Dear Diary, Love makes me boring

A pretty standard Friday night.  The highlight was going to get my bangs trimmed.  There were two teen goth girls outside the entrance to the subway with a poster board.  They were offering free hugs.  "Free hug?" one of them asked me.  "No thanks," I said, tears stupidly rising in my throat.  Anything will make me cry these days.  Ask me if I want a tall or a grande and you have no idea what you're getting into.  Next to these girls were the usual people selling things on ratty blankets and a cop politely pushed me out of the way in his pursuit of something bad. After I got my hair done I went to the tea shop and a cute boy smiled at me.  By boy I mean like 20. Someday I'll be attracted to adults.  All in all it wasn't too bad. Now I'm going to try to write.  In case you were wondering, this doesn't count.  

My new year's resolutions:  write poetry everyday, even if it's just a line, even if it's just an image. Even if it's just a word.  Come on, you don't have 30 seconds to write a word down, shrew?  That's what I thought.  The other things: meditate 5 minutes a day to start.  Do the clearing exercise my healer taught me.  That's 7 minutes.  Somehow I've convinced myself that I don't have time to do these things, things that will take a total of about 15 minutes a day.  So I'm going to give myself 15 minutes a day in the hope that it will turn into more.

I spent most of the day obsessing.  On the train, in the car on the way to see my neurologist. Something is shifting in my relationship.  It feels bad but I don't know if it is.  What is happening is that we're getting closer and it feels bad.  It feels bad because it's terrifying.  It is very terrifying and I can see all of the subtle ways I'm trying to sabotage it.  Now I'm going to get all Lifetime on your ass: I am afraid of intimacy.  Hence my past choice of men to whom I have no desire to be close.  It sure is a lot easier when you don't really like them or respect them.  But not as interesting.  I am so scared about him moving back here.  That I have not told him.  I'm really scared about opening myself up to someone, or what I will do in order to avoid it. I'm trying to be a detached observer.  It's pretty freaky, the things I've come up with to avoid intimacy with this person.  I'm too embarrassed to even write about them.  

I am on the mend.  This phrase popped into my head today.  Mending.  My back is a little better thanks to Sunshine and to the steroids that were injected directly into my nerve.  I'm starting to recover from my hellish job.  I'm starting a brand new shiny job in a few days.  I have a shot at trying to find out what a real relationship could be like, a relationship where you actually learn from each other and grown together.  I have this now, but it's a lot different when the relationship is long and sometimes sleepy conversations in different time zones and piecemeal Skype sex. But if I decide I can't do it or I don't want to do it when he comes back, it's ok. It doesn't mean I'm a failure at relationships.  It just means...something else. Tomorrow I'm going to look at properties that he might buy.  It's making me panicky.  Can I live with him? Can I live with anyone?  I don't think I can live with anyone.

Sorry, this is one of the most boring things I've ever written.  I was a lot more interesting when I was pissed off all the time.

Home

What a relief relief relief to be alone again.  When I left my parents several hours ago in the shabby smelly haunted house they rented for Christmas, I was all "Ok bye see you" and practically ran to my car.  The poor exhausted dog immediately fell asleep in her travel crate and I nearly cried tears of relief as we approached the grayish city, my home.  Mine.

When I'm alone or with my likeminded buddies, I feel normal and content, even with the cranky back and lack of job and all of the other things a person could list to show how my life is bad.  But when I'm with my family I feel like Roseanne, Rosie O'Donnell, and Ellen all rolled into one.  I feel like a celebrity lesbian.  A cantankerous one.  But I'm not a lesbian, though my best friend is more of a boyfriend to me than my actual boyfriend is.  And I'm not really always cantankerous, but around my family I have to bite my tongue around every thirty seconds to prevent myself from making cracks about Jesus, James Dobson, marriage, and about thirty other no-no topics.  After awhile, I retreated to my bedroom in the shabby house to read Antigone, which I have to teach in a few weeks.  At least I got my own room in the house--those married chumps had to share.

See, this is the problem.  I don't really like being around married people yet.  I may never like it.  The idea of marriage is so completely repellent to me that I can't hear about how so and so's marriage is different and really great.  Marriage to me is about ownership.  Period.  It's too rooted in yucky history and unavoidable archetypes to be about anything else. It is hard for me to spend 4 days with three married couples that I'm related to.  I feel like either a freakshow, a loser, or a skank--sometimes all three at once.  I don't blame any of my family for making me feel this way--I take full responsibility for my spleen.  But man, it is harsh sometimes.  Usually at restaurants where my mom always has to make sure that the couples are sitting next to each other is the worst.  I stand there while she arranges everyone and then take the sad lonely single loser seat.  The thing is, this isn't going to change.  I'm never going to get freaking married.  I did it and it's not for me.  R. will never accompany me to any of these holiday nightmares if I can help it.  Why would I subject him to that if I can barely stand it?  And even if he did come, it would still be weird.  He's old and foreign and will probably want to sleep in the same bed with me despite our lack of binding contract.  They would have no idea what to do with him.  My family is going to have to deal with my singleness forever.  And, even more difficult, I'm going to have to deal with it forever too.  I like being on my own, but it's hard in this world of nesting dolls.  

This is the last year I do Christmas.  I just decided.  I'll visit family members individually because I actually like them all quite a lot as people, at least sometimes.  Next Christmas I'm going on a yoga retreat or to England.  Or maybe I'll just stay here with a bunch of whiskey and a pile of fifties melodramas.  I already told them that I'm not going to the family reunion this summer.  I'll be too busy with my own family reunion:  my dog and I plan to hug a lot this summer after each of our separations.  It's going to take up a lot of time.

It's kind of like acid, only much more expensive (but with a payment plan)

I can't imagine what I could still possibly get out of Buffy, but once again I'm watching the series in its entirety. Right now I'm at the end of season 4, where they go to college. In the penultimate episode of the season, Buffy and her pals use a spell and a magic gourd to unite their powers so that Buffy can kill an uberdemon-man-machine named Adam. As always, I cried. Everytime the theme of the show runs to the friends' love for each other, I cry. Actually I cry at the end of nearly every episode. After a week of new doctors, teaching, yet another strange experience with the healer, and hurting, I was barely mobile on the couch this afternoon watching this, tears streaming down my face. Then I turned off the TV, got back into bed, fell asleep and had a weird sex dream about Spike.

So the healer--I'm going to talk about him. Basically what he does for me is clean my aura over the phone. I understand if you need to stop reading now--I'm fine if you need to go read a blog written by a sane person who takes pills when she gets sick or does exercises or whatever. Ok, see you later.

For those of you who are ok with this, or just want to rubberneck at the crazy lady, read on. My first session with him was exhausting and odd and I didn't quite believe it, even though my pain did go away briefly. The second was similar, only more satisfying, as it went slightly deeper. Last night was very intense and was the first session that caused me to disappear into a sort of trance for a while. My pain went away. Or not away, exactly...my relationship to it changed. It's hard to explain. It's like the core of the pain is gone. The pain is still there but it doesn't have to bother me. It can't really disappear because my sciatic nerve is pinched between my hip joints, which sounds horrible and feels about twice as bad as it sounds. But my relationship to this idea is changing.

The process is called clearing. I do most of it on my own, but the doctor is able to help remove some of the "dirt" for me as well. The general principle is that all humans are filled with a divine light, but this light can be buried under layers and layers of emotional pain. When the emotional pain is too great, it manifests as physical pain. In my case, I have a severe physical problem (several in fact) that must be treated physically, but I am learning that the physical problem was caused or at least aided by this emotional crap. If you believe in chakras, the 2nd chakra (lower back and pelvic region) is where many people hold emotional pain related to sex and finances. It's a weird combo, I know. I won't go into my problems, but they are legion, as you may have guessed. What I'm starting to believe is that I can probably fix my physical problem with chiropractors and physical therapy, but if I don't treat the emotional stuff, it's going to probably attack me again and again, and most likely in the same place as it's been doing for the last 10 years or so.

So the clearing process consists of journaling out loud--dumping everything out that is causing me fear, pain, anger, etc. The doctor, after doing a reading on me (which he does by doing this weird breathing thing which at first I was scared was him masturbating--I know, I know, but I'm starting to be ok with it) will give me a prompt based on what he can sense is going on with me. They have been pretty basic (I'm afraid because...). I keep repeating the phrase and whatever comes to mind until it empties out. Then I asssess my pain with him. He always knows exactly where my pain is--if I say it's at 4 on a 0-10 scale, he might say, Well, I think it's a little closer to 3.5. And I usually agree. He's also been able, over the phone, to tell if I'm moving, sitting, or standing; my weight; that my body doesn't process alcohol well; and that I come from a fundalmentalist background.

So this can go on for two hours or so. Last night we got into this very difficult stuff, and I felt like I had tapped into a well that I've been ignoring for years and years and years. All of this stuff spilled out, trancelike. I talked in a weird monotone that didn't feel like me for almost a half an hour. But it was me. It also may have been, in part, a part of me from a former life (we get into past lives stuff with this therapy, a concept I've always been ok with). At the end of the session, he told me that he saw my back bathed in light. I also felt like something old and hard and painful had been chipped away. This kind of surgery I can deal with.

It's so weird to me that I can't believe in Jesus--can't believe that he was a real guy who died and came back to life--the thing my family clings to the way I cling to my dog when I'm crying at Buffy. But I believe in this. I believe in it because it feels real to me--traveling through the spirals of my soul with this amazing guide is true to me. Everytime I've worked with him, I'm suddenly aware of how vast the universe, time, and space are--how our daily experiences on earth are just a crumb of what we could actually experience in the universe. I feel more like a poet doing this work than I ever could by writing words down. Just this notion alone is enough to heal me some. It also exhausts me. Coming back to this world is very hard for me. I've spent most of my life since childhood trying to hide in one way or another. I've done a lot of that hiding in pain. Light is difficult because you can't really hide in it. And the lighter I get, the harder it will be to hide.

I know it's the archetypal imagery in Buffy that keeps me engaged with it. It's so comforting and familiar. It was so strange to see some of this same imagery inside myself--there are temples and castles and weird winged creatures in there. This imagery isn't just mine--it's ours, the collective unconcious. I felt really strongly during my second session my connection with all beings in the universe. It sucks that I can't walk around feeling this way all of the time--it is a totally powerful feeling. I guess people experience this same kind of imagery when they meditate. Of course, I'll do anything to not meditate--I've got a whole system of distractions. I can see now that addictions are really complicated (disguised as simple) ways of avoiding the truth. I will do just about anything to avoid looking at the truth, especially, for some reason, if that truth is something I actually desire. Having what I want is terrifying. I don't really know what this means, but it's where I'm going to start.

Oh, and PS--Sunshine (my new physical therapist) is amazing. We compared New Englanders to Midwesterns while she did traction on me. Traction is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

This Donut Hurts

I haven't really felt like discussing it here because it depresses me and I spend most of my waking hours either discussing it with myself in my head or tormenting my sister, NU, or my mom with my latest fears and obsessions about it, but it's feeling slightly ok today, so I'm going to spend some time discussing my lower back. More specifically, I'm going to discuss the crap that hovers around the disc at L5/S1 in my spine which is herniated and currently pressing on my sciatic nerve. This (imagine that your disc is a jelly donut and that the jelly is made of fire and your vertabrae are crushing the donut and forcing the fire-jelly to harden and constantly burn your nerve, which is like...a nerve) causes me horrific pain in my back and leg on good days and horrific pain, numbness, and muscle spasms on bad days. I won't mention the terrible days.

Needless to say, I can't walk. I mean I have to walk sometimes, but when I do I look like I'm about 80 years old. People look at me strangely on the street--like they pity me or want to stay away from me. At one point NU described my pain gait as my "pimp limp" which often helps me as I'm stumbling around trying to pick up my dog's poop without screaming too loudly. I think about her saying this and I think about me being a pimp, and sometimes this makes me laugh out loud. Lately though, I've been too depressed to try to make myself laugh. All I can think about is getting back inside where I can lie on the floor and feel horribly alone. Pain sucks. It is one of the loneliest things in the world because you can't really describe it to anyone in a way that makes sense. You're just alone with it, in the way that you're just alone with yourself.

More than anything, this lack of walking sucks. I am a walker. I walk fast and I walk everywhere. I think nothing of the 20 minute walk to the subway station, I walk my dog all over the neighborhood, I used to walk to work when I had a job--I walk anywhere I can. Now I stumble to my car, drive to the subway, stumble onto the train, and grimace my way to my chiropractor's office, which is downtown in a fancy neighborhood (though he himself is neither "downtown" nor "fancy"). A dude has to deliver my groceries. I haven't figured out yet how to vacuum or take out my trash, which explains the squalor, which explains some of the depression. Some.

I've tried a lot of things and currently have 5 doctors helping me--one I hate (my neurologist) one I feel ambivalent toward (my former physical therapist), one I just met and love but feel weird about (my healer who lives in CA and does sessions over the phone--more on him later if I don't chicken out) my chiropractor (also just met and love him but am uncertain about him) and my new physical therapist (haven't met her yet--but her name is Sunshine). Remember that I just walked out of my job. I have COBRA but it doesn't pay for the new age healer, surprisingly enough. I have very little income. I have a lot of time for worrying (also a lot of time for meditating and healing, but I'm not there right now--I'm moving toward it). I had surgery for this condition over 10 years ago, and I don't believe in doing it again. But I also don't believe in navigating this already challenging life while I'm hobbling, clutching onto rails and swearing under my breath, yelling at my dog, and trying for hours to find a comfortable sleeping position (there isn't one).

The healer helped. He eliminated my pain completely. Twice. And then it came back, the way my ego constantly comes back when I meditate. It doesn't want to go away. Yes, I have a disc pressing on a live nerve, but I've had this for quite some time without this amount of pain. It's like it's the memory of the pain that doesn't want to leave. Like the way my past doesn't want to leave--it stays in my head and is sometimes more real than my present, which is actually full of many things I asked for and got--basically, the life I want is right here all around me. I feel like I've spent the last two year churning around in some giant soul-renewal machine--I clanged around and got beaten and welded by my divorce, leaving the midwest, moving in with a stranger, learning to dislike this stranger, having a horrible job and leaving it, and many other things. I asked for a job that would bring me some joy (I got it--I'll be teaching high school in January), my own apartment ( I've been asking for this since before I was married) and a relationship that would actually help me to grow (I have many, and have learned that I can also have this with someone I'm sleeping with, and in fact this very growth factor is what sustains my attraction to him).

This morning I looked around and saw all of this stuff. I think the machine finally dumped me out here, with only part of a half-grown soul, in a life I want. I am physically damaged by it. But I got something else: a month to heal. Actually, a lifetime to heal. It's so much easier to see it this way when I'm not doubled over in pain so I'm going to try to stay here for as long as I can.

I guess I'll probably change my mind about this soon, otherwise what's the point in having a blog

One of the best days in my recent trip to England was the rainy day we spent in a very cozy room with a fire, alternately watching TV, drinking tea, and making out. One of the things that came on was this weird American movie from the the 40s on Channel 4. It was about a woman whose husband leaves her for a rich old lady. The spurned wife starts a chain of beachfront restaurants and wins the affections of a smarmy mustache guy who ultimately hates her because she has to work for a living (even though he keeps asking her for money) and smells like a restaurant. The woman has one good daughter who dies and one bad daughter who steals her boyfriend. This woman's life keeps getting worse and worse, and for some reason it was all hilarious to me, even though there were a lot of parallels with my life, except my husband left me for a rich young lady I don't have any kids to steal my boyfriend. And I don't own restaurants, etc., etc. The theme of "it sucks to be a broad on your own" was really funny to me, I guess because it hasn't changed at all in movies or in our collective unconcious. Also, R. is in a play now where he's playing an annoying American in a kind of Noel Cowardesque drawing room comedy, and the dialogue seemed sort of perfect for him. For someone who's spent his whole adult life in the States, his American accent is really bad. English people almost always do Southern accents when trying to emulate us. Maybe it's because of George Bush.

I went to one rehearsal of the play, which is community theater. R.'s friend, a 65-year old millionaire, is playing the butler, and kept fucking up his lines because he had just smoked a bunch of crack. Earlier that morning, a lone horse had stopped by the cottage just to, you know, say What's up. A three-legged dog down the road is the protectress of a small dairy farm, where the cows wander up from the valley of their own accord every evening at five to be milked. R. screamed at his French ex-soon-to-be-tenant "Get off my property, you French asshole!" He yelled this in Spanish. The very kind old woman who insists on doing R's laundry gave me a long sad look when I didn't answer her question about getting married. Or I didn't answer it right. She gave me this look over a plate of very tiny pancakes ("flapjack") she had made and a very elaborate tea set. Then she asked if R. could take the hoover upstairs because of her hip. And open this jar. Every morning I watched the sun come up while lying in bed and often there was coffee brought to me during this event. Every night I watched the sun go down and the moon come up. The wind was like a person. Can you understand why I want to live there? If I get my wish, I'll live there part of every year.

I keep feeling like I have to justify everything. Why am I quitting my job? Why do I have a boyfriend who lives in England? Why do I like living alone in a very expensive apartment in one of the most expensive cities anywhere? I have these very tiring, intense conversations with my family members where I exhaustively explain each of these things. I'm gettting really sick of it, actually, because I don't think they really care. And I realize that I'm probably really Explaining It All To Myself, but I don't even think I need an explanation. I've always felt that I need some kind of story to parallel all of my activities, like a mini commentator showing the world that yes indeedy, I am one important motherfucker. My brain won't shut up--I keep thinking about the line from that Mary Ruefle poem where she says her mind is like the back of a tapestry. Every time I meditate, I have to dig past all of those twisted and knarled threads, and sometimes I just kind of get buried in the mire, rather than get out on the other side, where there is most surely light and peace and maybe levitation? I'm alone almost all of the time, but things are freaking loud in here. I want the things I do to just be the things I do, without analysis. This is what I want today. I was going to try to draw a parallel with movie I discussed at the beginning, but you know what--never mind.

Basically I'm a tired, naked spider. Or dirt.

Just at the moment I was putting my first post up, the neighbors from whom I've been stealing my internet access moved out, and now I'm internetless. This morning I am at one of the miniscule cafes in this city--I came here with the intention of applying to two jobs and grading lessons for my distance students. Instead I'm doing this while listening to the man next to me make some of the most horrific eating and drinking noises I've ever heard. I admit that loud chewing, smacking, and slurping is kind of a pet peeve of mine, but this guy is taking it to a whole new level. It reminds me of how happy I am that I live alone and I don't have to listen to someone else being human all the time. It also reminds me that I've never noticed any of these kinds of sounds emanating from R., and if I did I might find them sort of cute, and how, with the exception of one or two little things, he really does absolutely nothing that bothers me, and how unexpected and unfamiliar this is. Of course, he lives on a different continent, which makes hearing any sounds he makes difficult. (I think this guy next to me may actually be sucking on his scone.)

There are so many things I want to write about, but I don't know where to start. I think this blog is going to be a kind of way for me to sort out all of this stuff that's been unearthed during this giant physical and spirtual upheaval I'm going through. (Oh, I will be earnest in this blog. Just wait. I will be earnest as hell.) Two metaphors come to mind: one is a plant growing via speeded up film--all of that dirt underneath coming up quickly and haphazardly. If gravity didn't exist it would be a tumbling upward. I'm the dirt in that metaphor. The other is a new one I'm sort of sinking into this morning, as R. just gave it to me last night. When he was little he had a pet tarantula who shed its skin once a year. He said watching it get rid of its skin was scary and painful, and when the skin was gone, sitting like a little spider suit next its nude former owner, the naked spider looked like it was dead. It didn't move or eat for a couple of days. In this metaphor I'm a naked, dead-looking spider. Because my life span is longer than a spider's it might take me a few years to get my new skin, rather than a few weeks. It seems to be taking a very long time, and sometimes it hurts very very badly. To my family, it looks like I have a terrible, horrible life that has been horrible for two years. Sometimes it looks like this to me also. But sometimes it just looks like a life that is trying to become something completely other than what it was, and by definition this can't be easy. I don't want my life to be easy though, I guess. At least I have to keep telling myself this.

I promise that at some point I will discuss actual events that are taking place, but I have to say that one of my new symptoms is that I prefer to live via metaphor. I love Jung's autobiography because he hardly mentions anything physical that he does, other than rituals. In the chapter "Travels," he writes about going to India, but mostly discusses conversations he had with a guru and visions he had. I had a vision (that's right, I said "vision"--more on this later) nearly a month ago that has given me very valuable information about what is happening to my soul right now. It makes sense to me that in the midst of this internal change that my external world is still shifting--my job going away, my boyfriend away and staying away. There is literally a big question mark over my face right now (not my physical face). But this isn't a bad thing. It's not really a good thing either. It's just a thing.

I'm still really self-conscious about my spirtuality--I grew up in a fundamentalist household, where hell is real and the devil is a mean guy with a pitchfork who wants to tempt you and make you his slave. So I spent my twenties either completely ignoring this by being secular and earthly, thinking that my poetry came from my brain, or feeling horribly guilty and begging God to forgive my horrible dirty pasttimes and maybe, just maybe save me from eternal poo-shoveling in some sweaty underworld. What is happening now is not ignorable though, because it comes totally from me. I'm creating my own "religion" not because I decided to, but because I'm just doing it. I have had several guides in both book and human form, but basically I'm making this up as I go. And it's really the only thing that's ever made sense to me. But I'm still going to make fun of myself for it periodically. And then give myself a backrub and some tea and a nice warm sleepy dog to cuddle with, because I'm just really, really tired.

Ah sweet unconciousness

What do you get when you take a very tired thirtysomething divorcee, move her from a midlands cow school to the east coast, get her to move apartments twice in one year, give her a shitty job with an abusive, mentally ill boss, then get her to quit that job because some inner voice tells her to and because she simply can’t take it anymore (and she is suddenly the new owner of a certain sum of money)? Oh, and get her to somehow finish her second book manuscript in the middle of this chaos, meet a cute English guy who moves back to England permanently, and find out that her soul doesn’t have a face but is by-god trying to make a new one? Answer to these questions and many more: this blog.

It will probably be less focused than the last one (or at least will lack the theme that I tried hard but failed to adhere to). The bitterness, disappointment, and general malaise will still be found aplenty. There may be moments of fun and happiness and delight, as I have those moments too. Moments where I talk about my weirdo spiritual path. There may be little odes to my crushes still. There may be recipes. Basically it will be like every other blog: someone who didn’t get enough attention when she was little will beg for it now. And will keep on talking even if you aren’t listening anymore.

I’m about to be unemployed and my he’snotreallymyboyfriend boyfriend is going to live in another country, the country he was born in and has been living in for the last three or so months. I will have time on my hands . And a need to emote, I guess. I won’t be able to afford therapy.

A note on the title: it is the title of a Rilke poem translated by Stephen Mitchell. There have been many leaps of god which have landed me here, whatever here is:

Imaginary Career

At first a childhood, limitless and free
of any goals. Ah sweet unconsciousness.
Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,
the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance. The child bent becomes the bender,
inflicts on others what he once went through.
Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,
he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.
Yet hidden deep with in the grown-up heart,
a longing, for the first world, the ancient one…

Then, from his place of ambush, God leapt out.