Mother’s Day has been loaded for me since I was a teenager… not because of my own mother, but because of my abuser. She beckoned me toward her and simultaneously shut the door in my face, so I never knew if it was ok to celebrate her or not. Whether or not I celebrate her with cards and flowers, past memories wash over me like saltwater waves~ beautiful with a bitter taste in my mouth.

With the exception of the part of the day with my own sister and mother, I spent the day staring into space. I sat on the couch and looked out the window, watching animals and their humans walk by, subconsciously driving down Weslayan toward Drake in my mind, noting that we have to go to Central Market and maybe Dana wouldn’t mind driving me by…

I snap out of my daze and realize that these memories need to stay in my head. Nothing will be accomplished by trying to jog my memory even further, because I’m already feeling emotionally crispy and I don’t want to exacerbate the situation. Staring out the window and thinking is both the best and the worst I can do.

To quote myself from a long ago entry on a long ago blog, “so we sat there, my spirit and I, wrestling each other without keeping score.”

When I was 13 or 14, I don’t remember exactly, the woman known simply to this web site as “my abuser” said something to my mother that I will never forget, because at the time I thought it was just mean and the most horrible thing she ever could have said about me in a million years (but she was forgiven somewhere around 1995). She said, “Carolyn, I think she’s an alto.”

I KNOW, RIGHT????????

I remembered that conversation when I started in my new church choir, and it did not go well at first. It wasn’t that I couldn’t sing… it was that I didn’t fit in. Because I don’t want to hurt anyone, I will limit my comments about my church choir to the simple fact that I can sing high notes… and the people around me were First Sopranos. If you have been in a choir for any length of time, I won’t have to say anything more than that.

Last Sunday, my throat was a little bit scratchy, so I asked if I could sing alto. All of the sudden, my brain was firing faster, because sight-reading harmony is a hell of a lot harder than sight-reading melody. The person next to me was hilarious, and we wrote notes to each other like choir people having fun are supposed to do. It was then that I realized maybe I *am* an alto, because I would sing low notes all day not to have to compete. I don’t compete.

I write notes and have fun.

Yesterday at work, my coworker was teasing me about saying that one of our clients had a cute Texas accent. He told everyone that I must’ve been looking for a date. I said, “I got more woman than I can handle at home… what makes you think I want another one?” He looked at me like he’d never seen me before. “Whoaaaaaa…. welcome to the boys club!”

It was a moment that reinforced my feeling that only male sexuality matters. I am already looked upon with a bit of shock because Dana and I currently have the classic 1950’s setup (I bring home the money, and then it’s Dana’s). We are so new, and we are so retro.

I think that my coworker thinks that I prefer it this way… that I’m sort of chauvinistic and I like it that Dana’s home because she takes care of me. I do value Dana, beyond any type of measurement, but I can’t take that extra leap into deciding what Dana’s going to do for her. I get to enjoy whatever this is for as long as it lasts, and remember it fondly when it’s gone.

Another coworker is hounding me to have kids, because Dana’s already at home. I’m like, “bitch, let me learn to manage my own schedule before I take on anyone else’s.”

I mean, DAMN. I just got into the boys club yesterday.

I made an enormous mistake by not taking more time off to recover from working nights. I took just enough time to get some rest, but not enough for replenishing my soul. If I’d thought about it, I could have taken Dana to the beach… or to a park… or on a road trip… you know, just something to get the heck out of Dodge and just not be here.

Right now I am sitting in my precious lobby, which I no longer “own” because there are people coming through the front doors at this hour. These are the most comfortable couches in the entire building, and not being able to take a nap at lunch, curled up in my Lumpy Space Princess blanket, is especially irritating. Don’t these people know I’m recovering from not a small amount of sadism?

Necessary sadism, but still.

Two ladies just came into the lobby and their perfume is so loud that I can smell it from across the room. They’re wearing clothes that ladies wear- one has a fancy top and pants with no waistline. The other has one of those “walking suits” that were all the rage in the ’90s.

I like my new schedule- it allows me to sleep in a bit later. The only drawback is that traffic is much heavier now than it was two hours earlier, my last day shift. Apparently, everyone in the city of Houston has to be at work at 9:00 AM, or at least, it feels like it because normally, my office is thirteen minutes door to door.

I’m so impatient. Add ten minutes to my commute and I’m like, “this is BULLSHIAT!” I should try to be better about it, but when I was growing up I had a friend who absolutely white-knuckled the steering wheel with impatience at having to wait on someone, and it made an impression. Showing up on time matters. In fact, just showing up is most of it.

I sometimes feel that any job, anywhere, is based on a collective agreement that we can stand each other every day. If you’re man enough to put on your big girl panties and deal with my crap every day, I suppose I can do the same thing for you.

The lobby is quiet. I wonder if I could get away with putting my feet up…

It came to me in a flash of light, kind of like a dream if you believe in that sort of thing. I’m working like a cook. I’m working like everything is high priority and everything has to get out on time. I don’t understand the concept of “slow down.” Slowing down is being less productive. Slowing down means I am not contributing as much as I possibly can whenever I can.

No one gives me this pressure. It’s my internal slave drivers, “the committee,” as my AA friends would say (if you don’t have a friend in AA, you really need one). No one is harder on me than I am internally. It’s something that I’ve picked up from all my parents (which, by my count, is six). Everyone in my family is internally driven and successful beyond belief.

I am not yet, but not for lack of wanting. I mean, I do not discount all of the progress I’ve made over the years, but my mental health has been a constant obstacle in terms of time management and organization. If I was only paid to think, I’d do quite well. It’s the paperwork that kills me, even though it’s all digital. I’m sure you all have some version of this. Firefox always has sixty tabs at work, you know?

I am being switched back to days on Monday, not as a punishment but because I realized that graveyard shift was exacerbating the problem instead of making it better. I thought that I would have an easier time at night with the slowing down, but it’s been the opposite. There’s no one to talk to, no one to consult, and as I sit in the dark, I buzzsaw through backlog. The mistakes I have made are nothing major- akin to copying an e-mail to someone that didn’t need to be included or vice versa. Then, I hear the criticism that’s thisbig and blow it all out of proportion because I’m too exhausted to take it in stride.

Being on the graveyard shift has flipped my personality, as well. All of the alone time has made me retreat into myself. Even when there are other people around, I tend to put on my headphones and shut out the rest of the world. I only exist in my bubble, the place where no one can touch me because I look absolutely unapproachable, anyway. I am not like this. I have never been like this at a job. It’s nice to take off the mask and just be my antisocial, introverted self… but I’ve stopped feeling like I’m part of a team that shares the load. Right now, even though it’s really not true, I feel like it’s all on me.

In some ways, it is. I have to deal with my mental health issues. I have to keep tabs on myself when it feels like there’s too much flying at me. I have to know when the plate is hot, because it’s self-preservation to drop it. The calming down part is that not everything is an entree. Sometimes it’s just a salad.

I am starting to find out, between all my writing and reflection, that I am my biggest obstacle, and I don’t know how to get me out of the way. I have ADD without hyperactivity, and it is constantly plaguing me at work. I don’t fall short with big picture details… it’s only when something so small needs to happen that it runs under my attention and hides just beyond my reach.

It’s a huge deal to me, because I cannot think of one single thing I’m doing wrong, because this problem is not new. It has plagued me since elementary school. I know within myself that if I could think of a solution, it would be implemented by now. I’ve read Driven to Distraction, and like one of the case studies in the book, I know I’d be late to the psychiatrist’s appointment to talk about my ADD as well.

I’m at the end of my rope, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m late to the psychiatrist’s office or not. It’s either get this taken care of now, or let it continue to plague me until I’m dead. Those emotions create so much fear in me that something has to give. I cannot live my life this way anymore.

There are all kinds of psychiatry that would help me, most notably cognitive and behavioral therapy to implement habits. Creating habits, for me, is just as hard and stressful as higher mathematics. I can deal with infinities as well as I deal with finding my keys/phone/bag every damn morning, which is to say, not well.

I go completely inside myself, gathering my strength, because some days feel like battling my own mind just to get it together. I’m awfully hard on myself, which is why when life gets difficult because of my disease I tend to spiral into self-fulfilling prophesies of failure.

Talking to Dana helps, because she suffers with the same disease. However, she is much more consistent than I am about having coping mechanisms and using them. I’m often jealous that she is so much more put together than I am, but then again, because she’s not working right now, she doesn’t have as much on her plate to handle as I do in a given day. I am sure that if she were working, I would see more of her struggle than I do right now. In my darkest moments, I realize that I rely on her organizational skills way too much. Her nickname even reflects this- she is my “Danabase.”

I am putting these words down on paper to have something tangible to hold myself accountable to my words. I said I need help, now I need to get it… else this will be another detail I let fall through the cracks, and it’s the one thing that will heal the cracks from happening in the first place.

I’ve had just enough time away from the events of the summer that my body and mind are starting to relax. When I think about how tightly wound I was, I can’t help but wonder why my response was so vehement. The thing is, though, I’m not in that place anymore. I don’t understand me the way I did in the moment. I only have lenses that provide me with a window of past insight.

As far as I can tell, it has been a process of learning to self-soothe my way into wholeness and the acceptance of who I really am… and how that person is different than the person I thought I was.

In a way, it seems childish to define myself by another person’s actions. That’s not what adults are supposed to do (even though we do it a lot)… or at least, that’s what it looks like from this far away. In the middle of it, I was re-living everything I’d been taught as a child, unable to “age it up” because it didn’t fit me anymore.

I also had to learn that it was okay to tell, ok to release, ok to stop taking her story at face value without allowing myself any input. Up until last summer, I really had this feeling that what she said was gospel, and I didn’t get to help write it. After almost a quarter century of feeling bound and gagged, it was time to stop trying to save her and start trying to save myself.

The best news I’ve gotten in a long time is that it worked… but that doesn’t mean I don’t have days where I rethink things and wondered if I could have handled it any better. The reality is that it’s wasted time, and I try to catch myself in the act so that I can consciously move to a different topic.

But, of course, that only works for so long, and then I have to think about it or it will keep popping up. That’s another thing I’ve learned. Stuffing things down doesn’t work, because it will come back up, either as an emotional well of grief or pychosomatic illness… and by that, I do not mean that the symptoms aren’t real, just that they’re brought upon by stress.

For me, that stress came from knowing things about my family that only family members know… but others have gotten a taste of it over the years… or at least, enough to know that my story is valid. Anger and fear boiled over when I realized that the situation wouldn’t change just because I wanted it to. The situation didn’t change when I presented my side of the story. The situation didn’t change when I made it clear that I wasn’t dealing with my own childhood issues, but the ones created for me by someone else.

Adults have so much power when you’re a kid… often much more than even they know. In this case, I don’t think that she can plead ignorance. She would always refer to how lopsided our affection was, but there was no recognition that as the adult, she set it up that way. I just didn’t have that kind of power.

The blessing this year was seeing that I had gained it.

On Saturday nights, I work alone. I have an impossibly large caseload, but so much time on my hands that I’m already way ahead of the game. No one expects me to finish the whole thing, but it wouldn’t be a bad feeling if I did. When no one else is here, I can get an impossible amount done. At the same time, though, it’s Saturday night and I’m here while my friends are either out partying or getting together at someone’s house. If I was home, it would be mine. Alas, I am not.

I deal with this by calling the morning I get home “my party.” I invite Dana as if it were a real thing. If she’s asleep, I watch a movie, and when she wakes up, I say things like, “we enjoyed it. Too bad you weren’t here.” And then she says that she’s always fashionably late to a party and I laugh to myself that even when the party is held in our living room, Dana doesn’t show up on time.

What she lacks in promptness, she makes up for in enthusiasm. Dana is the best guest I could have chosen if I was going to throw a party every day. We are just hilarious, and it makes me happy that we can laugh at each other instead of zoning out to TV. You all are welcome to come to my party, but I don’t generally send out invites because very few people want to drink a beer in the backyard when the sun is barely up… especially on a Thursday or Friday, my days off.

Fortunately, that may change soon. I don’t know exactly when or what shift I’ll be on, but it might be good to have a day schedule again. It’s a catch-22, because I like actually working at night when there’s less going on, but at the same time, it wreaks havoc on my personal life. I don’t know what I want, so I think I’ll just take what they give me. I don’t have that much seniority, anyway. 🙂

 

Mike: I like your hair that way. It looks like you just rolled out of bed.
Me: …

The hardest part of working nights is knowing what time to do things so that your brain remembers how to live. When you work days, there is a certain rhythm. Working nights is recreating that rhythm when you have to figure it out on your own. I do things like forget to take medication or forget to shower because I haven’t ordered my day the right way. I am sure that showering is a priority, but did I take a shower “this morning,” or perhaps “last night?” When I wake up, it’s not even “tomorrow” yet.

I am fairly certain that I don’t have much longer on this shift, which makes me excited and reticent all at the same time.

Nights have their own pace, their own topics of conversation, and the pleasure of knowing that we’re not like everyone else. For starters, everyone just expects you to be tired. What they don’t know is that we’re not tired. We’re beyond tired. We drink more caffeine than you can possibly imagine and by the end of the shift, the caffeine isn’t even working anymore. We’re running on the fumes of adrenaline present right up until they’re not. It’s an exact moment, one in which all of the energy in your body exits like the plane is diving toward the scene of the crash. I was at my dad’s a couple of months ago and in the middle of dinner, all the blood ran out of my face and I said, “I have to go home.” It was instantly like, “yeah… get her out of here… she’s goin’ down.”

It’s happened to me multiple times. Sorry I fell asleep at your birthday party, Stacy. For those of you keeping score, that was when I fell asleep at the Indian restaurant. We’re going to a Mexican restaurant on Thursday. I’m thinking about loading up on chiles and jalapenos to give me a fighting chance. If my mouth is burning, it is less likely that Dana will have to carry me home fireman-style.

It’s a hard day for my old church community in Portland. Eight years ago today, we lost Ellie and Quinn, infant twins of members that had been at Bridgeport since the beginning. Their parents’ loss was incredible, but there was a sense that we all lost them, and we did. It was a moment that shook everyone, and we all reacted differently to the same type of stress.

When I opened Spotify today, Bach’s Mass in H Mol was on my recommendations page. I turned it on, and as the Kyrie started, I saw a picture of the girls in my Facebook news feed. I didn’t mean to celebrate their lives in this way, but it made the picture all the more poignant.

My mind instantly went to my abuser, because it’s on days like this that her absence is viscerally noticeable. After the girls’ funeral, I got a letter from her saying that she didn’t want to miss the possibility of us- not in a romantic way, just in an “I think of you as my family” sort of way. It hit me like a ton of bricks, because so much relief and gratitude flowed from me.

It was one of the great letters of my life, because it described in detail what it was like to attend such a service, including small details like the smell of the grass, and what people wore- it was near Easter, after all. She set the scene for me, and her writing was so painful and real that it made me realize how our connection had stayed so strong, despite not always being in the same city; her writing speaks to me in a way that breaks my soul into little pieces, but not in a bad way. It’s just that when she cracks my outer shell, it lets the light shine through. In some ways, she’s a better writer than I am, but I will never admit it. 😉

The brass are magnificent as the Mass plays on, from the Et Resurrexit to the Sanctus. It brings me peace, as if the brass are the heralds of great joy. That’s because in the story of Quinn and Ellie’s loss, there is so much resurrection. Beginning again was a superhuman feat in which we all passed from grief into once again experiencing joy. We had to give ourselves permission.

Just like I had to give myself permission to write down this memory, because the letter and the twins are inexplicably interrelated in my mind. I can’t think of one without the other… but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Walking away from creating bad memories and focusing on the good ones is what resurrected me.

It’s 5:30 AM, and the house is quiet- except for Dana’s occasional toss, turn, or snore. I am trying to decide what I want to do next, because I have to keep myself busy until the appropriate time for me to go to bed. Lately, I’ve found that it keeps my schedule sane if I sleep right up until I have to get to work, because that’s what you do in the morning. I wind down between noon and 1:00 PM, and wake up somewhere between 8:00-10:00. It’s not the best schedule I’ve ever had, but I am more used to it than when I started. Apparently, flipping my schedule around so that I’m up all night is more me than I thought previously. However, it does feed my dark side, and I’ve had to become conscious of it.

For instance, I feel like I’m a lot more snappish, because the rest I’m getting is not as deep. I am a lot more isolated, because the only people I see regularly are my coworkers and Dana. I am not available when the rest of my friends are, and when I make allowances to be available to them, I am either exhausted at work or fall asleep in front of God and everybody. So far, I have fallen asleep at a night club and at an Indian restaurant. It’s okay, though. People just assume I’m drunk and that someone will eventually take me home.

It is good that I have an online life in which I create content for the web rather than consume it. There hasn’t been a better outlet than writing during this graveyard shift because it’s something I do where I do not need or want interaction with other people. I do not have to carve out alone time to create this web site. I have built-in swaths of time where I don’t have to ask anyone to leave me alone so I can spend time in my head (with my head?).

My writing is becoming more important to me after having to put it away for a while. Writing about my childhood took a lot out of me, and it gave me some fear about blogging… but not for the reasons you might think. Blogging has a singular subject, which is you, the author. Many people write professional blogs, but that’s not how the medium started. The medium started with the idea that all our stories matter, and we should have a place to put them.

The struggle for me is not dealing with others emotions when they read what I’ve written. It’s gathering the strength to get my words out of me in the first place. I have a separation regarding what I write and what you read, because I know so well what I’ve written and what it cost me that anything you say in reaction is not going to have a tenth of the emotion that I had myself before I hit “post.”

I don’t shut down posting when I’ve had too much of you. I shut down posting when I’ve had too much of me.

Does that ever happen to you? I get lost in my own version of myself when I’m processing, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am exhausting. If I had me as a friend, my role would be the one to tell me to shut up and enjoy the moment.

Not blogging is shutting up and enjoying the moment. I have to take a break between digging really deep into the past and preparing for my future. I tend to write about things that happened a long time ago for two reasons.

The first is that I am of the age where knowing how you got hurt way back when gives you better strategy for dealing with emotions right here and now. The second is that I have to have some distance from a memory before I can describe it in detail. The present goes by so fast that I cannot live it and reflect on it simultaneously… although I did like Dmetri Martin’s joke about liking digital cameras because it makes it possible to reminisce immediately.

My blog is always going to be months and years behind what is currently happening, which is the best reason I know to get together in person…

Until I fall asleep.

I’m starting to lean in to the excitement of being.

Years ago, Oprah did a talk show on education, and a mother stood up to ask a question. She said, “how can I get my young black son to stay in school?” Oprah didn’t flinch. She said to tell him that the price had been paid for him to get an education and he should take that crown and Put. It. On. I was literally struck dumb with emotion. She was right. So many people died for him to have that opportunity. What was the point in wasting it?

I remembered the story because I’ve been sitting in the back yard alone, thinking about the kind of human I want to be. I have had such a hard time and so many people around me have sacrificed to help me get better… particularly Dana, without whom my stars would never align. What am I going to do with my life now that they’ve done it? How do I prove to myself that their efforts were not wasted, and neither is my time on this planet?

Jason Moran and the Bandwagon is playing in my headphones while Dana and the cats are snuggled up in bed. I’m trying to keep my schedule flipped around so that I don’t have such a hard time staying up on Saturday. Because of this, I’m in a contemplative mood, and jazz is the perfect fit.

I spent the first part of my night reading standard operating procedures for work, because I was in this total mood to beautify everything. Earlier, I realized that the house looked a little too lived in and scrubbed down the kitchen until it shone. That lead to wanting to continue being a rock star at work… beautifying my soul, because my confidence about what I read put me in a fantastic mood.

Now that I feel good, I want more of it.

Action begets action, and I want to do everything I can to move myself forward. The trick is not taking on too much at once, because I don’t want all the plates I have spinning to break. I’m measuring my expansion to avoid hostile takeover as Jason flips to a minor key.

It’s a chord that gives me pause. My mind flips to my insecurities, and I realize that I don’t want to go there. I want to figure out how to re-frame pain into warmth and openness. Everything that I’ve thought of as contrived about life is morphing into the way things actually are. Life really is that beautiful, but you have to look for it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. See? It sounds like a Hallmark card. It sounds like something somebody else would say while I sit behind them and laugh.

I laugh because sometimes I feel that platitudes are sound bites for emotions never meant to be boxed in the first place. Lately, I’ve realized that the limitation is not in the emotions themselves, but the difficulty of describing them to someone else. The English language feels inadequate in moments where the experience is just too big to digest verbally.

To go back to my entry from yesterday, the biggest way I’ve changed is that letting go of my abuser erased the tape in my head so that I stopped looking for approval from it. She can’t parent me inside my own head. Wow, that sounds creepy to say out loud, but that doesn’t make it untrue. My abuser wanted me to come to this realization and didn’t realize the role she was playing in order to keep it from happening. I could not process the enormity of loss and care what she thought at the same time.

I also know that I have come to this realization several times before, have broken this pattern, and she thinks that we can be friends again, but she doesn’t change her behavior at all, and the cycle repeats itself. Until she can allow herself to be vulnerable with me, I will react to her the same way, because the expectation of me is that we can just push all this unpleasantness under the rug and go on behaving the way we always have. It ruins me from the inside out, and I just don’t have the energy anymore. I can’t think of it in terms of all the years I didn’t make the connection that I was exhausted. I have to think of it as “how do I fill my life with relationships that don’t exhaust me?”

The two relationships that always give back are Dana and work, so I have thrown myself into both. Paying more attention to both. Learning more, faster than I ever have. Racing toward my destiny…

…whatever that is.

Sometimes Dana comes and hangs out with me in our bedroom until I fall asleep, because it’s so difficult for me to drift off without her next to me. It was one of those days on Monday when I told her I couldn’t think of anything to write. Writing has become how I think deeply about an issue, especially if that issue is a conflict, because I have to weigh both sides endlessly until I come to a resolution. Right now, there is no conflict… which is wonderful, but at the same time, I doubt any of you want to hear about what I had for lunch.

There is also no need to create a story where there is none because I don’t want to write about what I had for lunch (I’m having roast chicken, by the way). I just have to wait until inspiration strikes me, which it did… twice.

Dana sparked me the first time by saying, “why don’t you write about all the ways you’ve changed since ‘all this stuff’ has happened?” By “all this stuff,” I am sure she means the story of how my perspective was systematically changed by an abuser so I couldn’t tell what was fantasy and what was reality. She would simultaneously call me a family member and dispute it at the same time, so I never really understood which way was True North.

The biggest way that I’ve changed is that my story doesn’t. I know what’s real for me, what is tangible and present at all times without the feeling that the floor is about to fall out from under me. I feel more grounded than I ever have, capable of being a lightning rod instead of a scorched branch. In short, I’ve learned not to care.

For someone as dialed in to their emotions as I am, learning not to care so much was a gargantuan feat of will. I had to undo years and years of processing data the same way, which was that if I could only be more impressive, then the family I’d been told I had would actually answer the phone. I thought that I was garbage because I’d loved so hard and still failed. I failed her, and I failed myself, because my ego was so tied up in her success.

It sounds like a crazy mess when you think of both people as fully-functioning adults. The fallacy in that logic is I wasn’t a fully-functioning adult when we met, so that when I became so, she was my Achilles heel… the computer hacker with back-door access.

In healthy relationships, both sides have that ability to undo each other, and I mean that in the best possible way. We have to have those people that remind us who we are, who we have been, so that the future is different than the past. Relationships tumble and roll in tides of emotion as one person gives and one person takes. When you don’t let yourself take, you wind up with a relationship that breeds contempt and resentment. The “giver” feels used, and the “taker” feels guilty.

The disconnect in abusive relationships is that they don’t roll over continually. The “giver” rages that you want/need too much because the protective walls that they’ve built up around themselves prevent them from allowing themselves to take… until one day, they’ve had enough and you’ve really stepped in it because they obviously bear no culpability for their role in your dance.

Being able to see past that pattern literally saved my life, because I could finally walk away from encouraging myself to feel worthless. In retrospect, I wonder why I couldn’t have brought myself to do it earlier; it’s not that I have regrets, because I don’t. I’m just curious about the person I would have been had I made this connection in my twenties instead of my thirties. One of the things that really held me back was my own internalized homophobia, and that little kid feeling of “no one likes me except .”

When I was a kid, it’s not just that I needed a safe place. I did, but there was a larger issue at hand. The world reacted to me differently than it does now. In the present day, I am different than most people, but I am no longer bad, wrong, shameful… the list goes on. I don’t just have to have that one special place I go for encouragement and comfort. I have many of them.

The next time I was sparked to write was hearing my friend Frances sing at the Mucky Duck on St. Patrick’s Day. Her voice was so pure, and touched the smallest, most vulnerable piece of my soul. Frances is one of those singers that will tell you she can’t sing, and then she’ll go up on stage and rip your heart out with beauty. Her fingers fly up and down the walking bass. The sound is warm and inviting. Frances’ voice and accompaniment starts to feel like a room you wish you could sit inside, or at least take a peek.

And then all of the sudden you realize that the reason you want to go there is because it is stripped bare, all the way down to the elements, so that it is beautifully, perfectly, amazingly clean.

The way you’d be if you weren’t just so damned human.

So much weight has lifted off my shoulders that for the first time I can clearly remember, I feel happy all the time, and deliciously, ridiculously, wickedly funny. I have to believe I’m funny, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to put content on the web. I wouldn’t be able to invite you into my corner of the world if I didn’t believe I was good at it. The positive side has to outweigh the negative in order to care about sharing it. I rest on the faith that there are people who get me, and they vastly outnumber the people that don’t.

There’s been a lot of times in my life where I’ve mistaken the part for the whole and given up because I thought it had to be perfect or nothing at all. There wasn’t a lot of grey area. It’s been the source of my depression, and I didn’t know what it was until now. I didn’t have any grey area because my ability to trust myself had been shattered into a million pieces. Learning that process has been exhilarating, and continually shifts my mind from student to teacher. It unlocks part of my brain that I didn’t know was there, and it affects everything. I’m making much more solid decisions in every area of my life because I trust that I can handle others’ reactions- good or bad – without taking my love from them or being unable to receive it.

It’s the journey of man, isn’t it? Learning not to react like a cave man when your den is threatened? Feeling closer to animal instincts because when you don’t live that way, you are missing a voice? You’re missing the party that’s going on above you, and worst of all, you don’t even know it. Years later, you’ll never confess to being the person that you were back then, because you can hardly believe it yourself. You can hardly believe that someone like you has to remember something like that. It happens to all of us, “that” being the x variable you go to when asked about something embarrassing. You have to learn the point at which participating in other people’s lives is less important than not having to face triggers to begin with.

Once you release your hot-button issues into the ether and see that the criticism you give yourself is so much more cold than the reception coming from your peers, you stop believing that you are holding down chaos… and start believing you have something to contribute that is more beautiful than the pain you have to force yourself to share. You stop obsessing over how to hide that you’ve been hurt, and you notice when people remind you of your losses because loss triggers unwanted grief.

It’s exhausting. It takes a long time to find headphones for your mind. Something to speed up the reaction time to life because you’re not constantly looking at the play-by-play of coming up with a lie on the spot and judging whether it’s plausible or not by the reactions you get.

You have to be willing to feel caught and angry and guilty, and who honestly has the time? You do everything to avoid taking it for yourself, because you’ll remember it a lot longer than anyone wants to spend on the subject, including you. You have to decide when to archive, and be disciplined about it, because just like physically cleaning the garage, it needs more time the longer you go without a mental trip to Goodwill. If something is important enough to pop back up, you know where it is. Eventually, you get too tired to schlep through the garage and you’d rather carry a laundry bag than a U-haul.

You have to recognize the people in your life who know where your pain is, because if they get any satisfaction out of seeing your negative reactions, they’re not going to tell you about it. They’ll play the game until the king is dead. People bully us all the time, and the violence is returned when we react with claws extended to emotionally predict when we’re going to be hurt. Especially when shrinking back in fear is a learned behavior over many years, it takes more time to realize that the people you love are also the people that hurt you and when you’ve had enough. You have to see what it looks like when the people you’ve hurt realize they’ve hurt you, because time has a way of softening your relationship with your flaws when you can just rest in the fact that eventually, you’ll come to accept that you have the ability to stop trying to protect those people. Life is limiting the damage you cause to a manageable ratio, while at the same time ignoring others’ ability to hurt you without striking you dumb in fear. Life is learning to trust that the people who carry your heart carry it willingly, because when they don’t, your life is measured in your response time.

You have to see the beauty that comes from telling a story in your own perspective, something that says “I am not a mistake because I did y.” If there’s a meaning to life, it’s finding a balance to good and bad that has more greyscale than 8-bit. Learn to recognize when your behavior triggers others into negative behavior. Spend as much time thinking about how you cause reactions, because you’re taught to believe that the people you loved when you were small are still the people who get your attention now. The more you shut them out, the less they’ll care when you slip out of your network. Once you’re out, it takes a gargantuan effort to get back in.

Life is a struggle until you learn to handle the spotlight as the crowd grows. I’ll consider it handled now that I can average people’s opinions of me. How much something bothers me depends on how many people I’m willing to tell.

We are all in varying stages of acceptance of ourselves- depending on the lengths people will go to in order to hide from communication.

The people that mean the most to me are the people that would never criticize me without being open to criticism themselves, because it gets harder and harder to accept that there is such a thing as conditional love and you don’t get to decide who has it.