for the ones who are not okay.

It's not like I have any unique thoughts to offer grieving people for whom holidays are difficult. But still. Sometimes you just need it.


It may not feel okay, but it's okay.

It's okay.

It's okay that holidays make you anxious and afraid and sad.

It is okay that the faces of family togetherness on Facebook make you ache.

It is okay that you feel so especially beaten and broken for feeling this way during a celebratory time.

It's okay that you get sick of faking it, for the sake of not having to be alone.

It's okay, to feel so alone.

It's okay, these words without poetry.

It is okay, to want to give up. It really is. Yes,some people are dying, and they would give anything for life; is your struggle disrespectful to them? I don't know. People read the word suicide and feel as though you've handed them some responsibility for keeping your feet on the earth; do you keep it secret and silent as it grows? I don't know.

The struggle is okay.

It's okay, to have maybe lived a life full of Fighting To Recover From Bad Things, and to find yourself facing yet another set of recoveries and just feel so exhausted with the struggle, the blame of which you cannot speak, the rage which is easier than the limp acknowledgement of injury.

It's okay, conversely, to have maybe lived an idyllic life, only to have everything about you torn up and tossed to the wind by some horrible thing, that you feel like you should be able to get back to yourself already, that you see the way people look at you so differently, expectantly, bewildered and maybe a little impatient, and you hardly know what to tell them, let alone yourself.

It's okay to know that you'll recover from these things, but to still feel the pull in your bones toward Home.

It's okay, even when your heart is screaming at you to get your shit together in the glow of Christmas lights, to feel so unable to believe anymore that God knows what he's doing. It's okay to contemplate the birth of a baby a zillion years ago and feel nothing right now.

You can't talk yourself out of it. You really can't believe your way out of it, either.

So what else can it be?

It's okay. Take a deep breath and let yourself know it.

And no matter how it looks to anyone else outside you: Sometimes, every beat of your heart is a victory. Every spark of motion in your bloodstream. Every breath you choose to draw. Every sob in the dark, pushing oxygen into your lungs. Victory upon victory upon victory, of your choosing. When you can't do any more than that: it's okay. Whatever his greater purpose was,it's exactly what that baby did, a zillion years ago. Breathe in, cry, breathe out. Victory.

There is no hope in denial, in self-shaming, in blaming, in performance. But when you know that you're not okay: it's okay.

the dishes.

No, this is not my kitchen. "Good Will Hunting" - Sean's kitchen.

The decision to let yourself buy the paper plates is a big decision.

Is there a rule about writing during depression, or whatever this is? something like it's not interesting to anyone outside your head, so you don't share it. And aren't there similar "rules" regarding writing about writing, for the same reasons? like Fight Club? First rule of Fight Club: you never talk about Fight Club. First rule of writing about writing: nobody wants you to explain Your Process, with your monocle squinched in one eye and gesturing with a snifter of brandy, as though you're holding court, like some badass itching to ramble about your ramblings. And maybe first rule of writing about sadness, whatever variety of mental illness, or general downness you're wrangling is something like you don't write about how you simply cannot make yourself deal with something like a pile of dishes in the sink. It's incredible, how quickly they pile up even when you don't eat, and equally incredible how impossible they are to deal with.

The first time I thought why not just buy paper? my immediate reaction is to tell myself no. Because be better than that. do better. that's lazy. you're one person. and your job involves sustainable this-and-that and reducing waste, and also in the back of my head is the voice of my pastor, lover of all creation, who is as human as anyone else and would be the first to tell you so, but whose passion for the earth and its health is so excellent that I wilt a little before it on a good day, and I look at my cart and imagine paper plates in it and I bargain with myself for permission, like okay, I don't use paper towels, does that count for something? or and it's not like buying a pack of paper plates puts me on par with those people who are chopping the tops off of mountains and pumping all the crap into the air, right? But then, the hard-line interjects, maybe it does put you on-par with them; how many trees for forty plates? what kind of industry am I supporting? how do they treat their workers? all for the sake of my convenience? when I have dishes sitting right there? 

And the bargaining cuts all ways, because okay, I did good here, so maybe I can get the paper plates, like maybe I took a shower today, so to balance it, I'll get the paper plates; but then again, you took a shower today, so you're doing better, so maybe you don't need the paper plates; or possibly you woke up so early and didn't wash the dishes, so you don't get paper plates, or, on the other hand, you didn't get to sleep until some VERY LITERALLY UNGODLY hour and your sink is still full of dishes, so nope, not this time. No laundry? no plates. Could've worked late, but didn't? Nope. Didn't call your mother (again)? Sucks to be you. Sorry. I don't make the rules. 

And yeah, why? the chef in the back of your head pipes up, the one who speaks in clipped, brusque Brooklyn-cadence phrases, to-the-point, bottom-line: You got plates. Why you gonna buy paper? And it's true; would I bother to spend money that I should be saving when I have a perfectly good stack of putty-blue plates above my stove? where they sit on the pale-grey-and-white quatrefoil I got specifically because the blue of the dishes is what brings it together with the teal wall color and all of it ties in perfectly together that it's so pleasant to look at (but it's all theoretical, because they now live in the sink).

A stupid set of dishes.

Seriously, it's almost funny- of all things in which to stumble across significance, that it would be a stupid set of dishes. Eventually, I start finding them in every room: one in the living room, maybe from when I was trying to organize my books; one or two in the other bedroom, probably from when I started taking down the drapes to paint the walls, but decided to wait until I bought the paint because otherwise it probably wouldn't happen and my windows will just stand there naked to the dark; one or two in my actual bedroom, and I think of the fact that I'm leaving dirty dishes lying around, and of the fact that they're not even piling up in the sink anymore, but if I were to look in the sink, there's definitely a pile in there, too; that now, they're everywhere I look, and I don't remember how they got there, and they stare back at me unblinking, like bright blue eyes, like evidence of something.

I just can't deal with them. I don't want to touch them. They hurt to look at. Because I bought them at the beginning of my identity, and I absolutely fell in love with them: simple, almost boring, and when I call them putty-blue, I mean that they're the perfect deeper-saturated shade of sky blue with undertones of rock and almost-mushroom; they are calming, and every food in the world looks beautiful against them. And they made me so happy when I was twenty-something, when they were my first set of dishes, when they signified my life and my kitchen and my shared life with you, whoever you are, reading this, who has eaten off those dishes; when I had need for twelve settings, when I made people feel at home in my home, when I trusted myself enough to trust the people to whom I passed those dishes.

I thought last week: it's time to get rid of the dishes. No matter how wasteful it feels. I don't want these dishes here anymore. And besides, they broke in the boxes, sometime in the past three years, in my mother's garage. They are no longer a set of dishes, and they really aren't "perfectly good." Four plates left, five saucers, two bowls. The survivors are hopelessly damaged; their edges betray the flat absence of color beneath the varnish, and when I pull one out of the stack and feel it bend at the crack down its middle, I imagine that the weight of what lies on the plate is just enough that it might snap in half on my hand. I want to bend it until it breaks, just to see what the break is like: if it's a cartoonish poof of ceramic dust, or if I even have the strength to break it apart, or if it'll make a clean break from itself, if its pieces will mostly maintain their shape, like some kind of putty-blue dignity, or if the entire thing will abruptly crumble in on itself and rip my skin in the process.

Today, I threw them away, and I got the paper plates. On sale. Two packs four $4. I bought one.

I feel better.

red-haired, purple-chaired despair, or "some trainwreck bullsh*t."

It's not gonna be particularly compelling or well-written, but: I am not any good at being angry.

I suck at it. Spent my whole life determinedly not being it. Emerged from childhood completely disconnected from it.

I remember once, kneeling at the altar post-service in my Tennessee church, feeling the rage pressing at the boundary of my diaphragm without realizing that's what it was, wanting to feel as though I were about to explode, hearing myself say to one of my pastors I am just so angry knowing the truth of those words, but feeling fraudulent at how empty and dispassionate they were as I placed them on the altar before me and looked at them and felt nothing but overwhelming despair at that with which I could not connect.

I know you're in there. 
How do I find you. How do I name you. 
How do I get you out and bring you home. 

_________

I was fourteen.

I'd barely been living with my family, and I'd made the mistake of disclosing my struggles with self-injury and suicidal thoughts to someone who alerted my parents. I watched my father take the phone call, watched him walk outside and slam the glass door behind him; watched him as he saw me watching, as he angrily jerked away from the window; retreated to my room in a panic and listened to him stomp down the hall and slam the bedroom door shut. That evening, there was a blowup, and a crying mother, pat-talk of do you want to get counseling? on their part and emphatic NOs on my part, because what's the point of even trying when it's all buried so deeply that you don't even know what's there anymore? and how do you deal with the chance to tell when you're living with people who demand your silence? and what consequences would I face for having just now broken silence?

The next day, though, it was as if nothing had happened, and the incident faded into the background of things.

But a few weeks later, we were in the car, my mother and I.

"So. I need to tell you something." Her knuckles were white against the steering wheel. "And I, um... you listen to me." We pulled into the driveway; she parked the car, turned it off, and began to fidget with her keys. "So, I know you're not gonna want to hear this. But, um.. I think you have an eating disorder. And I know you don't wanna hear it, but I think you need to go to a counselor. So I'm gonna take you to a counselor."

She continued talking, the conflict in her voice - the clamor between breathless panic and plays at authority - this woman, so uninitiated in discussing Things with this strange daughter who now required discussions of her - she continued talking as the buzzing in my head expanded to cushion me against her voice, against the presence of her in that tiny car interior, where, on a normal day, time spent in a car with my mother was so heavy: the odor of Marilyn Miglin's Pheromone Musk, the manicured nails glittering on a steering wheel, a purse smelling of leather and cinnamon, everything meant as an outward statement of worth and meaning, all of it held tight behind lips pursed in tired martyrdom before the fantasy of a whole world judging the failures of the slim, coiffed one against the part of her sitting beside her, hiding in sackcloth. On a normal day.

Got out of the car and went straight to my room, where I half chuckled to myself: the words "cutting" and "suicide" and "abuse" were mentioned, but the thing she'll say out loud is the one about me being fat.  

god. 

_________

I trotted behind my mother as she glided through the corridor circling the exterior of the huge church building where my father worked; she seemed to know where we were going, although everything looked the same to me. She pushed open a wide, gray door and we stepped into a waiting area - brightly-lit, gray walls, purple-cushioned chairs hooked together, pew-style, at their sides, generic wall prints in thin, chrome frames, basic metal filing cabinets arranged around a reception-type desk toward the rear of the room, and three rooms on the right, doors closed, each dimly lit from within.

I sat in a purple chair as my mother shuffled papers at the desk, and I eyed those three rooms. What's supposed to happen in there? Oh god. Why are they so dark? Do I have to go sit in the dark with a stranger? How is that a good thing? Why do I have to do this? 

A door opened, introductions occurred, and I was ushered into one of those dark rooms by a woman with large, frizzy red hair. I nearly tripped over the chair as my eyes adjusted to the dim light of a tiny nightlight-lamp on her desk. She sat across from me, leaned forward, folded her hands in front of her breasts, and fixed her eyes on mine like someone invoking Insight which I didn't share.

I don't remember the first question she asked me, and I don't remember my attempt to answer it. But instantly - from the dark room, to the intimidating lean across the desk, to the way she seemed determined to disbelieve anything simple and unspiritual, to the reek of her overall boundary-flouting hyper-spirituality - I knew this was gonna be some trainwreck bullshit.

And it was.

I wish I could remember specific moments from the weeks I spent in that godforsaken black hole of an office. It was my first time in counseling of any kind, and she always stared at me with such intensity, as though she were trying to see inside my soul, and something in her eyes told me I was blocking her view as she asked me questions about whether I thought I had an eating disorder, and what kind, and how I felt my actions reflected on my family, and how my musicality made my parents feel, whether I had a boyfriend, whether I'd had sex with him or anyone else, and how often, and didn't I know my parents loved me? and wasn't I comfortable talking with her? and can I pray for you? I'm gonna lay hands on you, okay? as she's already halfway around the desk toward me, because it's never a question, and the only correct answer to that unquestion, ever, is yes, which really meant SURE, WHY THE FUCK NOT, LIKE I HAVE A CHOICE HERE as she stood behind me in a dark room and planted her palms on my back and moved herself closer into ecstasy with every inch she pressed into my flesh. As she moaned and jerked behind me, talked about how tight my shoulders felt, told me to relax and breathe with her, I sat in a chair in the dark and died to that moment: I have to leave this moment here; I cannot take this with me and come back to it again; it has to die here; I don't have the answers you want, I don't use the language you use, and you work with my father, the arbiter of my silence is sitting four feet away on the other side of that door in the bright light, and whatever God is telling you will kill me if I don't die first. Week after week after week after week for I don't know how many weeks of me failing in that chair, weeks of her ending "sessions" with a passive downward flick of her eyes and a deliberate set of her face toward neutrality to hide her irritation at my lack of "breakthrough." Weeks of my mother half-grilling me on the way home, half-hoping for my silence; do you feel like it's helping? and her palpable relief at my repeated nos.

Until the final session, which I remember in snapshots.

I sat in the empty waiting room flipping through a magazine, and suddenly, the sounds of a man wailing at the top of his lungs rang out from one of those dark rooms. The high pitch broke into gutteral sobs and unintelligible syllables as I sat frozen in the chair, my skin prickling, glancing back and forth between the door to the office and the door into the corridor. I had never wanted to get up and run away from a place as much as I did that one; is that what you want from me? nothing less? Over several minutes, the wailing slowed into moans, then a few minutes of silence, until her office door opened. I stared at the floor; I didn't want to see him, didn't want to see her, stared at the purple carpet until the corridor door clicked shut behind him.

The dark room was humid and heavy; it smelled like lung and sinus. I sat down in the dark as she sat across from me, shaking her head and breathing deeply in her red-haired ecstasy, whoa, I'm sorry you had to hear that, whoo, man, he really had his breakthrough, her eyes glittering in the dark, and I sat in the chair and watched her guide herself down to earth before an audience, continued deep sighs of satisfaction. Someone in my head whispered at least she gets to spend your session happy about somebody's breakthrough; I almost laughed aloud.

This moment: as though I were hearing it from across the room instead of across from her, when she asked me: Do you want to keep coming here? I was instantly brought back to myself by the difference in her voice - softer, almost gentle, less expectant, less dissatisfied. Her head was cocked to the side, her eyes looked almost sleepy; it was maybe the first time I'd ever felt like she wasn't trying to lead me toward an answer.

I said no.

And then, standing in the bright waiting room again, my mother standing at the desk, the red hair standing in her office doorway, all gentleness gone as she stated across the room to my mother that continuing this really is pointless, she doesn't want to be here and she's not participating in the process and not yielding to the Holy Spirit and not open to receiving anything and so tightly closed up. Not really not worth your money. 

And that was that, until I left for college.

breathtaking brides; whores and hellions.

One of the expressions of patriarchy that I'm having a really hard time with lately:

I have a hard time with men characterizing the church as female and talking about her in terms of her redemption.

It's the ultimate Madonna/whore complex.

I understand why we use the language. The Bride of Christ, and all that. I get it. I'm not saying it's wrong. I know it wouldn't really matter if I did consider it "wrong." And no, not all men, and yes, some women, too, and yes, I get it. Promise.

But I still don't like it.

I don't like the times I've sat in groups among wide-eyed and wide-smiled women eager to claim a place at a glass tabletop spread open with pink-covered Bibles, working so hard, so alone, to believe "wholeness" and "purity" and "joy in the travails of women" for themselves, on their own behalves - attending a bride so maligned, frantically self-talking against the current in which they were swept along without ever asking themselves why it was so hard to believe these things for themselves in this context. Because why ask? What answers would they expect? and what would those answers, if they ever came, demand of them? What did they stand to lose?

I never really had thoughts to share with them; never notes to add to the pile; never did much more than observe. Never swept up in the rapture of telling myself this Church, this Mother of this Father, affirms me, Lisa, girl, woman, female, half-dead wounded, questioner, skeptic, believer, dying for room to move. Never a bride. Never blushing, timid, virginally hopeful; never virtuously, breathlessly, femininely devoted, and so, a defector of this game: helpless, speaking or silent, against the discomfort in these women's eyes, which saw me as the outsider I was.

I don't like it - the way patriarchy steers discussions of the Church's shortcomings toward degradation and, specifically, feminine (dare I say sexual?) degradation.

I don't like how patriarchy subjugates this feminine Church, It's all very telling, to me.

It's telling, the way that patriarchy makes no room to speak of these things in masculine terms.

It's telling, that I always read things like they shamed, maligned, underestimated her, but one day they'll stand in awe of her. It's telling that I never read things like he played the arrogant puff-chest and the predator; now he stands as one with the victimized, humbled by the weight of their pain and his own dearth of ability in its wake, his inability to do anything other than breathe Jesus over their wounds and listen to the Spirit as she weeps through him.  

That I always read things like she played the hellion and the whore; now she stands new, washed, adorned, breathtaking; that I never read things like once, the skulls of the broken crunched under his feet as he marched toward ideas of entitled glory; now, he is low to the ground awash in the grief-spirit of Mother God which swells among the broken, so that Her searing glory might rush forth from his brokenness in rivers. 

That I always read things like once, she stood disgraced and dirty; now she walks without spot or wrinkle; that I never read about how he stumbled to the ground, disrespected, devalued, demeaned, but he found God was there, too, and always had been, and always will be, and that this stumbling block is, perhaps, the rock upon which God would build him, that this shadowed company of brokenness is, perhaps, where the glory of Christ's bride imbues its very essence to those who live and move among her, who drink living water from this rock, who seek after the light in the dark. 

So much more, that I don't even have words for, and I need to go to bed, but I just keep thinking: oh, the irony, that in order to discuss these things in masculine terms we might have to know them in feminine terms first.

I wish we were willing to do this.
I wish we were less eager to feminize the church's shortcomings.
I wish men* were as quick to defend actual women in their actual subjugation as they are quick to defend the ways in which they subjugate the Gospel in order to justify it.

I wish.


*again: no, not all men, and I'm really tired of having to say that. If you get really pissed about reading that, it probably applies to you, so deal with it; if it doesn't, don't get pissed.

take off your pants and have some grits.

Sometimes, I hate cooking at home.

The it's hot in here. The my house smells like onions now. The dishes. I am spoiled completely rotten by having a dishwasher at work - not the machine which I must load with scraped-nearly-naked dishes, but the actual human upon whom I can foist stuff that still needs to be scraped clean.

And the chopping. The only time my favorite teacher in culinary school ever got really irritated with me (as far as I know) was during my final exit practical (a combination of knife skills assessment and preparing a full menu solo) when I purposely chose the tiniest bunch of parsley and the tiniest garlic cloves I could find in each pile, in order to minimize my mincing time. He picked up pinches of each and flicked them disgustedly at me, looked at me deadpan, cocked his head to the side, and said.... really? I grinned and nodded. He remained unamused.

Anyway.

I know alllll the things when you don't want to cook, but you need to have food in your house.

Plan ahead, Lisa! - pffft. Cute.

Lisa, make a few dishes, portion them out, and freeze them! - nah, mayne. 

Lisa, if you just make a ton of marinara to freeze, if you just use the food processor to chop the onions and garlic, it'll take you no more than LONGER THAN I WANT TO SPEND AND THEN I GOTTA WASH THE FOOD PROCESSOR TOO AND THE CUTTING BOARD ALREADY FITS AWKWARDLY IN THE DRAINBOARD JUST BY ITSELF AND I ALREADY SMELL LIKE ONIONS AND I JUST GOT HOME AND I JUST WANT TO TAKE MY PANTS OFF IN A COLD ROOM AND BE UN-HUNGRY. 

"Cooking ahead" is rarely going to happen, and, when it does happen, it just kinda sits there because I'm just so over it by the time I'm done making it. Is this a byproduct of making food for people all day long? Is there some switch in chef-brain that flips as soon as the food is prepared, and that switch is labeled FOOD IS NOT FOR EATING SEND IT OUT SEND IT OUT WHERE ARE THE SERVERS WHY IS IT STILL SITTING THERE? I don't know.

So heck. Given my propensity to either go hungry or just go to bed rather than cook, I resign myself to doing Whatever Gets Healthy Food Inside My Person. I, the knife-skills nerd, with my storebought-sliced mushrooms and pre-cut bagged kale (keep it in the freezer, crumble it directly into the pan. perfect). And maybe you, with your own version of semi-homemade whatever. It's hard enough coming up with meals, sometimes, let alone healthy meals, let alone healthy meals that don't require much of you when you're tired, let alone healthy, easy meals that don't trash your kitchen. We need all the quickie recipes we can get.

So here is a nonfancy quickie recipe which was probably already presented to accolades by someone else, photographed with an iPad and I swear someday I'm gonna get a new battery charger for my real camera, but I never remember it until I need it, so until then, I'll be draping my lacy kitchen curtain over my head in order to get enough light by which to photograph, and I'll think for a second what if I never get married and, suddenly, for the first time, the possibility seems very real and sort of grief-y, so if that happens to you, just tell yourself I could throw some cheese in my grits if I wanted to. 

Ha ha.

Huh.

Grits and Stuff with an Egg
(serves probably 3-4 moderately-hungry adults, maybe. I don't know how much you eat. I have leftovers.)

1 cup milk
1 1/2 cups water or broth/stock
1 1/2 tsp. kosher salt
3/4 cup grits

Eggs.

2 tbsp. olive oil
1 bell pepper (I used half a red and half a yeller 'cause I can)
1/2 onion (or more)
1 cup sliced mushrooms
1 clove garlic (or more)
1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
Kale.. probably three aforementioned frozen handfuls
Salt and pepper

GRITS: Bring the liquids to a boil with the salt. Whisk in the grits. Cook and whisk over medium heat for a minute or two. Toss in some cheese, if you're single - no, wait, I mean if you want to. Adjust the liquid if you prefer your grits more firm or soft. Set aside.

VEGGIES: Heat the oil in a skillet. Add the pepper, onion, and mushrooms; cook until they're as cooked as you like them. Add the garlic and vinegar, and cook another minute or so. Stir in the kale and cook until kale is tender, about 10-ish minutes. Season with salt and pepper.


Cook some eggs. Cook 'em nice. Not like this dude's wife. Otherwise who knows what will happen. 

[On second thought.. maybe I'm better off single.]

Grits: in the bowl.
Veggies: on the grits
Eggs: on the veggies
Hot sauce: all over everything in the world.

The grits, they are creamy and perfect. The veggies, they are tangy and salty and fragrant. The egg yolk, its richness with the tangy veggies and creamy grits, and the hot sauce perking everything up. Yes.

And not a food processor in sight.

forward, fingertips, fetal faith, and flea bites.

I don't think I've ever told any one person the major events of my life.

Maybe this is a more common thing than I realize. After all, why would it ever be necessary to tell a person every major event that's happened to you, especially the bad ones? Other than a spouse (which I do not have), I really don't know in whom I would've confided, and for what reason... except that for having spent a number of years in therapy, you would think I would've spilled all my secrets. That's the place to do it, right?

I spent a good year of therapy sitting almost silently in a leather chair while a short, kind, rotund man talked to me, at me, past me, and I don't say that as a criticism, because I could not speak, and I didn't know why, but the terror seized up in my throat and all I could do was listen and exist in a space where it would be okay for me to speak if I could. And what is a well-meaning therapist to do with a client who won't speak? Sometimes I wonder what he thought, if it ever drove him nuts as I sat there nodding and sometimes eeking out a few words and flinching at the sound of my own voice in that close, cluttered office. I wonder if he understood my silence better than I did, if he understood that he was up against years of "home training," as it's called, in telling-as-sin; I wonder if he understood that the sound of my voice in the air was dangerous, that darkness hovered in that room with me, tumbled over itself like eager stormclouds, to strike me dead if the truth hung in the air too long.

________

I think I might be done with all that now. Older, more lived, perhaps more tired, more realistic, and less afraid. All good things. And I wish I could tell you my stories, unfurl them like a dusty attic quilt, trace the stories of each square to you with a fingertip that no longer trembles.

I wish I could tell you, without feeling the need to fumble around with I'm not trying to be dramatic please believe me please just stand here with me about how the only real word for the traumas of my life is deaths, because after each one, the person I'd been simply could not continue to be; I wish I could tell you how I became a different person after each, whether by will or circumstance, and I buried their corpses deep. How I am only just grieving all of my deaths now, reverently, carefully, silently carrying them toward home, and how I need you to bear witness, and how I am thankful that you do.

I wish I could articulate the ways in which the truth of my deaths informs the fetal faith in me

I wish I had words for trust; I don't. I wish I could articulate the struggle of responsibility and blame and wronged and self-wronged; I can't. I wish I knew if I were being one of those people who drift toward death with all the deaths they've suffered still bitter in their throats; sometimes, I wonder. I wish so many things were not such blistered sacred space; I wish I weren't still so terrified of so many answers to so many questions I'm afraid to ask.

But I wish I could tell you about how the Truth flows, and that these questions are alive if unformed; I wish I could tell you about the burdens that hang heavy around my neck, and the ways in which I know I am meant to speak, and although I feel so very far away from the otherworldy and powerful grace to which I know I'm called as a writer, I wish I could tell you how enchanted is the writer in me, that the Truth is alive in me, and it flows from my lips and fingers in a momentum I couldn't curb or rearrange if I tried, and that, for the first time in my life, when I sit down to write, I am chasing after the Truth to where it leads, and I know that this is what I was made to do (and, you know, I'm sorry that it probably doesn't always make sense to people who are lucky enough to live outside of my own head; you should read the stuff I DON'T share. ha).

I wish I could tell you these things, because the only way I can tell you of how they no longer threaten to devour me is to tell you what they are; I wish I were in such company that I could bestow on myself the gift of sharing not as expository or as absolution, without hating my own need, but as benevolent and forward in being known.

There's more, too. But there is an enormous flea bite on the sole of my foot, and I wish I could tell you how it's seriously derailing my Truth-train (omg so bad, it's embarrassing; I'm totally leaving it there) and ruining my night.

dear baby....

... For all the ways that I love you, I understand, a little better, how God loves me.


I do not love you because of what you can do.

You can do much more now than when you were brand-new, when the heavy musk of the divine lingered on the top of your sweet head, in the crease of your neck, in the breath of you, when I could press your sweet palms and soles to my nose and breathe in the holy fragrance of Spirit-in-womb still glowing between your fingers and toes, and know that to hold you was to cradle the presence of the Divine. You have, literally, come a long way, baby. Still, compared to what I can do, you can't do much. It's really not about that anyway.

I don't love you for the ways you might make me feel, or for the ways in which you might reflect me back to myself.

Sure, I love when when I smile at you, and the joy bubbles up in you, which bubbles up in me, and we spill joy all over each other, and you take pleasure in my pleasure, and I, in yours; I love you when I am made somber by your pain, and you, by mine, even if you don't understand what these pains and pleasures are, outside of their presence in my face before yours. I love you when you're present with me, and I love you when you're not, when I search for your eye but you're distracted by something shiny across the room, or by your own senses of pain or pleasure or discomfort or anger or weariness or hunger.

I'll be honest, baby, and say that I still don't really understand the depths to which love responds to pain. But know that whether you know my presence in your pain, or you feel alone: I love you.

I love you when we simply share a space and natter back and forth, with lulls between as I measure flour, or as you gum a spatula and kick the entire eighteen-pack of eggs onto the dog, who is furtively chewing on your favorite pacifier (again). I love you because I know you; because I know what it means to know you, even though what it means to know is, in comparison, mostly beyond your understanding.

I love you when you are fiery and fighting, and I absolutely joy to imagine what fires you'll fight; I love you when you melt into me, idly knead my bottom lip in a handful, forming baby knowings of comfort.

I love you when you kick me. I will love you the same when you stop.

My love for you is unaffected by your desire toward forward or backward. Whether you ever learn to maneuver yourself toward that shiny object across the room, or not. However long it takes you. Whether you ever get there. You were made to reach for more, and I will help you do it. But if, for whatever reasons, you never get there: I love you.

I don't love you because you're doing the "right" things, either. Ideas of what right and wrong might mean are beyond your understanding. And even as you come to understand more about them: every time you fail, I love you.

Not I still love you. 

Not I love you anyway. 

Not drag yourself back to me and prove your worth before I let you sully my arms.

Every time you fail: I love you.

Because you are. I love you because you are here. Not that you are here, but you're here! My day is brighter when I see your face; my heart lifts whether I am in the presence of your laughter or your tears; I simply delight that I am with you. Because you are mine. You are always mine; you will always be mine, from the foundations of the world, in life or death, you belong to me; the divine between your fingers is held sacred in the palm of my hand.

My love for you is not a feeling: it is a union, held in laughing tension or solemn trust. It reflected in tandem, one in each other, but it does not change, based on what you reflect. And it cannot be contained or expressed fully in this note, with these words, in this language.

I just thought you should know.

the b-i-b-l-e: no.

There has to be grace for those who were violated by the bible.

For those who panic when it opens, for whom the split-page format quickens breath and makes the skin tingle. The poetry format of Psalms buzzes white noise in my ears, the words of Jesus in glaring red toward the reader, blare in my head as from a scary, spittle-bearded wild man whose hands move too fast, too far. The pebbled dark leather cover; the gold page edges. Words screamed from pulpits in booming, dramatic vibrato, hurled toward the demons in the back of the room, where I hid from everything it fueled, mentally tunneling myself into the upper corner of the baptistry and counting the minutes until I could run outside into the twilight.

I hate the Bible.

I do.

I hate it.

I hate it.

It infuriates me.

A lifetime hemmed in by guilt-scaffolding, gouging and smashing and pillaging in the name of holiness or repairing the sinful human condition; more like a tent-fumigation, every single inch suffocated in the dark, poison in the name of life.

I can't tolerate it.

To paraphrase a fellow struggler: every single lie of my life is footnoted with Bible verses.

It speaks death to me. Striped into my skin on the edge of a belt. Streaked across my person, trails of sweat and sebum. Still and quiet as death, stop swinging your feet as it boomed against my ears. Taped to the bathroom mirror at five-year-old eye-level (honor your father and mother) by people invested in breakage. SOMEBODY is screaming at me through this book, I knew, but it is not God.

This is not God. I had no other words.

Its words bound and gagged me. Imbued my entire spirit with guilt and standard and shortfall. For me, the bible is strictly punitive: a roadmap of all the ways in which I am evil. Whether by all the ways we were all born bad, or by the ways life "made" me "bad" - the bitten apple, or the chewed gum, or you can't take the chocolate out of the milk, or the cake with just a little bit of dog shit baked into it, but go ahead, take a bite, because it's just a little bit of dog shit around smarmy youth-pastor smiles, oh my god, bite me so hard, purity culture, and needless to say, they did not say shit, but I will, because it is shit. 

All of the ways in which God is becoming new to me... redemption is deep, and wide. It is not the instant peace it seems from the perspective of a person who has never known its fragrance; uprooting and shedding light is not the fairy picnic you imagine. The work of redemption, not strictly mine anymore to feebly attempt, requiring that I be, which is (speaking of tension) equally the hardest and most natural thing I've ever been able to be, with God. Present and attuned and aware and listening. Painful, two-steps-back feeling. So much deeper, so much wider than I could imagine.

God is speaking.

Maybe someday, he'll speak to me from the pages of that book.

But not today.

Probably not tomorrow, either.

"untitled" sounds very pretentious; let's call it "Starbucks," since that's where I am.

Telling a story is a dicey thing. You're not just telling a story, or your story; your story is often interwoven with the stories of other people, who may not want their stories told, or who may not agree with the ways in which you interpret their stories, or who object to the ways in which you believe their stories have intersected with your own. More often than not, you're telling one side of a story which has many sides; you can own "your side," but the story is bigger than you are.

When your stories involve your family, the waters are further muddied. And I struggle with this, so very much. My family are mine, and I love them. But I love them guardedly, from a distance. I was chuckling to a coworker the other day about the existence of this blog, as he noted a particular entry and said your parents probably loved reading that one. And I replied, without thinking: they don't know I write. They're not allowed to know me. They kinda had their chances, and they kinda blew them all. 

I didn't realize that I'd given up on them ever knowing me until I said those words aloud. Maybe they know; maybe they don't; maybe they're reading this right now, though I doubt it. 

Part of me knows that they're intimidated by me, confused, unable to figure me out; part of me knows that they know that's the way I want it; the wounded parts of me are proud of, and guilty of, the power this knowledge gives me. Part of me knows that, were I to let them in, part of them would admire it (for lack of a better word); the deeply wounded parts of them would respond to the parts of me that have been unwilling to keep their secrets hidden away. Sometimes, a person needs permission to feel their own pain. But I can't be their permission; I can't stand in their pain with them. Just no. I can't imagine taking on one more burden for these people, can't imagine letting them into anything else I have. I could tell you stories - and it might sound narcissistic, but believe me, it isn't - I could tell you stories of the ways in which years of my burdened silence kept our family's image intact. I can't be their permission to heal any more than I was able to survive being their permission to close ranks around sickness and sin. That's only one side of a story, though; years of silence from every member of my family turned all of our wounds inward, especially the wounds inflicted within our own walls. They still live wounded, static in the immediacy of their injuries, years and years and years arrested at traumas they blink away from, if they ever surface at all. 

I have always wanted to blow the doors off of every ugliness and secret and burden I've carried around. I want to stand on mountaintops and fill horizons with every word of all of the things that were not my fault. Selfishly, though, in order to hear it echo back from the heavens to my own ears; all I knew of sharing was to try to rid myself of the scourge of the abused child, to try to find absolution in making it mean something good. My poor mother, who conflates secrecy with privacy, who gave birth to a mouthy, telling person, who has jerked me up by the arm and hissed at me more than once you do not betray the family; you do not tell things outside the family. The Family. Mafioso. Italian and all. Would you believe - I remember the first time she ever became aware that I write: I was five years old, and wrote some cheesy little essay that was published in the newspaper and netted me $25, which I spent on notebooks and pretty pencils. Her reaction, deeper than the surprise and happiness she expressed on my behalf: apprehension. Even then, I think she was afraid: she'd identified a perspective attached to a voice within her own ranks. 

I intended to write about grace, when I started writing this. Grace, ever-present, brand-new to me, life-changing, mind-blowing; hope, which I am so afraid to lose, because I have always, always, always been without hope. It scares me, to realize how fundamentally I function from a baseline of survival and nothing more; it shakes me, how grace and hope are secondary, and how I have to remind myself every single day that things are different now; this is what you know; new every morning is, in fact, a real thing, not just a promise, but a discipline in sweet hope; remember? remember? 

As much as my family has brought about death in my life, over and over again, I can't help but carry them into grace and hope with me. I might never be able to let them know it, but it's not my grace or hope to bestow anyhow. The stories of secrets, burdens, deaths flung into the horizon are flung, east to west, into the hope and grace that echo unto themselves. Grace for me, as one of them; hope for us all. 

jadis

C. S. Lewis writes
of Charn: a dead world, undead; decimated, bones
made holy with time and wind and fire still shut-up with ringing
in rote habits of circulation, blood-currents preserved
in false sleep for ill intent; these bones are not dead: they shriek
in dog-whistle frequencies, in treble presence of spirit
audible only to those whose living ears lay bare of any other noise
until the stirring
of vengeful queenly presence summoned
at the sounding of a bell
at the will
of a boy.

If rape is to be contained by symbolism, it is this:
the sex act, as allegory to the infilling of the Holy Spirit, turned infidel,
brutalized aloft, to the cross, and defected by God himself; it is suckling intent
laid to rest in womb-as-sarcophagus;
it is the full rage of God or gods behind each brittle consonant
of the word blasphemy against my teeth and lips.
It is Jadis's Deplorable Word,
casting a city to slow ruin
in defense against its conquest.
It is the heart-rhythm which continues unbidden after death,
the nerves electrified
by void habit evermore:

this death is not dead. 
this death cannot be made dead. 

this death is not dead. 
this death cannot be made dead. 

this death is not dead. 
this death cannot be made dead. 

as Jadis, forbidden apples will render a bloodstream electric evermore,
but in death-as-life promises of immortality
refracted against skin turned snow-white by horror;
yet beneath, a full, sacred rhythm belies such undeath:

shall these dead bones yet live again. 
shall these dead bones yet live again. 
shall these dead bones yet live again. 

why women are responsible for our safety, and it doesn't mean what you think it means.

I'm not trying to blame you, or anything, but maybe when you made him mad - maybe that wasn't the best thing to do? I don't know. (a former friend, when I told her I'd yelled at him previously for groping me.)

Huh, that sucks. But I don't know what you want me to say. And you know what? I'd rather be in your shoes than mine. My job is killing me lately. (a former teacher and friend.)

You're a grown-ass woman; what do you want? You chose this industry. You walked in there with lions. Now you know what comes with the territory. Suck it up. (a classmate.)

You a fucking badass? yeah? show me how fucking badass you are now. (him.)

________

I want to say a few things.

As before, I am discussing rape in terms of male-on-female rape, while acknowledging that men are victimized as well, and that female perpetrators also commit rape against men and women.

I am not in the business of relegating women (particularly survivors of rape) to perpetual victim status. I say that fiercely and directly to every single person (most of whom happen to be men) who accuse me of it. I love and appreciate men. I don't hate men. It's silly that I'd even need to say that. But there you go.

I want to be able to raise a fist and roar in solidarity with those who assert a woman should be able to dance drunk on a table stark-naked and expect that she won't be raped, groped, or even made uncomfortable by the men surrounding her! yeah yeah yeah! 

But I can't. Because while it's entirely true, it's also true that any person walking around among other people is already vulnerable to the evil in the people around him/her; if any person has compromised his/her ability to control his/her environment, s/he has become even more vulnerable to the evil in the people around him/her.

Yes, women should be careful (whatever that means, as though it were a one-size-fits-all Solution). Because we are human beings, and because human beings - men and women - should be careful around each other. Because there will always be human beings who are invested in taking criminal advantage of other human beings.

Women are responsible for their own safety to the same extent that men are responsible for their own safety. Because safety, and responsibility for safety, is not a gendered concept. Let me please yell that, all black-in-the-eyes because I am pulll-ENTY pissed off about how this vague concept of "safety" is twisted to be used against rape victims in particular:


SAFETY. IS. NOT. A. GENDERED. CONCEPT. 


Every human being should refrain from making choices that diminish his/her capacity to control his/her environment. Wherever you are, there are usually other human beings present who might steal a wallet, drug a drink, snatch your jewelry, steal your car, commit a sex offense, punch you in the mouth if you bump into them, accidentally run you over in the parking lot, steal your smartphone, damage or destroy your property. Because human beings - men and women - are shady as hell. And they will trample you, to their own ends.

________

I wish we didn't live in a world where personal power, so destroyed by rape, is so inversely-inflated by people who assume that a rape victim should have been able to find ways to prevent it from happening, and is therefore to blame for it.

Surely rape culture can't be that pervasive, right?

Surely women have more power against rape than that, right?

There should be no set of expectations that women protect ourselves more than our male counterparts. And there is certainly no special grace afforded women who are raped in spite of whatever "precautions" they may have taken. All of us - men and women - want to avoid victimization. We all work at it. All of us. We do what we can. But none of us - men or women - have a moral responsibility to avoid becoming victims of other people's evil. To be targeted by a perpetrator, in any capacity, is not a victim's moral failure. Ever.

It's true that if a woman is targeted by a rapist, it is not ever her fault. It is a rapist's fault. Period.

It is also true that there are behavioral and practical precautions that women can take which might possibly lessen the potential that they'll be raped.

It is also true that there are zero precautions available to a woman to prevent her from being targeted to begin with. Clothing words energy weaponry brightly-lit spaces traveling in groups blah blah blah - none of this matters to a determined rapist.

It is also true that, of all the specific "rape preventatives" and weapons available to women, not a single one of them will dissuade a determined rapist. Not a single one.

Why didn't you fight. Because he might have killed me.
Why did you fight. Because he might have killed me.
Why didn't you carry mace. Because he might have seen it and killed me.
Why didn't you carry a gun. Because he might've gotten it from me and killed me.
Why didn't you have a rape whistle or something? Because he might've killed me before I had a chance to use it. 

Or. 

Why didn't you fight. I did.
Why did you fight. I didn't.
Why didn't you stay in a well-lit area. I was raped in an office.
Why did you mace him? Don't make him angry.
She shouldn't have had a gun. She panicked. Of course he's gonna wrestle it away from her.
She used that rape whistle, but nobody heard.
Why did you wear a burqua, in the middle of a street?
Why did you wear a sari, on a crowded bus?
Why did you let them tie you naked to a tree?
Why were you wearing an acolyte robe in the vestry?
Why were you wearing yoga pants and a T-shirt, the only woman in a kitchen full of men?
Why were you wearing a bathing suit, in an uncle's bedroom?
Why were you wearing a sparkly mini-dress, in a club bathroom?
Why were you sleeping naked in your own bed?
Why were you wearing a school uniform, in a principal's office?
Why were you wearing an Easter dress, in a Sunday school classroom?
Why were you wearing a hospital gown, in a nursing home?
Why were you wearing a business suit, in an executive's office?
Why were you wearing a onesie, in a crib?

Why did you make eye contact?
Why didn't you look him in the eye?
Why did you say hello? why did you remain silent?
Why did you respond to advances? why didn't you respond? why didn't you demand he stop?
Why did you get angry when he touched? why did you ignore it? why did you play along to keep him calm, praying the elevator door would please hurry up and open?
Why did you walk away? stay put? look away? bite your lip? tear up? turn purple? remain stoic? refuse to cry? weep like a baby? refuse to react? react loudly? scream? plead? didn't plead? 

Why did you press charges? Hardly ever goes to trial. Hardly ever convicted. Waste of time and money. Just make him angrier. Just make yourself forget about it.
Why didn't you press charges? Oh my god, what's wrong with you? How many other women? little girls? Are you that selfish? Your fault. Letting other women carry the public/legal burden for you. 

Nobody's blaming women who are raped. But think about it: When beer commercials tell the audience to "drink responsibly," to plan ahead and designate a driver to avoid a DUI, that is an acceptable message, but expecting women to plan ahead for themselves to avoid a potential assault isn't?  [I cannot think of a clearer example of victim-blaming than to conflate a victim's victimization with a potential criminal action.]

Even though I know it's rambly and I'm trying hard to keep the rage and pain of it under control because I swear my brain is rotting in all this.... Can you see? It's not that there isn't a lot to unpack when talking about all the parts of rape, including the parts that are uncomfortable with regard to personal responsibility. It's not that nobody's allowed to assert that women, like men, should take all the precautions we can to protect ourselves, and that women, like men, should make choices that enhance our ability to control our environment. These things should be said. Absolutely.

It's just that any discussion of womens' responsibility in a discussion of rape and rape culture is already skewed against women. Because we are blamed for our rapes before they even occur, in the instant they occur, and for the rest of our lives afterward. Because when it comes down to it, there is not a damn thing any woman can do to prevent the hammer from falling on her face. Because it's a women's issue - how many times have I heard that shit in the past three years. Your problem. Her problem. I don't know what you want me to say about this. 

How can we ever really talk about these things in such a climate?

How can we unpack every single bag about men's and women's responsibilities? and safety? and the mixed signals human beings can send? and the ways in which we know other humans can interpret them, alongside the ways in which we know they can fully control themselves against a little flirtation? How can we talk about what messages the woman in Spain was sending when she performed oral sex on 24 men for a cheap bottle of alcohol? How can we discuss how empowered or disadvantaged she may have felt? How can we discuss the roles of every single man and woman in that bar that night? How can we discuss the signals we send (and don't send) in sending/receiving nude images from other people or engage in other overtly-sexual behaviors? How can we discuss our motivations behind these actions?

It feels completely impossible to discuss how these things fit into rape culture when the entire thing is steeped in a climate of blame.

I want to be able to say this: that, in the same way all men are responsible for rape culture but not all men are to blame for rape culture, all women are responsible for our safety but not to blame when someone chooses to violate our safety.

Sadly, I don't think we all agree on this point.

But it is true. And I should be able to say it. And I hope that any man worth a damn would please just take a minute and reflect on it. Please? Please do it. Think about what the former statement means for you, as a man; now please, think about what the latter statement means for me, as a woman, in light of what the former statement means for you.

The most frustrating thing (currently) is the reality of that previous little paragraph, though: if there is any antidote for patriarchy and rape culture, it will come in pointing out all the very real ways in which patriarchy and rape culture hurt men. Not women. Not me.

Like a toddler roaring out to battle with a paper-towel tube; like a hobbit waddling out to the gates of Mount Doom. Can't even.

wait.

I am so impatient for my words to come back that I can hardly stand to read.

I am so impatient for my wonder to come back that I can hardly stand myself in the world.

I am so impatient to feel small and reverent again that sitting in a forest would break my heart; I need a forest to sit in.

I am so impatient for strength that I can hardly rest.

I am so impatient.

But there are deep breaths and there is focus, and there's no room for impatience here.

Impatience is not for a grown woman; it's the luxury of children. It's the charm and frenzy of little people whose lives are still just small backyards, with no capacity for enduring long swathes of landscape. No understanding for what it means to wait, to do the work of waiting, in a life so short and small.

So. I'm waiting.

Enduring. Focusing. Breathing. Practicing these things. Practicing it all.

It's a crazy thing, a weird thing, how waiting also means resting: a weird thing, to have to learn how to rest, as though resting were something to resist. To learn that part of resting means to temporarily set aside the things that derail the waiting. A crazy thing, that some things are not for right now, and that's okay. The sweetest relief I've ever known in my life, to allow the focus to shift from DO IT RIGHT ASAP to pace yourself for the long-haul, kid.  

Because God is changing my life. I am changing my life. And none of this can be done quickly. Can't be forced. Can't be made into something it isn't.

This will not be right without waiting.

I will not be whole without waiting.

I will not survive this without waiting.

This is it; The Big One, as they say.

I will either die in half-wait, or be made invincible by learning how to wait; this will either kill me, or it won't. It's all I can do.

So I'll wait to speak, and I'll read the conversations I can't yet join, let them help build their truth in me.

Trust inspiration to the times when it smacks me like a semi, and trust that, someday, it will woo me again, if I wait.

Let the dust settle, let the bleeding slow, let the scars form, wait for them to become the words I know are blooming and kicking inside me.

Sit with the doubts in a concrete jungle. Say them out loud, every last one, to every last letter, and wait.

Recognize the work of remembering what I'm learning. Remind myself of what's new. Recite it, over and over and over and over again, a new language, richer and fuller and deeper than I ever imagined. Work to remember, every day, how old languages, as mine as my own name, can turn me back toward death before I even realize what's happening.

I don't think the old way of words will never come back; it's turning new leaves, as a book or a tree, as I wait.

The wonder swells up to my throat, and I begin to remember myself again, as I wait, and all I can say is oh God, thank you. thank you. thank you. 

The presence of God seeps from the hand-made, cracked foundations of this concrete jungle; it cannot help itself. It betrays its inability to contain a God who is more than his own strength.

The air is heavy with Everything for which I wait.

I don't wait alone. Which is kind of the whole point.

Hummusville, hatred, health food, and holding yourself a bit closer.

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selfish celebrity suicide [or not.]

I always thought he'd do it. As though I knew him. Of course I didn't.

When I saw the phrase on Twitter: For Robin Williams, we give thanks. RIP. - my fingertips flew to my lips, and I thought, oh, Robin, no. I googled.

He did it. 

He did it.

I'd always wanted to meet him. When I was younger, I imagined he'd be a completely exhausting dinner date, but as I got older, I came to believe that he'd probably be very quiet. Awkward, without an audience, without a framework, without a catalyst. I wanted to meet him even more; I think I got more joy out of his presence on this earth as I came to understand more and more, simply by virtue of age, how dark his privacy must have been.

I think we would've understood each other a little.

Oh, Robin. 

______

Is it selfish for a person to commit suicide?

I don't know if "selfish" is the correct word.

I half-heartedly attempted suicide when I was in my very early 20s - three times, all overdoses. They were tough times: family stuff, personal stuff, in college and didn't know what to do with myself, deeply depressed and afraid. Two attempts ended in puke and a next-day headache; the third, no ill effects. I was, like many people (particularly women), mostly acting out of desperation at my pain and solitude, rather than actually trying to end my life. I still had hope that life would be better eventually, when I grew up, when I got on my own two feet, when I was fully in control of my own choices and direction.

That idea of eventual control and happiness was chronologically far enough in the future that it seemed there was enough time to turn the ship around; it seemed possible for my life to, eventually, be completely different. That I might be completely different in it; that I might learn to shed myself and emerge with different muscle-memory, different bones, different soul. Like Precious, in the movie.

I put it away, but I couldn't shed it.

People don't talk about it. It can be weird. It's taboo; it's horror, and it's confusing. It can be "triggery" for people who have struggled with it, and it's a hard thing to put on some's radar for any reason. Saying the word suicide aloud makes people hedgy. So I don't know how common it is, but I know that, for me: suicide has never left me. It's always there: not as a desire toward an action, not as an intent, but as the presence of that intent.

Aren't you tired of fighting. Wouldn't it be so much easier to. Wouldn't things be so much better if. 

Nobody likes these thoughts, people. Do they sound pleasant? Do they sound like something people feed, in order to keep alive? They are not selfish. They are not jolly, hello. They are not welcome. They are intrusive. They are utterly exhausting. They garner horror from people, if you share them. They make me feel horribly guilty and shameful. They make me hide.

Mostly because people think they're selfish.

______

At some point, I learned that my great-grandmother committed suicide before I was born. I'm not sure how old she was; I believe my grandmother was a young adult when it happened. According to my grandmother, her mother overdosed on medications, sat resolutely in a chair, and waited to die while her daughter, my grandmother, frantically tried to get medical attention for her (tried to get her out of the chair, tried to call the hospital - their remote locale prevented ambulance care).

I can't imagine what it would be like to watch your mother's life flicker out, right in front of you, hard to the end, in the presence of your tears. I can't imagine whether it might have been any less painful or traumatic if my great-grandmother had committed suicide in solitude.

I know that my grandmother has never been whole; I know that she could not build my mother, and resented her inevitable growth. I know that my mother could not build me, and broke me instead, against all intent I can hope for, on her behalf.

And who knows where it started, but so it goes.

______

The only reason I haven't committed suicide in the past two years is because of my nieces.

And don't freak out at me. The only reason I will put that fact on anyone's radar is because I could never do it. Are you suicidal? It's moot.

I know it would hurt people.

I know that I will not be the person to stamp the notion of suicide on my nieces' life experiences.

I won't be that voice. It is the only drive keeping me here.

I know how persistent that voice is, once it grabs you.

Only he could decide for himself whether it was right. Nobody else can know whether it was right. It's not a wrong decision. I can't always agree with these ideas that everyone's truth is their own truth, and every truth is true, because it's true for someone, somewhere. That reasoning seems really simplistic, to me. It seems belittling to every single layer of the human experience, both individual and shared. And if you call me out on that: I don't have the words for it yet. Only the truth of it, and the questions that surround it.

But what degree of illness must a person suffer in order to allow her child to frantically watch her die? to watch her beg and plead and sob, and remain resolute in - what? Your last memory of earth is your baby's heartbreak.

What madness must a person suffer in order to, like Sylvia Plath, commit suicide in her kitchen, having set the table with her childrens' breakfasts, knowing it would be they who found her dead body in that macabre, jolting position, half-in/half-out of an oven? Was that a thoughtless act?

What degree of darkness could a person carry for sixty-three years on this earth, determined to carry it successfully, whatever that means, determined to try to make good in the world as he suffered the presence of that intent for how long? - to what degree does the presence of that intent eventually overwhelm?

To what darkness would a person have to admit, in order to admit that they wonder at their bad choices and ingrown soul and pain and depression how much better off would my nieces be without me in their lives? 

And to what degree does grace abound? Whether you phrase it as it is unselfish and morally neutral for a person to commit suicide or to the degree a person suffers, so is there also an equal measure of grace for their suffering - I think selfish is pretty much the stupidest word to use toward this issue. Right up there with have some faith! and tomorrow is another day! and find the strength within! and maybe you should just spend more time outside in the freaking flaming-hot Florida sunshine, man! 

That is all.

tensions.

My pastor claims to not be a poet. He published a volume of poetry entitled I Am Not A Poet, which makes me chuckle, and I wonder if he chuckled when he chose that title. Because he is a poet, whether or not he ever intended to be.

I am not a dancer.

But I dance all the time.

Oh, the tension of it all.

*hand dramatically flung across forehead*

_________________ 

In six days, it will have been 2.5 years since big, bad life events began. And I still cannot understand how women survivors manage to use their voices calmly, how they manage to plant their feet and live alongside rapids; how they consider first the life they draw upward into themselves, and not the fact that the rapids erode the ground beneath them: that tragedy is, at any time, imminent. A few years ago (before all this), I wrote that, in the company of strong women, I often felt like a little girl, sitting on the floor wide-eyed, one finger in my mouth as I watched the women go about the business of the world. I feel closer to tantrum than reason lately; bewildered, on the floor, as I watch the women dance in the tensions of whatever brings them to where they are.

I want to learn the Tension again.

I want to understand how to gather the parts of this experience that make pure, objective, critical thought impossible for me right now, and put them in the places where they won't need to burst out, graceless, enraged, snarling and foaming for blood. I grieve hard at the loss of my balance, my grace. I hate the way it cripples.

I want to know how to reconcile my firm belief that women are not primarily their sexuality yeah yeah yeah! with the shame of admitting how this experience has razed me and what I think is a pretty objective observation that I'm probably never going to be the same again.

I want to understand how to not be broken by this. Because I am. And the current goal of my life is to not stay here. Whatever mistakes I may make in processing all this, I cannot hold this close; I can't make it part of myself, to the extent that the value I assign the pain begins to outweigh the promise beyond it.

I get it, for the first time. It has to be okay to let things go. It has to be okay to outgrow the way things have always been. Outgrowing doesn't mean you're abandoning the self-care you invested in the person who experienced things; it doesn't mean you're leaving the four-year-old on the side of the road. It means that the tension of things is at work: it means that the person you've always known is the same, but not: the four-year-old is now twelve, or fifteen, or twenty-five, or fifty-five; it means she lives and needs differently. She's not Sleeping Beauty, holed up in a tower, static for a hundred years; she's Rapunzel, literally attempting to climb things for more.

So you give her more. You re-learn the Tension. And it's hard.

_______________

I've never thought about pain abstractly until people started giving me self-help books. There are some great ones; they're usually the ones I start reading, then say whoa. and set aside for awhile. I glance at them every now and then, and I know there's plenty in there for when I have teeth.

The other books, though? There are some weird, even offensive, ideas out there regarding pain and recovery. I don't know much, but I'm glad I know weird when I see/hear/read/smell it.

I'm not determined to carry pain around with me, and I'm not investing in poking at bruises to remember the ouch, but this idea of pain as something to be overcome, eradicated, left behind as an obstacle to greater things.... I don't know. I can't see the value in pursuing a disconnect from the pain we've experienced; I can't even see it as possible, that I would ever not feel pain regarding painful events.

The idea of not trying to overcome pain kind of flies in the face of most things I've heard or learned about pain. More tension. Glorifying pain, denying pain; making pain an idol, rejecting pain as sinful.

I'm not glorifying pain. Mine is currently debilitating, and I am not content with this. But I think that, if we're careful with it, and with ourselves, our pain is an integral part of the roadmap that propels us forward on a path: what does this mean? why, and in light of what ideas I had before? how has it changed the person I was? what does it mean to God? what will it mean, going forward? And while a tragic experience can be mistakenly processed as merely a framework in which pain can be expressed and made to redefine a life, the pain itself differs from the value we assign it and the ways in which it manifests in a self-image, an image of God, or a worldview. Feeling pain is not the Ultimate of a recovery. But neither is discarding pain as something peripheral, or attempting to eradicate it as a distraction.

I'm thinking that God is most profoundly present in pain: in the transmission of it, the unwilling reception, the burden, the go-forth of it. I don't understand it, but it is. It is witness to the in-between, the tension of all that is God. Sometimes, there's no greater comfort in the world than to hear the words I know how you feel from someone seared by their own branding of the pain you carry. Somehow, in ways for which I don't yet have words, when one draws a deep breath and pushes out those words, wishing that one did not have the capacity to know - I know how you feel - the in-between tension of all that is God is most present in those moments: knowing, not knowing, speaking, being still, recovered by grace, and yet that grace is most present in the sacred Moment of pain in their eyes; and you know you're not alone or without grace as you labor with your own moment.

Somehow, God lives in those most sacred Moments, which still rumble and smoke from the depths; to eradicate them? deny them?

Impossible.

gluten, booger-fruits, Twinkies, and frying people.

So I went to the doctor. You know it's real when Lisa goes to the doctor.

'Cause I hate going to the doctor.

I love you, pizza crust. 

But I'm getting older. And getting older comes with the need to make sure things are still working the same way they did when you were, like, seventeen. [Spoiler alert: when you're thirty-three, they don't work the same as when you were seventeen. I've heard the best is yet to come.]

So, for a few reasons, we decided that: it might be beneficial for me to abstain from gluten for awhile.

I love you, cheesy crackers.

Yeah, you heard me: I'm going gluten-free. Get your potshots in now. I've earned them. I've flung them around myself, O Thou Abstainers Of The Wheatberry: I know, I know: you're not celiac (neither am I), but you have a sensitivity, or an allergy (I might, too). I'm not making fun of you, seeing as how I'm on a little trip to figure out whether we might have this in common. I'm learning that there are many more legitimate reasons to avoid gluten than just celiac, or IBS, or whatever else, so I really need to be less judgy/mocky than I used to be. Especially as high-horsey as I can be about people judging or mocking my own choices. I've been a little hypocritical, I'll admit. So there's that.

But there's also this: I'm a chef. I manage one kitchen, work my badonk off in another, and personal-chef as much as I can, often for people with health issues who require special accommodations. So I have plenty of opportunities to interact with special dietary needs and diverse culinary preferences. I don't begrudge any person their right to eat whatever the heck they want or need to eat. Twinkies? VASTLY inferior to Butterscotch Krimpets, but have at 'em, if that's your thing. Lentils? With you. Lamb? Marinate with lime, and yay for dinner. Avocado? Avocado is, and always will be, a disgusting booger fruit, so you, I judge (actually, I'm just jealous that you can choke it down).

The Gluten Thing is a thing that I hate, even as I begin this experiment. There is a special place in Hell's Kitchen for people who play gluten-free games. People who play gluten-free games for no reason make my job harder, and they make life harder on people who legitimately suffer, and they make me want to stuff baguettes down their gullets before dredging them in flour (you know, the gluten kind) and flinging them headfirst into the fryer.

I love you, gnocchi, but I hate making you.

Por ejemplo: Customer strolls in, sipping a beer (gluten), munching a mini-bag of pretzels (hello), and I clearly hear her chomping into her iPhone about her study dinner of Bagel Bites and Sam Adams the previous evening (of course). And she asks:

"Do you guys have GF bread/croutons/crackers/babies/oxygen/chairs/restrooms?"

Sigh...... yeeesssss, we dooooo. [In my  head, I've said it like Napoleon Dynamite; in real life, I'm a professional, so I've said it like Napoleon Dynamite with a big friendly smile.]

"Okay, I want that. But I want the gluten-free crackers on top of the gluten-free bread, and the gluten-free  babies on the side, and I want the gluten-free restroom served cold but the rest of it just a little bit warm."

[Still smiling; eyes glazed over.] No problem.

"Yeah. And can you make it on a gluten-free grill that you've just pulled out of an unopened box made from gluten-free cardboard which as never been in the same gluten-free room with any gluten-free fertilizer which may or may not have been used to stink up a gluten-free wheat field?"

...Sure. I have one of those In The Back. [There is no Back, in that it's like Narnia and filled with magical things, like gluten-free grills.] [And I'm still smiling.]

"Great. But I don't want the obviously-GF potato side dish; I want extra flatbread on the side instead, but with gluten-free oxygen for dipping instead of whatever it normally comes with."

[I stop smiling.] The flatbread is made with wheat flour.

"Oh, it is?"

Yep.

"Oh. Well... Eh, that's okay. I love flatbread. It's fine. Just make sure it's grilled on a separate grill from anything that touched gluten."

The insides of my cheeks are bleeding because I'm chewing on them right now.

"What?"

Nothing. ["Idiot." Napoleon nails it again.]

(I know, I know, #notallGFpeople. But #yesallchefs. So.)

_____

For me... After talking with my doctor, I realize that I suffer from a variety of little tics, either mild enough that I don't pay them much attention, or have crept up with enough subtlety that I don't recognize on a daily basis how much they impact my life. But I've always dealt with depression that meds don't always alleviate. But I'm an overweight chef who's on her feet all day long, and I'm getting older; aches and pains are normal, right? But I've figured out so many of my migraine triggers and I manage them pretty well, even though I still get them, so never mind. 

There's also the brain fog that gets so intense sometimes that I truly can't think. There's the fact that, sometimes, I'll bump into a doorframe or catch my skin on the edge of a table, and within minutes, it's spread into a foot-long welt resembling a huge, hot, red bugbite. There's the fact that any prolonged contact on my skin - socks, bra, bobby pins, even a bandaid - results in huge, painful, itchy hives that take weeks to clear. Migraines. Other headaches. Girl Weirdness. Physical weakness.

So, for now; goodbye, pasta. Love you so much, miss you already, mean it like crazy.

like. crazy. 

People who are GF for a legit medical reason - celiac, allergies, IBS, whatever - I'm more than happy to accommodate. I can nearly always tell, anyway, when someone is legitimately Gf, because they make it clear that they're appreciative of the special treatment they wish they didn't need. I'm not looking for anyone to apologize for their needs; I'm just a curmudgeony person when it comes to dumb things. It's real easy to say things like if you're gonna be stupid, just stay HOME and cook for yourself when you're a chef.

Maybe gluten causes my curmudgeonism.

We'll see.

That is all.

adieu.