This is another one that to me, is painful and beautiful- worthy of uploading here. The setup here is that I’d been absolutely ignored after first agreeing to meet with me and my therapist. When I told her that I’d rather go to an Al-anon meeting (because of her first wife, not our families) so that we’d both be in an equal room without invading each other’s space, I must have scared her because I never really heard back, even though I would have checked out a different idea if she’d offered one.

This was written while Wi-Phi was in surgery, and I was just as fried as I have ever been in my life. The tone is urgent because I was wracked with anxiety because I’d told her that I needed a deadline to say “yes,” “no,” or “shut the hell up and don’t rush me.”

==========================

I asked you to meet my deadline so that I could have some proof that you would think highly enough of me to respect my wishes. When you didn’t respond, I knew that for whatever reason, you have not seen a single thing that is positive about working all of this out, even though you have said that you want to engage in my process and seemed to mean it for a day or so. I am tired of living in the box where I cannot emote. That every emotion is strung out into a series of reasons why I must not be feeling what I say I’m feeling.

Dana was trying to give you a book she found of classic American sheet music; when you didn’t respond to her, I realized that you might have thought I was trying to get to you through her. Nope, this wasn’t even my idea and I didn’t corner the market on hurting about this thing.

You need to challenge your own assumptions about me, because I come across a lot differently on the page than I do in person. For the last few years, you have only known my writing personality because I didn’t think I was strong enough to let you into my inner sanctum with the possibility of it being ripped to shreds. It is as if the pen (or keyboard) and paper is the blast proof zone. I can look at my own emotions without flinching because the landmines stay untripped.

I need you to challenge the thought that you are always big, you are always in charge, and when I try to assert dominance, it is not a slam against you. My thought process is “if I’m so star-spangled awesome, why don’t you want to elevate me?” I would hope you’d want me to feel like I had some power in the relationship. Because that’s what all relationships are- establishment of a soft constantly rolling hierarchy.

On Tuesday, I am going up to the top of Mt. Tabor around 7:00.

When Ellie and Quinn died, you sent me a note that said what you wanted and needed from me more than anything was to just sit there and be quiet next to you. Enjoy clove cigarettes and whiskey in the utter quiet without saying anything. Just. Be.

It is a different time and place, but I hope that you still want to sit next to me without saying anything. I’ve said enough for three lifetimes.

I would like you to join me, but that’s not a requirement. I figure, I can open the door to reconciliation, but I can’t make you walk through it. If you don’t show, I will sit there until I feel better, then I’ll pour the whiskey on the ground and walk away.

If you do show, my hope for this meeting is that absolutely nothing gets done. Like I said, I’ve written enough. I will sit there with my whiskey and know it’s a moment and shut the hell up.

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Epilogue
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…and in case you’re wondering, I sat on the bench with two shots’ worth of whiskey in the caldera of Mt. Tabor for about an hour. As promised, I poured one of them on the ground and walked away. Then, when I got home, I divided the shot into three parts. My Dana and my best friend shared it with me. It. Was. Perfect.

I don’t normally use this blog for correspondence to someone, but I loved this letter so much I thought it was worthy of sharing for posterity’s sake. I want this in my memoirs. This was written after I went to Al-Anon for the first time.

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I just realized that I know a piece of the puzzle that you don’t know, and that you’d probably like to. My sister, Steffi, was an attorney at a domestic violence shelter for many years, so her bookshelves are filled with thousands of dollars worth of self-help. Dana and I spent some time with her last summer in Sacramento.

I was asked to preach, and because of the Lectionary, I started reading about battered women and abuse. I went through Steffi’s library at length and read everything I could possibly read about battered women because I was looking for you, trying to find your emotional picture, so that I could figure out what the hell had happened to me over the last 24 years. I didn’t start the project by looking for you, but a book on verbal abuse held up so many red flags that I cried for weeks. You stifle my love for you by not letting it flow naturally. By damming it so that my emotions slap on you like waves and all you have to do is destroy the dam so that the tsunami doesn’t have time to materialize in the first place.

The missing piece of the puzzle for me was wondering how I could pull myself out of this relationship without your permission. It’s not that I couldn’t let you go, it’s that once you were gone, I still couldn’t take off the ring, you know? My interactions with you changed, but my behavior didn’t… a complete and total hallmark of verbal abuse. You also manage our connection so tightly that it’s strangling, and I didn’t know that wasn’t normal for a very long time. And by managing, I agree that it’s ok that you take up all the room in this relationship because that’s how we set this up. After 25 years, our relationship can’t handle some cracks and tears? Please.

Last night I lost about 400 lbs of emotional weight, and I feel lighter today than I have in weeks.

Before those books, my mental health was very unstable because the fact that I couldn’t NAME THE PROBLEM and it was going undiagnosed for years and years and years finally got to me. I realized how sick I was without even knowing it, so it kept compounding.

My first family didn’t drink at all. They had other flaws, but that wasn’t one of them. I say this to acknowledge that in raising me, everybody did the best they could do and I’m not bitter. I’m awesome.

You helped make me into a gorgeous woman, (name redacted). With your help, I’m a knockout. With your help, I learned how to get it done emotionally. With your help, I learned to love the banjo (that was a lie… releasing the shame).

There are two pictures in my mind that I want to leave you with today.

The first is the way the air electrified for me when you touched my hair because I knew that if you were touching my hair, then it was something really intimate… because anyone who tries to touch your hair has a fair shot of not bringing back a hand.

The second thing I want to leave with you is the most precious of my life, the most healing, and I’m sure it felt so friggin’ weird to you, but I have to explain now what I couldn’t explain then.

Years ago, Dana and I went to visit Steffi and the parents in California and we were literally scrambling for me to make it back for a meeting with you on time. I made it at, like, 5 of 7 and when I arrived, you were lying on the couch. I was so emotionally crispy that I couldn’t help it. I dove into you to get the scent of home, the feel of home.

(name redacted), when you hold me the way you do, it makes me remember why I moved here in the first place. That your body and your mind and your heart felt more like home to me than my mom’s, my dad’s, my girlfriend’s… Not until I met Dana did I meet the one which you called “the passion that will ignite my soul.” Those are my words for the moment when my center of gravity changed, so that we could break our first family connection… as I have done each time that I have been in serious relationships. The only time you become that center of gravity is when I’m so wrecked that I completely shut down and you’re the one I want. You’re the one I want when I’m hurting so bad that my soul is crushed into my 13-year-old behavior.

And this will never have anything to do with you unless you want it. and you’re going to have to want it, because we’re fucked up and I won’t be friends with you if you can’t show your crack and let some light in (That was a joke).

Welcome to what family looks like for me. I hope it’s dark, twisty, hilarious, and worth it.

Love,

Leslie

It’s my favorite song in the entire world, and I bawl like a baby every single time I hear it. I am sure there are other people that feel the same way, but I have a special connection to it. When I was nine and my sister was three, my mom and dad took my sister and me on a cruise. While on it, we had a talent show, and my three year old sister brought the house down by singing that song. People were engulfed in tears, including me. It’s one of the best memories of my life so far.

Today, it chokes me up that I left (name redacted) behind, and the song means even more. Today I remembered what I considered the best and my favorite memory of her, and I wished on the stars for her happiness.

We were on the waterfront, sitting together on a picnic. She was introducing me to someone, and she called me her best friend, out loud, right out there where everybody could hear it. I saw stars. I think on that memory and I blubber like a baby while “Somewhere Out There” plays in Lindsay’s three year old voice.

It is amazing to me how much grief allows me to let go by smiling all the way through it with happy tears.

I am not transitioning. It’s a line from “The Sword in the Stone.” I feel that I must use that as the first sentence if I’m going to use a title like that, because the excerpt on Facebook will freak people out and they’ll start calling before reading further. How do I know this? April Fool’s jokes. In one, I said that I was transitioning. In the other, I said I was pregnant. Both were fairly believable- my girlfriend at the time of the pregnancy prank said “I watched you have a period for three months and I still fell for it.” Let’s just say my writing can be very descriptive.

The reason that this entry is so titled is that it came to me when I was reading over my past entries to kind of evaluate where I am. In “The Wheat and the Weeds,” I explored the idea that I’d fallen in love with my abuser’s inner child, and the equal relationship ended when that child grew up and I was still a plain old teenager. It reminded me of the scene where Merlin turns both himself and Arthur into squirrels, and the lady squirrels find them incredibly alluring. The lady squirrel is still clinging to Arthur when he turns back into a boy, and she’s devastated, slinking off into the trees.

I was clinging to her inner child when she suddenly turned into an adult. Comparing that to a literal illustration helped me to understand my grief in a new way. In a sense, that is coping with grief in a nutshell… learning to understand the things that need to change so that you can process your loss in a positive way. My abuser has affected my art since we met, which has always been this type medium whether it was letters, e-mails, or starting blogs. It’s been a positive outlook even when there was only an audience of one.

Part of grieving has been learning to turn away from e-mailing her anyway, even when I knew there would be no response. It was never about her. It was always about me. I thought I might never know what would make her understand, what words would strike some sort of chord, so I wouldn’t shut up. I’m sure my level of bandwidth was really intense, but at the same time, there was a lifelong precedence for it.

Losing that urge to connect with her was the creation of a broader audience. My art didn’t have to be kept secret anymore, because I stopped caring about her reaction to my grief, because there wouldn’t be an end to it if I didn’t. It was like my body and soul finally said, “enough” in so small and still a voice that I knew I had to listen to it before I got knocked down again.

So I don’t e-mail anymore. It’s been a very long time- since I started writing for this blog in a disciplined way, so about a year. I think part of the reason that I’m still recording memories is that I’m terrified to lose them. They’re a part of me now, from the worst moment to the best. I never realized how unconditionally I could love someone until I met her, and even more since I’ve started thinking, really thinking about how my actions have influenced her in ways that I’ll never know, and finally don’t need to.

I am a squirrel, and she is a boy. This blog is just what I think when I’m wandering in the trees.

So I came back from living in the same game with my first wife to living the original game with my abuser, which I just put together right this minute and I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my fucking skin.

So, to pick up from where we left off…

Until (name redacted) started picking up her toys, I never realized how much she and my first wife resembled each other. They didn’t look anything physically alike, but they’d both been mentally groomed by an abuser to do all sorts of things that broke their psyches. In some ways, it was such a relief to figure that out, because any trickle of “what if” in my mind was no longer. Of course I’ve wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t moved at just the right time. What human wouldn’t? Seeing my first wife as having similar characteristics allowed me to see the full spectrum of what I would have taken on, and in some respects, already had. In my relationship with (name redacted), I had already given her so much, and in running post-mortem on my first marriage, I realized that  the what-if said this: I would have given <name redacted> more, and more and more and more and it still wouldn’t have been enough. Even when I change the circumstances, the resolution looks the same. In every case, the cognitive dissonance between her words and her actions leaves us at an absolute impasse.

It’s comforting to me there is no way that I can change the order of what happened, the timing, the age gap. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the more I realize things like this, I just become more Zen, rather than when I first met (name redacted) and called God a punk ass bitch to God’s face because I was so angry that God had put this woman in my path and made me too short to love her (well, I’m still short, but you know what I mean). Oh, God and I have gone 65,000 rounds on this one, because I can emotionally kick the shit out of God when I want to. I have somehow always known that in the silence is where God lives, and that even if I am kicking the shit out of air, there’s still resistance.

I had to pray through the realization yesterday that I married a pattern and not a person. I had to breathe, sit with it. Marrying my first wife was years and years ago, so I know that I’ve grown so much since then. But that doesn’t mean that realizing who I was isn’t triggering me into who I am. It’s like going back to college for the basics after 20 years, and then you get there and you realize you haven’t forgotten anything.

When my ex-wife and I broke up, I was just about to turn 25. My pastor put me into a grief and loss program, and when I finished it eight weeks later, I moved to Oregon to start over and recover. Anyone who’s ever actually been there knows that this isn’t what happened, mostly because if you’re trying to recover from grief and depression, it obviously makes the most sense to go somewhere where you can’t see the sun for what seems like years at a time. That was a tongue-in-cheek reference to myself, who had no idea what the Pacific Northwest was like in the winter. I just knew I had fun there in the summer. The first day I drove in, I thought I was being Punk’d.

However, I didn’t go there for the sunshine or the rain. I went there to find my abuser, because when we were young she was the one I went to with anything and everything. Writing to her was how I figured out what I thought about damn near everything. When I thought “recovery” and who I wanted in my life on a daily basis at the time, I chose comfort… and by this, I don’t mean that I wanted all her time or to see her every day. I just meant that I wanted a relationship out loud that looked like the one we had on paper. Does that make sense?

And for a while, it was exactly that. Because of her, I could breathe for the first time in months. You know how when you break up with someone, and your comfort zone is about thisbig and there are only certain people you can be around because when you’re with them, you don’t feel your loss as acutely? Well, she was that for me. I had no romantic intentions toward her whatsoever. They were long ago and far away… but she could still look at me “that way” and I would feel our history bubble up and my heart would get so full that I couldn’t hold any depression anymore, and for the time that we were together, I was happy. As you can imagine, me going through a divorce was every bit as attractive as what you’ve read over the past year. Just one rumination after another, not about what a freak show she was, but because I obviously wasn’t enough. Never mind that I let her treat me like crap because I didn’t have enough will to take up half of the relationship. When one of my oldest friends found out about my abuser’s history and the circumstances of how we met and became friends, she said, “well, that explains your first marriage.” To which I said, “yeah, I figured that out about fifteen minutes in.”

So I came back from living in the same game with my first wife to living the original game with my abuser, which I just put together right this minute and I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my fucking skin.

Yesterday, I finally broke down and called my rheumatologist. I know that she could see with her mind’s eye things wrong with my back that MRIs and X-rays miss. What she found is that the fascia between my shoulder blades feels like wood, it’s stretched so tight. I have prescriptions for an anti-inflammatory and several weeks of physical therapy.

She also said she doesn’t like how the mole looks on my back anymore, and inside, I was freaking the fuck out. My mom has called that mole on my back my “beauty mark” since I was a BABY. Getting it cut off is necessary and emotional at the same time because I had to learn to love it and my mom made it happen. I have to keep reminding myself that I am saving myself from cancer in the future, not slicing off the memory that goes with it. I also have to keep telling myself that I will still be beautiful even after my “beauty mark” is gone.

Man, it is just time for me to take care of so much that I’ve ignored about my own body. For instance, I flood Dana out of bed with night sweats, and that’s in addition to the aforementioned maladies. When I started fixing my mind, my body reminded me that it needed attention as well. I carried all of my stress between my shoulder blades and just repetitively injured it all day long at my desk jobs, and now I’m reaping what I’ve sowed. I’m in a lot of pain, but it feels good to be listening to it and responding. To me, that’s the best indication that depression is lifting- when something goes wrong to my body or my mind and I have enough will to want to fix it. When I am really, really depressed I stop trying to take up space in the world, stop trying to stand on my own. There’s no fight in me because there’s no point.

It’s truly a wonderful thing in my life to truly be able to point out the difference between “depressed” and “not depressed.” It’s a good jumping off point to being able to recognize triggers so that I can stop myself from going deeper at my own hand.

I’m so good at it, though. I mean, when you want a depression that will wallop you into a wall, you come see Mama. I tell you what to do.

 

Here is the list of pictures that go with these comments. Tile the pictures and my comments on your desktop for easy reading.

1. The summer camp I went to was church related, and even when there were uniforms, it was generally a t-shirt with a pair of your own shorts or pants.
2. Yes, but only if you are actually sitting in front of a campfire. The smoke is part of the charm of the moment.
3. Ditto
4. Oh my Jesus. Guilty.
5. Still guilty.
6. I mostly went to choir camp. I think that explains why I’ve never had this fantasy. Choir nerds find other ways to torture each other.
7. Stretching it a bit, are we?
8. I had one when I was a kid, Dana still has hers. However, it is not at the foot of our bed.
9. When I read this one, I laughed so loud Dana complained and I scared the dog.
10. No, I still fantasize about Lea Thompson and Kate Capshaw in Space Camp. Fuck Tate Donovan.
11. I have no idea what this is.
12. Of course. Are you crazy?
13. Probably except for the ones that do it to me.
14. This was a thing, maybe still is, but I wasn’t into it.
15. Hemp.
16. No, my idea of a romantic date is anything that ends in having sex with women, which just gets better as I age.
17. If the date goes really well, I’m obnoxious about my cooking skills in the morning, even after seven years.
18. Lifeguards weren’t my first crush, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t lifeguards along the way.
19. Yes. The first night is whether you decide what’s going to happen on the rest of them.
20. This is the dirtiest joke of them all, and I started doing the Rigby and Mordecai “OHHHHHHH!”

 

I was talking to a friend about “Stories” the other day, and I had a revelation. I originally started calling (name redacted) my abuser because I couldn’t think of a name that perfectly captured her essence better than her own. As time has gone by, the mission has become global instead of local. In the global sense, it is truly about bringing behavior to light in the most clinical way I can think, and I refer to myself as having an enabler personality all the time.  I also want to show that abusers are three dimensional people. They are so loved because they are so charming and brilliant because that’s just how it is… in public. Behind closed doors are skeletons held behind even deeper closets. It’s a duality that causes pain in a codependency, but that doesn’t mean that they cease to be real people in the process. They are fallible and human, just like everyone else. In fact, I often think that people are abusers because they’re trying to keep people away with barbed wire, locked in their own hell. People become abusers because they have no idea how to deal with their own pain.

Abusers are generally so interested in hiding from their own pain that they live on the dopamine that abusive behavior provides. Enablers live on the dopamine caused by being “the one that helps.” Over time, the abuser realizes that because the enabler is always “the one who helps,” he/she can do pretty much anything to that person without receiving consequences, and the stakes with control get higher. The longer the abuser and enabler are entrenched in the pattern, the harder it is for both parties to get away from the dopamine that feeds them… because the enabler doesn’t realize that they’re making it worse and the abuser doesn’t realize they’re ratcheting up their dopamine levels by actively trying to “get away with something.” The bond gets stronger as the abuser feels the enabler wants to leave, because then they’ll do just enough to get the enabler’s attention, but not enough for the enabler to see that in time, the abuser’s behavior will go back to their normal because the need for dopamine slowly starts creeping back for one. and after a while, for both of them.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Both parties are guilty toward contributing to the toxicity, because once the brain chemicals are in play, the addiction to higher dopamine levels makes everything feel like an alternate version of normal.

Enablers need to take responsibility for letting the dependency get so great that when the cat-and-mouse routine works, it reinforces the dopamine habit and it gets harder for the enabler to talk about what’s going on in their lives.

However, it is not a 50/50 acceptance of fault. Abusers need to start recognizing their behavior and find ways to stop it. Most people don’t intentionally mean to be monsters. They evolve into it. The earlier you catch it, the better.

Over time, both parties learn to get dopamine from other sources, but coming back around to the same enabler, in almost 90% of cases, turns into both parties falling back into old patterns, instead of using the skills they’ve learned with people who’ve never met them before.

It’s hard to admit you’re an abuser, because it means accepting that you agitate people for dopamine. It’s embarrassing to admit you’re an enabler, because it means that you’ve let people use you for dopamine, you liked it because it made you feel important, and you didn’t stop it yourself.

It’s hard to admit what you’ll do intentionally to make yourself feel better, but in all relationships you do it to a certain extent. The problem is when the imbalance becomes too great, and the harm done to both people goes undiagnosed.

I am so tired.

Yesterday I read an article about middle schoolers dating, and it had this scripture:

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that you not stir up or awaken love until it pleases. –Song of Solomon 8:4

And like that, I was off into the racebrain of rumination. I knew why I was so angry, so ashamed, so, well, MESSED UP is that my love was not awakened when it pleased. I was 13 or 14 years old, had never thought about sex with girls my own age, and my abuser opened the door and allowed me to walk through it without ever noticing my reaction.

In a lot of ways, I gave up my abuser so I could get some sleep. “Gave up” is particularly apt, because it took me quite a while to realize that whatever affection there was between us, it was clearly gone in a way I couldn’t fix, because her words were so much stronger and more vulnerable than her actions. Verbally, she affected me to the point of joyous tears, and then we’d get together and none of that closeness felt real. I have no doubt that I used to be a stand-in for whomever person she was supposed to be telling her secrets instead of a teenager. All the years of worry and toil in carrying said secrets was thrown away thoughtlessly, because in her mind, it wasn’t that she had helped create this alarm, she just thought I was weak and needy when it went off… or at least, that’s how it came across to me.

It hurts me to the core that I spent so much time feeling expendable after giving up so much of my own life to, in my mind, protect hers. A very apt description is that I thought we would go through life like The Doctor and his companions, or Arthur and Merlin, or any buddy comedy ever. I write on this web site to think, really think, about the enormity of loss and try to break it down into manageable pieces. I know that some part of me will always hurt, but it will hurt less and less as time marches interminably on.

“Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye ripped me to shreds the first time I heard it. The words were haunting and prophetic.

Now and then I think of all the times you screwed me over
But had me believing it was always something that I’d done
But I don’t wanna live that way
Reading into every word you say…

I feel so good about myself now that I’m not caught in a never-ending cycle of words that encourage me to come closer and actions that don’t. The fact that I can reconcile thoughts and actions with every person in my life is so important, which I didn’t know until one year ago. It was like constantly wondering which person was going to show up. Was it going to be the woman that loved and mentored me, or the woman that said she was high every time I called and our relationship never meant that much to her?

How can you say both of those things at the same time and expect the listener to remain unconfused? At the same time, though, I’m sure she wondered the same thing, because my reaction to what she put out there in the world was to keep telling her over and over that I was confused without much success, because she maintained for so many years that she’d been consistent in all her words and actions.

And I have to hand it to her, she had been consistent… because every time I talked to her, I came away even more befuddled than I did the time before. And then, finally, after a couple of months of e-mail, nothing. She wouldn’t even see me, even though I was leaving. Sent me an e-mail after I’d already left with a picture of her at a soccer game with the signatures of all my favorite players and said she wouldn’t be there without my influence. I’ve talked about that before, but in this case it feels a propos to bring it up because it illustrates my grief perfectly. I can’t reconcile her words and her actions, so I am doing the work to put this behind me so that I don’t constantly feel like I was emotionally hit by a bale of hay when I turned 13 and another one last year, on her way out.

Aaron will tell me I’m mooing, and I’m ok with that.

At my voice lesson, I was really tight in my back and shoulders, so I started thinking of all the exercises I’d done through the years to stretch and sing at the same time. I looked at Joseph and said, “I know this sounds crazy, but can I pitch a baseball?” I realize now that I should have put that in air quotes, because for a moment, he looked shocked, like maybe this is some sort of weird lesbian euphemism.

When I pantomime throwing a ball, the tension drops in recognition and he says, “do whatever you need to do to move.”

We do arpeggios, hitting the high notes as I release the ball into the air. As my musculature changes, so does my tone, for the better and brighter. I am literally starting to sweat as if I am in labor, because I’m using the same abdominal muscles to control my breathing. After half an hour, they’re starting to burn in a very familiar way… which is why I’m starting to carry myself differently. I’m trying to make it where those muscles are constantly stretched all day long so that it doesn’t hurt anymore. Singing is literally reshaping me from the ground up, and at this point, I feel a bit like a chrysalis.

In the past, I’ve had to think about all these things while singing, and by all these things, I mean everything – from breath control to counting. It was too much to keep track of all at once. The advantage of having been a singer my whole life is having a foundation so that I’m not starting at the beginning. I’ve just developed habits over the years that make it harder to get the sound out of me. Correcting them has been physically very demanding, because I have monocular vision, and I tend to move my body in all sorts of ways to make it line up with what I see visually. It particularly affects where I place my head, which is a lot of singing musculature to misplace at once.

I’m also extraordinarily proud of the work that Joseph and I are doing, because Joseph and I don’t do all this so that people will think we are talented. We do this to make the church service more beautiful aurally. He’s turning me into a better choir member and soloist all at the same time, but whether I’m singing by myself or with a group, I am participating in music that encourages people to feel closer to the divine. If you are not a God person, you can extrapolate that to mean I like music that encourages people to meditate and reflect… encourages people to think about beautiful things so that they themselves feel beautiful, for that is also divinity on a cracker. Everything fits when it sits on a Ritz.

Singing is also a way to reach out to people that aren’t there in the room with you. They can’t talk back, but you can certainly talk to them. You can hear the emotions running between your mind and your voice with amazing clarity. That is because your mind calls, and your voice answers. Whatever you think will come out in your tone a nanosecond later. It’s as religious a conversation as I’ve ever had.

The piano in the music room is  in the front, and I was singing next to it. After I finished pitching, Joseph said he wanted everything to sound like I was singing to my friend on the wall, which was odd until I realized that there were pictures of old choir members and such in the very back of the room… a signal that I am hiding behind my stand as if it is some sort of shield. However, I make the connection in that moment that I don’t have to sing to people I don’t know. I can sing to people I do. I chose my abuser first, because I’ve noticed over time that when I’m thinking about her as I’m singing, the abuser doesn’t come out. The voice teacher does. It’s like I can compartmentalize her behavior into boxes and during voice lessons, I can’t open any box except singer and conductor. I have many, many years under my belt of her direction from being in choir with her, and then singing for her when she got a choir of her own. It’s kind of amazing, actually, because even when I’m with Joseph, I still have a private teacher in my head. It’s like Xzibit pimped my vocal studio. “I gave you a private teacher in your head, so you could take voice lessons WHILE YOU TAKE VOICE LESSONS!”

I love that guy.

I’ve always hated the parable of the mustard seed, for the very reason that most people like it. My priest said on Sunday that the mustard plant is actually more like kudzu, so it makes more sense to me that the mustard seed is alternatively the tiny seed of evil that guides me to be an asshole on a regular basis unless I keep cutting it back. I know Jesus meant it as a good thing, but this is just where my brain goes on too much sleep. I have too much time on my hands to dream up things that ultimately make me a better writer, but I will quote my little sister on this… “Dad? Was that true or were you just preachin’?”

I am sure that my philosophy/theology is off by quite a bit. After all, what Jesus meant was the antithesis of what i picked up in the transaction. In the end, though, I think we arrive at the same place im the end. To me, the image of beating back my demons (or, for the linux nerds in the crowd, daemons, which will be frighteningly accurate if you find out what they are…) like kudzu in order to obtain the kindom of heaven is my uphill battle in life.

Even my definition of kindom of heaven has changed over time. It used to mean the place in the sky where God lives. Now, I believe that I am God. That was supposed to get a big laugh orally. I’m funny in real life.

What I actually mean is that God, for me, is an internal driving force in my life because it helps me to understand who I am in the middle of absolute chaos. It forces me to acknowledge my flaws and failures, and I know every day that my faith is not dependent on God actually being there. To me, secular humanism and believing in God are the same thing, because even though humanists do not believe in God, they do recognize that there is energy that runs between us. Just because I choose to call it God and they don’t is a moot point. It’s like arguing over whether liking potatoes and rice are mutually exclusive. It’s always going to be subjective.

Give. Up.

I don’t pray to get answers, because the answers come to me regardless of whether I believe that God lives in me or not. Praying is a way to organize my thoughts in a way that I don’t get through any other “medium.”

For me, praying is the answer to beating the kudzu back into a mustard seed, so that I can be the kind of plant Jesus intended, instead of the one that I did.

So, there’s this woman at our church that is totally hot, and I am shameless, so of course I went right up to her and told her that Dana and I had discussed it and she was really, oh, I don’t remember the adjective I used but it was something along the lines of gorgeous. I’ll just say that she has short, short grey hair and piercing indigo eyes (RIGHT?). We have a friend in Virginia named Karen that looks a lot like her, and we don’t know her actual name, so we just call her “NotKaren.”

Cut to two weeks later, when we’re in the new members class at our church, and this woman is in it.

Of course she is.

She went to Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley.

Of course she did.

She’s studied with some of the best theological minds in the country.

Of course she has.

She’s a second soprano and loves killer rep.

Of course she does.

So I am looking over at Dana and we are giggling so hard at me. Dana is laughing because she knows my “type” and cannot help but make fun of me like she’s a ten-year-old at recess egging me on. Additionally, instead of being mad at me, it is much more amusing to Dana to give me more than enough rope to hang myself in front of girls I like. She knows who I’m coming home with, especially after she does her part. :P~~~~