this is why you should keep your closets full of secrets

I found my old prayer journal yesterday. Over the weekend I did much cleaning and culling and throwing away. While moving things around to fit more and different things into my closet, I found an old, beat-up, red, spiral-bound notebook. I thought, when I picked it up, that it was my high school poetry. That, it seems, must have been purged long ago. These were high school prayers. 

What a revelation those prayers were! It isn't the case that anger is a new struggle for me: it turns out that I have been struggling with anger for much longer than I remembered. It may be that I have always been quick to feel offended. That I was crazy about boys, however, was not at all a surprise. 

I am relieved to have found compassionate tendencies in that journal. And I am relieved to have learned that I thought much about and struggled greatly with questions about how to be a good friend. This is something I think about a lot these days and I thought that this might be a new concern. It isn't the case that I used to practice friendship with ease and fluency that I have since mysteriously lost. Instead, I found that it was hard for me then to know how much or little to say; when to offer advice and opinions and when to hold back; how much to share with friends and how to ask for help. This makes me feel a lot better now. 

I was happy to recognize myself in many parts of that journal. What surprises me a little is that it feels as though I am meeting myself again. That is, I see now and lately that I feel very angry more often than I would like. In high school I was also aware of my anger. But it seems to me is that there were years in between then and now during which I did not think of myself as angry. The same is true about my concerns regarding friendship. I am aware that other people have needs and boundaries and differences that I can't always see and I am aware of my tendency to hold back, assuming that others don't need or want my advice or opinions or perspective. And I was aware, at least to some extent of that back in high school. There seems to be more coincidence between my current self and the self I found in that journal than I expected and there seems (though I may be wrong in this) to be more coincidence of selves than there was a few years ago. 

What feels alien to me now, of course, is the intense longing for God. I've wondered if I had manufactured (somehow) that desire back then. I don't think I did. I think it was genuine. But I can't imagine being that passionately identified with anything in any way like that at all. 

I am left wondering, then, whether I have been broken or fixed. Or neither. Perhaps just different.

is this what they mean by narrative therapy?

I am irritated and jumpy because I can't seem to get away from myself and I want very much to get away from myself. I don't like myself very much. I know that. And I know from all the wisdom of self-help advice that I am supposed to like myself and that I can't expect anyone to like me if I don't like myself first. Well, I can't. So I don't tend to expect people to like me. I'm delighted when they do (or seem to). And I am often very lonely. I won't deny that either. I also know that I am lonely to the extent that I don't much like myself; when I am least annoyed with myself, I don't feel lonely at all.

I have been trying to learn to like myself. I don't make much progress. Every time I look for things to like, I am vexed by all the emptiness: there simply doesn't seem to be anything there. What is "me"? I am crabby, prickly, aloof; a know-it-all, a procrastinator and a perfectionist; I am suspicious of people who are very cheerful or friendly. I am difficult. I have no job to speak of, no hobbies. My social life lies comatose. This, if you will believe it, is progress.

Given how I see myself, as I said, I am not terribly surprised when people find me hard to like. Still, it would be something to have a group of friends. Another way of saying it: it would be something to be a member of the kind of group that is hard to disband. To have a group of people who have to put up with me (and with whom I, too, have to put up). The way kids sit together in a lunchroom and become, for years, a group. I remember not liking some of the kids in my group of friends. Sometimes no one liked certain members very much--we'd even go out of our way to avoid including them. Still, they always were there and we never kept them out too often or too long: they still belonged to us. Even if they were a little weird or annoying or dumb or mean, they were still ours to find weird and annoying and dumb and mean. I miss that.

It would be nice to have a web of relationships--people who know me and know each other--into which to fall when I feel, as I do now, that I simply can't stand myself another moment. To have people who care about me (even when they don't like me) to talk about me to me and to one another so we could all bear a little of the burden of being me and of knowing me. That is something I miss having. It isn't that I haven't got friends. But I have friends here and there. My friends, generally speaking, don't know one another. They aren't able to gossip about me in ways that can then get back to me and let me know that I need to figure things out.

I do need to figure things out. I suppose I don't need a gossipy web of friends who sometimes do sometimes don't like me to tell me that. It may be that saying out loud, no longer trying to hide the fact that I just don't like being me might be an act of friendship toward myself. Maybe I can just stop trying to like myself, self-help blogs be damned. I wonder if that is progress. One of the reasons I don't like myself is that I don't like myself, and that is foolish. Now I can accept that I don't like myself and that gets to be a step toward self-acceptance. How funny. And how foolish all this now seems. Maybe it doesn't matter at all whether or not I like myself. Maybe it doesn't matter, generally speaking, what I think about myself at all. And maybe when I feel, as I do now, that I simply can't stand myself another moment, I should just breathe.

What do I want to be, anyway? What would I need to be in order to consider myself someone I could like? Easygoing. Relaxed. Happy. The kind of person of whom I am suspicious. Neither clingy nor aloof. I think that I will not be able to learn to develop those qualities or to see any ways in which I might have them unless I spend more time with more people.

I have been drawn to novels lately, particularly, it has turned out, to novels about family relationships, small towns, marriages, siblings. The book I am putting off but enjoy is one full of solitude (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). I want to read books by women and about women. I loved Olive Kitteridge. I don't want to become an Olive. She is difficult, suspicious of other people's expressions of emotions and cheerfulness and empathy; she is crabby and a bit cold. She gets angry when her feelings are hurt and she turns that anger loose on her husband and son. By the end of the book she is in her late seventies and only then does she finally see that she let herself become a difficult person. Maybe I have an advantage: I know now, in my early thirties, that I could easily become cantankerous. But then I am also at a disadvantage: I don't have many people who have to put up with me. My social world has been shrinking.

Wherein the curse of eve is a mighty curse

And lo, the angel of the lord came upon them and the glory of the lord shone round upon them: and they were sore afraid.

Suffering under Eve's heavy curse, I rolled out the pie pastry for Thursday's pie. It didn't feel right. I couldn't tell what was wrong or different, but it was not the same and it was despised and I esteemed it not. Like sheep, it had gone astray, and turned every one to its own way.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

And so I made a chocolate cake as well, just in case the pie was not edible. Alas, it, too, like a sheep had gone astray and turned to its own way. And so the cake was not quite right, either.

At that point, I contemplated a pumpkin spice cake. It was midnight: For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people. Yet the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. So I went to bed instead.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

The next morning, I arose and shone, and ate a tiny piece of the pie. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: the pie was not terrible! It was indeed safe to eat. I ate a small sliver of cake, too: Comfort ye, comfort ye my people. The cake was not terrible, either. A smidge dry, and a smidge dark: not bad at all.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Thanksgiving was going to be just fine.

Cooking while cursed and while practicing for this year's DIY Messiah is so wonderfully dramatic.

prickles and you don't let anyone get close to you

Tuesday October 12
1:47 am
dream

I just recently awoke from a dream. Cat decided to chase after a python which had slithered 87 feet up a tree [actually, I think it was a wall and a tree]. Cat fell out of the tree and snapped his neck. Intense grief woke me up. In my dream the tears came so thick and fast--tears piled on tears before any even fell. If I could have formed other thoughts, I would have worried that I might drown or choke on tears. I sobbed in a great howling wail. I didn't even hear myself making sound. Felt rather than heard the wail which, looking back, didn't even feel or sound real.

And the pain! A column of pain from my neck to my belly. Squeezing, suffocating pain. Even now [I woke up and wrote this a few minutes after having the dream], I've lost the depth and reality of the pain and it is only a memory of a dream.

That's what I felt for my cat in a dream. I have never felt grief over any human person's death. What if I never do?

avatars

There was an impotence then. A thorough-going powerlessness. A hardly articulated ever present longing to escape. The moths would gather at the porch light by the back door (but there was no front door. It was the door. The side door. The door). They would cling to the screen and fly in sometimes. It got dark early and stayed dark long and the mornings smelled of mud. Mineral mud and fish and trees and damp.

How I hated it all! Hated it all so much I couldn’t love what I loved: the smell of morning, the pale light through the telescoped tree tops, the smell of fire every evening while the trash burned. These things I remember now and I love them. How I hated them all then, lumped them all together because they were together and they were my life and I wanted to escape. Embarrassed to go into town and stop at the Ben Franklin. Embarrassed at the Laundromat. Embarrassed to hear the story of the red ants. Again. Embarrassed to see the moths flying into the kitchen.

Rushed through the days to earn the comfort of night to remember that night here is just as long as a day. My sister’s curling-up ski slope toenails slicing my ankles in the bed we had to share. Wedged between the wall and my sister’s adenoids, deprived of the breeze that scooted around the bunk bed and hit the door, falling. The adults in the other room, walls cliché-thin, playing canasta (sometimes they’d head to Escanaba which sometimes, to amuse myself, I’d rhyme with “Canada”) or cribbage, voices low, keeping me awake. I was a very light sleeper and listened.

Morning brought the coldest milk I can ever remember. Or maybe it was not cold and I contrasted the warm milk with the perfect coldness which I thought I remembered milk could have. Whether the milk was warm or cold, it is still and always will be the coldest milk I can ever remember. I still wish my milk could be that cold.

This is not to say that there was never pleasure. Pasties with ketchup: heaven. Perfect food. I never did watch a fish being filleted but my great-grandmother certainly fried them up well. Walleye and bluefish. Free blueberries picked in wooded fields owned by no one. Or at least no one charged. I was a model berry-picker: I always picked far more berries than I ate. Like filling my basket or tin or bucket or whatever they gave me with virtue until I overflowed the tin and had to ask for a fresh one. No one picked as many as I did. Diligent. Quiet. Focused. Well-behaved. Sugar-plums, too (though you had to reach for those).

There was the pier and I think I sometimes sat there with a book. I think I also tried to look cool. I think I tried to look tall and lanky and beautiful. How I wanted to escape, escape everything, escape it all.

I don’t think of escape any more. Haven’t for years. I think it has occurred to me that there is no escape. Wherever I go, the days are all as long and the nights are all as dark. What a hopefulness there was behind that longing for night: later, when I’m older, when time has passed, things will be different. Something will have happened to me. Some magic something will have happened and will have taken me away from all of this. Some prince will have come and taught me how to be happy. Now I know that that is not the case. There is not a prince in the world who can give me that, who can teach me that. There is not anyone that can stand between me and myself and lift me off of myself and remove me from myself. I am what I must bear always. And so there is no escape. No running. No hiding. No new beginnings.

Still. What hasn’t stopped is the premonition of a future more real than this present. This can’t be my real life. No. not this. This is not yet it. I am still waiting for myself to arrive. That future one is the one to whom good things may happen. That future one is the one who may be loved. That future one is the one people will respect and admire and adore. This – this current one is merely a stand-in. Don’t get too close! Soon this inadequate one will be replaced and that future one is the one in whom you may confide and to whom you may entrust your very own self.

A new alarm clock sits in my new bookshelf. This clock belongs to that long-awaited future one who will replace me.

I no longer feel so powerless. My days are all my own and my nights are too. I am not consumed by that same helpless rage. I have things to do and often I do them. The embarrassment is not entirely gone, however. This might be already clear to those who know me.

I still think of those moths fluttering around the light at the back door (the side door, really. The only door at which a guest would knock. The door). The steps were red (and if they weren’t, they should have been). Standing at the door, back to the house, the trees formed a green-black wall nearly opaque in the night. It smelled of green and mud and fallen apples and the dying smoke of the night’s trash and the lake out back giving more light than the moon which was invisible for the trees anyway.

I am the one I’ve been waiting for.

Even so. Come quickly!

sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we

I love Christmas carols, particularly publicly sung ones. Even when sung by a lonely, generally ignored Salvation Army bell-ringer, having the music in common makes me happy every time. I love the pageantry of holidays and Christmas particularly offers itself up to this. There is something beautiful in ritual, in repetition.

this year, for example:
- there will be lumps of coal in everyone's stocking
- there will be cookies (caramel nut slices and pecan dreams at the very least)
- there will be a strata flecked with sun-dried tomatoes and broccoli for Christmas morning
- this year there will be brandy and eggnog while we clean out my mother's room


For me, however, my special treat is literature like a down comforter:

"We lie together, skin close enough for grafting. When I kiss you, I give you all the words that room in the roof of my mouth. When you kiss me, you give me the shape of silence."

Oh, Jeanette Winterson, how lovely!

I wrote 1642 words yesterday. That makes 2601 words this week. I don't think I'll actually feel pleased with my progress, however, until I have a passed proposal. Until then, I don't know that any of the work I'm doing is any good, or if it is truly progress.

Dearly Beloved

At the wedding, the pastor read from and expounded upon 1 Corinthians 13. Love always trusts. Always hopes. Love endures. In his exposition, the pastor treated the passage as a text for marriage counseling. “Debbie, ‘love always trusts’ means that you always look for the most loving, most positive way of interpreting Doug’s behavior. When he’s late, rather than becoming irritated and angry and possibly even jealous, think, ‘he’s probably gone to buy me flowers’”

My first thought was “How simplistic! It’s one thing to love deeply, another to make oneself into a doormat, a fool!” And then I heard my own thoughts and was ashamed. Love believes all things and is never deceived. Love hopes all things and is not put to shame. Love requires complete vulnerability all of the time, forever. Love means being willing to never harden oneself against the beloved. Love loves the beloved even when it is unclear just how to go about doing so.

Love means not – ever – scolding my mother
Love means endless patience, no matter how infuriating she is
Love means pretending to be cheerful
Love means pretending to love her

It is so much work. And it is lonely. Extremely lonely. Once cannot very well call up a friend and say “Had the worst time of it pretending to love my mother today.”

We missed the reception. My mother felt unwell. My sister and I were, for various reasons, unable to drive. We missed the reception.

My aunt called my mother and accused her of ruining every family event, of having planned to avoid the reception, of lying about her health; she said she wished my mother had never been born into their family; she said she was sick of having to put up with my mother and was finished with her.

Love means it doesn’t matter whether I am loved. It doesn’t matter whether I am happy. I don’t get to count myself. Even if no one loves me, I have to love my mother (for example).

Love means becoming an eternal wellspring for the beloved, even if/when there is no one who can or will do the same for me.

How I wish, though, that there were a shoulder somewhere in this world with my name on it!