Week 3/52 January 23, 2017

Full confession. This is week three, and I have already slid a day behind each previous week. I don’t know if this is indicative of some horrid form of self-sabotage, or if my other worldly concerns were just too heavy to write, but I find that all through the week I am thinking of topics that I would like to explore with a thoughtfulness and attention that I have yet to give to myself or my writing, and then, when it comes time to write, I have discarded all of my previous ideas. Perhaps, then, this week will simply be a report on the status of… this woman.

Since the election, I have had somewhat of a numb feeling. Like, I know how horrible of a human the new president is, and I worry about all the things that might happen… but somehow, perhaps because of my already precarious emotional state, I just… sort of shut it off. Like the feelings of despair are simply cordoned off, and then wrapped up in bubble wrap and sent off to deep freeze.

I think that’s what I do with negative feelings in general. And maybe positive ones, too. Like any emotion that is too hard to contain, I just… set it aside and move on.

 I wouldn’t know this, of course, except sometimes my parents, and other people tell me stories about things that I did or felt and I have, literally, no memory of them. Like, not at all. Perhaps this is simply the nature of aging, but I’m convinced that it is not.

Oh, who the fuck am I kidding with this? I cannot write when my heart feels like it is being ripped from my chest, and stomped on by a smiling executioner. How can I? I can’t maintain some jocund tone when I know that underneath the smiling mask, my face is crumpled in that puffy red ugly cry that comes with dry-heaving gasps. Separation anxiety is real, even when separation is the path to the best possible outcome.

Why, I wonder, is letting go, letting be, so hard? Why? Because our hearts are a veiny, thorny morass of feelings upon feelings that we’ve built and broken and rebuilt and rebroken until we don’t know whether we are living or reacting to the present situation or the past, or if we can ever disentangle ourselves from the quagmire of our previous mistakes. Or maybe just because we love. Hard. And losing it, losing hope, admitting defeat is just. Too. Defeating. Or maybe not. Maybe it is because we are afraid of actually asking for what we need and want, and deserve, because if we were to get it, really, we might lose it… and that… well, from that, we know we could not recover.

When I think of my daughter, when I hold the thought of something terrible happening to her in my mind, and I examine it, I am filled with a sense that I would simply not survive the loss of that person, to whom I am so, deeply, and tightly bound. I would shatter.  You hear stories of couples who have been together for 60 or 70 years and who die within minutes of each other. And I wonder, do I really want a love like that? Maybe not in this lifetime. I don’t want to depend on another person, I don’t want to give over my autonomy, my sense of adventure, my need to hang myself over the abyss and dangle by my toenails. I don’t want to need you. And still, I do. I can tell myself that I’m not really capable of love, because I’m not capable of trusting another human not to drop me. (I always hated those icebreaker games that were meant to build trust in which you had to blindly fall into the hands of people who you had only just met, as if the fact that forcing yourself to do something terrifying would build trust. No! It just meant they didn’t fuck up… that time… but there were no guarantees that they would be reliable for any other sort of thing.)

So, that's where we are.

I can’t let go because I can’t trust myself. I can’t listen to myself when I say: just hold yourself, you don’t need anyone else. I can’t trust myself to listen when I say: you deserve to be treated with love. You deserve to be safe. So I hold on to threads, and shreds and scraps and crumbs, because if I fill in the gaps, and I weave them together, I can trust in my own handiwork. I can build my own safety net with words, and memories, and friendships intertwined. And that is enough. It really is. It is so much more than many people have. I don’t need more than my fair share.

So, today, in the car, as a passenger, I read about a house bill that was introduced trying to undermine Roe v. Wade by establishing “life” at fertilization, and I finally lost it. I mean, I held it together in the car, so as not to be taunted or have to defend a position, but I came home and sobbed, face down in my bed, hunched over, still standing with my face in my hands. Then, I made dinner. But I can’t stop crying. At least not on the inside. 

The other night, on the inauguration day, I couldn’t participate in a protest, nor the next day, because I simply couldn’t be around people, around their anger, or their ignorance, or their fair-weather outrage, or their deeply felt fear, or their privilege, or their solidarity… it all just felt like too much. Feeling. So instead, I listened to other people’s stories, and offered them phones to call home, and water to drink on their travels, and I helped them. And for a few hours, that was enough. I was outside of myself, and the sadness was cordoned off, bubble-wrapped and floating down some subterranean river, that might resurface. But for a few hours, it was enough.