick me up for school in the morning and hang out at my house in the afternoon. People automatically thought he was my boyfriend, and I didn’t do anything to correct it.

Lying caught up to me at my junior Homecoming dance. Gary was coming to pick me up, would be there any second, and I was in my bedroom having a panic attack. And by panic attack, I am not kidding. I mean shortness of breath/Chevrolet on your chest panic attack.

When I recovered, we went to the dance, and I actually had a really good time. But there was this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that this wasn’t the way I wanted the school dance to go down. That I would have rather stayed home than just lie. In the end, I decided that Gary was ok with just being friends, and that I’d overreacted.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about that. When I finally came out to him, HE had a panic attack and said that he had wanted to follow me to college and that one day, I’d want to get married. Now, keep in mind that while I’d never corrected others’ impressions of me, I’d never led Gary on, either. Not once did I ever try to be affectionate with him- the best I could do was an awkward hug. Not because I didn’t love him as a friend, but because I didn’t ever want to give him the impression that we were a thing.

And then there was David (name changed to protect identity). David was probably the closest thing to love that I found at my high school, because the first day we ever talked, he said, “why do you wear those rainbow rings around your neck?” He later told me that he thought I might be clueless, because he didn’t know how in the hell someone would get away with wearing Pride rings to high school. When school let out (and keep in mind, I’d just met this guy that morning), we jumped in the car and headed to the gay area of Houston… because back then, there was only one.

We sat in front of Crossroads bookstore and had coffee, which was pretty much our only option, being under 21. Then, we went shopping at Lobo. I mention that he was the closest thing to love I found at Clements, because he was the first person to look at me the right way. The first person that made me feel like I was normal and there was nothing crazy about going to a gay bookstore rather than a straight one.

It’s a great love that continues to this day, all because he wanted to talk to the girl who was brave enough to admit she was gay in some uptight, rich, conservative suburb.

A few days later, I met my first girlfriend. That was a relationship in which “she’s just not that into you” would have been great to hear at the beginning. I put up with a lot of bad behavior simply because I was so excited to have a girlfriend in the first place. She’s not really part of the story so much except to say that in the abyss that was my self-esteem, I really felt like I was getting sieged from all sides.

I was right about college. There, I could just be me. The weight of having to carry around a secret had lifted, and my life wasn’t any less normal than anyone else’s.

Things have come so far, so fast, that many of you will never have the same experiences I did, and that’s a good thing. The amazing thing about being 34 is getting to see younger people grow up without the stigma that I did. Because believe me, you are entirely, wonderfully normal.

For those of you who are getting bullied, and it seems like it will never stop, keep telling adults until you find one that will go to bat for you. If it’s not your parents, it might be your aunts and uncles. If it’s not your parents, it might be a close family friend. Just keep talking… and just keep believing that it gets better.

There’s so much to look forward to after high school. The world is wide open. If you had a really crappy high school experience, go to college out of state. There are plenty of GLBT scholarships available which will make your schooling free or low-cost for your parents.

If you have the means, take off for Europe (or anywhere else that will give you a sense of what the rest of the world is like). Get out of that small emotional space you lived in as a teenager, and broaden into the person you want to become. That person isn’t based on your high school self. That person is based on all your hopes and dreams.

Dream big. Don’t let the experience that was “growing up gay” color your view of the world, because it will… IF YOU LET IT. Believe that there are good things out there that you haven’t discovered yet, and don’t ever lose your sense of wonder. Life is too short to live and work where you feel unwelcome.

Here’s the story that changed my attitude about where I should live: one of my coworkers was talking about a baby, and when she finished, she looked over at me and said, “I guess you can talk to us about your cats like that.” What did that even mean? That I was barren? That she thought my cats were as important to me as children? Let’s be clear. I like cats, but I am not a cat lady.

So I packed up and moved to Oregon, where life has been extraordinarily hard at times. But here’s the thing. All of my problems became regular life issues, and I’ve never had to lose an ounce of sleep over coming out.

In short, I’m just normal.

I have a roommate named Valentin (but pronounced like the holiday) whose mother is visiting from Cameroon for the next four months. When I came downstairs to fill my water bottle, they were speaking in a foreign language that I couldn’t quite place. When he and his mother stopped speaking, I said, “Valentin, what language are you speaking?” He said, “French.” I am thinking that it was the African dialect that threw me off, because I did not recognize it as such. So, I say the only sentence I know in French off the top of my head…. “Francais c’nest pas comfortable pour moi” (French is not comfortable for me). From behind, I hear this CACKLE as his mother just loses it and starts shaking, she’s laughing so hard. I turn around and she gives me a high five.

It’s the first time we’ve really connected on something, because she does not speak more than a few words in English. We have mostly communicated through gestures, like “here’s the one button you press to turn on the dishwasher.”

Laughter filled the kitchen, lighting us all up from the inside.

Baby steps.