Exceptional moments might require recording and sometimes the mundane ones do too.  I’m not sure anyone knows the difference between the two at the time and we all just do the best we can.

Ro sings and I got to watch him on stage last night.  It was a weird moment, where I sat in the audience and breathed while underneath I was roiling over being nervous and excited and so proud.  As if I had anything to do with it.  But still, my heart was so full to watch him do something he loved.

Oh and you know, I looked stunning.  Not by my own approximations, but by some else’s.  A compliment laid at my feet when I didn’t expect it.  It was a pretty great evening all in all.

And now to the meaty bits.  No dirty jokes, I run a clean(ish) blog thank you very much.

For the record, I used to use sympathy strategically.  (Admitting this makes me nervous a bit.)  Imagine if you will, a very aware child, maybe the age of 8 or 9.  She was so disconnected that the only thing she understood about the recital of her posthumous origins, (gravely repeated in a low voice) was that the moment earned her something.

At that time, I was too young to even understand what it was, but I knew it was currency.  I learned that I could trade on it.  This currency was made of weird, abnormal, single-parent origins, of fear, of pity — it didn’t matter what the makeup of the currency was, I just understood that I was forgiven a little more or left alone or at the very least could usually prevent the challenge.

People who forget what it’s like to be children may not remember the challenge, so I will try to describe it as best as I can.  Of course, my experience may be a unique one and if that is the case, hopefully it’s at least an entertaining description.

The Challenge

Growing up, much of our time is spent attempting to define, describe and accurately communicate who we are to those around us.  Why does it matter who we are?  The very us-iness of us determines who our friends are, who our enemies are, if we are allowed respect, if we are tripped when the teacher isn’t looking, or if someone snickers when you cry.  It matters.  Mostly, these assertions of self occur unconsciously.  There is no real understanding of what boundaries are set by declaring that, “my favorite color is blue, I only eat bananas that are still a little green, my favorite place is Paradise, CA” and so on.  These are the bits we present and parade as representative of who we are and even into adulthood, these small preferences are thought to say something.  To make up a whole.

Along with those bits of preference, we each add tone.  This is the undeclared but still perceivable — the tenor of each voice, the word choice, the manner in which we assert our thoughts and opinions into our interactions with others.  Qualities of abrasiveness, politeness, kindness, each of these are characteristics that we cannot assign to ourselves (no matter our wishes).  Signifiers of self that are given instead of taken.  This where that cliché truth lives: it is not so much what you say, but how you say it.  I will get to how what you say is taken, I promise.

So these two pieces, our overt declarations of individuality (the taken pieces that make up the whole) and the subtle declarations of how we feel about all of it (the who, what, where, why and how of what we feel and the resulting naming of our traits) blend into the ever fluid preception that we give to others of our self.

Perception in itself, is a fickle and empty promise. We strive, when we are attempting to exist in earnest, to give those around us accurate, clear versions of who we are.  The fickle and emptiness exists because no matter how clear I may make and how sincerely I may believe my statements, actions and conveyances of self to be, there will always be the perceiver’s thoughts and feelings that receive me and color it all.  The idea that I am still trying to allow is that you only get to control what you give of yourself or what you make available to those around you and you have no control over what they make take or reject.

So, “the challenge” happened to me quite a bit.  I was a suck up to teachers, a know it all and I reveled in being right.  I was an only child who knew best and never truly related to her peers.  In that moment of being correct, in that pride, I found a place that felt like the only place I was allowed to occupy freely.    I was tested on what I projected as my self often.  I privately think of our declarations of self as a shell.  This is a remnant of my introvert history, of when I spent so much time hiding from the people around me. Because I was weird, because I didn’t start off being ashamed of the weirdness, I was periodically targeted.  I’m ashamed to say that I may have been the bully as often as the bullied, but I can’t remember.  I do know that my heart beat wildly and my ears roared when finally someone decided, that just maybe, I was full of shit.

Then they’d try to prove it.

They’d rap their knuckles on the shell of my self until they found the hollow spot and then they’d throw boulders at it.

The motivations for inaccurately representing ourselves are, by my own experience reduced to the following: loneliness, fear, anger, desire, pride, shame and the overlap of any or all of our basest emotions and desires.  That list is easily expandable, but these are the ones that I used to justify the armor that my lies created.

***

This is something that needs more rumination and so much work that I likely will grapple at the mere edges of it for all of my life.

I am the person I am, not in spite of my mother, but because of her.

It doesn’t mean I forgive any of it.  Nor does it absolve those around me who knew and did nothing.  I cannot with any honesty say that I went through my childhood without being in fear of my life.  That single statement may make the preceding one unforgivable. As an adult I cannot fathom that anyone had any inkling – that a sliver of a percent of awareness of my torment existed.  Because, if it did – if it did and that person did nothing is… well it’s why I existed for so long on the loneliest island.

I am not one to assert that I know the truth.  I grasp at words that maybe mean something, but who the fuck knows.  Don’t get offended.  Don’t feel like you need to defend or console or acknowledge.  Sometimes it really isn’t about you, and that’s okay.

 

Habits take what, three or so weeks to form?  Well here goes the third entry of an every day blog 10 days in.  The whole of my existence is a Work In Progress.  There’s a hashtag for that.  #WIP  If those were my initials it would be fitting, but alas.

I started making To Do lists again today.  It felt lovely and empowering and centering.  I spent too long going without making them.  I tried to send emails in the morning and the evening with the lists but I found that there is something ridiculously satisfying about writing the words, working then crossing them off one by one.

My To Do lists are not necessarily daily – there are items that carry over.  Tasks that once complete create new tasks, but that is okay.  I felt accomplished and together and good.  I will never quell the fear of failure, of being below average.  Do other people have this lingering fear?  I worry every day that I will do something to endanger my job.  Normal?  What is normality anyway – if not some bar we set for ourselves to clear to ensure we are okay.  I am used to other people’s normal being so far out of range for my own life… it’s laughable to think about comparing myself now.

I had an apartment manager once, her name was one of those cute ends in a vowel, nickname sounding names that seems to fit someone young, but she was a lovely older woman with adult children, a serious demeanor but kind and friendly enough.  I respect her still (excepting the fact that when you tell someone not to worry about cleaning the carpet when they move out you’d think that would be the end of it…).

Ms. T, the apartment manager told me a story when I sat down and talked to her about my troubles with H.  She said that her children were not with her current husband, but the former.  She had four kids.  He was not a bad person but there were moments when he was unkind.  She told me that in relationships each of you starts with a clear pathway to one another.  That our actions build walls and eventually the smallest thing – something that may not have even been fight-worthy in the beginning can place – can put the final brick up.  Once the wall is done there is no tearing it down.  I cried to her about how stupid I felt.  I remember having a co-worker ask me years ago if I loved H, if that was why I stayed with him when no one else thought I should.

I said I didn’t think so.  It wasn’t love.  Stubbornness and my anger at members of my family for finally having an opinion about my well-being when I no longer needed or asked them to have one.  H was a result of the fact that I really didn’t want to feel alone, and I did.  I felt so alone.  I learned over the last 5 years that there are different kinds of loneliness and that you can be asleep next to someone who says they love you and still be abjectly alone.  That’s really the scarier of the two I think.  I’d rather have the hope for one day finding something real than feel suffocated by the sheer impossibility of having a companion who makes you feel more isolated.  That is me now, and it wasn’t me then.  Or, I didn’t realize there was that second, scarier option and that it was staring me in the face with doe-brown eyes.

Of course the memories linger.  I wonder if there will be a day when he stops crossing my mind.  I hope so, and I hope that it comes sooner than when her name stops crossing Ro’s lips.  He has his own ghost of course and she too exists for us both.  He invoked her into being.  In defense, I invoked my own ghost.  I hope it wasn’t just defensively, but I can’t tell if I am the better or the worse liar.

H has left me alone since my birthday, that last phone call and series of texts.  This is where I work now.  I hope you have a good day.  I wish we could have been friends.

I did try to be his friend.  He returned to me by reciting Ro’s address to me, telling me he was aware of the kind of car Ro drove and then proceeded to attempt to slip paper thin wedges between Ro and I.  Of course it worked just a little bit and then backfired massively, when I told H that his behavior was scary and obsessive and that if it continued I would need to file a restraining order.  Of course I had to tell Ro and that reaction, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been – but it reinforced my shame.

The brick wall matters, because now I am acutely aware of it always.  I try to notice what constitutes a brick, what hurts enough to remember.  Wonder of wonders, I thought I had one – a brick and while I am blogging some very intimate details, I will keep the details of this first brick to myself.  The reason why it matters, is that I think Ro removed it.  Or I did.

Either way, the brick is gone.  I have no lingering bitterness, nothing I would bring up again years from now in fiery arguments.  Perfection we are not, but that brick was turned into sand on Sunday and I must say, I am thrilled.  I had no idea such destruction existed after creation.  There is so much hope there in that moment of realization.

Lastly, it was grandma’s birthday on Friday.  H called her.  He misses her, maybe more than he misses me.  That pity card, his lack of parental involvement, attention, etc.  It takes him far into the hearts of the women around him.  But that credit of feeling it earns him is so easily used up.

Suffice to say grandma didn’t answer the call.  She didn’t want to tell me he had called.  She is protecting me I think, or him, or both.  I think the restraining order scares her.  I have it all filled out, sitting patiently and waiting for the signatures and the fees.  I’d really rather not use it, to save myself from having to see him again.  I assume he’d show up in court to defend himself, though I don’t know for sure.

The result of failing to blog for a week is a rather long rambly blog.  Apologies.  I will try to maintain the daily one to forgo these long massive creations.

Goodnight.

 

The goal is to blog every day.  I’m sure this will really turn out to be next to impossible for me – the person who can’t even stick to a week-long menu (after I’ve bought the food).

Today was a good day.  Work was productive.  I am somehow out of the loop when it comes to a few clients and I’m feeling the heat.  My goal for this year is to push for clear pathways with each of them and help to guide them towards their ultimate risk management and financial goals.  Very flowery words that mean nothing without further detail.  But that’s all you get.

On the personal side, I am busy trying to keep the reality of my life in order and discard my obsession with appearances.  I’m not sure whatever romance exists out there for me at the moment is real.  I don’t trust it.  Partially because I’m the asshole who gets into things and cares more.  And I have expectations for myself and I apply those to the people around me, as if my actions and feelings and who I am drives the both of us.  Welcome to: “How role-reverse parental/child relationships can affect how you see the world.”  I am in charge.  I make decisions & everyone follows.  Except you turn around 9 miles into the journey and you find out you are all alone, again.

So, starting tomorrow.  I will care less.  I’m still going to push him, but the plan is to withdraw.  I’m clearly over-invested and that’s too risky for my taste at this point.

Oh how the winds can change in 24 hours.

 

Hello darlings.

It’s the first day of what may very well turn out to be my last year.  It’s a premonition I had when I was 16, this early ending.  It’s not a choice I plan to make, though the quieting of breath has always had the lure of a silent room after a loud, shouty exchange.

I digress.  This premonition occurred when a friend of mine died one day, on her way to a high school football game after getting ice cream.  Her name was Whitney.  I had a crush on her best friend.  She was kind and silly and we were both awkwardly trying to make it through high school.  I was 16, she was a year younger.

I aged and she didn’t.  I went to group counseling which was a sad joke of everyone sitting around trying not to actually be vulnerable.  I said out loud, to my accounting teacher, (who must’ve at some point have been qualified to counsel bereaved teens, right?) that this was my mid-life.  That I was 16 years old and had accomplished nothing and that there was not much time left.  She looked at me as if I was utterly mad.  I knew then though, that 32 was an utter certainty.  That the year would mean death.  I hope not.  I’m just regaining control of my skin and mind.  Often times death can mean re-birth.  I tell myself that on good days, that rebirth is an option.

That death will be a part of this year, I knew/know as truth in my core.

I sometimes wonder if Whitney and I would still be friends now.  I think back on those days and the friends I had and think she was the kind of person I searched for and hadn’t found yet, one of the real ones.  I think we would be friends.

So here goes day 1.  I will try my best to be coherent, not too self loathing/deprecating or masturbatory.  On that last one, aren’t all blogs a bit masturbatory though?  It takes a special kind of arrogance to think that little old you could have a damn thing to say that might be of importance to the world.

I guess that I’m doing this – in case that premonition was true.  So that my little band of family can have something left if I go.  Something they aren’t expecting.  And if I don’t die, well I’ll have a record of the bullshit that happened, which I’ve never had before and I forget so much that it might actually be useful.

I spent yesterday – my birthday — at Ro’s.  I spent several of the hours I should have been sleeping quelling the urge to run away.  I almost ran.  I had made the decision.  I went upstairs to tell him I was leaving, I had packed and psyched myself up to be pouty and needy and I got up the stairs and he was awake already.  I couldn’t have my breakdown fit, because I didn’t want to leave.  I just wanted him to pay attention to me.  And he did, and I stayed.  If ever there was a moment when someone else’s actions changed the course of your life, yesterday morning was one of those moments for me – his awakeness.  How simple and innocent.

My loneliness makes me act impulsive and makes me want to guard and run away to lick my wounds in utter self-perpetuating depression.  It takes so much self talk to not give into that impulse.

I’m learning new muscle memory now, re-training that reaction.  I suppose it will take time, and acknowledging what the actual underlying feeling is, rather than settling for the one my mind concocts to justify my behavior.

Trust and loyalty.

They are very different things, but being able to rely on what we think we know about people is a part of our support structure.  Learning that when our parents leave us that they are not leaving forever is the most basic of these moments.  There was a moment this weekend where I realized why broken trust is such a hard thing for me to overcome.

My mother went to a beach bonfire, with an old friend who’s family she has sort of been a part of for 40 years.  I grew up with the next generation of this family, and while there is no ill will – we aren’t close.  I didn’t go to the party, despite being invited.  My mother, when pitching the excitement of the event said, I thought we could maybe use it to celebrate your birthday.

Co-opting the event of people who do not love me for a celebration of my existence.  That sounds like a terrible, intensely-selfish idea.  I am not strong enough to demand others care about me.  I didn’t tell any of this to my mother; I just didn’t go.

My mother, and the 15 year old girl who still lives inside her, once she realized I wasn’t going to go – proceeded to tell both her generation and the next that I had some inexplicable falling out with one of the girls there.  That I was mad for some unknown reason.

I remember being young and telling lies to make myself the center of something.  I remember that brief flicker of feeling included, it must be what it’s like to be popular, to actually be organically included.  I have so much frustration woven into my relationship with my mother.  I love her.  I beg her silently every day to love me back.  I can’t tell if my begging works.

It’s midnight folks.  Signing off for another day in paradise.