Abby Rosmarin's Blog, page 6

Follow Your Bliss

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I have this little notebook — one of those impulse purchases from Marshall’s or TJMaxx, one of their cute & quirky notebooks the aisle over from the cute & quirky household goods — with the words Follow Your Bliss on the front.  I can’t tell you exactly when I got it; only that it was sometime close to when I started getting comfortable teaching yoga, when I started teaching more specialty classes and workshops, and I wanted a notebook to devote to the cause.

The pages are already half-filled with notes.  Little pink post-it flags delineate the different topics, and over time the stickies have folded in on themselves.  Notes for potential workshops, revised notes for workshops I’m able to do multiple times — and redundant notes, for workshops that could never get off the ground.  In between all this is a small smattering of poetry that I must’ve written when other notebooks weren’t around, poetry that just makes me sad when I stumble across them in the present day.

I used the notebook yesterday as I led another weekend workshop.  I finished the two-hour class simultaneously drained and full, exhausted and energized, already knowing what I’d change in my notes for future versions of the workshop.  I closed the notebook and put my slightly sweaty hand over the cover and smirked at its stock photo and clichéd words.

It was sometime last year that I realized how funny it was to use a Follow Your Bliss notebook in such a fashion — fittingly, it was after leading a workshop when I had this realization.  I had most likely bought the notebook at a time when my soul was superficially stuffed with affirmations and platitudes and other feel good sayings that lacked depth and understanding.  But I had put that notebook and its little saying to use, making it the perfect tableau to the actual idea of following your bliss.

Because amidst the Pinterests repins and Twitter retweets and Facebook shares, no one really talks about the inner workings of what following your bliss actually means. That following your bliss definitely doesn’t mean sharing some text graphic and hoping for the best.  They don’t tell you that following your bliss is involved and complex.

They don’t tell you that following your bliss takes work.  A lot of work.  That following your bliss means creating plans of action and revising them a thousand times.  It means contacting people and sending out emails and feeling like every moment of genuine free time has been sucked away from you.  They don’t tell you that following your bliss throws you clear out of your comfort zone with no hope of return.

They don’t tell you that following your bliss sometimes has a really shitty ROI.  They don’t tell you that following your bliss means knowing the rules of the game and knowing that you won’t be the exception to the rule, but still hoping somehow you still will be.  Following your bliss means taking rejection on the chin and marching forward and doing your best not to touch the fresh bruise.

They don’t tell you that sometimes you think you’re following your bliss when you’re actually following false promises, or a temporary high, or a bandage to the things that are ailing you.  They don’t tell you that, while following your bliss, you have to keep a keen eye out for those who might take advantage of your trusting, adventurous heart; that you have to be discerning, that you have to recognize when there’s a snake oil salesman in front of you, that you must follow your bliss the way a knight follows a dragon, with shield in hand and sword drawn & ready.

They don’t tell you that sometimes following your bliss doesn’t feel blissful at all.  That it sometimes feels the opposite of anything positive and you wonder why in the hell you are doing it in the first place.  They don’t tell you that the path to following your bliss could meander and backtrack and have roadblocks — that the path can be dark and gritty, and there are not enough pretty text graphics in the world to sugar coat it.  They don’t tell you that, on the road to bliss, you’ll have to quell the voice that says that no one wants what you have to offer and you’re better off dropping your aspirations and finding something sensible to do with your time instead.  That, on the road to following your bliss, you’ll meet enough demons to make you wonder if you’ve been damning yourself the entire time.

I get the feeling that, if they tried to convey that, the notebook cover wouldn’t be of beachside cliffs and sunshine, but of a sinister forest with gnarled trees and only the slightest glint of light in the far background.

—

There is another notebook I have on hand.  Another impulse buy, a cute & quirky notebook that I got at a TJMaxx in Ohio this past Christmas.  I got it as I started to feel the rumblings of my new book, and I wanted something to jot down notes for it — a wide open space reserved just for that book and all of its possible, redundant, outlandish, unusable, brilliant ideas.  There is no platitude on this notebook — just a mock-up of an old, Parisian magazine cover in watercolors and minimalist lines.

I’ll be releasing a book soon — a book I wrote over five years ago, a book that got passed by countless agents and a few small print publishing houses.  A book that tried its hand at a Kindle Scout campaign and a book I decided that I was going to release myself (even though I swore I was done with indie publishing).  A book that needed a little extra time in incubation so it could be what it is today.

It certainly doesn’t feel blissful to read my book over and over again, reading it out loud because I fear my words will sound stupid to the woman who’ll be narrating the book, will read wrong to the readers and booksellers alike.  It doesn’t feel blissful to research and send out queries & pitches like I’m trying to get a job interview.  It certainly doesn’t feel blissful when websites glitch or a transaction doesn’t go through or I’m stuck on hold customer service for the fifth time this week because oh my god can anything go right?

But I keep at it, because I know how I’ll feel when the book is in my hands, when one fewer of my manuscripts has to wait in the shadows, when I’m reminded in ego-stroking ways that maybe what I have to say is worth at least a passing glance or two.  Because I feel this in my bones and I’m spurred on by something otherworldly, something that prods at me when I want to slouch off. Something that reminds me that what awaits at the end might not necessarily be fame and fortune and a happily ever after, but at the very least the satisfaction that I gave what I could to the world, that I followed my trusting, adventurous, battered, resilient heart through the forest without once trying to turn back.

I am following my bliss, after all.

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Too Strong for The Role

[image error]It was inspired by the influx of my childhood toys.

My childhood belongings.  Their exodus a complex story in and of itself, one that — like many other portions of my narrative — will someday get its moment in the spotlight after enough emotional distance has been established.  But, for now, we’ll skip to the end, with the final cargo of my past now delivered to our house, our guest room looking more like an adolescent’s bedroom mid-pack, and me bitterly musing to myself, “Fitting enough.  The ghost of my upbringing has been the perennial guest as of late, anyway.”

But, again, that’s a story for another day.  Like many stories of mine, when it’s time to be revealed, I will unapologetically give it the stage.

—

The role of my childhood belongings is that of an antagonist in this story.  The catalyst, the spark — riling up the part of me that realized it was time to clean out my closet.

(Insert another bitter, slightly amused musing here.)

—

The double-edged sword of a house is its space.  And in that space, things can accumulate.  Our one-bedroom apartment off the Orange Line in Boston didn’t grant us much clemency when it came to clutter, and our two-bedroom apartment that hugged the border of New Hampshire and Massachusetts didn’t relieve much, either.

But in this idyllic house in an area that straddles the border between civilization and the country, there is room.  Things can be moved and relegated and forgotten about.  There is no impetus to really clear out until you are given a household’s worth of your old belongings, and you find yourself closing the door to your guest bedroom, looking at the overflowing closet in your own bedroom, and going:

“Enough is enough.  It’s time to clear this out.”

—

I’m a hoarder by nature.  Not in the sense that I’ll collect do-dads and trinkets and refuse to throw out even the morning paper (that is, if we actually subscribed to a morning paper), but in the sense that I ascribe emotional sentiment to inanimate objects.  I keep mementos, as if the weight of memory is too much to keep in the ether and I must transfer it to something tangible.  Such a sentiment will make it impossible to get rid of old handbags that had been worn past the ability of being donated — but somehow have enough structural integrity to hold the years that it had been by my side.

(It will also make it impossible to, say, sort through your childhood belongings, let alone decide what should be saved, donated, or thrown out.  As if cracking open a box is like cracking open a heart — as if the cardboard boxes were something given to Pandora, filled with all the demons inside, rearing to get out.)

(But, again, more on that at a later date.)

Clothing is no different.  It can feel like the act of donating an old shirt is akin to donating the very memories attached to it.  It’s usually enough to make me look at my expanding wardrobe, sigh heavily, and refuse to do anything about it.

Unless, that is, you become inspired to finally clear it out.

—

The first things I honed in on were my clothes from my preschool teaching days.  Clothing that I bought specifically for the role of early childhood teacher, specifically to be worn in an early childhood classroom.  Baggy khakis and cotton shirts with cheery pastel colors.  Things I hadn’t worn since I put in my final resignation letter and left in a burned out glory, ashes trailing behind me.

I reminded myself that I will never wear these clothes again.  It’s been over five years, and I’ve yet to find a place for them outside of the classroom.  My professional wear is in stark contrast to the khaki pants these days, and the cheery tops look out of place in a night-out setting.

But I decided to give them one last wear — a last hurrah, if nothing else.

A lot has changed in five — going on six — years, and the changes manifest into the physical.  I now teach as many as 15 yoga & fitness classes a week.  I’ve taken up kickboxing and weight training.  I’ve upped the miles considerably on my runs and I’ve stopped joining martial art studios just to quit a month later.  I’ve put to bed the version of me who thought she was gangly and awkward in light of an inherent athleticism I swore I never had.

It’s the first thing I think about as I attempt to put on one of the pastel shirts.  I had bought this shirt when I was skin and bones, a lingering relic of my modeling years.  Now, the additional weight of muscle is far too apparent.  My shoulders are too broad.  I can barely move my arms.  My biceps press against the fabric when I try to bend my elbows.

“I’m too strong for this outfit,” I muse to myself, wryly, without a hint of bitterness.

—

The cleaning out of my closet becomes a purge.  My husband joins in, sorting through clothing he’s outgrown in one way or another.  Soon, our bed is an avalanche of clothes, and there’s still more to go.

I let the realization that I can’t even fit into most of my preschool clothes propel me forward, becoming merciless with what I cut from my wardrobe.  A lot of outfits from that time in my life find their way to the chopping block.  I toss impulse purchases that had proven to not survive the shimmer of retail therapy.  I toss clothing that served no purpose but emotional weight, reminding myself that sometimes it’s good to let certain mementos perish.

There’s a song in my head as I try on outfit after outfit — one from Maria Mena, the lyrics and the melody a lullably in and of itself:

Finally see the progress made in me, the hard work I’ve put in, the person I am

But you’re still involved with the old me, the baby, I don’t blame you, maybe

It’s because I still wear her clothes.

I’m wrapped in her role.

The metaphor is effortless.  I’m too strong for these old clothes, these old roles.  They have no place taking up space in my life anymore.  It’s time to clean out my closet and bid farewell to the past.

The line immediately following the previous stanza: But the path I am on is a different one.

I’ve grown stronger in ways I never could’ve predicted as a meek little preschool teacher, getting bullied around by higher ups, feeling powerless among her own peers, among the children sometimes.  I’ve grown stronger in ways I never could’ve predicted even a few years ago, especially when I was at my lowest and felt the insurmountable weight of it all, when I swore everything that was happening would inevitably crush me.

(But, again, stories for a later time, when enough emotional distance has been established.)

I’m getting stronger in the present day, even without that sense of urgency, that warning of, “get strong or die.”  Every day, something is a little more defined, and I become that much more determined to keep at it, to let nothing atrophy.

There are roles that won’t fit me even if I tried.  I would have no room to move my arms.  My strength would press against the edges.  These are outdated roles that I don’t even want to have around taking up space.  Even if they hold emotional weight, I’m through with them.  Clear it out and make way for things that will serve me better.

—

I wish I had taken before and after photos of our closet.  The walk-in went from overflowing to almost sparse, there were that many clothes to give away.

“The thrift store is going to love us,” I muse, warmly, thinking of the thrift store arm of a nonprofit in town, the good that they do, the good that our old clothes will hopefully help with.

In some weird way, I miss what the closet used to look like.  I don’t miss the clothes so much as I miss the sequence of them, which hadn’t changed since I first unpacked our apartment boxes and organized our clothes.  It’s strange, the things that will ping at us, as if we’re so much creatures of habit that we can’t handle when positive changes clears things out.

—

Of course Eminem’s “Cleaning Out My Closet” finds its way into my head — I’m not all sad, heavy songs with huge emotional undertones.  Much like the literal clearing out of my closet isn’t all heavy and triumphant.  I hum out, Cuz tonight, I’m cleanin’ out my closet with a slight amusement, calculating when I’ll have the time to drop off the boxes — perhaps another sign that I’m outgrowing certain roles, that I’ve used my time with the Enneagram to notice when I fall into ruts with sad songs and hurtful memories and to clear out for something new, something better.

Our cats love the boxes — which, ironically, stay stacked in our closet, taking out space, until I find the time to clear out my car and pack it back up.  Perhaps a reminder that you can’t just prepare to clear out: you have to actually go through with it and see it to the end.

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Ohio

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Ohio feels like homecoming.

Ohio feels like road tripping, like twelve hours that go by in the blink of an eye — that is, at least, until we get onto 70.  Ohio feels like junk food and fast food and rest stops and philosophical discussions and the views of the valleys as we cut across Pennsylvania.  Ohio feels like telling people that you actually look forward to this, that there are few things you cherish quite like your road trips with your husband, or being with your in-laws for the holidays.

Ohio feels like waking up to crisp air and clear skies, to long and winding roads through wide open spaces.  Ohio feels like towns so small you could hold your breath as you drive from one end to the other.

Ohio feels like sitting around the living room as terrible puns are read off the iPad, like sitting around the kitchen table as effortless banter bounces back and forth.  Ohio feels like inside jokes and meaningful shorthand, a language that simultaneously sprung up from the ground and evolved over time.

Ohio feels like silly rituals.  Eating cheap chili dogs with Tobasco sauce. Visiting a mansion decorated to the nines for Christmas.  Homemade pizzas and a night full of movies. Blueberry pancakes, biscuits with dulce de leche, and shenanigans at a local restaurant.

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Ohio feels like Sunday morning church.  Ohio feels like leaning into my husband, my hand in his the way a plane touches down on an aircraft carrier, the music of a full band and a singing congregation filling the room.

Ohio feels like my face surreptitiously to my husband’s ear and his to mine, whispering the backstories of those in attendance.  It feels like my eyes going wide as I start to connect real life people with the characters who keep showing up in the back of my mind, and my husband saying, “You could write volumes based on the people here.”

Ohio feels like Sunday morning hymns, the devotion of a small group of people, the energy that makes my pantheistic heart swell — the reminder that God is here and everywhere and in everything and these expressions of such an entity can be so beautiful and so pure sometimes.

Ohio feels like stillness — like the luxury I rarely afford myself.  Ohio feels like lounging around and lazily making plans, like letting it all move at a slower pace.  Ohio feels like slowing down when the world around me is usually at 100 miles per hour.  Ohio feels like a deluge of written and edited word — a reminder that constantly darting around just makes it harder for your muses to find you, but that the drive to create is constant and real and will demand even in whispers.

Ohio feels like miles of farmland and the serenity it gives. Ohio feels like a reminder that the role of a home is sometimes that of a launching pad — that you can touch down and refuel and then fire back up. Ohio feels like a reminder that this is a place to hang my hat, but eventually I’ll put my hat back on and return from whence I came. Ohio feels like the mountains are calling and I must go. Ohio feels like a proper night’s rest before a new day dawns.

Ohio feels like the type of home I didn’t realize how badly I needed.

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The New Book

I have no idea what it’ll be about, but I can feel it coming.

I can feel its rumble the same way you can feel a thunderstorm before it arrives. The air is electric.  The inevitable is on the horizon, and there is an exquisite anticipation.

I have no idea what the book will be about, and that’s the exciting part. The story is being coy, making its presence known but only in snippets and hints, like a child playing hide & seek, giggling madly behind the curtains, hoping to not be found but still shouting out clues when they think the adults have strayed too far.

It comes out in introductions — character studies breezing past my mind, these hypothetical people so loud in their presence that I’ll lose my wording in class or glaze over what someone else — someone actual and real — is saying. Handfuls of these introductions, and I never know if I’m meeting someone new, or if I’m learning something new about a previous character — and, if so, which one.

It gives life and proof to Elizabeth Gilbert’s idea about ideas — that they are not things we create so much as creatures in and of themselves, existing in another realm, making themselves known to hosts who prove worthy enough to flesh them out, or drifting away when they feel they’ll be of better use elsewhere.

Perhaps this is the probationary period. The interview, proving that I want the job and I’m up to the task.  The employer teasing out my abilities and capabilities after contacting me for the gig in the first place.

It’s in stark contrast to my previous book — a book that came hurdling out, that refused anything less than complete fruition. A book whose first draft was written in a dizzying six weeks, my life a flurry of notes and scribbles and tossed out ideas and thousands upon thousands of words. A book I wrote simultaneously possessed by and exorcising a demon. A book I finished and went, “This is it. This is my best work yet.” And what few friends I’ve lent it to agree — there’s something special about this one.  It has the potential to shine unlike anything else I’ve written.

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There’s a part of me that chuckles at this new one, though, this ethereal and elusive idea. I have three unpublished manuscripts waiting in the wings — one of which I’m hoping to finalize and independently publish by the end of winter. There’s a collection of poetry that I’m slicing together, another idea that refuses to stay quiet, an idea that has demanded me as its host — backed by the publishing arm of a website I write for that has always been willing to give my collections a shot.

But it’s feast or famine, I’ve noticed, and I’ll gladly take the floods and swim with the eddies. It’s these moments of pure and bursting ideas — when I’m surreptitiously jotting down notes as my students rest in savasana, when I can’t get to my car fast enough because there is more to write out — that make the sun a little brighter and the lines a little crisper. Where it all feels right and purposeful and I wonder why it can’t always feel this light, this easily swept along. A temporary stay against the confusion of the world, as Frost would say.

So I wait for the book. I’ll let it be coy — a scene idea here, a new character there — and draw it out in its own time. It knows where I live, knows where I go. It knows my patterns in maddeningly familiar ways.  When it’s ready, it’ll make itself known — or perhaps just known enough so that I know where to lay down the bait, and lure it out bit by bit, word by word, idea by idea.

An Ode to Mid-Distance Running

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I.

I don’t think I’ve ever liked the first few miles of a run.

That might be why I love races so much: for those first miles, you are surrounded by fellow eager runners — and the energy is enough to carry you into the heart of the race, when the runners fan out and supporters on the sidelines dwindle and it’s back to you and your music and your thoughts.

But on non-race days, I slog through it.  I remind myself how good it feels when I finally find my rhythm.  Sometimes I imagine being in a race, surrounded by onlookers instead of the trees and shrubs of the trail.  I know, by mile 3 or 4, I will have found my rhythm.  I will have found what I’m looking for.

Perhaps that’s why I love mid-distance running so much.  If I have to force myself through upwards of a half hour of running before I get to that magical place, I want to spend as much time there as possible.

Ironically, it’s the short runs that make running feel like a chore, instead of an experience.

 

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II.

My poison of choice is the various ATV trails and fire roads that spiderweb the forests in this area of New Hampshire.

I can give the typical reasonings for it: the scenery, the beauty — I can talk about how I need variety, how boring neighborhoods can be, how nice it is to be away from cars and in the thick of nature — but I love the trails for the same reason I live for the hike.  It feels like the woods around me take in whatever it is I’m radiating out.

And I am radiating out.  I’ve mentioned before the grimaces I can make when I run — as if everything that’s bothering me is brought to the surface for me to contend with as I speed along.

Perhaps that’s why I do so poorly on treadmills.  I used to joke that treadmills are an existential panic in mechanical form — spend that much time exerting energy only to go no where and eventually you’ll start questioning the meaning of life — but it’s a lot more than that.  On a treadmill, stuck inside, that energy has no where to go but off the walls, bouncing and echoing until there’s nothing but cacophony, drowning everything else out.

Outside, there is nothing but the breeze.  And in the open silence, I become a little less sodden.

 

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III.

“So, what’s the difference between running and mid-distance running?” a friend asks during a Sunday morning brunch.

“When it’s only 2 or 3 miles, I’m running away from my problems,” I quip. “When I’m running 6 miles or more, I’m running with my problems.”  It’s supposed to be a joke, but I don’t know if there’s a better way to explain mid-distance running, or why I do it.

Perhaps that is why the first few miles are so tough.  In the beginning, I run while simultaneously carrying everything that weighs me down.  I run while lugging the frustrations of the day, old hurts and haunts, what is on my mind, whatever is bothering me or got under my skin.  My demons play piggyback as I attempt to find my stride.

But somewhere along the line, it all gets shrugged off.  It’s as if I find the fortitude to turn around and go, “You don’t deserve me carrying you like this,” and I demand them all to fall in line.

It would be wrong to say running gives me a platform to sort out what’s on my mind.  If anything, I am the one on the platform, and every issue, insecurity, demon, and frustration is forced to sit in the audience, forced to recognize how insignificant they really are.  I don’t bear witness to my problems so much as I make my problems bear witness to me, as the miles tick away, as I rediscover my strength amongst the waves of fatigue.

It’s as if I get to say, “Do you not see what this body is capable of?  Do you not get how tiny you are compared to this?”

I don’t run despite my aches and pains — I run with them.  I am present with my discomfort as a way to show I’m more than just my discomfort.  I become a conqueror of so much more than a few miles and a handful of calories.

And in a piece that is filled with “perhaps”es, perhaps this right here shows why the mid-distance run deserves an ode.  It is another nod to the understanding that you have to incorporate the body in order to heal the mind.  It is a reminder of the triumph and force of sheer, stubborn, resilient human will.

It’s the ultimate equalizer, a way to win the staredown happening between yourself and your emotions.  Did something cross your path to rattle the cage, stirring up a dormant rage about something that you swore you had put to bed for good?  Take it to the trails, the streets, and watch how it becomes no match for what your body can do.

Our earliest ancestors hunted by running their prey down — by literally running until the deer or the bore had collapsed from exhaustion.  It’s why they believe humans sweat, why we have some of the physical traits that we have today.

Our ancestors ran to survive.  And, in a way, so do I.

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IV.

The woods take on new life in the winter.  The trees are stripped bare and the space between them becomes more apparent.  I can see deeper into the forest now — I can see the forest through the trees.

It’s a good feeling, to be able to see through everything.  To see past what was once obscured, to know what exactly is in front of you.

It makes the world look a little more open, the path a little more free.

I’m on my last run before the December snow came.  I’m zig-zagging around a spiderweb of ATV trails, keeping track of trail numbers, noting trails that fork away from me, hoping I can get to them soon enough — motivating me to return and explore where the paths had diverged.  I can hear the Robert Frost poem in the back of my mind, but I give it little room to breathe.  Even I refuse to be that cliché.

Besides, I know I’ll be back, even with way leading on to way.

But maybe not for the rest of the season.  Snow means my runs will be relegated to the roads again, and only after they’ve been sufficiently plowed.  I typically lower my mileage in the winter.  Some years, I take a complete hiatus and let my knees recover.  There will be plenty of outdoor activities to do: I’ve finally learned how to downhill ski, and I have a pair of snowshoes I need to finally use (and a snowshoeing buddy I promised to use them with).

My husband and I are also insanely close to finishing our basement, and there’s been talk about getting a treadmill once we do so.

The treadmill: my existential panic in mechanical form.  I’m not opposed to it.  There are times during the heart of winter when I’ll hear a song and it makes me wish I could lace up my shoes and hit the roads — times when every muscle fiber in my legs becomes a pack of Pavlovian dogs, and I’m salivating at the sound of the bell.  I remind myself that my runs are very much not just about the external scenery, but the internal sensations.

Besides, it might be time to show I’m stronger than the noise, too.

 

Lighter

“It feels lighter. The lightest it’s been in three years.”

I’m remarking on the holiday season to my husband during a car ride through the small towns of New Hampshire.  It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, both of us tired but not emotionally depleted like we had been with previous years.  I’m enjoying smooth drive of my husband’s new pick-up truck, the twists and turns of the roads, and the gentle relief of an uneventful Thanksgiving, one that came and went without much fallout — a potential harbinger of an easier time of year.

It’s an unexpected gift — this lightness — after such a heavy November.  November had a melancholy to it, its origins I never could exactly pinpoint.  There was a somberness in the air, as if a chapter was ending on a cosmic scale and I didn’t exactly know what to do with it.

Throughout the month, Thanksgiving awaited me, not like a finish line, but like an unnerving rumbling on the horizon.  I can’t remember the last time the holiday was easy for me, but the day had been given an indelible mark since coming to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving three years ago, witnessing the state my father was in, and, at the end of the night, numbly sitting in my husband’s 2-door coupe, mumbling out, “I think that was my dad’s last Thanksgiving.”

(I’d be proven right within 10 month’s time.)

But Thanksgiving this year came and went without the heaviness of the previous years, to the point that both my husband and I looked around us, wondering if it had actually happened, if we had missed something.

Thanksgiving was light this year, and I could sense it was transferring over to the rest of the holiday season.

—

I am constantly drawing exhausting and exhaustive sets of parallels — comparing and contrasting this year versus last, versus two years ago, versus three.  It’s like I have to see how every action reverberates back and what they do when they meet echoes of the past.

Because of the markedness of the holiday season, the parallels come out in full force.  I’ve been documenting the holiday season for three years now, each year bringing with it something loud enough to send sound waves straight into the past.

I think about how the holidays have felt, what they’ve meant, the good and the bad, over the last three years — about the desperation felt one year, the desire to turn my back on what had abandoned me in my hour of need the next, and the gentle hope of the one after that.

This year, it just is.  No heavy emotions or baggage attached.

I think about the holiday decorations, how they had become emblems of how nothing was okay one year, anathema during the next, and a beacon of reconstruction the year after that.  Each year, something as simple as ornaments carried a heaviness that should’ve snapped the branches and brought down the tree.

This year, I’m just wondering where I can carve out the time for decorations in the midst of plans, preparations, work, and friends.

—

There is a lightness, in it and in myself.  It’s as if I’m floating above the holiday season, looking down at what I see but not getting tangled up.  Appreciating what’s around me but not drowning in it.

If the previous years were loud enough to send sound waves back, then this year is the equivalent of a whisper.

I don’t seek out Christmas music like it’s my path to salvation, nor do I avoid it for fear of what it would bring.  It’s just there, existing alongside me.  I find myself absently singing along to them in the grocery store, decked out in leggings that one of my students told me makes me look like a Christmas gift. The Christmas spirit has come in the form of a wisp, not a ghoul.

There is a lightness to it all, and — just like November’s heaviness — I don’t know what to do with it.

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At some point, you’ll have to stop doing this.  At some point, the retrospectives must be put to rest.  It’s my first thought as I start comparing the holiday seasons — comparing life in general — between now, and last year, and two years ago, and three.

I give myself credit where credit is due: retrospectives are how I connect the dots, how I make sure I don’t make the same mistakes again, how I chart my progress.  It is a godsend when I’m in the thick of suffering.  But, by the same token, I also tend to not know what to do when things are good and the suffering is gone.  I instead look back and dig up old hurts for the sake of digging them up, under the guise of proving how far I’ve come, how much better off I am today than I was even a year ago.

It’s almost like I’m acting on a fear of things being light.

It’s almost as if the heaviness of November — the somberness of something finishing on a scale I could not even begin to fathom — was heavy not because of the content, but because there was nothing to weigh it down anymore.

There’s an Anais Nin’s quote I’ve been repeating for over a year now — one that resonated in ripples and waves when I finally took back control of my life: I wept because I lost my pain and I’m not yet accustomed to its absence.

It’s been a wild couple of years, and the upheaval can be documented like rings inside a tree.  And the retrospectives do add a richness to everything — a reminder of the peaks and valleys of life and how beautiful it all can look in the rearview mirror.  But sometimes you’re just putting up decorations because they’re pretty, singing a Christmas ditty because it’s catchy, making plans to see family and friends because it’s that time of year.   Sometimes you’re just on car rides through small towns, gazing at Christmas lights, mumbling something about buying presents as part of your growing to-do list.  Sometimes you can let the baggage sit by the sidelines and enjoy the path in its current state.

Sometimes you can enjoy everything as the sweet whispers do their own echoing out — sometimes you can appreciate it without wondering if they’ll ripple one way or the other.  Sometimes they’re just something to hum along with amongst the other sights and sounds.

Sometimes, you can just let things be light.

The Bearable Lightness of Being

This time of the year always brings a depth of reflection and introspection.  It’s carried out in the cold mornings brimming with sluggish light, in the afternoons that fall quickly to darkness, in the crisp & brisk sun and the murk of overcast days.  It’s presented alongside the final weeks of the year, a chance to weigh out the thoughts in my mind and the actions of my past and the potential actions for the future.

It’s unbearably heavy sometimes.

I know I have reason to reflect and introspect.  Changes have been great and sudden and only recently have settled.  I compare and contrast where I am now to where I was even a year ago.  I look around, cautiously optimistic that Saturn has finished her return and left my abode.  I shift what I’ve learned from one hand to the other, vacillating between pride in what I’ve become through what I’ve learned and frustration that it took me this long to learn them in the first place.

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The funny thing about feeling like you’re finally out of the woods, that you’ve actually made it through the tunnel to the light on the other side, is that you find yourself constantly peering back and judging your navigation through them. You make note of every wrong turn, every time you backtracked, every time you thought you were on the mend only to realize how off you were.

And you vacillate a second time, because you don’t know what gets to you more: that it took you this long to learn what you finally know now, or that you’ll never get a second shot at the situation, finally knowing what you know now.

That you did all that work navigating the woods, and yet the map you made will be for a forest you’ll never enter in the exact same way again.  That your experiences might have made you a little better at wayfinding, a little more prepared, a little more equipped for the task, but the next set of woods won’t look like the ones you were just in.

That there’ll be new challenges, new information you will need to learn — hidden information you’ll wish you had acquired before you’d entered. That you know you will have to run those future scenarios — those future dark woods — as good as blind, just like you did before, with the same fevered hope that there is actually light at the end of this tunnel, that you’ll make your way out again.

It makes you question if your lessons learned have any weight at all.

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It’s not exactly a new idea — nor is it an original one. I got it from Milan Kundera and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, this idea of the weightlessness that happens as a result of only going through life once.  This sense of futility created in recognizing that we learn these lessons and never get a second go to implement them.

I was 22 when I first read the book, and the idea of lightness was laughable.  For the first time, I had seen the unmarked paths of the rest of my life laid out before me.  I was contending with this newfound reckoning, that the decisions I’ll make will ripple out until they hit my life’s endpoint — and suddenly every move seemed unbearably heavy, even if we only make them once.

But when I hit my late 20s and felt my Saturn Return with full and brutal force — when everything was wrong and I couldn’t get a sense of balance, a sense of grounding, a sense of justice, a sense of predictability — I felt unbearably weightless. I felt like I barely had one foot planted, and all it would take was one strong wind and I’d blow away.  I was the weight of a single flame, just as susceptible to the winds, unpredictable and uncontainable, burning brightly in a haze of uncertainty and anxiety.

I wouldn’t feel a sense of anchoring for a long while, not until I was out the of the woods and in the light and able to put my lessons on the scales and resist the urge to cry do-over — resist the desire to go back in time carrying the knowledge that I wish I’d had and now do it all differently.

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But in the dawning hours of a cold autumn sky, with nothing but the silence and the scenery, in brisk, biting air and slow, rainy days — in moments that reassure me and make me smile — I know innately that both incarnations of the scales are correct, and that the weightlessness might be the perfect counterbalance.

Maybe life needs to be light, if only to counteract when the sheer weight of your life’s decisions makes your shoulders fatigue.  Maybe the lightness is not a punishment but a reassurance, a reminder that you’re only going through this life once, so cast off the shackles when you can.

Maybe that lightness is about recognizing you’re not in a school, collecting lessons and reprimanding yourself for failed tests, but instead a dance that was designed to make you step on your partner’s toes and trip over your own legs.  Maybe that lightness includes having faith that the dance is going the way it was always destined to go, that there are no do-overs in the same way you wouldn’t splatter white paint on a masterpiece and demand a retry.

And maybe that lightness includes letting go of the weight of “if only I knew then what I know now.”  Maybe the lightness means no longer lugging around the knowledge that you would’ve done things completely differently if you had been given all the information up front. It means knowing that holding your lessons in front of you does nothing but tire your arms out — the best you can do is deposit them for the future.  The best you can do is be more discerning, have your eyes more open, but also understand you only know things when you know them — that all you can really do is commit to doing the best you can with what you’re given.

Perhaps that’s the whole point: to learn lessons for problem sets you’ll never come cross in that exact form ever again. To build up from where you’re currently at and see how new winds will challenge your structural integrity.  To dance wildly and trip up and injure yourself and get lost in the music and have faith in the conductor.  To have faith you were supposed to run blind and get lost and be found and move on.

Because, at the end of the day, you know you couldn’t have made it out of the most recent woods without your previous forays into it, without a repertoire built slowly from past mistakes.  You know you’re not going at the newest obstacles completely unequipped.  The maps are unusable, but the fortified soul is.

Because, at the end of the day, you know that the lessons do carry weight.  You know that, until the necessary lesson is learned, you will keep returning to those woods, returning to that path, one way or another.  You will trip up over and over again until you learn what it takes to avoid the roots and rocks.

Maybe the whole point of creating the map is to make it unnecessary by the end.

There are times during this part of the year where I feel sodden with what’s around me, like I’ve taken in everything and am left immobile as a result.  Sometimes reminders like these feels like a ringing out, leaving me lighter by the end of it.

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Autumn

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Autumn feels like promises kept.

Autumn feels like waking up to chilled air and warm comforters, like holding your coffee mug with both hands as the heat radiates into your palms, like looking out at the changing leaves with sleepy, peaceful eyes.

Autumn feels like a reassuring hug at the end of a long day.

Autumn feels like the glow of a roaring fire, like the evening air at your back, like the hooded sweatshirt you snuggle into with your eyes on the flames.  Autumn feels like the heaters turning on for the first time, the sound and the smell synonymous with comfort and home.

Autumn feels like warm apple cider, like a set of fuzzy warm socks, like decorations that feel more sincere than the Christmas variety.

Autumn feels like the clarity that comes once the fever breaks.

Autumn feels like the brisk, crisp cleanness that wins out over the haze and heat — like the rushed busyness of summer has simmered, like you’ve been given permission to slow down.

Autumn feels like an old song on the radio, played with the car windows down and the breeze zipping past you. Autumn feels like nostalgia and adventure, the familiar and the edge.

Autumn feels like acceptance.

Autumn feels like the swan song of nature — a beautiful symphony of colors and sensations before the inevitable chill, the inevitable darkness and ending.  Autumn feels like a reminder that the ending can be gorgeous and breathtaking and so much more than a sign of what’s gone.

Autumn feels like the beauty in letting things change, in letting things be. Autumn feels like what happens when you let things run their course, when you embrace the cycle of all things, with hope and faith that a new one will begin. 

Autumn feels like golden sunsets, like gentle twilight, like a clear night with the North Star shining brightly before you. Autumn feels like Polaris, like Cassiopeia, like every mythos and truth rolled into one.

Autumn feels like home, like homecoming.

Autumn feels like the freedom in moving on.

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A Call For Help (Or Something Like That)

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**I need your help!**

Yes, you — person who is literate and also possesses the ability to click a blue button.

(I’m assuming.)

One of my not-yet-published manuscripts — In The Event The Flower Girl Explodes — is now part of a Kindle Scout Campaign on Amazon, and I need nominations.

How do you nominate me?

1. Click on this link: https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/2B6XOMFOADEN0

2. Click the little blue button that says, “Nominate.”

3. THAT’S IT.

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It is SERIOUSLY as easy as that. Nothing to sign up for (assuming you have an Amazon account — and at this point not having an Amazon account is like saying you don’t have email, like how do you function in the modern day), no email lists to be a part of. And if Kindle Scout chooses my book for publication, you will get a FREE e-book of In The Event the Flower Girl Explodes.

(Not a bad deal, amirite?)

If you’re interested, the link also has a shortened synopsis and the first 25 pages up for a free read. (And if you’re not interested, skip all that and just click the blue button.) While not a “most votes win” type of situation, Kindle Scout uses the nominations to gauge interest in the book, so more nominations = more interest = my manuscript looks more appealing to the editors.

Within the first 10 hours, In The Event the Flower Girl Explodes landed on the “Hot & Trending” list and has, for the most part, stayed on said list.  It’s beyond anything I could’ve asked for, and I’m praying I can stay on that list for as long as possible.  While not a guarantee, being on “Hot & Trending” tells the Kindle Scout editors that my book has commercial potential (which means they’ll be more likely to publish it).

So I turn to you, readers who put up with my babbling for the last 3 years.  Can you do a girl a solid and click a blue button?

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Inheritance

It’s 2013, and I’m at a gas station in Nevada, having the best phone conversation I’ve had with my father in a long, long while.

The details behind the conversation are long and complicated and best left for another time and another storyline.  I am on the phone, early morning in Nevada, closing in on noontime in Boston.  I had braced myself for whatever the call would bring, but instead of what I had anticipated, I have an effortless and connected talk about road trips.

I’m in the middle of my road trip to San Francisco, just a day’s drive away from California.  My father is hours away from being discharged from the hospital, brought in for what would turn out to be simple dehydration.  And from his hospital bed, he tells me about driving to Mt. Rushmore, about trekking across Wyoming with nothing but his camper trailer and his two buddies by his side.

There is a camaraderie in how we talk, as if this has always been our relationship.  I eventually hang up, carrying the thought, “So this is what it’s supposed to feel like,” with me as I return to the car, as we set off for the Pacific Ocean.  It is our best conversation in years — decades, potentially — and it will be the last good conversation we ever have.  And I don’t know what tires my bones more: the fact that it would be our last good, meaningful conversation before he’d pass, or the fact that it would be two more years before he’d pass.

*

There was a man I never met, a man I wish I had met.

There was once a man who was ready to take on everything by storm.  A man who wanted to explore the world and become a lawyer and be a leader and live passionately.  A man who scaled the tallest mountains in the region and lived for the outdoors.  I’d see him in small snippets from time to time, when my father would come up with a harebrained idea, or waltz out onto the dance floor with unbridled gusto.  But, by that point in his life, those were all just echoes, faint sounds muffled through the layers of time, the multi-layered demons — and the older he got, the fainter the echoes became, and the less I saw of the man I was never introduced to.

There was a man who gave me part of my inheritance, and I never got the chance to properly learn who he was.

The man I did know bared little resemblance to the first one.  And I spent too long refusing to take ownership of that side of my inheritance — the one given to me by the man I had bared witness to for most of my life — only to learn too late that it had taken ownership of me.  I spent too much time looking at the destruction I could create, putting my head in my hands, and bemoaning, “I am my father’s daughter.”  I spent so much time in Al-Anon meetings and therapy, uncovering what it actually meant to be an adult child of an alcoholic, what it meant to grow up in the toxic, chaotic environment that I did, and what in the world could I do with this particular portion of my inheritance — an inheritance that felt more like a redistribution of debt, the sins of the father moving down the generations.

But that’s only part of it, and it’s easy to focus on the negative — no, it’s needed to focus on the negative. At first, at least: know what you have been given so you know what you are capable of, so you know what to do to rise above it. Know your enemy, even when your enemy is a part of yourself.

But it can’t stay there.  There’s so much more to this inheritance, to what got passed down the generations.  I know this sense of adventure of mine is due in part because of my father, not despite it.  My harebrained ideas and blind enthusiasm are two heirlooms handed over from the man behind the layers.  I am that man I never met when I go out onto the dance floor with the same willful irreverence.  I have his wit, his innovation.  He is there every time I pack up the car and go on a roadtrip and ache to go through another state, another territory.  He is there every time I look at a manuscript and decide, “This is the one, the one that will get me to the bestseller’s list.”  He is someone who faded away before his time, but still possessed the vital gifts that had been given to me.

It’s now been two years since I got that phone call, early one Wednesday morning, my emotionally overwhelmed mother trying to tell me that the thing we had been anticipating all week had happened.  I had once made a vow to never make the same mistakes he made, to never go down the paths that he had dug out for himself.  But I had to also learn to vow to uphold the good I was given, to continue to be harebrained and wandering and wildly & blindly enthusiastic about things.  To recognize that not everything that had been handed down to me must be caged up and monitored and examined like specimens.

Because it is through those adventures, through living my life with a wild but delicate spirit, that I meet the man I never met.

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