thirteen months and a bacon-chicken.

After nearly thirteen months in my house, I unpacked most of my boxes today.

For the past year, I just couldn't.

I've always been a light social drinker; nothing crazy, nothing crutch-y. Almost immediately after the rape, I began drinking heavily, daily. A functional near-alcoholic. Class, work, home: I'm positive that I reeked of vodka. Every now and then, I'd crack: break down weeping in the car on the way to work, or silent, seething rage at classmate hijinks. A friend later told me, of that time, you scared us; you were always drunk, somehow so desperate; we didn't know why; we didn't know what to do. I truly don't even remember doing it, though I don't remember much of anything about the four months between when the rape occurred and the stalking began.

It all just happened so fast. One crushing event after the other, shutting out the rape completely from day one, trying to contain the stalking as though I were dealing with a civilized person and eventually realizing I couldn't; then leaving Florida for Pennsylvania in fear, then leaving Pennsylvania for West Virginia in more fear, then a job which rendered me exhausted and unable to think (which I was extremely lucky to get, though), then moving back to Florida.... All in thirteen months. Thirteen months. Until today, I hadn't realized how short the timeframe was.

And next month will mark thirteen months in my house.

I returned to Florida with all intentions of jumping right back into school. Picking up exactly where I'd left off. I returned to the scene of such an abrupt exit to expectations that I didn't realize I had: that my life was here waiting for me, that the spaces which held the person I'd been had frozen, and that I could just slip right back into the hole I'd left in the frame, like a digital photo with a person-shaped cutout. That nothing would have changed. That I was fine. I am not going to fail at this. I am going to finish this. And I tried. But I couldn't make myself be in that building.

So I didn't.

I got my job stuff settled, I moved into my house, and I began unpacking boxes which still smelled like my living room in Tennessee; out of cardboard and newspaper, baubles which had brought me pleasure and comfort clanked against my bones, and I set them up on shelves and looked at them as they expectantly occupied bits of space. Piece after piece, vases and books and sheets and dishes and an entire life-ful of items.

Do you do this, too? - When I enter someone else's space, I'm always interested in how they've chosen to make the space reflect themselves. All the little details they've purposely chosen to display for themselves, knowing that other people will see them, too. Family photos, old childhood toys, books, media, particular pieces of furniture, maybe a wall color reminiscent of a grandmother's kitchen. I looked at the walls of my new house and didn't know what to do with them, purchased furniture I didn't want to touch to fill a space I didn't want to know me. I may as well have hung from the ceiling to sleep, as displaced as I felt. I functioned through work every day to escape those walls, then returned to them every night as the dread built in me, as the evidence of how destroyed I felt continued to build, as I tried to incorporate items from the past into this space where they absolutely did not fit, as I tried as hard as I could to just make it okay now. You're fine. FORWARD already. Get going. In my father's Pastor Voice, no less, urging us into the car on Sunday mornings: c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, let's get this show on the road. 

I threw it all back into the boxes and stacked them in the garage, and after the last boxes were packed away, I pulled the garage door shut behind me and looked at what I'd done. I didn't know what needed to happen, but I knew I needed to see my house as it was: full, but mostly packed away, disheveled, a denied space with no windows in the middle. It was the first time I could breathe deeply, and the sound echoed against the walls. It was the first time I was alone with everything that had happened, the first time I was in a space with everything without urgency or fear driving me to focus three steps ahead. I could look at my walls and know that this sadness was real, and that my brokenness was more than in my head, that I could shut the door behind me, in this space, and let it come. The more I fought it, the more it took me away; the more it took me away, the less I cared to fight it.

I fell apart.

I was on my deathbed. A wonderful therapist who retired four months into our work; a second try, with another therapist which didn't work out. The immobility and inability were terrifying. I remember sitting in my bathroom, not really thinking anything other than I need to clean this bathroom but knowing I couldn't make it a priority, and feeling so tired, so confused about why something as trivial as clean your damn bathroom was fundamentally impossible, and I started talking, to God, in my bathroom, while I was peeing: I'm just done, man. I've been done. I don't know what else to do. I know that I'm sitting here in limbo. I know that I have to decide whether I'm going to live or die. I can't inflict my choice to leave on my nieces, but God, I can't imagine living anymore. I can't live with all this. I can't. Help me. It was a turning point; I was realistic about how much I wanted to die, and then I determined that I would not die until I could do more for myself than just stay alive.

For the past thirteen months, those words: I can't. Help me. It wasn't self-pity; it was reality. It was neither negligence to engage in positive self-affirmation nor determination to remain a victim; it was my umbilical cord, my total, honest, naked, destroyed soul learning how those words felt in my mouth for the first time in my life. And you know what? I'm a little defiant about this: I'd love to not care if it sounds like self-pity or lack of effort to anyone outside it, but I do. That's both the rock AND the hard place: it will look like laziness or wrongdoing to lots of people, but sometimes, self-care just can't happen, whether it's showering or eating or sleeping or therapy or cleaning your bathroom. But I am better now at being supportively helpless with someone than I've ever been. God's presence in tragedy - a truth that still makes me deeply angry, and I don't know if it ever won't - teaches us all over again not just what it means, but how it feels and what it costs us to weep and mourn with the broken and dead. God never said FALL YE NOT APART, nor did he ever say MAKE IT SNAPPY IF YOU DO. So shut that noise down, noisemakers.  

New therapeutic environment. New work. New terms to learn; new habits to develop, new coping methods. God is here. So am I. Whatever that means. (I'm chuckling as I write that.)

I also drizzled some bacon with honey and rubbed it with garlic, then shoved it under the skin of a chicken and roasted that sucker with some broccoli and whole garlic cloves today. And if THAT doesn't make you happy, then.... well, that's okay.

*puts some in the freezer for you*

i will charge you $25 for a pie. $30, if you're a pain. not sorry.

Listen. I love junk food. My tastes lean toward the salty and horrific. I don't care what unpronounceable crap lurks in my crappy drive-thru mozzarella sticks, because they are fried freaking cheese with a crunchy shell and I love the crap out of them and no, I have no plans to make my own just because "chef."

But we all know that junk foods aren't for everyday consumption. There are definite issues of privilege tied up in discussions of people's diets, so I'm not here to soapbox about it.

I'm here to tell you why I, as a chef, and a business person, will charge you at least $25 for a lemon meringue pie. $30, in fact, if you earn it. In a heartbeat, without apology, and with sincere understanding and good wishes for people whose budgets don't allow for $25 or $30 pies.

______

"Are you serious?" She'd just finished eating a slice, and, upon first bite, leaned back in her chair with eyes closed and proclaimed it ambrosial and otherworldly and transformative, and that should've been my first clue that she was nuts, but it wasn't, because sometimes, I am dumb. So she inquired about ordering a whole pie. "Are you serious? How can you charge that much? That's crazy!" Her nose wrinkled up and, I swear, her eyes shrunk backward into her head, somehow. As if I'd told her something like... well...

That's pretty much exactly how she reacted to the words twenty-five plus tax.

I'm so thankful that most customers seem to accept the prices I charge. I'm thankful that they trust me to price items as I need to. And I actually love working with people whose budgets might not typically have room for luxury items, like fancy baked goods or catered events. I love making it happen, because I love creating or contributing to an atmosphere where people can participate in the deeply social, deeply personal, and deeply primal rituals of physical nourishment. Blah blah blah basically I like making pretty food and making people fat and happy and sometimes drunk if I can 'cause drunk people tip better.

But that "crazy" talk up there? I despise that kind of exchange with a customer. I really do. It's never worth replying to, even though I do, sometimes: "No, the price is not 'crazy.' It is expensive. But it's not crazy, given the experience you'll have, and given our costs in creating the experience." By the end of that statement, they've usually either interrupted to continue berating me, or they're walking away, or calling their hipster daughter-in-law, who recommended me, to complain. It makes make me sad, to know the wonderful experience I could've created for them if we'd been able to dialogue a little.

But really, though? It pisses me right straight off. It's ugly. It's boorish. It's just plain rude. Call me crazy, but: don't call me crazy. It's not gonna make me drop the price. It's not gonna make me inclined to work with your budget. It leaves me nowhere to go with you. Basically, you've just sailed directly into I'd-like-to-not-deal-with-you-anymore territory, and I may or may not jack the price up a little just to make you go away, rude person. 'Cause, to me, it's just like walking into someone's home and berating them for how much they paid for their furniture, with absolutely no knowledge of either the price or whether their finances can accommodate the price. It's rude and crazy for a home cook - even a very good home cook - to walk into a professional food business and call their prices craaaaazy without any relevant frame of reference.

And I'm happy to tell you more.

1. There's pie, and there's Walmart pie. I know it's en vogue to hate Walmart; I've never met a person who's happy to work there, but while I know plenty of small business owners who lose business to Walmart, I also know plenty of people who, in the short-term, can afford to feed their families because of Walmart. So there's that. Privilege is a serious, relevant issue when criticizing Walmart, and I'm not crapping on people who shop there.

But I'm totally crapping on the ways in which Walmart affects consumer expectations, particularly where they intersect with my small-business practices. Walmart can crank out 3983598395 pies per day, using automated equipment and the lowest-quality ingredients they can, and make them available to you literally twenty-four hours a day. That's not a judgment-based statement; it is a fact. The only real reason this is relevant to me as a businessperson is that millions of people use a $6 Walmart pie as the standard by which they measure the prices, quality, and availability of food items across the board. And that is relevant because...

2. ... Unfortunately, with the proliferation of highly-processed foods in any mainstream marketplace, items made with whole foods are considered more problematic; they have shorter shelf lives, often require refrigeration, freezing, or otherwise "special" handling (which used to be standard handling), and are more expensive. Do you know that there are people who are afraid to purchase baked goods because they contain real butter? Well, is it gonna go bad? Well, yes, darlin!' Eventually, it will! Because it's real food! Which goes bad, if you don't eat it! Because it was made for eating! It wasn't made for storage! I'm not saying a Walmart pie isn't sometimes yummy; I'm saying that Walmart pie is made primarily for long-term storage, and food made primarily for eating, from ingredients made primarily with sustainability and responsible production in mind, will always cost you more money. I wish it weren't so. But I can't control a single thing about it. And my inability to control those costs is relevant because...

3. ...I use higher-quality ingredients in my cooking, because I am currently in a position to use them. That hasn't always been true, and it may not always be true, but it's a position I've committed to for as long as I can sustain it. I'm not all about the buzzwords, because many of them are meaningless, but those buzzwords, like "grassfed" and "organic" (the only buzzword with consistent relevancy) and "free-range" and "cage-free" items were, at one point, not part of food culture, because they were simply how animals were raised and how products were produced. Those products didn't require a totally different designation and pricepoint. They were cheap, easily attainable, and standard. That's not the case any longer. They are more expensive to purchase, and they are often more problematic to source. Which is relevant because...

4. .... Every raw material in the world is more expensive than it was fifty years ago, the cost of living has increased, and wages, etc., have been increased accordingly. High-quality, responsibly-produced ingredients require more time to source than their conventionally-produced counterparts. BUT: the amount of labor involved in making a scratch lemon meringue pie hasn't decreased in relation to how much those labor hours actually cost, or how much electricity costs, or how much insurance costs, or how much my time costs - my time, which is, unfortunately for ME, often the most easily-sacrificed cost available to me in pursuit of creating items I love for someone's pleasure. I don't always pay myself for my time; I definitely don't always pay myself enough for my time. But I always soak, scrub, zest, and juice real organic lemons for your pie. And that's before I make the crust, before I make the filling, and before I time the meringue to be ready while your filling is still hot, so it adheres properly before broiling. Walmart doesn't do that, so if you want it, you have to pay someone to do it. Usually while they're also doing eight million other things. Which is relevant because...

5. ...I already kinda said it, but I'm giving it its own number, because I want you to know it so hard... The costs of pies made by a home cook for pleasure do not carry the same weight as the costs carried by a pie made for business purposes. Unlike a pie made in a home, the price of a pie in a business covers much more than raw material and labor (which is likely not a concern anyway). So pricing lectures from a home cook - even a very good home cook - it's like being angry that we communicate in Chinese in a professional kitchen, even though you speak Greek in a home kitchen. It's. Just. Not. The. Same. Not better, not worse - just different. If you walk into China expecting Greece, you will be disappointed. 

6. And the bottom line is: lemon meringue pies are luxury items. Drive-thru mozzarella sticks are luxury items. Even a Walmart pie is a luxury. I would love to make you a luxury item, like a gorgeous brioche, or a tiered themed birthday cake, or a romantic candlelit dinner for twelve, if that's your thing (I don't judge). Just know that I have absolutely zero qualms about charging you enough money to cover my costs. If you're trying to work a lemon meringue pie into your budget, I'm not here to tell you that you're crazy for spending less than $25 on a pie; there are markets out there to fit every budget, from Walmart prices, to my prices, and way beyond my prices. The only judgment I'll offer is this: Frankly, if you're eating pie that often, it's worth your while to pay more for a pie made with whole foods...

I also make a damn good lemon meringue pie. It's worth your $25. And if you're a jerk to me, I consider that worth a $5 surcharge.

So there.

Cookies, though... I'll give those away.

"...someone else's eternal home."

Every time I'm out and about, I see my father.

It's not actually him, though: it's the man standing ahead of me in the grocery checkout line, fidgeting and impatient and radiating discontent; or it's the man ambling to his vehicle, the way my father ambles, drawing out each stride, each entitled yard, stretching limbs as though released from a cage; or it's the man making earnest, almost desperate conversation with whoever, leaping forward with interruptions, throwing his head back to laugh, eyes unchanged, because this is the world and this is how people do in the world, and the world is watching. Ever the external pastor-figure: chin up, eyes straight ahead, looking forward, moving forward, ever away, ever someday: toward someone else's eternal home.

_____________

I can hardly face the ways in which we're alike; I suspect he feels similarly. We are alike. I have never been my mother's; I was his, until he left me toward the ecclesiastical ecstasy of someday. We were never familiar, though; we nodded coolly at each other over art and music, discussed the penciled shape of a face or the messy imprecision of watercolor or the vast vocabulary of pottery, completely confusing to a six-year-old (he is an amazing artist, and it was his trade before he pursued ministry). We regarded each other's edges as he strove to connect me intellectually to his understanding of artistic interpretation, where he found solace, and I strove to meet him where he was, wherever he was; to draw him to where I was, which, surely, I could do, if I could do it better.

His hands changed with his vocation - from ruddy, paint-stained, bruised and scraped, dirty fingernails, to smoother, no longer torn, webbed with hardened scars, and in perpetual futile motion; endless drumming against steering wheels and tables and doorframes, knuckles flexing white against his palms, fast-moving, hard-grabbing.

I'd always told myself that he was the safer of my parents. My mother's rages and violence were totally unpredictable, extreme, emotional and manipulative, and satisfied in our destruction. If I had to weigh the cost, I always figured my mother's relationship to me had cost me more.

But anymore, I don't think that's true. I'm starting to realize, as an adult, how very deeply my father hates women. Starting to understand the very real damage that banks inside the daughter of a man who hates women. Starting to understand how that hatred shapes her.

For my entire life, I knew my femaleness was a problem for him, something which drew and repelled him, against which he had to take deep breaths. I was always afraid of it, always felt shameful, dirty, in his presence. Always. Always felt sorry, as though I were a blight on already-broken things which he might otherwise make function, as though he could be happier or more present if I weren't present to remind him of the demons which banished him toward someday instead of now.

Always listened at church - red nail polish! makeup! wanton! wearing pants? failure! purity rings: wear your sex life on your sleeve (my snarky interpretation)! modesty! temptresses! nice to see you in a skirt for a change! why can't I touch you? god wants me to pray for you! better get used to! have every right to! It's not the result of any great insight, or anything to do with me; it's nothing I'm bragging about, because it was one of the central most painful truths of my childhood and young adulthood: I was the only one in my family who did not know how to pretend it wasn't all bullshit. And he knew it. Because we are alike.

It sounds arrogant, condescending, to me, to say things like but he's a good person, he is, insisting to the wind, as though I am a person who could sit and list another person's sins and bask in the heightened glow of my own righteousness by the end of it. I won't do that. He's a seething, broken, angry, controlling person in whose presence I have always - every single day of my life - felt threatened and endangered, pacing childhood bedrooms knowing to myself he could snap and kill us all - as real as fearing my stalker, as wondering if I would die at the hands of the man who raped me.

But I know that the question of whether he is a good person is a stupid one. What is a good person, anyway? I know that there's always been good in him. I know that a broken person is terrified of the indescribable grace which abounds in the presence of children. There's enough good in him that he was, early on, enchanted with his baby daughter, his own hopes for redemption so interwoven with her presence, sustained by his expectations that her nonwoman female presence ought to nurture his good intentions. Until she failed him, somehow. I don't know how. Sometimes, I think I know how. I don't want to know.

Now, I am just tired. I've stopped calling him. When I do, I end up sitting rigidly across tables from him, hardened and wise-talking and swallowing sawdust food which lodges in my chest, absolutely exhausted, thinking you are a person I truly don't know what to do with. I don't know what you want from me. I am still afraid of you. I will always be afraid of you. We still regard each other's edges. He still holds himself distant, as do I. I know, intellectually, that he can't hurt me, not really. I fear for when he's gone, when I still see him at the bank, or the grocery store - wiry, graying, dirty-blond hair, a tall, slim frame in drab colors, an ambling stride, blunt, work-darkened fingers drumming against a steering wheel. I don't know how I'll be with the time of my chosen separation, when the separation becomes final.

And, as an adult, I sometimes wonder what it must have been like, maybe from an outsider's perspective: all of us under the same roof, my brother and I old enough, and all of us thinking and feeling as individuals in a unit; sometimes I wonder, at all the different relationships we had to each other, all the ways we saw ourselves in each other, and how we could hardly face the ways in which we were all alike.

you will probably read yourself in parts of this.

Nothing about this is important, and you should stop reading immediately and find a worthwhile and productive channel for your attention.

I guess you're a glutton for caffeinated stream-of-consciousness, though, because there you are, still reading, like I'm giving away $100 dollar bills or something. I'M NOT.

But did you know that coffee changes your life? kind of? And these are the ways in which coffee has changed my life.


1. I HAVE COFFEE OPINIONS, AND I KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS. KIND OF. 

My Christmas Keurig (let's stop right there for a sec. I'm aware that Keurigs are controversial little robots. They make gross coffee, some bleat. They're awesome and fast, others yell,  waving their pitchforks. They're lazy, retort the torch-flingers. They're heavenly, screech the poo-shooters. Drip times and extraction and oils and all that. I like my Keurig. I also know nothing about coffee. Maybe it's crap. I don't know. Leave us alone.)

My Christmas Keurig came with a bunch of K-cups, and I have been steadily working my way through them. And I'm so dang giggly that I never understood the wide variety of coffee characteristics. Acidic. Smooth. Too smooth. Bland. OUCH. Ew. Awesome. Weird. Why does this one taste like fruit; that's gross. Why does this one taste like nothing; that's stupid. THIS ONE TASTES LIKE THE SMELL OF AN ANGEL'S NECK-FOLDS AND I MUST HAVE IT. Why does this one taste like hot chocolate? Oh... it's hot chocolate.

I threw away the decaf. Also, I'm so unaccustomed to using coffee-talkings that I always type "decalf" first. Which is a horrid slip on my part, because...


2. MY DAIRY-PURCHASING HABITS HAVE RUN AMOK

... Milk is required for all coffee interactions, hot and iced. I love all coffee-drinkers equally - some of my best friends drink black coffee, OKAY? - but black coffee is acidic and not creamy, and I don't know how a person chokes down black coffee, like some kind of grown-up, and I don't want to know, and I don't need that kind of sadness in the mouth part of my head. Some of us never stop nursing, it seems, and I need milk joy in my mug. There should be a lot of it. Whole is preferred. 2% will only slightly dissatisfy. Half-and-half is too much. Soymilk is eeugh. Almond milk is pretty nice. Coconut milk is pointless. Hemp milk is... not food. All that to say: I use a lot of milk.


2. MORNING ROUTINE

... as in I ACTUALLY HAVE ONE NOW. With a GOAL in it. Which is a NEW thing. Truly, before I started drinking coffee in the morning, I didn't even aim to make it out the door. And even though my brand new morning goal is only "drink the coffee" and not "make it out the door," I shall brag where the brag takes root.

Former morning routine: Hit snooze. Hit snooze. Hit snooze. Hit snooze. Hit snooze. Ooze out of bed teeth clothes door wait glasses wait pee suddenly I'm on the interstate how did we get here

Current morning routine: Hit snooze. Remember that I drink coffee. Practically skip to the kitchen (no, I'm not kidding), pour about 1/3 cup milk into my favorite mug (Life Change 2a: I have a favorite coffee mug and it's so pretty), microwave for thirty seconds while eating leftovers out of the fridge with my fingers, remove mug from microwave, place under Keurig spout, hit the "power" button instead of the "brew" button, sigh deeply because I'm not awake enough to curse, perform the whole turn-on-lift-handle-close-back rigamarole again, hit the "brew" button, visit with the potty, return to hot milk-water because last night's shower made me so sleepy that I forgot to do the coffee part.

I might be getting ahead of myself goalwise; perhaps the goal should be dialed back to "master the coffee part."


3. I HAVE DISCOVERED WHAT SUGAR IS 

Hallelujah, friends: there's a reason this season is called Epiphany. And that reason is that I finally understand why they call it coffee cake. I finally understand why doughnuts + coffee is a thing. I am rendered speechless at the glorious, terrible beauty of a mini powdered-sugar doughnut dipped in cappuccino. I can't look it in its all-seeing Eye. It will level me. It is my maker.

You may or may not have noticed, but sugar is not kale. And you may or may not have noticed, because it's not like I talk about the stupid minutiae of my life all the blah blah blah blah blah, but I don't have much of a sweet tooth. Or, more accurately, I DIDN'T have much of a sweet tooth. Turns out, my sweet tooth is a huge coffee fiend, too. My kale tooth is apparently a lying sack of compost (not manure, because that's oppressive), because guys.... sugar is really good. Sigh.

Fortunately (and this is gospel here, folks): Sugar only belongs in iced coffee. And since the icy-coldness highlights the milk's sweetness, it requires less sugar (barely a cup and a half wait what?). Also, I totally meant agave. Which is nothing but sugar, ya big hippies. Pass the tequila. Or the mezcal. Name the connection there and I'll totally give you $100. (Speaking of: liquor in coffee is disgusting. Not that I'd know.. that one time.. at 9:45 am....)


4. A MUG OF COFFEE IS A MUG OF ACTUAL HAPPINESS. 

I was sitting here derping on them interwebs and filling out a form for something boring and listening to Roseanne on Netflix, and suddenly, I thought: I want a cup of COFFEE WAIT A SECOND, I CAN MAKE A CUP OF COFFEEEEEEEEE! and then I thought: coffee makes me so happy. And then I thought: oh god, do you hear you? I'm one of them now. This is what it means when they say it. Coffee makes me unreservedly happy. I don't understand why it's true, but it's true. Why is it true?

That is all.
(coffee is all.)

contained in this post: a dog with spaghetti on his head.

There's not much that's pretty about it, but it's true:

Sometimes, you just have to tell everybody to shut the hell up.

this might be my new favorite picture in the world.

Sometimes, you reach a breaking point. You haven't been okay with things, but you've just kept your mouth shut. Maybe you've been functioning in a system that malfunctions; maybe you've lost yourself, little by little, in just trying to just keep quiet. I don't have the energy for. I just don't want to listen to. It's easier to just.

And there are times, so many times, when you swear, oh my god, I'm just going to, I can't even, when I see them I'll say, and then the moment comes, and the air is thick with it, you just know how huge the fight will be, and that the fight will play out over the next several interactions, because it's not as much about the other person's actions as it is about the way they see you, the way they see themselves and the world, and the ways they treat you in light of it all, and it's not a one-shot deal. And you know it'll be long, drawn-out, mostly silent, and toxic and petulant, and seriously, who ever has the energy for that kind of thing.

So you swallow it down. It burns in your esophagus, turns food into acid; it pounds in your head; it pulls your eyelids over your eyes to escape the conflict twisting in your gut, the conflict you absorb instead of drawing a clear line of shut. the. hell. up. Because nice people don't say shut the hell up; nice people, people who love other people, try to find ways to deal with it. And Christians, in particular - I'm not flinging crap; I am a Christian. But gah, the exhaustion of navigating Grace And Unintentional Martyrdom - God says to respond to each other with grace, and responding to this with grace is impossible for me; I need to do better with this, to extend more grace to this situation, to love them better. I'm the only one who's hurt or upset here. What am I doing wrong.

It all gets so confusing. Laying yourself down on The Altar Of Poor Boundaries before you realize what you're doing, because it's so stealth, so insidious.

And whatever finally trips your trigger, whether you pop like a champagne-bottle cork or slowly work up to your shut-the-hell-up - it feels a little jittery, a little foreign, to plant yourself there, to stomp out your intent after so much tiptoeing. But you realize that it's right, that you're out of practice in being a self. And you realize:

It's about their behavior, yes. But sometimes, you have to lay down some shut the hell up because you're the one who shut the hell up to begin with.  

Actually, no: THIS is my new favorite picture.

Sometimes, you relaxed your boundaries. You just wanted to be nice. You thought, just this once, or just occasionally; it's not that bad; I can deal with it. You didn't anticipate they'd mow you down like they did. You wanted to belong.

Sometimes, you were too tired to use your backbone.

Sometimes, you just didn't want to risk speaking up.

But then, down the road, you realize you're exhausted, because you've accepted a role in a system that's built on a giant, steaming pile of vermin-inhabited, sun-fermenting BULLSHIT. You're not responsible for their behavior, but you're responsible for how you participate in the system; you're responsible for how much of the bullshit you allow to infect everything else on your plate.

And eventually, when you're tired of being exhausted, when you're tired of feeling undermined and powerless, when the SHUT-THE-HELL-UP wells up inside you and you wonder where it's been this whole time:

You remember who you are.

You remember what shut the hell up means when YOU say it: here's the line. i trust the lines i draw. do not cross them. if you choose to, i choose myself over you. bye. 

You remember that shutting down for the purposes of self-preservation in an unhealthy system is a killing thing.

You remember that participation in such a system nullifies any concept of neutral in the eyes of the system; you are Part Of The Family, or you are not. You're a captive, spineless lemming, or you are an outlier in a system which devalues you.

You remember that you're lonely in either choice, but you're intact in only one of them.

You remember that the black-and-white nature of each role has absolutely nothing to do with you. You didn't set up the choice. It's not your system.

You remember that the system counts on you flying under the radar and avoiding a fight and just don't want to have to deal with the upset - the system is built on the very denial which fuels the delusion of neutrality.

And ultimately, you remember: it's a lonely thing, to refuse a system which erodes and assimilates you; it's a horrible, painful, confusing, exhausting and lonely thing, though, to extricate yourself from such a system.

You remember more than that, but you're so full of vegan mac and cheese that you can't exactly think strai - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.