Abby Rosmarin's Blog, page 7
September 19, 2017
Dashed Upon the Rocks
Part 1.
My favorite thing about flying out of Boston is the aerial view of the islands.
Almost every flight does some type of turn above the Boston Harbor Islands, and I watch them until they go out of sight. The islands hold something familiar and mystical for me. They hold teenaged and early college memories. They hold a source of pride as I’d point out Peddocks and tell anyone who’ll listen, “They shot Shutter Island there!” They hold a reverie and solace as I remember the ocean waves rolling in, the view of the islands from the mainland, the feeling as the harbor island boats gently bumped against the docks.
But they also hold something heavy. They hold a memory of my best friend calling me up one night, telling me that she’s heard there’s been an accident on one of the islands — an island another friend was currently on — and that she couldn’t get ahold of him. A memory of me and my blind optimism, saying that it was all alright, that she’ll get in contact with him soon, that there is nothing to worry about. A memory of me learning how naïve I had been, learning in the light of day the next morning that he was the one in the accident — that he didn’t survive, and that absolutely nobody, directly and indirectly involved, would ever be the same again.
To this day, it makes me think of all the mistakes we are granted clemency on in life. All mistakes that could’ve — or should’ve — killed us, and the fact that some of us don’t get that grace sometimes. Sometimes dumb mistakes cost you your life and you don’t get a chance to look back and say, “Whew. That was a close one.” Some are not given that opportunity to dodge a bullet and feel grateful that they’re alive.
Part 2.
We fly into Cleveland and upgrade our rental car on impulse.
We pass by the convertible on our way to the check-in desk. When we get in, the first words out of my husband’s mouth are, “How much is it to upgrade?”
The cost is justifiable and suddenly we are throwing our gracefully small luggage into the trunk and putting the top down. As we blaze down the highway, finding out just how much get-up-and-go the Camaro has, 60s rock blares from the radio.
This is what it means to be living, I think to myself.
Part 3.
We’re technically in Ohio for a wedding, but we stay longer to celebrate my birthday. We traverse diagonally across Ohio, from one corner to the other and back, eventually hitting the roller coaster capital of America for my birthday.
My first stop is the theme park’s most death-defying rollercoaster — one that was shut down due to technical issues when I was there last, 8 years ago.
The Top Thrill Dragster rockets you straight up, hitting the highest point in the entire park, before summiting and shooting you back to Earth. The words you say as the coaster slopes down would make a sailor blush, but the rush is so thick and pure that you can barely get your seatbelt off afterwards.
Ironically, as soon as you’re rocketed up to the top, you are given a few moments of the best view in town. Lake Erie out in front of you in all her glory. A vast and open sky. A few of the other coasters twirl below you, tame cousins compared to what you’re currently on. A view that deserves a true moment of reflection.
But before that is possible, you twist and fall more than 90 degrees. You curse something mighty as genuine fear surges through you. And then — like that — your car slows down. You’ve made it out alive, and you giggle like a kid, eyes wide, smile huge.
It’s like rollercoasters are a way of creating that moment when you’ve dodged a bullet — a controlled environment where you are granted clemency, where you can walk away, walk away on wobbling legs, and thank God that you’re alive.
We attempt to do the Dragster one last time as the day starts to wind down. We get there only to find a chain across the entrance. Temporarily closed due to technical issues.
Part 4.
I try to do something crazy on my birthdays. Sky diving. Hang gliding. Ziplining. Little reminders that I’m growing older, but not getting older. Little reminders that I want to be a little hellion of an old lady, scaring the people in her 55+ community with her potentially self-destructive antics. Little reminders that I want to fill this life to the brim with experience.
I see a gigantic swing — known as the Ripcord, the Frontier Fling — on our first lap around the theme park. I watch the people in what are essentially padded sets of overalls get hoisted up to rollercoaster peak heights before dropping. My stomach lurches as I watch them technically freefall for a second before their rope catches them and they swing like a pendulum over us.
“Do you want to do that?” my husband asks.
There’s a part of me that is in pure fight or flight mode. A part of me that is going, “No. Fuck no. Don’t you dare.”
On our second lap around the park, I go in to do it.
There are multiple moments of legitimate fear. Fear as I’m hoisted up and my padded overalls press into my shoulders and I realize they’re the only things stopping me from a fall to my death. Fear as I keep going higher and higher, as that same part of my brain goes, “That’s high enough. That’s high enough. That’s FUCKING high enough!” Fear as I anticipate the person at the bottom telling me to pull my ripcord — fear as I recognize oh my god I’m the one pulling this damn ripcord. Fear as I pull the ripcord and freefall for a moment.
I let out an involuntary yelp, and then my rope catches me.
Then I’m flying.
I bring my arms out to the side and eventually in front of me. I’m a bird, I’m a plane, I’m Superman. I’m staring death in the face and laughing.
I’m giggling madly by the time I reunite with my husband.
“And this is why I never listen to that part of my brain,” I say, as I watch the video he took of me, as he shows the part where — at least from the camera’s perspective — I fall straight down towards the ground.
[image error]
Part 5.
The Millenium Force was the ride when I first went to Cedar Point. Eight years ago, it was the rollercoaster with the highest point and the steepest drop. The lines for it were staggeringly big. Now, with time (and the help of a fast-lane pass bracelet), we’re at the roller coaster’s cars within 15 minutes. It’s not the big guy in town anymore — usurped by things like the Dragster and Valraven. Higher points, scarier drops.
But we go on it twice, cherishing the vistas of Lake Erie from the top, our vision graying slightly from the G force as we hit the first bend. My knuckles aren’t white and my adrenaline isn’t through the roof, but the experience is wonderful and exhilarating and giggle-inducing.
On our second trip, during the usually quick ascent to the top, something stops. We feel our coaster slow down and slide back slightly. We can hear the backup chain attempt to click into place, only to ratchet a couple times. We slide back a little more.
For a brief moment, there is a supernatural calm that takes over me. I know this is not what a rollercoaster is supposed to do. But whatever happens, happens. I am at peace with something that is clearly beyond my control, with something that could quickly become calamitous. There is zero fear, zero adrenaline.
The backup chain clicks into place, and outright shoves our coaster to the peak and over the edge.
Part 6.
While in line for another rollercoaster, a girl behind me asks me what one of my tattoos mean. The type of midwestern friendliness that I adore and cherish (the social introvert, the person who lives for small snapshots and interactions). She wants to know what my Sanskrit means.
I begin to babble — as I always do when something matters to me; the more important a subject is, the less succinct I’ll be when talking about it — in a roundabout way, I talk about Tat Tvam Asi. You Are That. You are part of the Divine, part of God, part of the Universe, part of Consciousness. You are a wave in the ocean and the ocean itself. Whatever this force is that permeates all things, you are part of it and you ARE it.
In the ancient yogic tradition, you are put on Earth to discover and recognize that. Yoga translates literally into “to yoke, to unite”. Unite what you think you are with what you actually are. Live your life in a way that help you see your life is — to see that you are — part of something so much greater.
Part 7.
My favorite moments at Cedar Point are all the intense ones.
My favorite rides are all the ones where dread crept in the second I heard the lap bar lock into place. Rides where my knuckles were white around the handles, rides where a part of me just wanted to hurry it up already so it could be over. Rides where there is a moment of genuine, pure fear.
Moments where I trick a part of my brain into thinking I’m on the verge of death.
In a time of great introspection and soul-searching, I have to wonder if I’m akin to an arrow or a slingshot: I have to be forcefully pulled in the opposite direction — aggressively, to the point that the tension is unbearable — before I can spring load into where I should be.
It makes me wonder if that is just the person I am. If — like Carrie Fisher — I have to toe the edges of hell to see what heaven feels like. If I have to overwhelm the senses to calm my nerves. That my love of the thrill isn’t just about pushing my limits and overcoming fear, but staring death in the face in order to appreciate being alive — and is it even possible for me to live outside of such a state of opposites.
Towards the end of the day, I can actually feel my fight or flight response become exhausted. I can practically hear my amygdala say flatly, “Oh no. We’re dangling over the precipice. Again. Certain doom is immanent. I guess it’s time to flood the body with adrenaline…again…”
I’ve become an adrenaline junkie who is exhausted on her own supply. The same part of me that fights wildly when I want to do something crazy is now calmly telling me, “See? Even living on the edge can get repetitive.”
Part 8.
But, that’s not entirely true. My favorite moments are not just the intense ones.
When I think back on my birthday, I think about my husband and I sharing food, sampling plates from all different places. I think of trying frozen custard for the first time, my husband and I passing the waffle cone back and forth as we take gigantic, delicious bites.
I think about the hues of pink as the sun set. I think about the stroll down Lake Erie after Cedar Point closed. The gentle silence of a quiet theme park, the rolling waves, the feeling of soft sand beneath my feet. A gentle, rolling joy. Something exquisite in its subtlety.
Part 9.
We drive back from Cedar Point through the backroads of Ohio, top down, the dazzling stars above us. Within minutes, we are encased in darkness, a vibrant and sharp nighttime that rivals the most rural sections of New Hampshire. We find an isolated spot and park. The car is turned off. All lights are off. Just us and the clear sky.
We can see the Milky Way as our eyes adjust. Thousands of tiny little stars start making their appearance, finer and finer little specks making themselves known, the subtle aspects of the night making the picture better, more alive.
Silence and the stars and a gentle summer breeze. A moment to remember how amazingly tiny we are in the grand scheme of it all, and yet how beautiful it is that we’re part of something so big. Tat tvam asi.
Part 10.
It continues to be a time of soul-searching. Or perhaps the soul-searching never really ends. So long as you’re aware of it, you’re constantly searching for what makes your soul sing and why it sings in the first place and how the music sounds to you. You’re constantly on the lookout for self-understanding and self-improvement and maybe, just maybe, self-actualization.
My biggest contender as of late has been staring down my need for extremes. Contending with my need to toe the edge — perhaps even let a foot slip off for good measure — in order to find peace with the soil in the center. Recognizing how lucky I have been when I’ve done more than just let a foot slip and could still scramble back up in one piece — recognizing how this is not a luxury that is present for everyone.
Our plane back to Boston is delayed due to bad weather — echoes of a hurricane that has gracefully missed our region. But, unlike Montana, our flight still goes on, and we’re even able to leave earlier than they had originally thought.
On the descent, the islands are blackened out by the night and the fog, indistinguishable from the ocean. Even when it’s clear, you can’t see the islands during nighttime flights. Just an ocean of blackness. The only thing that remains visible are the handful of lighthouses: a constant vigil in the night, keeping well-meaning but wayward boats from dashing themselves on the rocks.
August 23, 2017
Burdens, Strains, and Fruit
“It’s like the tree doesn’t want to survive.”
We’re stringing up our peach tree in essentially reverse-bonsai fashion. The branches have gone horizontal and dipped down, semi-ripe peaches inches from the ground. It looks like all it would take is one strong wind and every major limb would snap.
We’ve done this before — peach trees bear fruit once every three years, and, when we first got the house four years back, we were stringing up what was essentially a sapling, clearly too young for the task at hand.
Three years later and it feels like little has changed. Every week, the peaches grow bigger, and the branches sag a little more. I check the fruit daily, seeing when I can finally pick the fruit — relieve the strain before a branch breaks off.
After a major rainstorm, one of the major branches does snap in half.
But by the end of August, the peaches are ready — and on the exact same day they were ready three years prior. I remember making an analogy back then — this time three years ago, I had also just finished my yoga teacher training, and felt this incredibly vast and unpredictable world open up to me — about gaining abundance before you’re ready, and how heavy it can feel.
I think about that analogy as I start picking the peaches in the present day. I fill up one, two, three, four big bowls. When I run out of big bowls, I go to medium-sized bowls. When I run out of medium-sized bowls, I improvise with whatever containers I can find. When those run out, I resort to buckets.
The peaches are extremely heavy. My arms fatigue as I carry bowl after bowl inside. I try to add up what the weight must be in total.
“My poor tree,” I think to myself. “I’d bow, too, under all that strain.”
My analogy from three years back — about having abundance, bearing more fruit than you’re ready for — comes back into my mind. The tree has grown considerably but it has also yielded an exponentially larger amount of fruit. Fruit that has weighed it down, fruit that has made a branch snap, fruit that has made us scramble to set up a pulley system so it wouldn’t break under the strain, under its burden.
A burden. That’s how I saw the fruit when it wasn’t ripe. Just hanging on the tree, threatening the tree’s very existence — but the timing wasn’t right to remove it, just yet.
But, when they were ripe, the burden became quite literal fruit.
As I go about picking, I can feel my analogy evolve. I think about strain and I think about reward.
“Sometimes your burdens become your fruit,” I think to myself after clearing off a branch.
[image error]
I don’t mean it in the perverse, pseudo-Christian sense, where we throw ourselves into burden and acquiescence and suffering because somehow that is God-like, somehow that is our only way to truly communicate with the Powers that Be.
Our burdens become our fruit. The very things that weighed us down and threatened to snap us in half can yield us a harvest beyond our wildest imagination.
It’s how the very things that seemed the hardest, most painful, most arduous, end up producing exactly what we need.
It’s how you can go to hell & back and somehow stumble across heaven upon your return — and recognize that it took the road to hell to get on the path to heaven.
It’s how you can be so tremendously upset at someone for how they were to you, for the hell they put you through, and yet still be grateful for who you became because of it. It’s how you can feel the desire to simultaneously curse that person out and thank them for creating the flames that your Phoenix rose out of.
It’s how you can remember that your personality wasn’t and will not be forged when things are good, when nothing is the matter, when there are no demons to conquer — that your defining moments happen when you swore you’d snap from the strain of it all.
It’s how you can marvel at what you went through and realize that you wouldn’t try to erase the past — because it would mean erasing who you became, the things you created in light of and despite of it, the growth that happened in the presence of what threatened to break you.
—
But it’s not all positivity and feel good life affirmations. Life is never as simple as that.
The tree doesn’t spring back to life once all the fruit has been picked. After multiple fruit-picking sessions — after our kitchen is filled with peaches, to the point that I can’t even fathom what I’ll do with all of them — after all the fruit is finally off the branch, the tree only changes shape minimally. The branches are off the ground, but the branches still bow. She still looks more like a weeping willow than what a peach tree should look like.
The rope system we created is still holding branches up. And the snapped branch will never un-break itself.
That’s the other side of burdens. They can become your fruit, but they will also change you. And shifting burden into fruit won’t suddenly spring you back to life.
It takes time. A lot of time. And a trusted support system (of strings and anchors, of people who understand you and will listen). And sunshine, and time, and more time. It takes a while before you feel like you won’t snap in half again. And you might never come back to the shape you were before you were weighed down.
August 18, 2017
Returning to Pain
It continues to be a time of deep reflection and soul searching. The moments can get so overwhelming that I can only hope that I’ve hit an era of purging, of watching the wrecking ball go at old outdated structures, and clearing the way for something new.
One of the biggest pitfalls for Type 4 people on the Enneagram chart is dwelling. But I don’t necessarily need a personality analysis to tell me that. One of my biggest pitfalls has always been dwelling, of coming back to bad experiences and over-identifying with the pain & hurt — of over-identifying with getting hurt — and finding myself in a world of sad songs & tears & unresolved issues.
Sometimes things come on their own volition. They’ll show up like uninvited guests, under the guise of giving me a clearer view on things — things I glossed over as they were happening only to now reveal themselves in full. Moments that hit me all at once with how terrible, how unfair, how manipulative they really were — moments where I am furious with others for what they did and furious with myself for allowing it to happen. I harness that — or try to, at least — and say, “See how this makes you feel now? Use that as fuel to make sure you never get into something like that ever again.”
But sometimes I call them over like a vulnerable lover in the middle of the night. I invite them back in and relive moments and feel the heartache and grief and anger and pain. Relive, and then perversely proclaim, “I never want to feel that way again for as long as I live!”
…But how can I proclaim I never want to feel that way again and yet revisit the feeling like an old friend?
[image error]
There is merit to such a return. One of the biggest mistakes in horror movies is moving on without making sure the villain is really dead. If you want something killed off, make damn sure it won’t resuscitate — because it will come back with more force than before, now out for blood and their pound of flesh.
And I know in some ways this behavior has been my saving grace, dredging the grime to the surface and holding it in the air until it dries out and blows away. But sometimes I dig it up and bring it to the surface with hope — or at least intent — to air them out until they shrivel up, only to watch it all skim the surface and settle back down.
And I repeat the process, again and again: drag up if only to watch from the surface as it swirls around and returns.
It’s a dance that does nothing more than exhaust my arms and muddy the water. And I keep going at it, fueled by the desire to get rid of the muck, to free it into the open air, to have my waters clean again. But something stops it from breaking the surface tension, something keeps it within set parameters.
It makes me wonder if Sisyphus was ever really cursed, or if he deliberately would let his boulder slip away and roll back downhill again, so he’d have something to do, something to focus on, a reason to go uphill.
There’s a line in Anais Nin’s journals. I wept because I lost my pain and I’m not yet accustomed to its absence. I have to wonder how much I let that pain and heartache be my companion, to the point that I feel a pang of loneliness over the idea of departing from it.
I’m now in the season of sad anniversaries. There is this 30-day span of death — it will be a year next week since my siblings’ mother passed away, a year in September since my brother-in-law passed, two years in September since my father passed — this rabbit hole of a reminder that, at one point, the hits just kept coming and the pain wouldn’t stop.
It’s a tantalizing rut to get stuck in. To remember all the hurt from those years, from beyond those years. To rehash the anger at people who neglected or abandoned you in your hour of need, at people who made a tough time tougher. To sit in the middle of how it all felt back then, because you’re fooling yourself into thinking this is exposure therapy, that you’ll emerge with things a little more processed.
It’s an easy time to over-identify with hurt and loss — and with being someone who gets hurt. It’s an easy time to return to pain, as if it’s the only thing I know.
But at some point it has to stop. At some point, I have to dig up the dredges and be brave enough to let them fully air out — and be braver still to let the wind take them away. To become accustomed to an absence of pain. To recognize that life doesn’t lose depth because you are not gripped with emotion.
To stop ripping the scabs from the wounds just to watch them bleed. To stop returning to pain for the sake of pain.
If I truly want this to be an era of purging, the wrecking ball has to be allowed to strike until the structure collapses — and the cleaning crew has to be allowed to take away the debris. I do myself no favors standing in the wreckage, remarking on how the old has been demolished and yet surrounded by remnants of it.
There’s a line from one of Kesha’s newest songs: You gotta learn to let go, put the past behind you. Trust me, I know the ghosts will try to find you. From her song “Rainbow”, which has become a bit of an anthem for me this week.
There’s no stopping my processing, my desperate drive to sort out the past until something feels balanced. I will always want to make sure that the villain is good and dead. But there’s a stark difference between that and standing around the body, waiting for it to attack.
And it’s exhausting, trying to press forward. Trying to crawl out of the rabbit hole and stop yourself before you fall in again (which you will, eventually, inevitably). It’s frustrating to know your pitfalls and yet get stuck in them anyway.
But there’s an additional line from that song that strikes at me: I can’t lose hope. What’s left of my heart’s still made of gold.
Ironically, when I first heard that line, I gravitated towards the phrase “what’s left of my heart” — a focus on what had been broken, on what I’d lost, on pain, pain, & more pain. But outside of that trapping, this song is a reminder myself that I have to press forward, finding ways to get out of these ruts and to let go and to recognize the difference between processing and dwelling.
Because the beauty of letting the wrecking ball demolish and letting the cleaning crew take away the debris is that you’re eventually left with a good-as-new plot of land, and a chance to really build what you want to build.
August 5, 2017
An Ode to Hiking (pt 2)
[image error]
I’ve been trying to up my hiking game this summer.
My teaching schedule — once a scattered mess that had me teaching in smattering amounts every single day — has consolidated, leaving me my Thursday mornings and weekends free. I’ve been dedicating that free time to solo hikes and group hikes, quick jaunts around local trails and longer expeditions further north.
I hiked avidly as a kid, I barely hiked at all when I lived in Boston, and I only hiked sporadically during my first few years in New Hampshire. With each passing year, I try to become a little more deliberate, a little more focused.
My parents are/were members of the 4,000 Footer Club — a designation for those who’ve climbed all the major mountains in New Hampshire. If I’m doing the math right, I’m now the age that my mother was when she finishing scaling the last of the 4,000-foot summits. I don’t think that’s influenced my uptick in hiking, but given the connection between hiking and that untainted purity from my past, I won’t strike it out.
[image error]
I don’t know how to explain hiking to those who don’t find resonance with it. It’s a lot like running: either you get it, or you don’t. It looks absurd on paper: devote a morning, a day, multiple days to a hill, to scrambling up that hill — surrounded by bugs and oppressive humidity, with a handful of snacks and worst-case-scenario provisions in a sweat-collecting pack, until your legs quiver with fatigue and you can’t ever seem to catch your breath. And all for…pretty vistas? Calorie burning? Blatant masochism? What, then?
I can talk about being in nature and challenging the body, but it all falls short. I’ve already sung an ode to hiking essentially this time last year, and perhaps that should be enough. But, still, it feels like it’s only scratching the surface. It’s a pragmatic explanation to something a lot more visceral.
[image error]
I remember studying what the mountains and the woods meant in one of my literature classes in college. Shakespeare’s characters would retreat to the woods for mischief and scheming and fantasy. The mountains were a source of mystery and peril and adventure for medieval characters. Modern characters used the woods to disclose secrets or have affairs or find salvation.
There has been and continues to be something encasing in the wild. Something larger than life. And we are able to step right into the middle of it. Even if we don’t believe in anything else, the forests have this feeling of enchantment, as if the Fae could actually be lurking behind each tree, watching you on the trail.
[image error]
I continue to be knee-deep in the Enneagram personality types, if only to have that avenue where aspects of myself can be validated (while other aspects get the calling out they need). Type 4s tend to dwell on the negative. I tend to dwell on the negative. I’ll go back and replay bad experiences and then play out lengthy (typically dramatic) conversations in my head.
My solo hikes are never fully solo. The hypothetical conversations always seem to join me. My head fills with dialogue that hasn’t happened and probably never will. Every “how could you…” and “who the fuck are you to…” and “do you have any idea how…” swims around my head.
It’s not unlike any other time in life. The hypothetical conversations can sometimes be a constant companion, filling my head with the words I never said. Sometimes they can be redirected into dialogue for a manuscript. Usually they just drain me.
But it’s different on the trails. It’s almost as if the trees absorb everything my mind comes up with, to the point that, by the descent, all the hypothetical conversations have lost their potency. All the “if you only knew…“s eventually silence themselves, tagging behind at a distance before getting lost on the trail.
It’s part of why I love to hike alone as much as I do. Let everything bubble to the surface. Let the woods take it in. A cosmic reset button, in some ways.
Your pack naturally gets lighter on day hikes. You drink up the water you lugged along the trail. You eat the snacks you packed. You might even start wearing the layers you brought with you.
But something else gets lighter. The things that hang like weights around your neck start to fall by the wayside, if only temporarily.
I think of a 16-mile hike I took the summer of 2015. At the risk of showing that Type 4 side of me — revisiting and dwelling on old, negative experiences — the summer of 2015 had been one of the hardest times of my life. My father’s decline was in freefall, my family’s dynamics were in shatters, and practically everything else in my life had just blown up. I was a frenzied mess of anxiety and dread and heartache and pain.
I remember that hike vividly. I had gone with my husband and two of our friends. I remember burning brightly with that anxiety and dread and heartache and pain as we drove through the White Mountains, as we set off from the trailhead. I remember how candid and wonderful the conversations (real, actual, non-hypothetical conversations) were, how the trail just seemed to take in the burning I was radiating out, how the world felt surreal and hyperreal at the same time.
And I remember — somewhere, somewhere on the return — feeling this acceptance of it all. Acceptance of where my life was at in that moment. Acceptance that things had gotten bumpy and the trip was far from over. Acceptance that my heart had been breaking and probably would break a thousand more times before I could even think of picking up the pieces. Acceptance that things were changing and there was no going back. It was a feeling I held dearly and carried for as long as I could, holding it long after I shrugged my pack off my shoulders, praying it would stay with me like the dirt on my shins.
In some ways, that day was a miracle. Days of acceptance and peace were few and far between in the months leading up to my father’s death. And in some ways my hikes pay homage to the fact that the trails can perform magic, even if the spell is temporary.
[image error]
The longer the hike, the more it feels like a spiritual journey. In a world filled with anticlimaxes and loose ends and unresolved cliffhangers, the hike has a set beginning, middle, and end. A crescendo and a decrescendo. Challenge and a payoff.
Especially on the solo hikes, I emerge from the forest feeling like something has been exercised and exorcised. I bask in that somewhat bewildering feeling, when you leave the trail and find your car and vaguely remember that the real world awaits.
I turned on my car after a recent hike, the preview songs of Kesha’s upcoming album beginning to play through my radio. Her song “Learn to Let Go” started to play as I set up my GPS and took one more swig from my water bottle.
“I was a prisoner of the past, had a bitterness when I’d look back.“
I had preordered her newest album on principle alone — making a statement with my all-mighty dollar that I support women who fight to get back what had been taken from them. But the album speaks to me outside of that context, outside of Kesha’s battles with the studio and her abuser and the court of public opinion.
Another thing the Enneagram validated for me was my almost obsessive need for music. Type 4s use music to amplify what they’re feeling. If they’re unhealthy, they’ll find sad songs and use them to stay in a depressive rut.
But, if they can stand on both feet and get back what’s been taken from them, they can spin it to their advantage. The music can amplify something more positive.
So I think it’s time to practice what I preach
Exorcise these demons inside me
Oh, gotta learn to let it go.
And that feeling — that surreal euphoria, that precious hold on what the trails brought me — lingered as my GPS started to navigate me home, snaking through the smalltown roads until I’m on the highway I know by heart.
July 24, 2017
Meek, Strong, Big, Small – A Story of Strength in 7 Snippets
[image error]
I.
Scene: It’s 2006. 19-year-old me behind the register at a local pharmacy. My summer job until I return to school for my sophomore year. A woman comes into the store and starts perusing the aisles in a peculiar, suspicious manner. My supervisor — a petite, blonde girl, who is maybe a year older than me, at best — has me follow her. Standard retail procedure: pretend to clean the aisle, to put things away, yet all the while a presence around a potential shoplifter.
The woman doesn’t purchase anything, but she also doesn’t steal anything. She just leaves.
“Thank you so much for doing that,” my supervisor said. “I would’ve done it myself, but you’re so much more intimidating. I’m too tiny — I wouldn’t scare anything.”
I smirk self-consciously. Me? Intimidating? I’m 5’11”, but the idea of me holding any weight or space is foreign to me.
[image error]
II.
“You don’t really look people in the eyes when you talk.”
I smile sheepishly. I don’t deny it: when I talk, I look to the ground, to the wall, at my lap. I almost never look people directly in the eyes.
“It’s not like it’s a bad thing,” she continues on. “But it can be seen as a sign of weakness.”
“You definitely have to be careful with that,” says another friend. “As someone with a psycho ex, trust me on this one. That’s what sociopaths look for. They look for the meek ones and swoop in.”
I nod in agreement. I already know what that’s like, to attract that type of people, those who sniff out the timid. Those who can easily detect what your body language means and know that you won’t confront, won’t stand your ground, won’t put up a fight. They might not be sociopaths, but they are those who don’t exactly wrack themselves with guilt over abusing your mild-mannered nature.
They’re the ones who, at best, will play both sides of the coin to get what they want, knowing full well you won’t slip on your Big Girl Pants and call them out.
And I already know the consequences of having such people around — as well as the consequences of thinking they’ll become kinder, more considerate, less manipulative, on their own. And with each year I become more determined to not let that become a returning guest in my life.
The rest of the night, I force myself to look people more in the eyes.
“See, you already appear more confident,” says the first friend.
[image error]
III.
It’s almost a magic trick. I can take someone like me and make her the tiniest person in the room.
I’m 5’11” and yet know exactly what to do to become small and unassuming. It’s a terrible parlor trick, and the training for it is not something anyone should go through.
And it’s a trick that I’ve spent the last few years actively fighting.
So small, so unassuming, so acquiescent, that I might even become invisible to the naked eye. David Copperfield has nothing on me. He can trick people into thinking the Statue of Liberty disappeared. I can trick people into forgetting I’m even in the room.
I used to live by the motto, “I’d rather be forgotten than have someone mad at me.” I was timid and scared and went submissive at the first sign of aggression. I started clawing and scratching my way out of such a mindset, and each year I think I pick up just a little more momentum. I find a little more height, a little more space, a little more force.
But even now, the magic trick can start up, and at all the wrong times. All it takes is one confrontational remark and I’m hunched over, moving my drink around, looking to the table. A woman who is Amazonian in height is suddenly on par with the mouse behind the wall.
I told you: it’s a terrible magic trick.
[image error]
IV.
I hate when people ask me if my books are autobiographical. Partly because they’re not, and partly because they are.
The details are fiction. I’ve never worked in a bookstore while having an existential panic at 24. Likewise, I’ve never been a teenaged ballerina on the verge of going pro, or a gay Chicagoan on the verge of losing her father figure, or a widow who realizes how much of a lie her life has been.
But there’s still me in every book. Every single manuscript, I can see me. The same way Stephen King writes about alcoholics and depressives and writers down on their luck.
Details of my life always seem to sneak into the books — a character assumes the personality traits of someone I know; an experience of mine becomes the backdrop in a scene — but the biggest section of my soul found in my books is the underlying theme:
Every. single. one. of my manuscripts tell the tale of a woman becoming.
Whether she is 16 or 24 or 63. Whether she is piecing her life back together or figuring out what to do with her life. Every single one of them follows the same pattern — a woman fractured coming into her own.
And, by the end, each woman walks away with a little more of herself than she did before.
The biggest complaint I got from Chick Lit & Other Formulas for Life — the only one of my manuscripts currently out and published — was that the main character was too painfully passive for much of the book (well, that, and a slow first chapter). I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was writing an indictment against my own passivity, as well as the sheer beauty of finally standing on your own two feet — even if it is a little too late.
[image error]
V.
“You start getting addicted to not getting enough.”
My best friend and I are talking about something completely unrelated to strength or being big. But the words resonate so deeply that I yelp back, “Yes! That! That’s exactly it!”
It’s a terrible cycle. When you revert to being small & unassuming, you get used to becoming someone’s doormat.
That’s the other problem: when you’re small, you get unconsciously attached to being treated like you’re small. You go back to things that prove how insignificant you think you are. You become addicted to being fed scraps, to never getting enough, to being mistreated and taken advantage of and taken for granted.
I’ve written this as a poem, I’ve written is as a line in a few notes for my memoir, and now I’m writing it here: until you can confront your demons, you’ll forever attract people who confirm them.
[image error]
VI.
“You had to be small. It was a survival instinct.”
My husband, my therapist, my best friend — shit, any friend of mine who grew up in a similar household and shared their battle scars with me — has said this.
You learn to be small. When the world around you is volatile and unstable, being tiny means slipping through the cracks — and that means escaping the area. Being big means competing for space with the elephant in the room. And you’ll always get smashed in the stampede.
But I don’t want to be Alice in Wonderland anymore. I don’t want to touch the cake that says Eat Me and become small enough to slip through the cracks. I’m tired of reverting to minuscule when the response is to grow larger.
It’s a behavior pattern that can become impossible to break. It’s an easy-out as ingrained as learning to walk & talk. Whenever there is any heat, or confrontation, or discomfort, or anger: get small. Get really small. Show your belly and maybe the alpha dogs won’t attack.
But it’s a behavior pattern I’m breaking. I started with the body — feeling at home and strong and capable in my own, literal skin. Through martial arts and yoga and running and hiking. I build up physical strength in hopes that it would transfer over to my mind.
I know it’s a multi-pronged approach. It’s more than just getting big and hoping for the best. And I still back down too quickly. I avoid conflict to the point of madness.
But there are still moments — these precious, fleeting moments — when I use that strength to prop the rest of me up. When I remember I’m 5’11” and broad-shouldered and muscular as all get-out. When I hold my shoulders back and my head up high and go:
“You have no idea who I am. Allow me to introduce myself.”
[image error]
VII.
“Now give me your victorious pose!”
Whenever my husband takes my picture, he says that. It’s my cue to flex.
And in that, my smile gets easier — like I can better own the space because I’m reminded of my own strength. The context of the picture is not enough — it’s not enough that I’ve scaled a gigantic mountain, or found a breath-taking waterfall, or stumbled upon something wonderful, something worthy of posing next to. But it is enough to flex, to remind myself of my own strength — to have my husband remind me to remind myself of that.
Scene: It’s 2006. I’m a month or two away from my 20th birthday and standing in front of a bus stop bench in Cambridge. In front of me, my now-husband, then-newish-boyfriend, sits and laces up his shoes. Behind him, one of Cambridge’s treasured pizza shops, the light from the pizzeria spilling out from the large windows onto the sidewalk and onto the bench.
I’m dancing. It’s not much of a dance — little arm circles and head bobs and hip swivels — but I’m dancing along to the music in my head before my boyfriend finishes tying his shoes and goes into the pizza shop. I’m still outside, but I can see from my spot the guy behind the counter — a middle-aged man with grey hair and olive skin — pantomiming my dance with a smile.
My boyfriend comes out with the Gatorades he purchased.
“What did he say?” I asked.
He smiles.
“Dancing girl!” he replied, mimicking the man’s thick Mediterranean accent. “She dances for you!”
I smile sheepishly.
Scene: It’s 2017. The power is out in our neighborhood, so we opt to drive out and grab Mexican food just off the main street in the city.
Selena’s “Si Una Vez” is playing on the radio and I’m bobbing along as we wait for food.
“Dancing girl,” my husband says in the same thick accent, a quote that’s been repeated for the past decade. “She dances for you!”
“I dance for you!” I repeat back with my own terrible accident.
I stop and cock my head to the side. I go silent. I look towards the table.
“I can’t believe that was ever me,” I say after a moment. “She doesn’t feel real.”
“She was a lot smaller,” said my husband. “She hadn’t yet realized what potential she had.”
I think about that version of me. I’d probably intimidate her, even if I attempted to be small & unassuming, speaking to the floor and the wall and the ceiling but never looking her in the eye.
Or maybe I wouldn’t. Or maybe I wouldn’t try to be unassuming around her.
Maybe I would just draw her in for a hug.
“There’s no use warning you about what the next decade will bring,” I would say to her. “But you will be amazed at how strong you will become.”
[image error]
July 18, 2017
Type Four
[image error]
I’ve been blessed in my adult life with people who are primed to dive deep into the waters of the human condition — from all walks of life, these incredible people who are willing to admit we don’t have as much knowledge or control over who we are as we’d like to think we do, and that it’s vital to learn our own authentic story before — as Jeanette Winterson puts it — the story takes us in directions we don’t want to go.
Recently, a few of my friends and I have taken a pretty in-depth test, one that let us in on where we landed on the Enneagram chart. It has resulted in shakeups and breakdowns and “a ha!” eureka moments. It has resulted in constant read-ups and podcasts and turning to each other and going, “…holy shit.”
The Enneagram Personality Types have been around forever. Its origins are disputed, but it’s not exactly something created by some modern-day Bullshit Feel Good Guru (something I tend to be hyper-aware and hyper-vigilant about).
It’s older than Myers-Brigg, Jungian archetypes — perhaps only the ancient Greeks bypass it in seniority.
[image error]
I am hyper-aware and hyper-vigilant about things like this — and I know how easily something like a “personality test” can become Bullshit Feel Good Dribble. Perhaps it’s because of the industry I’m in, but I’m a constant skeptic, even in the things my heart believes in fully. I’m keen on sniffing out vague wording and cold reading and any “test” telling me things it thinks I want to hear.
With that in mind, I took the Enneagram test.
[image error]
Type Four. The Romantic. The Individualist. With a Wing 5 (which technically makes me “The Bohemian”) — and with Types 2 & 7 bringing up the rear with a close, tied second place.
I read up on the personality types — all of them — to make sure I was not cherry-picking what I wanted to hear.
Again, the last thing I need is Bullshit Feel Good Dribble from a Bullshit Feel Good Guru.
But there was no way around it. Type 4. Wing 5. The Romantic. The Individualist. The Bohemian.
[image error]
The write-ups for the personality types are quite possibly the opposite of Feel Good Dribble. They’re Punch You In The Gut Paragraphs. They’re Call You Out On Your Bullshit Podcasts. They break down what you do when you’re healthy, what you do when you’re not so stable — how you interact with those around you and what it takes to make those relationships go sour.
Type 4. Desperate to belong but also feeling like they can’t. Unable to fit in, and yet perversely unwilling to fit in. Aching to be part of the group but also proud of how different they are.
(Something I used to file away as plain and simple “social introversion”, but becomes fleshed out here.)
Type 4. The kind that seeks out intense emotions, more so than any other type. The kind to dive into the deepest waters of their mind if only to see if this will be the moment they drown. The kind that puts on sad music and dwells on negative experiences — because there is something real and authentic in the dark side.
(Possibly the reason why I’m vigilant against Feel Good Guru Bullshit — why I lead my yoga classes with a firm grasp on that dark side. Why I refuse to play with hippy language like “breathe in love” and instead play with what hurts, what gets us stuck, and what we can realistically do about it.)
Type 4. The kind to get upset if their environment is not conducive to where they are right now — as if the radio should’ve read my mind, or the skies should’ve shifted to my whims, or the clutter in the kitchen should’ve known I was in a bad headspace.
(This is not a trait that I’m proud of.)
Type 4. The kind that is unapologetically open about who they are, warts and all. The kind that gets real in front of others as a way to say, “Hey, it’s okay. You can be upfront with your demons, too.”
(Two words: This Blog.)
(Or two more general words: My Writing.)
Type 4. With a desperate and palpable need to be understood and heard. A type that doesn’t want fame or flattery — but wants to stun a person, a room, an entire subset of people, into silence, to create a platform to feel deeply and introspectively. And, through that platform, finally feel known.
(Again. My writing — specifically, how weird I feel when people compliment me on it, but how alive I feel when people say that what I’ve said moved them in some way.)
Type 4. The kind that constantly feels like something is missing. The kind that is insatiable and can’t handle the mundane. The kind that will drop an experience because it wasn’t as transcendental as they wanted it to be. The kind that needs to be overwhelmed with passion, consumed with what’s in front of them.
(This is known as “chasing dragons” in my household.)
Type 4. The kind that embraces pain, but has a tendency to mask pain with pain. A tendency to cling to a pain that is easier to process, and then keep it around because dear God this pain is easier to handle than the other pains that lurk below.
(Oh, that places I could go with that statement.)
[image error]
I’ve done these deep dives before (Type Fours are known for them, after all.) And the last three years have been nothing but deep dives to figure out how I tick before I learn too late and mess up my life (again).
But, with this, the deep dive has felt more like a scuba dive — prolonged and going into depths & locations that I could never have predicted, but with a system in place so I don’t drown. But, every once in a while, there’s a moment where the oxygen tank is low and I’m reminded of how perilous of a place I’m in.
Moments when I listen to a podcast and burst into tears on my way to class, for instance.
[image error]
Waking up is tough. And the older we get, the more violent the wake up calls have to be. And even then, we have to press forward. We can’t hide behind the covers until the alarm goes away and then close our eyes again. It’s so easy — too easy — to think we know ourselves and we already know what sets us off and what gets under our skin. And the older we get, the more that feeling can solidify (and the more we feel like we need that to be the case, for sheer survival sake).
It’s not enough to know we’ll eventually emerge on the other side a healthier, potentially even happier, person. Sometimes that security in thinking we know who we are has to be ripped from us before we’d even be willing to dive in.
(In short, we have to be shoved off the cliff and have no choice but to stop flailing, assume the position, and get ready for impact.)
[image error]
But this is more than just diving in to what makes me — what makes us — tick. This has been a deeply reassuring expedition across the connectedness of all things. To see where my personality type overlaps with this friend, that friend, this person, that person. To be given literal numbers to show how interwoven the human condition is.
This has been a chance to lay bare in front of people that I know will not leave me naked and exposed to the elements — something I crave more and more as each year passes, as I get older & older and realize I can’t just pass the time around people who just want to pass the time.
(But, then again, a Four would totally say that.)
It has been one more weaving in this tapestry that I am convinced we are all a part of: a belief system that I hold in defiance in front of the Feel Good Guru Bullshit and outright yell, “The image doesn’t have to be bright and shiny in order for it to be beautiful.”
[image error]
The weather during my drive back from class is intense. The sky is a patchwork of opposites. Perfect blue skies that erupt into downpours within seconds.
I love this type of weather. As I’ve tried to assert time and time again, I don’t hate the rain: I just hate murk. I hate mist. I hate grey overcast skies. It can rain, but give me FIRE with that rain. Give me lightening and hail. Make something come down with its intensity.
(“Make something come down with its intensity.” And thus sums me up quite well, warts and all.)
On that drive home, I’m listening to an Enneagram podcast, this time about a different personality type — Type 8, The Challenger. Because this is not just about understanding myself (and pouring out so others can understand me better). This is about all the different ways we all tick — about the different threads in this cosmic image, about how we all behave in this tapestry, about how that texture feels underneath our skin.
(And, Type 4s are supposed to bring texture to the world of art, anyway.)
[image error]
I remember making a homophone error in a message a few days back; I meant to say I was looking forward to “pouring our hearts out,” over lunch — instead, I said, “puring our hearts.”
There was something so accurate in that wording mistake.
(That Freudian slip, if you will.)
[image error]
There are plenty of places to take the Enneagram test, but this is the one I took. This is the part where I assert that I’m not in affiliation with the Enneagram Institute, nor will I get any financial kickback (or any other type of compensation) for linking them.
Besides — a Four would HATE that type of inauthenticity.
[image error]
July 7, 2017
Urgency
[image error]
I can’t do beach vacations.
At least, not the type where you lay in a lounge chair all day (to quote Bill Engvall: “With a mai tai in hand, and keep them coming until I fall over.”)
To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, I’m a running, jumping, climbing trees type of person — even when the location is tropical. Even in Puerto Rico — at a resort made for relaxing on a lounge chair with mai tai in hand — I had to keep moving. The idea of being idle all day sounded like hell.
“I’ve got an hour of laying on the beach in me, tops,” I say to my husband, as we’re discussing our anniversary trip — a trip that has, not once, been a beach vacation, despite that being the #1 way my husband relaxes.
“Why would that be so difficult?” he asks.
“Because…I’m anxious,” I reply.
“But, why the anxiousness?” My husband asks, his usual inquiring. There’s nothing accusatory about it. He simply wants to better figure out how I tick.
“Because…there’s an overwhelming sense of urgency,” I say. “I’d spend the entire time feeling like I should be doing something. I’d feel like I was wasting my time. There’s nothing relaxing about that.”
[image error]
I’m an anxious person. I do nothing to hide it and everything to remedy it. But even anxiety doesn’t fully explain my overwhelming sense of urgency.
That sense of urgency is stronger than my exhaustion, my hunger levels — even the anxiety itself. That feeling that time is fleeting and life is unpredictable and it could all be gone tomorrow and there’s just so much to see so I must do all the things and do all the things now.
It’s what catapults me out of my comfort zone, fills up my schedule, makes people scratch their heads and go, “How do you have the energy for that?” I’m fueled by an almost hysterical urgency. I’m far too close to Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
“I’m constantly anxious that I’m not living my life to the fullest.”
The only difference between her and me is that I wouldn’t dream of ever deleting memories — even the painful, haunting ones. To remove sections of experience, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum, sounds like a hell way worse than laying idly about.
[image error]
The anniversary trip starts as something simple — a flight to Montana, a trip to Glacier National Park. We check in with our favorite airline and find out the their closest stop is in Salt Lake City. We went there four years ago as part of our San Francisco road trip and quickly fell in love with a city that we had thought would be a quick, boring stopover before we got to the good stuff.
And just like that, we are mapping out our new itinerary: fly in to Utah and drive through Idaho and arrive at Montana before looping down to Wyoming to spend a few days at Yellowstone and then coming back to a few days in Salt Lake City.
My heart swells. An adventure is born.
[image error]
Getting to Montana proves to be a nightmare of Kafka proportions. The entire time, I’m anxious. I need to get going. There needs to be another flight. There are things to do and see and experience and I’m stuck in this airport that I know far too well at this point. I must go now. Necissito ir. Debo ir. Vamos vamos vamos.
I’m an urgent bundle of nerves as we take our flights out the next day, and I don’t start fully breathing again until I see Salt Lake City outside of my plane’s window.
[image error]
I’m naturally a morning person – even more so now that the sun rises so early. I can’t remember the last time I slept in past 6:30, and even more so past 7. This also means I go to bed by 9:30 – 10 at the latest. I wonder what will happen when we travel across two time zones and land in Mountain Time, where their 9:30 is our 11:30 and their 7 is our 9.
But when we get to the western side of the time zone, I shift effortlessly. In fact, I find myself having the opposite problem. The sun technically sets at 9:45, but we’re so high up that the sky is light until nearly midnight. It takes work to get into bed by 11 – and yet I am still up by 5:30.
“I think living out here would make me a bit of a night owl,” I muse. “A sleep-deprived night owl, but a night owl all the same.”
“You’re not an early riser – you’re solar powered,” says my husband, referencing a term I constantly use for myself, to describe seasonal affectation, the murk of misty days and the unstoppable power of sunny ones.
The sun is my reminder that the world is out there. The sun provides space to get out and achieve. I have a hard time ignoring its siren-like call.
“Apparently I just chase the sun,” I reply, and it makes me think of my summer semester in Northern Ireland — of going to bed by 1 and waking up by 4 because that’s just how the daylight is during the summer that far north. And how fine I felt — until I had to sit down for a lecture, at which point I would fight harder to stay awake than I would to take notes.
[image error]
The pace of the vacation is relentless, even more so after losing a day. There is just too much to see, too much to do.
And it’s so hard not to add on. One of our hikes brings us barely 20 miles from the US/Canadian border. So close that border patrol passes us as we navigate the dirt road to the trail head. It is actually, physically painful to return back to the car and back into town — to literally turn my back on Canada. Alberta is right there – right there. Why not add on another day. Drive to Calgary. Knock off another Canadian territory from the list. I actually ache as we drive south again, the potential border in my rear view.
Someday. As the car lulls me into into a semi-doze, I plan out a road trip across the southern territories of Canada, hitting Calgary along the way.
Someday.
[image error]
We’re at a small restaurant at the dead end of Glacier’s smaller entranceways. The spot serves as food and showers and general supplies for campers and day hikers and those on backpacking excursions. I have left everything in the car, with nothing on hand as I sit down to eat — not my phone, not my wallet, not the pack I’d just lugged 20+ miles in in the last 48 hours.
I open the menu and see that they serve hard cider – the only alcohol I really drink.
“If they card me, I can just run back to the car and get my ID.”
“You think they’ll card you?” My husband asks.
I shrug. I know I’ve hit the age where I don’t really need proof that I’m 21+. It’s not something I worry about or mourn, but a simple fact of life.
“How old do I look right now?” I ask – a genuine question.
My husband looks me over, furrows his brows, and goes, “Younger than you typically do.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you actually look…refreshed,” he adds with a smirk on his face — because who honestly looks refreshed after spending all day hiking?
“It’s almost like this is exactly how I relax,” I jibe with a smirk. Almost like what replenishes me is quenching that sense of urgency.
I order a cider with my dinner. I don’t get carded.
[image error]
We still have a few days left of our trip when I find myself mourning the drives from our hotel to Glacier National Park. My heart aches for those open roads with the mountains in front of and beside us. For some reason, that is what I’m missing and what I am going to miss the most. That drive through the winding roads with barely any traffic and no traffic lights in sight, where the Big Sky Country sun blazes and the music hits the soul just right.
There was no sense of urgency at all. I was exactly where I need to be. And in those moments I am completely free.
[image error]
That sense of urgency is the most potent force about me. More potent than my anxiety (even my at times crippling social anxiety), more potent than my fatigue, more potent than my doubts. It gets me out of bed at absurdly early hours of the morning. It gets me off my computer if I’ve been lounging around for too long. It might raise my stress levels and keep me anxious, but I have a hard time seeing it as a bad thing.
It keeps me going: trying new things, exploring new places, going on more adventures. It fuels me when nothing else will. And I want that fuel. This life is nothing short of a miraculously rare chance for the universe to witness itself — and by God I will bear witness to as much of this universe as I can.
[image error]
There’s a part of me that wishes I could find relaxation and replenishment in laying still, especially since that’s how my husband relaxes. But it’s just not in my DNA. I’m not even the type of writer who thrives on being still and letting the mind do its thing. Almost every poem, every novel, every blog post, has been written in the heat of the moment, in the middle or tail end of the adventure. It takes too much mind power to be still to actually be creative.
I promise my husband the next anniversary trip can be a beach trip. Be on the beach, no major plans. But I already find myself planning what I’ll do in that hypothetical beach scenario — early morning runs, paddle boards, reading… but, ultimately, my goal is to see if that urgency can calm itself down, at least for a week. Because I know I need to slow down. I know I do. I’ve been exhausting myself for the last decade, going at breakneck paces across all platforms. It’s simply not sustainable. Urgency might serve as a fuel, but it’s one that burns a little too bright sometimes.
If I am to actually bear witness to the world around me, I can’t have one toe already into the next adventure. Constantly look to the future and I’ll miss the present moment — which is all we have, at the end of the day.
[image error]
We take a red-eye back to Boston and get three or so hours of fitful, restless sleep. The sun is shining and the air in New Hampshire is perfect when we come back home. The very idea of going back to bed when the world around me is so beautiful seems inconceivable. But I force myself to crawl into bed and snuggle into my pillow and close my eyes. I’m out like a light for another three hours, this time with two grateful cats snuggled close against my legs.
On my way to teach an evening class that Thursday, I pick up a project I did during a girl’s night. I had painted a New Hampshire-theme on a ceramic mug: an outline the state on the outside, an amateur rendition of mountains on the inside. It wouldn’t be ready until I was already in Montana, which meant the earliest I could get it was upon returning.
I walk into the ceramic painting studio, jet-lagged and exhausted and already aching for another go at the Rockies, and pick up my mug. It was fitting, to get my mug at that moment, barely 24 hours after returning home. The more I travel, the more I realize New Hampshire is my home base — and the more I appreciate it being so. It’s my anchor in a sea of urgent, hysterical wandering.
New Hampshire has a calming effect on me. Whether I’m driving through the countryside or hiking the mountains or even just attempting some stillness in my hammock in the backyard. I can turn to the trees and the sky and the fresh air when I feel that anxiousness rising. And I can almost feel the trees whispering in response:
“There’s no need for urgency. You are exactly where you need to be.”
[image error]
June 25, 2017
The Adventure
The flight to Orlando goes off without a hitch. That much we get. At that point, the most annoying part of our journey is the fact that our connecting flight in Orlando — which will bring us to our first destination in Salt Lake City — was delayed by 45 minutes. But we board without issue and I’m already looking forward to when we land — when we can pick up the rental car and drive to our hotel and rest our travel-weary heads before embarking on our mini-road trip across Idaho and into Montana. I’m already looking forward to the dawning of the next day, when the sun will peak over the mountains of Utah and we start our adventure. We’re two days out from our 6-year wedding anniversary and my head & heart are filled with what we will do.
As we’re preparing for takeoff — as we are literally preparing for takeoff, plane on the runway, engines firing — the captain comes on and tells us we have to turn back to the gate. Something is wrong with the air conditioning system.
We return back to the gate. We wait in the plane, all the while a very upbeat captain with a slight brogue tells us that it shouldn’t take long — and that he doesn’t want to deboard the plane over something as minor as making sure the cooling and heating systems are working.
Twenty minutes later, we have to deboard the plane.
We’re in the Orlando airport for an additional 5 hours. I try to keep my complaining to a minimum. I’m nervous about the rental car place still being open by the time we hit Utah. I’m frustrated that we our arrival time for Salt Lake City comes and goes and we still haven’t even reboarded the plane. But I try to keep it together. What good would complaining do. This is a minor setback. Better delayed than canceled. Keep it positive.
There is a gaggle of cranky, overtired toddlers. I send them a mental note: “I feel you.”
Around 12:30 in the morning, we finally board. I immediately try to get comfortable, counting the minutes until we’re in the air and the lights are off and I can finally get some rest. It is easily 3+ hours past my bedtime.
As we are taxiing the runway, a woman in the back says that she smells burning. She’s getting anyone’s attention, which includes the captain’s. The captain attempts to figure out the smell, and when he can’t smell anything, he opts to return to the gate, just to get the go-ahead from maintenance (but that he doesn’t expect that will take long).
We return to the gate. Twenty minutes later, the captain tells us the plane is now out of commission.
Flight is canceled. No other planes available. Next flight is tomorrow. We’ll have to fly back to Boston, just to take a direct flight — a direct flight we had opted out of because we didn’t want to lose a day like that for our adventure.
At that moment, I burst into tears.
“This is an adventure-type of vacation,” my husband says as we wait for our luggage. “Things go wrong on adventures.”
I try to look on the bright side: they’re putting us in the Hilton, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum from our no-frills Best Western in Utah. Perhaps a comfortable bed with high-thread-count sheets will offset the fact that I’m hysterical with exhaustion. Offset the fact that I’m going to lose an entire day. Offset the fact that it starves us a day in Montana. Offset the fact that I’m going to bed at 2:30 and I’m naturally up by 5:30 no matter what. I try to put all of that out of my mind, sink into the comfy bed, and fall asleep.
At 5:15, the fire alarm goes off, violently waking us from our delirious slumber.
I try to laugh — it has gotten comically bad at this point — but I burst into another set of tears instead.
[image error]
The alarm doesn’t fully turn off until 6. No real reason is given. Not that I’d want to be sticking around to find out anyway. I’m officially past my breaking point.
I crawl into bed still crying, and my husband rubs my back before wrapping his arms around me.
“I’m here,” he coos, and I immediately feel a little more at ease.
I drift in and out, getting in perhaps 45 minutes of semi-sleep before giving up and leaving the room, finding a common area so as not to deprive my husband of sleep as well.
There are not enough mantras and affirmations and meditation techniques in the world to counteract all the negativity I feel. I’m frustrated at the stupid plane and its stupid AC system. I’m pissed at the woman who said something about the smell and decide she did it just to feel important. I’m devastated that we’re losing money and a day in Montana. I’m heartbroken over my ruined plans. I’m irritated and sleep-deprived and nauseous and nauseated by it all.
I’m on an adventure. I tell myself. Things go wrong on adventures.
[image error]
According to my husband, when my mother-in-law would find herself lost, she would tell her children that they were on an adventure. Something that could be annoying at best and panic-inducing at worst was now something that added flavor to the day. When asked if they were lost, she’d always chipperly respond, “No — we’re on an adventure!”
I envy that mindset — envy the fact that my husband can see this mess as exactly that, as part of an adventure — and I wish I could switch over to it. But I know it’s not as simple as that; the human brain, as malleable as it is, doesn’t shift gears so abruptly. Deciding you’ll just stop feeling so intensely about something and instead feel the opposite is akin to shoving your car into reverse as it’s going 90 MPH. You can’t just force a mindset, not without longterm consequences.
But I still try to focus on that. Adventures are thrilling because there’s an element of the unknown. Adventures mean taking a bit of a risk. Adventures mean don’t be too attached to specific plans because they could change in an instant. Adventures are meant to have some element of danger, even if its a danger of having your vacation plans go awry.
Adventure means you can prepare all you want and still get the unexpected. Adventure isn’t meant to be easy on the soul. Adventure is meant to fill it in some way.
I can’t help but draw parallels to other aspects in my life. Perhaps its because this vacation is part of our yearly tradition — a trip to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Perhaps its because it’s been an intensely introspective time and I pull parallels like bricks for a repaired foundation. But I see them lay out before me, as if begging to be taken in.
My husband’s and my first dance was to Angel & Airwaves’s “The Adventure.” We chose that song partly because no one else had done it, partly because we were fervent Angel & Airwaves fans back then, and partly because the song resonated so perfectly with what we were feeling.
Hello, here I am. Here we go — life’s waiting to begin.
[image error]
I can’t live, I can’t breathe, unless you do this with me.
I once derided marriage. Said it was what people did when they wanted to make each other miserable. And it can. I look around — look at what I grew up around and what I see in the present day — and see so many people in toxic, dysfunctional marriages, where their roles are almost addictively stuck on making the other miserable (while guarding themselves against the oncoming misery).
But, when done right — or, at least, as right as any of us can do it — marriage is that adventure. It’s a step forward with an element of risk. It’s a “don’t be too attached to specific plans because who knows what’s going to happen next.” It’s a step into the unknown. It’s knowing things will go awry and that there’s no such thing as prepared.
Just like any adventure, when done wrong, it is a draining, potentially life-ruining experience. But, when done right, it can fill the soul. It can tap into exactly what needed tapping into and restore a part of your humanity you didn’t realize was lacking.
I wanna have the same last dream again,
The one where I wake up and I’m alive.
I return back to the hotel room and can hear my husband’s alarm through the door. I walk in and find the bathroom door closed. Filled with emotions, I turn off the alarm on his phone, pull up Angels & Airwaves on my phone, and start playing “The Adventure” — and I immediately burst into another set of tears.
Halfway through the song, my husband emerges.
“Good morning!” he says. “How are you feeling?”
I look up with tear-filled eyes and laugh out an, “Emotional!”
“I can see that.” And, with that, he pulls me in for a hug. The hug turns into a reincarnation of our first dance, swaying back and forth to the music. His shoulder is soon soaked with my tears and I am crying for a thousand different reasons. He holds me a little closer and a little firmer as the song plays into its final refrain. It’s not spoken this time, but is implied as loudly as the music itself.
“I’m here.”
Hello, here I am (do this with me),
And here we go, life’s waiting to begin (do this with me).
Here we go, life’s waiting to begin.
Life’s waiting to begin.
June 20, 2017
To Do With Myself
[image error]
On Sunday — on Father’s Day, no less — I finished my in-person exam/practicum, thus completing my 300-hour training in yoga therapy.
It capped off an amazingly busy May into June; a time where there seemed to be so much going on at once that I could focus only on the most immediate deadline. From my maid of honor duties, to my best friend’s wedding; from leading workshops, to taking them; from hosting dinners & barbecues, to my in-laws coming in from Ohio.
It also capped off a gently transformative and evolutionary 10 months, a time where things fell into place — where light was shined where it needed to be shone — and everything tumbled into the exact spots they were always meant to be. It was a 10 months that were never calm, never linear, never one-thing-at-a-time.
In September, when I just started the training, I was finishing up my young adult novel about the ballerina who quits the dance world and joins a boxing gym in secret. From October to November, I was enrolled in a group fitness certification course, reading its textbook with the same blazing speed as I was reading my yoga anatomy one.
When I finally took my exam and passed, I sat back and went, “Well, what am I going to do with myself now?” — assuming with my trademark naiveté that this would be the crux of my multi-tasking.
[image error]
In January, I got an email from the same group fitness course, asking me to take their beta version of their newest course — and if I could take the course and the exam in a timely fashion, I’d essentially get a chance to take the personal training course I’ve always wanted to take, but for dirt cheap. I then spent the next 3 weeks at a blistering pace, making sure I fulfilled my requirements in time for the deadline.
In February and into March, I found myself at another blistering pace, this time writing my newest novel — this one about a wife who learned just how much of a lie her life had been after her husband passes away from a sudden heart attack (and another women still desperate to reconcile her past, decades later). In 5 weeks, I wrote that novel — the fastest I’ve ever written any manuscript, ever. Within weeks of finishing, I signed up for the personal training course, diving in at the same blistering pace as I did with the second group fitness course, and taking my exam only a month after signing up.
I didn’t even get a chance to ask, “What am I going to do with myself?” At that point, it was only a few months until my best friend’s wedding, and I had a bridal shower & a bachelorette party to clumsily put together from my spot in New England. I was hightailing it to Chicago one weekend and having people over the next and going to New Jersey for the wedding the weekend after that and having my final yoga therapy seminar the weekend after that — everything happening at such a breakneck pace that I almost tumbled into my final exam, pushed by the sheer momentum of everything behind me.
“And now you’re done with all of your trainings,” said my husband, facetiously adding: “What are you going to do with yourself?”
The answer, in the manic swirl of my life, is quick in the short term: I’m making good on my plans to visit the northwest — returning to Utah before immediately driving through Idaho and into Montana and Wyoming. I leave soon for the mountains of Glacier National Park.
What am I to do with myself? Pack.
And maybe, in the longer term, it’s somewhat as quick as well. There are two new manuscripts now to edit, to query, to edit again, to query some more, to submit to anyone who will give it a passing glance. There’s an older manuscript that might be entering its newest phase in my efforts to get it published. And there are other trainings on the horizon I want to take part in, ones that will help me with my niche of therapeutic exercise.
But, really — what am I to do with myself? The true long term answer?
Just be.
[image error]
I’m not in the same place I was a year or two back. I’m no longer the teacher who had to fill her schedule with classes and workshops and subbing and training, because God help her if her mind went idle for even a moment in the midst of everything that was happening. I’m not even in the same place I was in September, where a hysterical heart had morphed into a determined soul and I was checking off all the necessary things I wanted to do, what I wanted to bring with me, and what I needed to leave behind in order to take the next step forward.
I’m known for having an insane schedule, for going at a breakneck pace, for getting things done in ways that makes people go, “How did you have time for that?” I know I’m industrious at my core. I have a hard time with just hanging around.
But it’s time for that. Exactly that. It’s time for more afternoons in the hammock. It’s time for more early morning hikes and late evening pleasure reads. It’s time to do one thing at a time — lead my class, write my assignment — and not wonder how much I can multi-task, how much can get squeezed out of a minute.
I want to bask in the outcome of what I’ve been through and where I am now. I want to spread out that hysterical heart and that determined soul before me. I want to notice from afar everything that both of them have been through in the past three years and relish in how they’re — how I’m — on the other side of it. I want take a moment and pause and realize I did not get lead astray when life said, “I’m going to make you happy. But first, I’ll make you strong.”
I want to let the world slow down and settle in. There have been enough upheavals, enough crises, enough demolitions. I want to spend as much time as I can in that calm after the storm, when the sea smells like adventure and the air feels replenished. I want to let myself feel light knowing that I did make it out all right — perhaps with a few scars, but with plenty more accomplishments to show for it. And now I want to sit with the fruits of my labor and feast.
I want to simply be, and enjoy what it means to be.
But first: Montana.
[image error]
June 6, 2017
Thelma & Louise
My maid of honor speech — at least, the written draft:
Like any good maid of honor speech, I’m starting off with an anecdote.
(Bear with me on this one – at least this anecdote involves us jumping out of a plane.)
I should just jump ahead and say that it was a skydiving plane, for skydiving purposes. It wasn’t like we were on a commercial jet and decided, “YOLO.”
But that’s just what we did the summer after our freshman year of college. And it all came about as we were driving around the shorelines in our hometown area south of Boston, reliving the days when we would do this practically every evening and weekend in high school. I forget exactly who proposed the idea at first, but I do remember the conversation going a little something like this:
“Do you want to go skydiving?”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s do that.”
And, with that, we turned the car around, drove back to her house, got online to find a skydiving (because this was before smartphones back in the dark ages when you had to find a computer to access the internet), found a skydiving place, and made a reservation that day.
Two weeks later, we jumped out of a plane.
[image error]
In many ways, that embodies our friendship. We have been the Thelma to each other’s Louise, only somehow we keep making it out okay every time our car goes off the proverbial cliff. From when we were middle school kids who felt like such adults because we got Slurpees at the 7-11, to high school kids who felt like such adults because we drove cars and had part-time jobs, to college kids who felt like such adults because we were in control of what we did with our days, to present-day, thirtysomething adults, who look at the real world and go, “Oh damn. THIS is what it feels like to be an adult.” – with the grim realization that being an adult is not as light as grabbing Slurpees and working on the weekends and waking up in time for 9 a.m. Survey of English Lit 1 class.
But that’s been the bedrock of our dynamic. Even when our lives started going in completely opposite directions – as I moved north of Boston and she moved West – we were still the Thelma to the other’s Louise. Facebook chat and weekday evening phone calls replaced our drives through Cohasset and Hull, but that didn’t stop us from being on the same wavelength, weirdly living lives that were simultaneously parallel and complete opposite. That didn’t stop us turning to each other when live got amazing, stressful, difficult, wonderful, or just all around heavy.
That included turning to each other during the highs and lows of our romantic lives – and how, even when we were clearly living those two different lives, our situations would parallel each other in beautiful synchronistic ways.
The first thing I noticed when Jess told me about Brian was how differently she talked about him. In the 22 years I had known her, I had never heard her talk about a guy like that before. The energy was different, her tone was different. It was the tone of someone who had found her person, her Capital P Person. And flying out to Chicago and meeting him in person only solidified that this was different, this was special.
And when she told me that she knew this was the person she was going to marry – that he was indeed her Capital P Person – and how beautiful and wonderful and outright terrifying such a revelation was, all I could think was:
“Thelma, you got this.”
I once heard marriage likened to jumping out of a plane together, hand-in-hand and hoping for the best. And all I have to say to that is — first — you already have experience doing exactly that, so you’re golden. And secondly, I don’t think there is a more perfect partner to be jumping in tandem with.
To an amazing woman, to an absolutely beautiful couple, and to many, many happy years together.
[image error]
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4505.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4508.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4557.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4559.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4564.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4576.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4580.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/img_4583.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_4198.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_4202.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_4069-1.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_4056.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_3739.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_3871.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_3086.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_2801.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_3166.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_3220.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_3890.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_3969-1.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/img_4014.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://thatabbyrose.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/img_2692.jpg){kind=link}