Notes on My Life

Delayed Depart

Oct 16th, 2023

Heading home now, finally. Been sitting, waiting on a train I hustled to catch, walked 30 minutes at a quick pace to get here – to hurry up and wait. I love this saying.

Saw Sophie Calle at the Picasso Musée today. What a surprise and delight, and thanks to my friend for making that happen. Five stories of an irreverent take on Picasso by the French artist. A living artist so alive that she was actually there, having taken up an office on the top floor as, as the wall text explained, because there was really nothing left except a few things in her flat, so it was quite empty, quite lonely. The exhibit was immense, and the division by floors provided a lovely sort of encapsulation by theme. I was surprised by the experience, in several ways. I simply hadn’t expected to go, so when it was suggested I thought of course, why not? What is not a day out in Paris without art? I remembered the name of Sophie Calle but not her work. This entire world is several lifetimes away from where I am now, in time, space, and vocation. Art is a part of me I’ve had to put aside, to forget so that I could focus on my lot as a mother, in France, a country that I am only now beginning to know. I’ve put it aside, more like closed it into a cupboard, like the dusty magic cupboard in Narnia. As I was telling P about it today, about my story, briefly, I had fleeting memories of that life before. Again, I find that I am seeing that past with a new perspective, understanding my feelings about just what I experienced then, what it was in me that held me back. It’s a Pandora’s box, of sorts, to stop and think about the past with the eyes I have now. The peeling back of layers of complicated feelings to reveal the hurt and anger and confusion that I felt but didn’t have the words for.

I paid a lot of money to go to art school. I wanted to become an artist. I floundered a bit, tried to paint and didn’t really like it as it was too open, too free. I didn’t know where to begin. Inversely, I loved photography as it gave me the parameters and boundaries that I needed. It was a process art, one that was full of forced decisions. Take a picture, make a choice. Once it is done, it is done. The film will be finished in 36 exposures. Then, you must develop it. How? Exact or longer, shorter time, hotter water – the decision must be made. Choose the frame to print, then the paper, the time, the contrast, the development. Within those choices I found rigidity and freedom. Having never had experienced healthy boundaries, I think I liked this process as it gave me structure. It gave me a structure in which to experiment, and so I did. My very first project was putting writing on female bodies. My body, my friends bodies, my writing. A few words, an abstract poem, a statement in black ink on the flesh of an abstracted form. No one asked me what it meant, no one asked me to talk about it, to elaborate, to reflect. It didn’t seem important. No one seemed to care, so I didn’t either. I don’t think that even us girls that posed for these pictures knew how to talk about them. We didn’t have the words to use or the examples to follow. There were no women in the art department. In the photography department, there were a few but they only talked of light and shadow, of documenting what they saw. I was doing something else, and no one had anything to say about it.

I knew that I was talking about my experiences in my female body, a body that was not my body, as the female body, I had learned, belongs to everyone except its resident. It belongs to the men on the street who catcall it, who tell it to smile. It belongs to the boys at school who are enamoured with its fitness in a tiny cheerleader skirt. The cheerleader itself exists not for her own reward but to encourage boys to win – how is this ok, to teach girls to be decoration whose only meaning is as a prop to hold up the egos of boys and not to exist for herself. I knew that the value I had, the power I held, as a pretty, young woman. It was the only access to power that I had, and I hated it and embraced it at the same time. To be smart wasn’t enough. You could be smart as long as you were ugly as then, you were not a real threat because if you were ugly, you had no power. But pretty and smart? This was not possible because a pretty, smart woman, especially one not afraid to speak her mind or call someone out on their bullshit, well that would present a real threat. But as you are pretty, then you can be knocked down for that, too, and especially by other women. I do recall one woman art history teacher, she did not like me. At that time, there was definitely no rejoicing in the fabulousness of other women as you find today. No, the women, fighting for power themselves, expected you to be plain if you were smart, and dumb if you were pretty. Basically, there was just no way for you to win.

I remember clear as day being laughed at by my art history professor, a man, obviously, when during the one class in which we spoke briefly about feminist art. I said that it seemed clear to me that men hated women because they were afraid of us, because we bled and did not die. We stayed home and tended the kids while they went out and hunted and gathered, we missed a few days to a week each month to our bleeding, and so the balance of power was off. He though this was funny. A man. Thought this was funny. And so the lecture moved on, with feminism and Judy Chicago as a footnote to all the big men of Art History, an unimportant, insignificant footnote. He had presented Chicago’s work as though he didn’t understand it, thought it was an oddity, women’s work. How horribly ironic when the subject matter was literally all of the women artists that were left out of art history. Instead of saying their names, recognising that they existed and were worth noting, he swept them aside like they were nothing. This was how I learned how little women artists mattered.

So here today in Sophie Calle’s exhibition was the account of a response to Guernica, in a book called The Ninth Street Women. They were group of women artists that might have at that time been referred to as painters’ wives. Why, how had I never heard of them before, as a group? How was this not presented along side the grandiose (I guess) ideas of Jackson Pollack and de Kooning and the other boys? Were these women simply cheerleaders? I think not but this is what they wanted us to think, to not know our history, to not know the wise women that came before us. Sophie Calle instead of Guernica installed art works from her own collection, a composite, if you will, of the works of other artists from the last 50 years. A composite was what had been suggested before, and recorded in that book about The Ninth Street Women, so Calle tried it out in her own way, to see if it was as good. I don’t know if it was, because I have never seen Guernica, but I liked it quite a lot, just the same. There was so much more information there, but it is so hard to separate the art from the artist and from history in this hanging, as each work held a place in art history. Perhaps the same can be said for Guernica, too, that it is bigger than itself, holds a compounded interest that has out-valued its inherent artistic worth, because of its place in history and infamy. I wonder if she was thinking about this too, as she put it together. I think that this hanging of work from her personal collection, in the greater context of the exhibition, one in which she deals with her own history, and the inescapability of her own mortality, I think this might be a way for her to reflect on her place in this same grand Art History, as these are not just a grouping of great artworks of great artists but of her own, intimately personal collection. This is her story, her life. She has a personal attachment to all of them.

I know now that to make art, good art, that we have to be in conversation with ourselves to make that art make sense. We have to become aware of what we are doing, even if it is in retrospect of its making. Often, or almost always, I’ve found, you do not know what you are making as you are making it. You only know once it is made. Even then, the why can be quite ambiguous. This is not a bad thing, necessarily, as good art is rarely easily understood but must be encountered, pondered, and encountered over and over again. But the artist must eventually understand so that they can guide the work. The artist must understand through dialogue with themselves. Maybe it’s not too late for me to have this dialogue with my self, to write this personal history, to make sense of the tumble drier of ideas in my head, to put it out all in writing, to prove that I was here, part of this conversation, after all.
On Time

Oct 15th, 2023

Today I am in Paris, by myself. Sitting in the coffee shop at the Gare de l’Est, happy to be out of the train and not quite ready to go to the next place, yet. I am fine here. It takes me time to acclimate, always has, but now I am not rushed to be anywhere and this, in and of itself, is a fact that I can celebrate. I can sit in this nothingness, nowhere to be, no expectations. The music here is fine, the chair comfortable, the place anonymous. This is enough for me now. For after weeks, months, years of busyness and yearning, hustle and rush, thinking always of the next thing, all my tired body wants is to be still, to be present. I have nothing left in me, it seems, nothing. Now that is not what I want to say, but that is what comes out. It’s not that I have nothing left, but that I don’t care about the things I used to. Of those things I still do care about, I feel that my perspective on them is changing. As I am writing, I worry about what you might think, reading this, and that I will let go of, too. My head is filled with a tumble dryer of thoughts and feelings, but the predominant is tiredness. As I take a moment to reflect, that feeling changes to peace. I don’t have to be anywhere, do anything, meet anyone. My time is mine and mine alone. I can sit here, in peace, and reflect on what has gotten me here, today.

One year ago I decided to try a different way. I decided to try to be sober. I stopped drinking alcohol and see how that might help me to improve my life. One year later, I sit here completely sober. I’ve given up alcohol, cigarettes, cannabis, CBD, Xanax, and Lexapro. In place of these things I’ve started doing breathwork, exercise, healthier eating, and focusing on changing my mindset – this last bit has been the hardest. I find that my thoughts have been overwhelmingly negative for as long as I can remember. Listening to these negative thoughts has created the narrative that I’ve told myself, they have defined my story. I used the substances mentioned above to try to quiet these thoughts instead of trying to change them. Now that I am sober, I am left with just myself and that, my friends, is frightening.

Now I come to the page with a renewed sense of purpose, but also, a heightened sense of fear and trepidation. What if I don’t say the right thing? What if it doesn’t flow? What if there is no connection with others? My self has returned but now everything feels new, and raw. I feel my emotions now, and fear is one that is often at the forefront. Daily, minute-by-minute even, I must combat the negative thoughts in my head with active reassurance. I know I am not in my old ways still, yet the new habits are yet unformed. They are still feel fluid, like they might just be passing through, and negotiable. Also, what if I fail at this? What if I can’t? This experience of growth and change has challenged me and my faith in myself and in the Other – God, the Universe, or whatever.

In waking up, as this phase could be called, I feel as though I am waking through layers of heavy dreams and weighted blankets. Thoughts take a time to stick, even. I though of this many times before I really let my self feel it: I haven’t made any of my children a book of photographs of their birth and first months of life. Not one complete book. There is no book of our wedding, engagement, life in London, DC, or France. It is like they never happened, existing only in a distant memory. Sure there are a few photographs in frames around the house, a few small photo books, but there is no story, no lineage, no connection. How have I let myself miss out on this? How have I cheated my children out of their memories? We lived in our first house in France, for 5 years. This was the children’s first home and there is almost no evidence of this, at all. How could I have been so blind to this error? How have I let so many other things take importance over this gesture of love, value, and sanctity of the life and family that we’ve created? How, dear god, how??? When I realise something like this, the only thing to do is to try to forgive myself for this mistake, to let myself mourn the loss of what might have been different, and to consider how I might do better now. I have to tell myself in my tiny, everyday thoughts, that it can be ok now, it is not too late, I can be better, feel better, and do the things I know will bring about better things. I am in the middle of the change, in the middle of something that will bring about better things. So I tell myself, in these little moments, that good is coming. I often hear that it is not possible to be behind in your own life, so I have to choose to believe that I am right on time.

My friend calls, the reason I have come into Paris today, on a Sunday, to see where we should meet. I feel a rush of panic as my time is suddenly limited. It is ok, I think, I still have time. So we agree on a plan, and I am back here to close up this tiny chapter. I have so much more to say, to try to describe the changes that are upon me, the exhaustion that comes from finally learning to take care of myself while also taking care of my family. How could I have let my self go for so long? How did I ignore the central piece of my life for my whole life? I think I have these answers already, inside of me, but like the others they must come slowly as to not knock me down completely. Your mind, your ego protects you so that you can keep going and living your life. So for now, I must be content with the fact that the answers will come, in ways I don’t expect, I’m certain of that. Now my work is to take care of myself, today, in the best way I know how. I will have a walk and a talk with my friend, in the warm Paris Sunday sun, and that will be good, too. Things will be good, better than before, even if the now is difficult. Even if the now is difficult, at least now I am in it, fully, pushing out the negative thoughts with good ones, until little by little I won’t have to push them out anymore, as they will be gone. The good ones will have worn in and the positive habits will have stuck. The tears won’t be as frequent, the fatigue wont be as strong. Until then, I’ll tell my self that it is ok, it is good, life is a blessing. My children are well and my husband loves me. I will figure it out. It will never be perfect but it will be good. When it is bad, I will get through it. New things are coming, better than before, because I am better than before. There will always be love, and I will always be right on time for my life.
Homecoming

Sep 10th, 2023

What a long, strange trip it was, this summer. I can’t believe I let myself stop writing, but I didn’t really have much of a choice. Well, I guess there is always a choice to be made, and the choice I made was to not write. You see, I had to clarify that as I’m trying to really be accountable for my actions, maybe for the first time ever. I had no connection at the house, as it had been cancelled long before by my uncle, the executor of my mother’s ‘estate’ – a word that seems so conflated considering how she lived her life – so my time online was limited to when I could get to the Starbucks up the road, a place the kids learned to love because of its big free cups of water filled with ice. There they had way too many sausage and egg sandwiches while I downed coffees, answered urgent emails and tried to regain some semblance of normalcy after being in the vortex of my mother’s still messy house. Instead of writing, I chose to sleep, to recover from it all, to try to be rested for myself and for them, so that I would be at my relative best.

The last time I wrote, it seems, I had finally had enough. I didn’t know the way up, or the way through, or the way out, but I knew that I’d had enough of everything. I didn’t want to feel any worse, or even the same, and I knew that something had to give and of course, that something was me.

Even as I write this, sitting at the kitchen table, I can’t seem to leave all the old crutches behind. I am eating what had turned out to be a bottomless bowl of my favorite cereal, a sugary treat that I bought ‘for the kids’ for the weekend. It’s the worst thing to eat before bed, a sugar-heavy simple carb with dairy, but oh how I’ve made it a habit. That fullness, that calming, reassuring fullness that makes it easier to fall asleep, it too is a crutch. But for now I will not feel guilty, as I’ve given up literally everything else and for now, I’m ok with it. I know that not long from now I will back and wonder why I did that to myself. By soon, I don’t mean the 20 minutes after you’ve eaten a Ben and Jerry’s and wonder what the hell you were thinking. I mean soon, soon along this path I’m taking, leading me closer to my self. Soon, when I finally realise, not in my head but in body and by my actions, that the way forward is through health and – god forbid I admit it – exercise. Soon, when I can fully accept and integrate the fear that has forever been holding me back from what truly want, from truly, and simply, becoming.

This summer I went home to California. I seems strange to say that, but good. It feels good to call California home. Never in a million years would I have thought that it ever would be so and yet, here we are. I have struggled for so many years to feel at home, anywhere, probably because I just kept moving. First, when I left home, it was to college, just to get out of there. Two weeks later, I quit that and moved to St. Louis with a few friends who were working in TV there and not going to school. Then it was Chicago, for art school, then LA, to be closer to my family who had moved to the region, the exurbs if you will. There I found it too fake, too hot, and too spacy, so I went east again to New York, and then DC, which was a bit of a fluke but turned out to be a place I felt quite at home in. Then I met Cyrille and we decided to go to London next. Then to France – first the northern most part of the South in the Rhone valley and now in Champagne, the best place to be, if you ask me. It has a quiet, simple sort of luxury. Life moves slowly, and predictably to the rhythms of the growing season, the cuvées, and the releases of the wines. It is full of tiny villages, like ours, packed with producers of all sizes, big and small, there is a solidarity and respect among all of them, an égalité and fraternité. All that and we are less than an hour away from Paris on the fast train.

None of this mattered this summer as I went home with the three kids to which will forever be known as Grandma’s house, a little, what I like to call ‘cottage’ in an old working class development just a mile from the mighty Pacific in the not-quite northern-most part of California. It’s safe from the wildfires, too humid, and it’s nestled between the glorious coastline and the old growth Redwoods. It’s a funny little sour green house with a white picket fence around a garden that my sister laid out with my mother’s plants, and put in with the help of a neighbour, a lovely man named Gene, whose story I listened to on the front porch while he dug and planted the beds. The house was built in 1950, the date and names of the first owners is finger-written in the cement on the little front porch step we discovered that first summer of 2021 when we cleared its overgrown white-flowered plants growing from under its porch. We had arrived to help her through a surgery that was then postponed and so we spent a month clearing and cleaning and decorating. I stayed a week longer than planned to be there for her first round of chemo, to help her, to not abandon her, so that she felt safe and cared for, surrounded with love and by her things neatly presented, finally. She had been left in that house by my brother with not even a closet rod to hang her clothes on. She had been making do for so long that she didn’t even mind it anymore. She’d put a bookshelf in her room with the shelves left un-posed at the bottom of it, which left a gaping space so that she could rest the hangers at the top and let her clothes fill in below.

The infamous closet rod, a symbol of so much in the sad story of how my brother left her to flounder in that house. It was even mentioned in the lawsuit against him – she was left there surrounded by unpacked boxes and vermin in an unfinished house, abandoned by contractors and her very son, unable to unpack without his help, without even a closet rod to hang her clothes on. He took here money, borrowed what he needed, paid it back just once to earn her trust, and then just never did again. She paid for every last bit of it, trusting him to do good by her, unable or afraid to stand up to him, a tall, angry, intoxicated 6 foot 4 beast of a long before estranged child of hers. She paid for everything and he abused her faith in him, kept her name off the title so that when it all came down to it, she had, yet again, no power, no protection. While she continued her treatments for not one, but two cancers, he proceeded to try to sell it and make her a renter in her own home while he up and moved his family to Ohio, away from all the carnage he left in his wake after 10 years of life there.

He hated her so much for not being the mother that he needed growing up. His unchecked ego made it all about her, which I know it was at some point, but that point had long passed. He had long been responsible for destroying everything in his wake, for years and years. Years of burning bridges and fucking over everyone that he encountered. Years of not doing the right or even decent thing to others, deciding that somehow it didn’t matter or he didn’t care. He had once been a sweet, soft, caring boy and and even young man. He had been hurt by others, besides his own family, and had never quite recovered. He’d experienced the incredible, terrible loss of his best friend, who had been following his car on his motorcycle when he lost control and crashed and died instantly. Who knows the details of how this felt to him, for he never learned to share anything, as no one ever taught him how, except perhaps this friend that died. With his loss, I think my brother lost his innocence forever.

Instead of hurting, he chose to toughen up, as he had seen everyone around him do, to toughen up and not care about the repercussions of his actions. He’d learned that certain, terrible type of masculinity where the bigger and scarier you are, the less you care, the more you can win. He took from everyone a lied about it, too. He took from our father, preyed on his kindness, knowing that our mother would never agree, got money from him to buy his first house, a house which he just completely walked away from. He abandoned it and its payments and it was in turn repossessed. He laughed about it when he told the story of how it had been raided by the DEA just weeks after he’d left it. He’d escaped arrest and prosecution because of his good timing. Years before he told me this while our father lay dying in his final days or day, even. I was aghast, appalled, not even by the act itself but for his lack of repentance. I told him I hoped he realised how lucky he was, and that he’d learned from it. Apparently, he didn’t. Apparently this all just reinforced his grand ego, a sign that he was untouchable, that he could get away with just about anything he wanted to, and so he continued as such. This is why, I now remember, when he called me to tell me that he was married and asked me for a mere $1000 as a gift, I said no. Even though I sat on a small inheritance that I had to fight my mother for in her lawyer’s office after my father’s untimely death left them still married, and her still his sole heir. No way, no how, sorry, but no. Do something for yourself, for once. Learn your lesson, for once. As our father lay dying, each time I called from the hospital during that last eight weeks, he seemed to not really care, to not really realise. He finally came just two days before, when it was finally ‘time’. He came, he smoked, he swore, and he drank and drank, bringing a bottle of Jack Daniels to the side of my father’s bed in the ICU. Uncaring, unawares, and dealing with the situation the best he knew how, that I now know. I do have compassion for him now, from this point. I know he didn’t mean to, he was just doing his best at the time.

My mother’s house was left just to my sister and me, a feat she managed to stay alive for, beating the deadline for me to sign off on the lawsuit for the house – as it had been me who was finally able to pull together all of the financial evidence against my brother. She made the deadline by just a few days as it would only finalise if she were still alive. Sadly, I realise now, it was the last day that she was awake. She was deeply driven to do so, to leave us a home, so that no man could ever take that away from us, as had been her experience, I imagine more than just this one time.

In the last week we were there this summer, as I lay on the foldout couch in the back room between two kids, I said to myself, deeply in my soul, I never have to leave from here. This is home.

Now I know why I have not written until now. It is so hard, so painful, so emotionally revealing to write, as I cannot avoid the words that come. They arrive without my permission, they bring up the images and tales that are hidden in the parts of me that I do not want to see, nor feel.

Only now I have begun to have the tools and the abilities to feel the feelings that arise and then let them go. This is what I did on my summer vacation – I learned to let go. I have never before known this, and even now it is not my brain or my heart that knows how to let go, but it is my body that has begun to learn how. My soul can exist in a place with these feelings, in the in between time, the elegant word for which escapes me, but it is in there somewhere, through the fog of my mind, like on the moors of so many sad and sorrowful, frightening tales. This unknown I am now familiar with, the hounds in the distance are no longer just symbols of fear but of an animalistic part of me that I am learning to accept. These feelings, at once emotional and physical, are no longer forming the foundation of my daily experience. They arise, I pay attention, and then let them be, aside, within, or outside of me.

You see, I knew that I had to go home this summer, to be in the place that it all went down, to finish what I started when I went there for the first time. In the late summer of 2021, I went back to the US for the first time since fleeing everything in 2010 to start my next life with Cyrille in London, to be married, to be finally free of my family of origin and all of its sadness and failure, and to be free from my own failures and shortcomings, sins and sadness. How foolish I was to think that all of that wouldn’t follow me, how naïve, how deeply hopeful I was that I could actually start over. But here I am now, for the first time willing to look at it all as just ‘me’ and my life, to accept and love the darkest parts of me. This is what will let me be finally free of it all, to accept it, and to love my self, truly, as I love my own children even when they make their biggest mistakes. They know not what they do, they are forever forgiven and loved, so why not me too? I know now that it is ok, it will be ok, it will be good and great and dark and sad and lovely and terrible, forever and always, and it will be ok.

I learned this this summer, in my mother’s house, by the sea, on the roads, in the forests, and on the tables of a great body-work healer and intuit who saw me, in the present form, with the physical reality all of these experience as they had been stored in my body, for years and years. In his treatment room, four times a week, I would arrive with the intention of healing, and it worked. That space was transformative, that space allowed me to exist in my body in the present, to feel exactly where I was, each time, and through his gentle adjustments I was able to feel pain and let it go. To feel everything in my body as it came, and it did come. These sessions offered me a place, a deeply important and necessary place for my self to be present, with no demands from others, human or otherwise. It seemed that every other moment I had was spent either caring for my three young children; clearing, cleaning and decorating my mother’s house; sleeping or just trying to generally recover from the vortex of the entire experience. These sessions allowed me to feel better, to realise and then literally tell my self this:

I don’t have to feel bad. I can find joy in this even though it’s hard, it hurts. I can be ok with my mother being gone, she is free now and I can be, too. There is no point to suffering. I can be sad and miss her and still experience joy with my children, still love them as I want to love them, as they deserve. I can forgive myself and love my self, too. I can love those around me without fear of more pain. I can exist in a complex world with love and loss and the entire array of human experience.

This healing work is by no means finished. I am really just at the beginning of this next trajet of my journey. Moving forward, I am not only filled with hope but also with a deeply grounded knowing, a belief in possibility. My sadness, which manifested itself as an ever-present anxiety for years and years prior to this experience, a sort of waiting for the next terrible thing to happen, is gone. For a little while I wasn’t even sure what this difference was that I felt and then I realised, it’s gone. Even now when I think of it, I let out a deep breath that resonates throughout my body in gentle waves as if checking and yes, it is gone. It might come back, but now I know that I don’t have to keep it, to store it, it is not necessary, nor helpful, nor good.

Until the next time I write, I will continue to say to myself, Let it go, little child, you can be free again.
Rock Bottom

Jun 20th, 2023

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A Day Like This

Jun 12th, 2023

Yesterday my daughter had her first communion. It was a lovely occasion and a new tradition to me. As I was raised Protestant, I was confirmed at 14. I was baptised during the same period, as I hadn’t been baptised as a baby or small child. This fact alone gave me suspicion about the entire ceremonial process, the function of the church and religion, as I wondered how and why my parents came to it so late that I was baptised at 14. I am realising now that I no longer can just ask them. This is how grief continues to sneak up on a person. These little moments when you’re like, oh I’ll just ask… but wait, I can’t, that’s no longer an option. Perhaps I can get to the point where I am clear enough in my dreams to ask them there.

Dreams, again, are why I’m here today to write. Exhausted from a weekend of first preparing and then socialising, I went back to sleep this morning after dropping the kids to school. My dreams took me so many places. I was once again back in my childhood home. I was arranging the lovely entry nook, which was never made lovely while we lived there, it was always left a dishevelled mess. I now have the sudden urge to clean and arrange things in my house now, but I ignore it and choose to keep at work here, instead. There was nothing wholly remarkable in these dreams this morning, but instead I feel rattled, off balance, by the way I moved through them. There were many fragments of dreams – storylines and places I’ve been before – all mixed up, like someone was changing the channels on an old TV, yet I was living them all.

I was waiting for them to come home, my parents. This is what I remember from the main dream; the station I kept coming back to. I was waiting on a bright, soft summer day, not unlike this one today, making things nice, happily. It was a slow, easy feeling of making things just right, not the rush of doing it before visitors arrive, like this past weekend. It was the pleasure of taking the time to do something, enjoying the process, enjoying the sun through the woods outside, the fresh summer air filled with enchanting fragrances wafting from one direction and then the other. With the whisper of the wind through the trees and the birds calling, it was the kind of day to lay in the grass and bathe in sunshine, to stare at the clouds and look for shapes, to close your eyes and feel the sun on your skin and and the soft wind cool you and kiss you as it passes by. It was a perfect day, a day to never end, a day that you always remember, as the memories of each day like this blend into one and each time, if you are lucky enough, that a day like this returns you are reminded of what it feels like, and felt like before, and it is bliss.

I remember a day in early May in Chicago, I was with my boyfriend, another boyfriend who I clung to for dear life, as he did me, knowing not what else to do with a kindred spirit, except to try to be together as a couple. This day in early May was so perfect, coming at the end of a long, dark, cold, sad winter that seemed to have no end, that it seemed to spring out from the earth with a glorious leap, all at once, exclaiming that the winter was finally over and we could all live again. The winds were still strong but finally warm, and caressed the soul of a city and its people, who were all drawn together by the act of mere survival of its hardest season, and had all, somehow, again survived. So we too rejoiced, just stayed outside, skipped classes and went close to the lake. I remember walking all the way there through the city streets and its magnificent architecture, the sunlight forming majestic shadows and light not seen before. In the park by the lake we lay in the soft green grass and basked in the sun and swam in our love for each other. We’d found each other quite by accident. I’d wanted to film or photograph something. He’d hosted at his loft and no one else showed up. We spent the day and evening together and he kissed me as I left. I was quite surprised, as I hadn’t really thought about it before it happened which was probably why it was so nice. I was my regular amount of nervous around him but could still be myself, as I didn’t think of him as more than a person who shared my interests and also had a world of other ones that I knew nothing about. I can still remember how I felt in the cab on the way home, struck by having found something that seemed like it would be quite interesting. If anything, he was hopelessly sincere, as I now know that the English have a tendency to be. I was honest, too, and felt so lucky to have found someone who I could talk to, who was interested.

Weeks and several encounters later, he showed up at a club where I was with another group of friends just to tell me that he had realised that I was his muse. He was so excited to share this with me.

We drank, we would fight, we’d lay in bed for hours, hungover and desperate for relief. We threw parties, made art, were rebellious and brave together. We were young and glorious and destined to self-destruct. He dealt with his complicated experience of me in his art. I took his adoration and turned it into power and the courage to be magnificent. Together we were a chemical reaction, bringing out the best and the worst in each other, sometimes exploding and sometimes creating beautiful magic; we were always a sight to be seen and we loved it. Like Sid and Nancy but without the heroin and plus a trust fund and art school federal loans. We both loved the attention, I think for each of us it was a chance to be a part of something envious, to prove that we were just as fabulous as we’d always wanted to be. After one event, when he’d drank too much, he left in a blind rage and disappeared, walking miles through the city at night to finally arrive at dawn at my flat on the south side. He loved me, was in awe of me, and he hated himself as I did. I thought he was wonderful and mean, with his biting English humour that I loved as well. When no one else was listening, he heard me, my comments, my critiques, and rebuttals. We laughed the way that two friends do when they not only find the other funny, but with the joy of finally finding someone else that gets you and your humour.

We did many things together, including my first trip abroad and then my second. The first was just two weeks away to meet his mother who lived in Malta. She was an English socialite who had never worked a day, who’d inherited the fortune of his father on his sudden death. After that we wandered through Rome in the August heat, and then alone I went to Milan for a day. The second time, we left the US for four months in North London after his visa had run out. There we got engaged, we came back, and we fell out some weeks later.

On that fine day May day there were not yet problems but just two young lovers and friends that were happy to have found each other, together in spring, and happy to bask in the warmth of the sun and each other – in the grass, in the wind, and in love – in the love of each other and in ourselves, of finally being seen, being heard, being wanted by someone else who saw the damaged parts and loved them, too. Being kissed for nothing, being admired, being touched by someone else that you would see from a block away and be, every time, excited by their deep, dark blue eyes, looking up at you through a furrowed brow, once downcast and thinking of serious, sad things. Seeing that face look up, change, lighten, transform into one of joy, because of you, this is the highest compliment to receive. It is a look of love, adoration, relief, joy, happiness, admiration, all of these things. But is it selfish on the end of the receiver, as it can often times just serve as a substitute for all of these things coming from within oneself. If I had loved myself, would I have needed him, or even wanted him? Would our bond not have been so immediate, so strong, so entangled? Or would I have seen him simply as someone who needed love, needed me, and still loved him for that, but differently? I think I know now, and knowing now doesn’t change anything but my perception of this time, long, long past. It doesn’t change the perfection of that fine day, of that perfect day, when we loved each other and were loved in return.

Now I can recognise this gaze of love as the way a child looks at their mother or father, and can take this lesson with me as I next see my children, and meet them with all of that love returned to them. I think I missed this so much when I saw my parents as a child, a teen, and then as an adult. My mom would still light up, my dad too, but it was hard for them to express that in actions, beyond that. I think that I was always seeking this in another, that someone would light up upon seeing me, that I could be the center of their world for a minute, that time would temporarily stop in that exchange between us. The experience of being seen, being recognised, being encouraged, I missed out on this so much. Now, I need it less and less, now that I am trying to understand it, and finding it in healthy ways, ways that have no strings, no quid pro quo attached. Now as I sit in the shade of the tree in the garden, the heat surrounding me like a duvet, bugs passing by for a visit, I think again of my dream, preparing the house, the entry on this fine day. I slowly came to realise that it was, in fact, a dream, that no one was coming home, that I would have to leave, to wake up, to go back to the day after a big day, to re-enter all of the things that I’d left behind as they weren’t as important as the preparations. Now all of these things I must go back to, leave this place of simple bliss, of home, of family, of healing, of safety. I must go back; they are not coming. I realise this as I try to pull myself out of sleep, out of fatigue, I attempt to cry out but barely a sound leaves me. I am physically filled with sorrow and sadness, and pain in my heart. One last time, I dip into dreams, again, and grieve for them, again, as a child who has been left alone. I feel lost without them. I want to be young again, to have a party with my family, to be at the center of their loving attention, at my grandmother’s house, in the garden. I see how happy it has made my children, as all day yesterday, even after the guests were gone, they played and read and were just, in a word, content. They felt safe in the warm and loving embrace of god and their ancestors, both present and absent. They understood, through the mere presence of others, that they are part of a community bigger than just the 5 of us, which is, at times, difficult. They are loved by people they do not even know or remember. They are surrounded by stories and changes, of new members of the family that they now realise weren’t always there. They see happy results of sad divorces, of people coming together, for them.

Today I sit in my garden, writing and letting these recent memories heal me, too. I am not a child, left alone. I have my self here now. I am here for my self, a parent to not only my kids but to my inner child, who was left alone before. I can cry out for a past that is gone, and then pull myself back into a fortunate present without the need to erase that memory completely. I only hope that the next time I am there that I can know, deeply, that it is a revisiting – not the present time – so that I can enjoy it with the reverence for a time passed, a past from which I have recovered. I have felt again that pain. I must remember it and then comfort myself and integrate it so that next time, if I do go back, I won’t have to feel it all over again. Perhaps it will be like the memory of all of the perfect days, one great memory of sorrow that I can choose to revisit, a feeling and place that surely will come again, but that until that time, I can keep at a distance, and stay firmly alive and well in the fortunate present.
Memories, Real and Imagined

Jun 8th, 2023

This morning I woke up in a fog to the sound of the children creeping down the stairs to watch TV. I got up, feeling somewhat rested as I slept early the night before. As I was making coffee I realised I had been dreaming, back in the familiar architecture of my dreams. I was in Trenton, or we were, the town where my grandma lived when she was alive. Many family members were there. We walked the route home from the park, as we did so many times in my childhood. I realise now that I have visited this place many, many times in my dreams, for it was not just the familiarity of the memories of visits in real life, but of dreams, as well. It all comes flooding back now. How strange, to realise an entire imagined landscape has existed in my head. It’s like all these disparate elements are suddenly coming together and seeping into my conscious memory as I write.

It is no wonder that I am so tired, even after I sleep, as I have travelled so much and seen so many people in my dreams. My mother’s house is there, too, but in this dreamscape it is just down the road from our old house, where we all lived together. There’s the long stretch of the two-lane county highway road, the one just after leaving our house, turning left, and heading out to Gramma’s house. The start of the journey I loved so much and on the return, the long , straight stretch I loved so much, before returning to the warmness of home. I would rest my tired head against the car window and stare out at the telephone wires moving past, bobbing up and down like dependable waves, from pole to pole.

I drew a vessels card this evening, the card of mourning, as if to remind me of exactly what it is I am going through. It is not just the mourning of my mother but of my past, of finally letting go of those sad longings that I have for that time when things were not easy but simpler, when the world was small. The warmth and safety of simple things, of living in someone else’s care, no matter how much it wasn’t what I may have wanted it to be; it was everything, nonetheless. It was a time when I had still my safe inner world, and dreamed of all of the things that I would do when I was out of it. I remember visiting ‘home’ with my grandmother, going back to where she grew up, seeing her sisters that still lived there, and their lovely homes and husbands. Aunt Rhodie and Uncle Bill, Aunt Goldie and whoever he was. They were fabulous and funny, happy as could be in the little town that they grew up in. I never saw a house where they lived before, nor the farm, never heard them speak about where or how they grew up. I only heard tales of a farm and too may children and a mother dying young and my grandmother having to step up and help care for the rest. There was no pride in their past, only their present, in which they’d built their own versions of success.

Their mother would have been half Indian, if my math is right. I’m a 16th, so Dad was an 8th and Gramma 4th. Her mom was 1/2 which made her grandmother was a full blooded native. Choctaw, I believe, or at least that’s what my research led me to. Now that I am older, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. When I was a child, it seemed like ancient history, a history that had nothing, really, to do with me. But now as I learn how much we inherit, both by blood and through behaviours, I think about how much that shock, the shock of being stripped of culture, of having to deny one’s self, of having to learn how to be someone else to survive in the white world, how much that would have effected my ancestors. She was just a woman, not a concept, not a group of people. When you think of a group, it is tragic, but it also makes it easy to generalise the experience, to simply think of something horrific that happened long ago that to some faceless people. But when you think of it as something that happened to one person, and feel that individualised empathy for another soul course through your veins, suddenly it seems so very much more real. At some point in our history, in our family line, someone was told that they had to change, to forget all that they knew, because what they knew and who they were was savage and wrong. They had to relearn everything, or they would continue to be part of the problem, and they would not survive. Imagine what that does to a person. No wonder they were quiet, they had to be to survive. This was my grandmother – with her quiet strength, her absolute, unmovable stoicism that was never enforced through violence. Perhaps it was, when her children were small, god knows that we do change as parents as the kids grow, but from my perspective, she only enforced it through love and care.

She and her siblings made it, all of them from what I could tell, or perhaps I only knew the ones who made it, with her. There were eight of them at one point and I surely don’t remember knowing them all. The ones I did know, they made it, they were the archetypal American dream. The went to war, and to the factories, they won, they came home, they married, they had kids. Many of them stayed in the service for life, like my grandfather. They lived the lives of service wives, with fancy parties and couture cocktail dresses, big baubles and flashy jewels. They bought up fancy furniture for a song at auction and in shops across a decimated western Europe. They brought home Samurai swords from Japan and set them atop tiki bamboo bars, relics from a conquered land. All along, they drank to remember or drank to forget, depending on the day. They raised their kids in this backdrop of relative wealth and success and security, and American pride, in a way that only the military could provide.

All these things are somewhere inside me, ready to be unpacked. How proud I am to be American because of them, whether it’s the right way to feel or not. Every parade I went to as a child, my grandfather was in it, with the Shriners, in his little car doing their funny zig-zag routine in their fez hats. I was always so pleased to see him, to be recognised. He was always sweet and kind and funny to me, I never knew the man that I later learned used to terrify my father. How much of this inheritance have I absorbed, unknowingly? How much of his death was due to damage done by alcohol, by PTSD?

For now I have to put it all aside, to go on as though everything is fine, that when I close my eyes my family isn’t dancing around in my head, that my Pandora’s box hasn’t been blown open. Sleep early, rise tôt. Keep on allowing myself to figure it out, to mourn, to rest, to remember, to question, to let go. I must go on living today like it is the new day that it is, unencumbered by the past, if I just let is be so. I remind myself that this is the work – the work that you can wait to do until you are dying, days with eyes closed, when all the memories come back to be processed one last time, when you finally have time just for this and nothing else, if you are so lucky. Or, I can do it now, I can slow down enough to let these memories and emotions back in, so that I can truly live, free of their shackles to the past, for the rest of my days. Born anew by the forgiveness I can offer to myself and to others, I can remember what and who is really important to me and start again, with fresh eyes, a clear mind, and a full heart, recovered and renewed.

This morning I woke up in a fog to the sound of the children creeping down the stairs to watch TV. I got up, feeling somewhat rested as I slept early the night before. As I was making coffee I realised I had been dreaming, back in the familiar architecture of my dreams. I was in Trenton, or we were, the town where my grandma lived when she was alive. Many family members were there. We walked the route home from the park, as we did so many times in my childhood. I realise now that I have visited this place many, many times in my dreams, for it was not just the familiarity of the memories of visits in real life, but of dreams, as well. It all comes flooding back now. How strange, to realise an entire imagined landscape has existed in my head. It’s like all these disparate elements are suddenly coming together and seeping into my conscious memory as I write.

It is no wonder that I am so tired, even after I sleep, as I have travelled so much and seen so many people in my dreams. My mother’s house is there, too, but in this dreamscape it is just down the road from our old house, where we all lived together. There’s the long stretch of the two-lane county highway road, the one just after leaving our house, turning left, and heading out to Gramma’s house. The start of the journey I loved so much and on the return, the long , straight stretch I loved so much, before returning to the warmness of home. I would rest my tired head against the car window and stare out at the telephone wires moving past, bobbing up and down like dependable waves, from pole to pole.

I drew a vessels card this evening, the card of mourning, as if to remind me of exactly what it is I am going through. It is not just the mourning of my mother but of my past, of finally letting go of those sad longings that I have for that time when things were not easy but simpler, when the world was small. The warmth and safety of simple things, of living in someone else’s care, no matter how much it wasn’t what I may have wanted it to be; it was everything, nonetheless. It was a time when I had still my safe inner world, and dreamed of all of the things that I would do when I was out of it. I remember visiting ‘home’ with my grandmother, going back to where she grew up, seeing her sisters that still lived there, and their lovely homes and husbands. Aunt Rhodie and Uncle Bill, Aunt Goldie and whoever he was. They were fabulous and funny, happy as could be in the little town that they grew up in. I never saw a house where they lived before, nor the farm, never heard them speak about where or how they grew up. I only heard tales of a farm and too may children and a mother dying young and my grandmother having to step up and help care for the rest. There was no pride in their past, only their present, in which they’d built their own versions of success.

Their mother would have been half Indian, if my math is right. I’m a 16th, so Dad was an 8th and Gramma 4th. Her mom was 1/2 which made her grandmother was a full blooded native. Choctaw, I believe, or at least that’s what my research led me to. Now that I am older, it doesn’t seem like that long ago. When I was a child, it seemed like ancient history, a history that had nothing, really, to do with me. But now as I learn how much we inherit, both by blood and through behaviours, I think about how much that shock, the shock of being stripped of culture, of having to deny one’s self, of having to learn how to be someone else to survive in the white world, how much that would have effected my ancestors. She was just a woman, not a concept, not a group of people. When you think of a group, it is tragic, but it also makes it easy to generalise the experience, to simply think of something horrific that happened long ago that to some faceless people. But when you think of it as something that happened to one person, and feel that individualised empathy for another soul course through your veins, suddenly it seems so very much more real. At some point in our history, in our family line, someone was told that they had to change, to forget all that they knew, because what they knew and who they were was savage and wrong. They had to relearn everything, or they would continue to be part of the problem, and they would not survive. Imagine what that does to a person. No wonder they were quiet, they had to be to survive. This was my grandmother – with her quiet strength, her absolute, unmovable stoicism that was never enforced through violence. Perhaps it was, when her children were small, god knows that we do change as parents as the kids grow, but from my perspective, she only enforced it through love and care.

She and her siblings made it, all of them from what I could tell, or perhaps I only knew the ones who made it, with her. There were eight of them at one point and I surely don’t remember knowing them all. The ones I did know, they made it, they were the archetypal American dream. The went to war, and to the factories, they won, they came home, they married, they had kids. Many of them stayed in the service for life, like my grandfather. They lived the lives of service wives, with fancy parties and couture cocktail dresses, big baubles and flashy jewels. They bought up fancy furniture for a song at auction and in shops across a decimated western Europe. They brought home Samurai swords from Japan and set them atop tiki bamboo bars, relics from a conquered land. All along, they drank to remember or drank to forget, depending on the day. They raised their kids in this backdrop of relative wealth and success and security, and American pride, in a way that only the military could provide.

All these things are somewhere inside me, ready to be unpacked. How proud I am to be American because of them, whether it’s the right way to feel or not. Every parade I went to as a child, my grandfather was in it, with the Shriners, in his little car doing their funny zig-zag routine in their fez hats. I was always so pleased to see him, to be recognised. He was always sweet and kind and funny to me, I never knew the man that I later learned used to terrify my father. How much of this inheritance have I absorbed, unknowingly? How much of his death was due to damage done by alcohol, by PTSD?

For now I have to put it all aside, to go on as though everything is fine, that when I close my eyes my family isn’t dancing around in my head, that my Pandora’s box hasn’t been blown open. Sleep early, rise tôt. Keep on allowing myself to figure it out, to mourn, to rest, to remember, to question, to let go. I must go on living today like it is the new day that it is, unencumbered by the past, if I just let is be so. I remind myself that this is the work – the work that you can wait to do until you are dying, days with eyes closed, when all the memories come back to be processed one last time, when you finally have time just for this and nothing else, if you are so lucky. Or, I can do it now, I can slow down enough to let these memories and emotions back in, so that I can truly live, free of their shackles to the past, for the rest of my days. Born anew by the forgiveness I can offer to myself and to others, I can remember what and who is really important to me and start again, with fresh eyes, a clear mind, and a full heart, recovered and renewed.
A Year in Vulnerability

Jun 2nd, 2023

I had this idea a while ago: what if I committed to a year of living in vulnerability? This is inspired by the work of Brene Brown, a brilliant mind in a field that she has come to define by scientifically examining how people process trauma and life experience, and how it defines their personality, actions, and lives. In my understanding of her work, which I have not studied in depth, allowing oneself to be vulnerable is the key to progress. If we are not vulnerable to being exposed to others, we are not really living. Healthy vulnerability is key to intimate, true relationships, relationships that will help us to grow. We must be truly present, as our true selves, to fully experience life and the human experience. Otherwise, we are merely existing.

As I dig deeper into myself, to try to bring my true self to actualisation, I return to this idea again and again. It takes bravery to show up, to be vulnerable, to feel exposed, to risk rejection. To achieve success, not in a capitalist fashion, but however we choose to define success, we must not even think of failure. Failure is only possible if we seek goals that are defined by the outside looking in. If we seek goals that are true to our hearts, humanistic, can we ever really fail? Or are we only destined to encounter setbacks that we can learn from, setbacks that will ultimately lead to the success that we ultimately seek?

Perhaps the word ‘success’ itself is the problem. The mere idea of a goal that is finite and attainable implies that there is an end to the road that we travel, an end to our path of life, a great garden of bliss and perfection that simply does not exist. Perhaps it is simply choosing a path that is our own, with both weeds and wildflowers along the way, muddy parts, washed out bridges, and beautiful vistas, too. Even the weeds have their purpose, and most often than not, they too can be used for medicine, if we only look deeper to discover the wisdom of our ancestors, to learn how they have been used over the centuries before us.

If I could commit to a year of living in vulnerability, how would my life change? Can I show up as my best self, vulnerable to the critics, naysayers, doubters, and non-believers? See there, how I automatically think about the negative. Today I revisited the idea of negative bias in the course that I am doing. Our brain has a natural tendency to remember the negative outcomes rather than the positive as this has served our primal needs for survival since forever. Our brain, and perhaps also our ego, remembers these lessons to keep us safe from harm, from pain, from predators. It is a survival mechanism. It also keeps us from changing, from evolving into better versions of ourselves. It says NO to us, to our dreams of bigger and better lives for ourselves, to the possibility of simple happiness, of lives lived telling ourselves the stories of our lives not with happy endings, but as tales of caution and protection. These are the fairy tales that we tell ourselves, with the big bad wolf and the old witch in the woods that eats the children who have strayed too far from home. These are the same stories that end with a happily ever after once the princess meets the prince that saves her from herself. These are not tales of lives long lived, lives that progress, change, develop, and grow until the end when souls are ready to leave this earth and start again, ascending into a new existence. Where are these tales? Perhaps they are ours to write.

What if I lived a year in vulnerability? How could I change my path, and the path of my family and children, if I were not afraid, not shackled to the earth by the tales I’ve told myself of lack and fear and failure? What if I started anew, today, to re-write the sorrows and difficulties of my life, to tell a different version of these thousands of days that I have lived. For I am here, now, living a day in the beautiful spring sunshine in the countryside, surrounded by flowers and leaves and wind. I am so fortunate to have this life, created by choice and by events in my past, both good and bad, and decisions I have made, and by the blessings of chance and by birth. The lessons I’ve learned have given me a rich encyclopaedia of experience from which to draw. It is time to stop only thinking of the negative, it is time to switch my perspective to the good things that I’ve gathered, and to recenter them in the story that I tell myself.

In a year of vulnerability I could change so much. I could feel the fear and do it anyway. But could the fear also be set aside? I do believe it can be, and I am learning how to do that as well. Commitment to me is the challenge, but I think that I can build up to being able to commit, as well, by taking small actions of commitment every day. This will move me towards feeling able to commit to bigger challenges. For now, I recognise that I am not quite there yet, but that I can be. Being in a place of possibility is wonderful, as before I did not feel this way, and this itself created a cycle of negative thoughts, implied failure, and inaction. Now, I begin to feel a little, quiet shift inside, a soft ‘I think I can’. One day I will be able to say about myself, ‘she thought she could, and so she did’.

For now I can at least imagine making the commitment of living a year in vulnerability, even though I am at my very core afraid of the changes that will bring. I can imagine being ok with having my world opened up to all the possibilities that I have imagined. For now, that is enough, as now I believe in that possibility. I think I can, I think I can, and so, when I am soon ready, I will.
Nothing Left to Prove

May 25th, 2023

What do I feel like I am trying to prove? This is the question of the day in the course I am doing so I thought I’d address it here, where the space is unlimited.

I want to prove to my self that I can change, that I can do this, that I can live up to my potential. Do I tie my self-worth to what I accomplish? Absolutely. How can I not? This is what we are programmed to do from such a young age – that life is about accomplishments, success, awards, recognition. How quickly my thoughts go back to my mother. She knew what mattered, from so early on. Through her actions I learned that a quiet afternoon walking through nature, looking at birds and flowers in the air and sunshine, was the best thing. Just enjoying life, that is the point. It was outside of this bubble that I was shocked. I was supposed to care what people think? Fit in? Race to be the best? Ironically, when I was young I was the best at school without even trying. The work came easy to me, I enjoyed it. I didn’t have to work for it. This, I think, was a key factor in me later not being able to work for what I wanted. When I was young, I didn’t have to. My mother languished in her simple life, without being able, I can guess now, to get her head above water in motherhood. So she just existed. She came to life when she worked, finally, when I was in high school, when she was the happiest I’d ever seen her.

But this isn’t about her. What do I have to prove? I always thought that I’d move out of the small town and small mindedness of where I grew up and prove them all wrong, that I’d make something of my self, by my self, and create a huge, rich, fabulous life as an artist. As an artist, that was the key. I never really even tried, I was too scared to fail – and then who would I be? So I tried a little and got some momentum and then it was too hard. I just needed rest, a soft place to land, and to be loved, and warm. I knew no self-love, I didn’t even know it was a thing. I was in so much pain that I sought love in others, putting the cart before the horse, as my grandmother warned me not to do. She loved me, but her’s was an unspoken, quiet love. No one ever spoke to me and taught me how to love myself. She had probably never been taught either, she just knew how, perhaps because of her nativeness, stripped away just a few generations before, which was what she knew deep down in her soul.

I tried to prove that I was loveable by finding love, never in a healthy way. But here I am now, with a marriage and family of my own, just now learning to love myself. I am still searching for accomplishment to prove that I have a place in this world. I should be proud of what I have accomplished. From the outside, it all looks great. I need to embrace what I have accomplished, and rejoice in it. My career can really begin now, with my passions at the core, but first I must accept my own greatness, not for what I’ve done or who I’ve been on the outside, but just for being human. The greatness in me is the same as in you and as in every human, the same as god and the universe and everything. Simple, calm, true, and as easy as a spring day in the forest, and like the miracle of the woods filled with sweet williams, a sea of blue flowers as far as the eye can see. It is this greatness that I must embrace, the nature in me that has always been there is still there, just waiting for the sun, and the rain, and the right time, to bloom.

As I pull myself out of the ‘prove’ mode, I can see that it can be easy. I have nothing left to prove, all I need to do is believe that anything is possible, that I have a purpose, that I have a gift, or even gifts, to share with the world. I have passions, for love, beauty, sharing, helping, and change that I must share with the world. I just need to let go of that younger me that is so angry and afraid, and alone. I am not alone and have never been so, I have only been scared of being with others, wounded from the past, a past of being trapped in cycles that were not made by me. Now, I am free of these parental traps, this is the gift of them both being gone. They are now both free, able to be rid of the trappings of this world and their recent tours of this earth, and now, I can be too.

I am an artist. I am a mother, a wife, a friend, a sister, even a niece. I am still a daughter, and I can recall what this feels like while raising my own children, to try to to better now that the roles are reversed and it is my turn to be a parent. I am passionate about change and helping others to have a voice, to be heard, and to not have to feel like I did because no one ever helped me to know otherwise. It is ok to just exist, to enjoy the life and the time that we have here on this earth, on this tour. Why not? I don’t have to prove anything anymore, I can just be me. That is enough.
The Killing Time

May 19th, 2023

Now that it’s happened, it seems like it was inevitable. Last night I drank. Today I am hazy and dull, with a hangover not only from the alcohol but also from the emotions and the desperate need that I felt – to either stop and process them or escape them – for the last two weeks. Unfortunately, the latter won out this time – I tried to escape from their grip with alcohol. After a sunny day of celebration filled with conversations, social pressures, and champagne – which I resisted with ease – the night came and I caved to my desire to drink. Sitting around a warm fire with nothing to say, I felt that I might as well, and so I did. One glass finished the magnum of red, and the friends left. My husband went to put a child back to bed after a nightmare, and then it was just me and an empty glass, alone. I remembered the bottle I’d opened the week before, something nice, made by friends. It was under the sink. I’d left it there the day of my mother’s internment service, last Friday, when I’d first caved. Though then, I hadn’t liked it. It felt like a poison, the taste and then the feeling of the alcohol in my blood, a toxin needing to be rid of. This time I was ready for it, and enjoyed it.

Alone by the fire, I had another glass while I stared into the flames and tried to process. I tried to be aware of my own desire to drink and drink more. I probably had about three glasses in total. It’s hard to say as I only filled up a bit at a time, bargaining with myself over when I would have enough and go to bed.

I remember in a meeting recently someone said that the relapse starts well before the first drink. This stood out to me, tangibly, as if everything else just silenced for a second and this concept just hung in the air, resonating. I could relate to this viscerally, as if something I’d always known but had never been able to put words to was suddenly explained for me, to me.

I’ve also read recently that a sign of healing is falling back into old patterns, finding comfort in the familiar. I would assume that the second, healthy part of this is recognising them and moving forward out of them. Instead of beating myself up about this relapse, I can try to look at it as a sign that I am healing, that I just needed a return to the course I’ve known, to see the feelings and patterns from a new perspective, one that has, ironically, been made possible by almost 8 months of alcohol-free living. So what have I learned from this and how have I changed?

I now know this about myself – I am sensory seeking, creative, and sensitive to my core. I am still reeling from the pain of losing my mother, and from the loss of so many years and moments during which I did not understand her, and I expected things from her that she was just not capable of doing or being. It is normal for me to feel this way, to feel sad and lost and alone. This is the right way to feel, the appropriate, necessary thing, but it still sucks to be so tired and empty from all of this.

I am detached from my father. I don’t know why, I wonder, but have no clear answers. For starters, the man he was at the end of his life was not the man I knew growing up. How much the weight loss, the result of an unhealthy, improperly done gastric bypass, effected him I can only imagine. His body was completely changed, at the end he was a skeleton. Ultimately, I think, alcohol killed him, as his addiction to food transformed into an addiction to alcohol, and could never be fully satisfied. That is the problem – it’s nearly impossible to satisfy this urge to completely self-obliterate but oh how we try – through food, or alcohol, or cannabis, for starters.

My mother is easier to feel the absence of, as she was so present in my life in the end of her life and her death is so recent. I began to understand her mental and emotional shortcomings, the new ones that had arrived through experience and the ones that had been with her my whole life. The mechanics of denial had instructed her thoughts for such a long time, they had made well worn paths in her mind. These paths had begun to influence other thought processes, of comprehension, understanding, and remembering, all very interrelated functions.

My desire to drink came from a place of needing and wanting to escape all of this, a life where I feel out of place, disconnected, living a lonely existence while my children’s childhoods pass me by. I don’t know what breakthrough I am hoping for, waiting on, but in the days of recovery after this at least I won’t have to think of everything all at once, the quiet misery and then slow victory of recovery will be quite enough. After that, who knows, maybe I will have to face the objective reality of my life from now on, finally. Perhaps it is time.
Will and Inertia

May 15th, 2023

Today has been hard, a hard day on top of many, each pushing me further past what I thought was my limit. I need deep, healing, uninterrupted sleep, perhaps for days. I need to stop, be still, and process. I feel like the last of my energy had been sucked from me and yet I still have to get up and take care of everyone else – mostly my kids who are fully dependent on me. At least I have started painting again and that is giving me hope. It feels like it is keeping me alive. It is proof, at least, that I exist, as now I have been so completely stripped down that I am not wholly sure that I do anymore. I am a ghost of myself, my past, in a body that wants nothing more than to move into a future that is free from its pains. I at least can take the awareness that comes from writing these words and begin to shut down, knowing that in another night and two days from now, my husband will be home, school will be out, and I can stop, finally. So now, I will take comfort in that horizon coming soon, and rest at least for this short night.

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