Balancing without Acts

I don’t know how to walk a balance beam and trust that it’s not going to move of its own accord. It seems the most natural thing in the world to me that it should suddenly toss me off, or that a gigantic gap might appear, or an earthquake might force me off. I know what to do when the unexpected happens. When the center of my gravity is shifted without my approval, or when the only ground allowed to me is removed. Uncertainty and disloyalty I can deal with, but security? What is that? How do I take care of myself in such untenable circumstances? How can I possibly cope with a secure balance beam?

Either way, I needed something and I couldn’t grasp it in that moment. Walking on a thinly edged balance beam, arms stretched toward the ends of my vision, seeking some semblance of a straight path. For all the pressing on thin air my palms do, every second or third step comes only after an intense wobbling- an almost catastrophe. And there are no mirrors with which to watch the terror creep up in me. I walk, toe to heel, toe to heel, focused so intently upon my next step that I am utterly ambushed by the sudden cramp, the seemingly unavoidable tension that wracks my ankle, grips my leg, and threatens my body with collapse. It is all I can do to pause mid-step without flailing my arms toward some imagined pole or arm. Anything to keep from the desperation of a fall. Anything.

And the unintuitive reality is that the more I reach for help, after the fear has set, when I’m shaky and threateningly near a meltdown, the more I seek to grip, to squeeze tighter on whatever air is before me, the less secure I am.

I must put my arms out, straight as the wings of a blue jay on the soar. I must step. Only one foot at a time- That is all. Toe to Heel. And again Toe to Heel. And I must learn to breathe. Breathing with each step. Breathing between each step. Breathing to fill my arms with soul. Breathing- that simple action I can repeat without fear- to remind myself that the beam below my feet is solid and beautiful. It goes on and on and my feet are sure upon it. I can learn to let the old expectations pass.

Sympathy is under-rated

you know, at times like these the urge to shave my head again is almost overwhelming. Of late, the exterior of my life has been a continuous strain of change, transformation, and ordered chaos. Such intensity begs a change- a chosen change- to mirror the extremity of the internal demolition.

It's funny how suddenly the urge to chop off my hair comes. It seems to come almost out of nowhere- a voice clear but comforting- a calm suggestion that seems to emanate from a deeper soul. Release your hair. Let go. Feel the weight move on.

I have no idea if I will give in and remove my hair. Practically speaking, I love having hair. Having long hair enhances my feelings of beauty, of elegance, of distinction. I am proud of my hair.

But the release that letting go of hair brings sounds so attractive. I feel like I need something to latch on to after so much transition. Something tangible to refer people to when they ask how I am doing. Something for people in ongoing interactions with me to see, so they know that something has changed, that I am not the same as I was yesterday. They don't need to know everything, but I need them to know that things are different.

My writing is suffering as a result of sentimentality, emotionalism, intensity of feelings- and I don't have the energy to go back through what I've written and hyper-edit, as I usually do. Maybe I will tomorrow, but for tonight it seems essential to simply document the oddness of my breadth of feelings. Document and publicize.

This has been a grueling week. I know that I have experienced some pretty hallmark weeks in the past, but I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this week has been the most trying week I've ever experienced. I think I will be reeling from it, reaping the rewards of its emotionally transformative potency, for quite some time.

I ask that during this time, if you are able, that you send me your love. Send me your hope. Your understanding. Your empathy. I am doing my best to make sense of a set of realities that seem to me beyond comprehension. I exist as I do now only because I have a little faith in the supreme direction of the universe. I do not understand how a person could survive such loss and desperation without any semblance of faith or trust in the ultimate good of existence.

Faithful readers. Unfaithful readers. I entreat you to share your pity with me. Share your love not just with me, but with yourself. Share it with the assholes with whom I am unable at this moment to share my love.

If I am learning anything, which I hope I am, I am perhaps learning more of the simple frailty of life. I know it is cliché to speak of the fragility of life, but I think it is idiomatic because it is true. In one minute I had so many little ducks lined up, all ready for a specific path. In the next minute there was no order, no agenda, and no hope for such. And now, in the aftermath, I find that it is not possible to simply return the little duckies to their plot and continue as planned.

I don't know what will happen, and it's ever more true that the more I experience, the less I know.

a creation of catharsis

I Realize that sometimes I forget,
But this is a reminder,
I Fucking Deserve Better.

I'm not asking for perfection or absolution.
I'm not expecting permanence,
But I Fucking Deserve Better.



I know it's hard.
Fear is potent.
The unknown abounds.
But I am here. Here is my hand.



don't mistake my empathy
for low self-esteem.



I know that I am a thing of beauty.
I feel it in my belly-
in the roundness, punctuated and imperfect,
I feel it in my hands-
raised fist and open palmed plea,
I feel it in my lungs when I sing,
in my teeth when I bite,
in my pride glazed cheeks after another day.


I feel my beauty in the depth of my soul
as the fears of this world yet again rip apart old beliefs to build new hopes,
as the thoughts I once revered come yet again under scrutiny,
as I watch myself transformed time and again
by the trials of this universe.


I am a thing of Beauty.
I see it, I feel it,
I hear it in the leaves as we mingle in the park.


I am proud of who I am
of my battle scars-
(not wounds)
I know my wounds will heal.
And even as I fear their lasting presence,
I know they are not a thing of forever.



I am Proud of my words. of my thoughts. of my loves.
I am a child of this universe.
No more than you.

No less.

I deserve to love. To love freely.
And I deserve love.



I deserve better than what I have fleetingly accepted.
I have (perhaps) misled you into thinking that I am just another
cynical,
self-deprecating,
misanthropic masochist.
And that is my fault.



but i am not.



and I fucking deserve better.



_

"Judy"

Walking quiet streets was a pastime for Judy in the purest sense of the word- it was a way to pass the time. The ache in her abdomen refused to give way, crowding her senses and refusing her favorite form of personal abandonment. She had tried to go walking three times already, but she couldn’t catch her breath enough to conquer her stairs, let alone the hill she lived on. She settled for a puff of guilt-ridden cancer and sat on the stoop while its acrid taste seeped into her cheeks and fingertips.

She wondered if the ache in her belly was something more than bad food. The recurring fear of a tiny parasite leeching the walls of her uterus drained her mind of its store of calm and left every signal her body sent tinged with dread. She couldn’t be pregnant. She just couldn’t be.

Why hadn’t she insisted that he be safe? What was it about her that allowed those sudden bursts of passivity in the worst possible moments? She was a pillar of strength and intention except in those terribly hopeless moments when an older man pressed himself against her or an unknown stallion pierced into her. She couldn’t understand herself and she had all but given up hope of forgiving herself for such weaknesses. They were to be born, and that was all.

Judy climbed into her bed and swaddled herself with blankets. She was always cold, her extremities tingling even in the full weight of the sunshine. She pulled the neck of her sweater up over her head to trap in every escaping molecule. She stopped moving to survey the results and found that she was trapped. The warmth would come soon, but the knocking in her head and chest would not leave. She wished for a sign, a desire, a passion, even hatred. Her apathy was paralyzing.

If her blood returned in a week would her numbness disappear? She listlessly hoped it were so and curled her hands into a twisted ball, cradled under her chin. How she longed to sob into the night, but there was nothing for which to sob. There was nothing wrong with her life even if there was nothing right. She wished for sleep.

The elusiveness of such dreamless sleep was ironic for a woman who often battled competing waves of depression and narcolepsy. At any point she could sleep for a dozen hours without stirring, that is, any point but when she desperately needed to escape. She could not banish the thousand empty thoughts running loops in her head. For a woman without conflict she carried too many fears.

And anger, though she was reluctant to admit it, was creating its own course through her body. She couldn’t believe that she had allowed her ex to seduce her. She had been weak, she had been clouded, she had been lonely, and though she knew she could have done things no differently, she was still disappointed with herself. She should have known the future, her gut pushed. She should have seen the falseness and the trap. She could never forgive her own humanity.

How she expected herself to resist That Woman’s smile and shoulders is a mystery, but Judy was still crucifying herself for it, and laughing at the reality of the conversation the day after when That Woman had spoken of being cautious and building friendships with respect. Somehow she seemed to miss the glaring inconsistency in her own philosophy, having pounced on her confused friend and former lover only the night before. Judy felt stupid for having believed any of the words that came out of That Woman’s mouth. After all, she had prior offenses and a history of laxity when it came to being genuine with her truth.

But this was past, as all her transgressions were. Lying in bed and considering all the ways that life had gone awry was Judy’s least favorite pastime and the one that recurred most painfully and insidiously. It was frustrating, but it was her only reality. What was life without these occasional forays into the pitiful and pathetic? She couldn’t be happy, not really. Perhaps she didn’t believe that such happiness or comfort was acceptable. Perhaps she was happiest in her soul when she was huddled alone and crying. That was a sobering thought. These journeys into her sad, illusionary world were becoming less frequent and, Judy thought with a hint of a smile, maybe she was growing past the sadness. Maybe she was beginning to live.

That life made these moments all the harder to bear. When she had fallen asleep every night cradled in her own arms, it had been comforting to know that her self-pity would always be there. Now its presence brought a stale, mildewy stench with it and memories of that life, many lives ago, when she had believed that she truly was alone. It was jarring to find herself lifted from the joy of life to this self-induced trauma. She hoped it would pass soon. If only she had the energy to walk right now she might walk until she flew away. Instead she tucked her head in and pressed shut her eyes, praying for sleep and a little bit of clarity.

October 7th, 2007

I didn’t set out to become some sort of sexual deviant, not that that’s what I’ve become. In all reality I set out to be a nun. I wanted to be pristine, close to god, and the first in line to go to heaven. When I’d given that dream up by the wise age of eight, I converted the same desires into a plan for a solid Catholic marriage. My grandmother still presses this dream into my hands every time I see her, somehow hoping that my short hair and tolerant words might be fluke signs; I might still become her saint. The advantage of my adjusted plan, a good, strong husband of god and all the children that our modest sex afforded us, was that I wouldn’t find myself stuck in a convent for the entirety of my life. Seclusion didn’t fit into my life plans- how could I be president if I were a nun? In holy Catholic matrimony I would find both religion and some semblance of actualization. That was my hope.

My dreams began to revolve around egalitarian white picket fences and average family afternoons. I believed that my life could have one real path: school, college, graduate school, marriage, kids, career. The lines were distinct and everything had its place. Almost, that is. I wasn’t prepared to interpret my thoughts about women.

I knew lesbians and gay men. They were friends, neighbors, people I respected, but they were other. They existed, but they were separate from my personal paradigm, token friends and characters in my own staged show. Sure, I thought about women when I masturbated, but didn’t everybody? So I thought about them pressing me against a wall, that was a normal teenage thought to have. Or maybe it wasn’t, but it just meant that I was open and accepting of people. It didn’t make me gay.

My first sexual experiences were with men. Later on, I would quote those experiences of horrid, passionless single nights as proof that I was simply not a heterosexual. Despite the tiniest nag that those experiences might not have been exactly a fair sampling, I wanted so badly to define myself, to fit in, to belong. I wanted an identity. So when a beautiful woman offered me her hands and her body, I slid happily into my modern box.

All the desires of a life, moving in and out of age and location, the absoluteness of every discovered want, how is it that life can feel so real at every second? To be nine, to know that life has more in store, but to have no plane of reference, no concept of what more might entail. To be twenty and to still hold fast the belief that what one wants then is what one will always want- perhaps this is the soul of naïveté. How disillusioning to find yourself, a proclaimed lesbian with a broken heart, looking at men with a twinkle in your eye? Yet it was even more confusing to go home with one and watch, almost disembodied as he pressed his advantage without ever stopping to ask what I wanted. We fucked on his huge, empty bed, and I wished that it would just be over- that I wouldn’t hate myself too much in the morning. Another one night stand, another series of unfulfilled wishes.

Why am I still attracted to men? It can hardly be explained, and other than my perverse need to explain everything, I really have no desire to pick it apart. I like whom I like. I meet whomever I meet. I follow the guideposts of feelings. Most times this is enough.

I find myself craving the solidity of my ex. The knowing that each night she would tell me she loved me. The comfort of good sex. Even after all the self-prescribed growth inversion, all the weaknesses indulged because I knew she would carry them, because it felt good to have someone who would carry them, after it all, I still miss the assumed right to cuddle, to kiss, to love.

I’m scared of this process of taking each day as it comes. It’s terrifying, at times, to rise to a moment’s unexpectedness. Finding new feelings and realizing that old ones have passed is unsettling for a woman who has tirelessly sought an anchor to believe in, to trust in, to depend upon.

There is a certain honesty in the act of sleeping alone. The reality is that each night I go to bed alone. I have slept alone every night of my life, even when I shared my bed. The loneliness felt bitterer, more hidden, whilst waking next to a cherished body, the pain more acute when my partner was an unknown quantity. Sharing the warmth of a comfortable sleep with another leaves the illusion of solidarity without the removal of reality. The truth is, thus far, that I am the only being with whom I am. I join the paths of others, I listen, I love, I journey, but I do those things in tandem at best and in solitude the rest of the time. This isn’t to say that I prefer sleeping single, as that couldn’t be further from the truth, but my reality remains.

I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of becoming emotionally close to someone who I couldn’t at least imagine being with forever, yet I’ve had three one-night stands. Are these two realities unrelated? Inter-related? Here I am, a woman out of the closet twice, a seeker and a lover, involved in a Polyamorous situation. Relationship? I am not in love with multiple people, though I could be. The object of my affections is most definitely involved with others. How in the world did I find myself here? I would have thought that by now I would have decided exactly what and where I was to be. I thought I had those questions worked out.

Here I am, each day a pleasant surprise of new feelings. This good little Catholic girl, this refugee of a broken lesbian relationship, is creating something with a man who has a girlfriend. Why does confusion follow me? I feel fear tonight- the unknown pain, the possible aches and division, the mystery of my heart, all unquantifiable. No promises can be made, no absolutes. I don’t want finite answers and I don’t want promises. I know that I have nothing to be ashamed of and that there is nothing to fear but my thoughts. I have faith in the process, faith in God, but that doesn’t take away the years of habit, worrying about how things might end before they’ve even begun.

What do I want? I want to be happy. But that question begs another, more poignant question- what do I not want? I don’t want to be surrounded by chaos. I don’t want to hurt friends. It seems not to matter that I remind myself that the current problems are not something I could have prevented, I still feel responsible. Not solely responsible, but culpable nonetheless.

I acknowledge that these are not my issues, that I have control over my own actions alone. And though everything might resolve neatly, I am more inclined to believe that it won’t be simple. If I were my own friend I would probably use patronizing expressions while reading this. Shouldn’t I have known that this would be difficult? Shouldn’t I have avoided it? But who can avoid their own journey? Even avoidance of a path is an affrmation, however negative, of that path.

I need to sleep before fatigue overwhelms me. So for tonight, goodnight.