Transitional Objects January 27, 2008

I’m thinking about getting voice recognition software. I’m a quick hunt-and-pecker, but I wonder if my thoughts would go down differently if I didn’t have to wait for my fingers to catch up to my brain. Though I do like the tap tap tap on the keyboard, and I’d much rather learn to type quickly by touch, but will I, after all these years?

I have a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head. Sometimes I miss having someone to fuss over – to clean the house for in preparation for her arrival, to prettify myself, shave, smell nice for. I miss the drama of flirting. I attended a book group on “Eat Pray Love” this morning, and one member of the group was talking about how David was just a “transitional object:” that he was there to help catapult (my word) her out of her marriage and onto whatever was next. I started thinking about B in those terms: is that why the relationship only lasted a year? It happened a mere six months after C moved out of my house, and C and I were still sleeping together even in February of that year, I think, so I really think it’s possible that I jumped into the relationship with B in order to make a full break from all that was so unsatisfying with C. It only matters because it puts the relationship with B in a slightly different perspective – that she wasn’t really a serious relationship candidate, but more of a symbolic stand-in of sorts. And she did introduce me to my spiritual teacher (Al-Anon), and she did crack me wide open so more light could come in – she served her purpose incredibly well. But I don’t want to be a dog at the dump with a can stuck on my nose – I don’t particularly miss her, and I am realizing all the ways the relationship was a compromise for me, but I don’t have anything to replace it with at the moment except for excruciatingly cheesy episodes of “Beverly Hills Bordello” and “L Word.” I so so so so don’t want a relationship right now, and I know I can’t even choose well yet, but there are moments when I miss the lust, the electricity, the excitement, the…do I miss the distraction? Wow, less and less. I am becoming so much more comfortable with my life – even the fact that it’s a Saturday and I’m completely content to be home by myself, writing, reading, napping. I don’t feel lonely, I don’t feel afraid of being left alone with myself. A book called “The Joy Diet” was recommended by someone in the book group (even she conceded it was an awful name), and apparently one of her remedies is spending time with yourself and being still. I don’t know if she means meditation, but I do see that the universe can speak to me much more often and more clearly when everything around me is quiet. Just this afternoon when I arrived home, I was squatting down to put something away in my kitchen, and my cat clambered up onto my knees (one of my favorite things that he does). As I’m sitting still and petting him, I start looking around, and I just happen to notice that there is a leak under one of the radiators. How else would I ever have noticed, until it actually became a serious problem?

See, a friend just called and I didn’t even feel like picking up the phone. Sometimes people are a lot of work, much as I might love them, and as I’m becoming more at ease in my own skin, I find that being with myself is kind of fun and easy. Not to mention my dog just put his nose by my lap and my cat is flanking me on the other side.

I wonder how many days I could not shower and still not be disgusted with myself? I’m going on at least four days now, and with my hair up, you really can’t tell how long it’s been. At what point could I just not stand the smell or feel of myself anymore? Will I shower today, or wait another day? Stay tuned…

Dare to be Yourself January 24, 2008

From “Courage to Change:” “I dare to be myself…I can only learn to love myself if I am willing to learn who I am.” Yes! That completely sums it up.  The only way for me to truly learn who I am is a) to be single and selfish in the good sense of the word, and b) to see this as a time of experimentation, with curiosity rather than judgment or fear.  Hmm, okay, I like getting back into bed in the mornings.  Does this mean I’m aimless and lazy? No, it means I like getting back into bed, cuddling with my cat, reading a book I enjoy, and dozing until 9 or so.  It’s lovely.  I’m gaining a little weight.  Does this mean I’m fat and lazy and will just keep getting bigger?  No, it means I may need to exercise a bit more if I want to stay slim and continue to eat as I please.  No ultimatums (ultimata?), no hard lines; just curiosity, patience, and if possible, a sense of humor about it all.

On My Way January 22, 2008

I’m not sure I was all that clear yesterday about the “clap on, clap off” reference, and it’s something I’m still grappling with today. Part of what is happening to me thanks to Al-Anon, therapy, and my own unstinting desire to heal is that I’m starting to recognize that the way I see the world changes completely depending on the frame of mind I’m in, and that frame of mind can “snap” back into place in an instant. Being around my family brings up such negative, old shit for me, but I have another understanding of myself now that I didn’t have as a teenager: back then I knew I wasn’t the sullen, selfish, angry girl my family made me out to be – the trouble was, I didn’t know what I was.

I’ll admit with only shreds of embarrassment (such a useless emotion, really) that I’ve been watching “Star Trek: Voyager” for the past few weeks: it started from the very beginning of the series, and it’s been interesting to see how the crew’s personalities evolved. Oh god, I really can’t believe I wrote that. At any rate, Kate Mulgrew is the captain, and she is so filled with wonder, and yet also able to be commanding and authoritative, and it made me think about how I used to be. Even now, the first sip of really good eggnog, the first bite of fresh summer corn, the chill of autumn on my cheeks when the rest of me is warm in soft clothing – little things can bring such wonderment to me. When I was younger – a teenager but away from home – that wonderment brought on a surge of happiness so great I’d have to skip or jump or hug someone. And I’d cry, too, with the depth of my sadness for certain moments – I remember going to see “Less than Zero” with my first girlfriend and her brother, and tears just streaming down my face at one point. I felt things so very, very deeply. I want to believe that part of the “me” I’m becoming is a returning to that depth of feeling, of uninhibited sensual enjoyment. I don’t think I feel deadened inside, but some of the wonder is gone…maybe that’s inevitable?

So now I’m beginning to see that when the world feels wearisome and predictable, when I feel aimless and passionless, that’s the default, old place I can go to. But within minutes of doing something “esteemable,” as my therapist likes to say – be that making my bed with clean sheets, or cleaning up the kitchen, or paying bills or returning a phone call – I come back to this even contentment with my life. I’ve “clapped off” the light that makes everything look dull, or maybe I’ve “clapped on” a brighter one. Al-Anon is about learning how to live a drama-free, crisis-free life: it’s very Buddhist, really, very focused on learning how not to run away from myself by diving into other people’s problems, or worrying about what their issue with me might be. Live and let live.

I don’t know how to lead a healthy, balanced life, but I know I’m on my way to learning.  And staying single, living away from the city, and surrounding myself with healthy, honest, loving relationships are all invaluable in helping me walk this path.

Clap on, Clap off January 21, 2008

I just returned from a family celebration, and I really thought I was fine, until I woke up this morning. Safely ensconced in the cocoon of my home, I guess it was finally okay to decompress, to feel all my feelings. I did that, as I often do, in the form of anxiety dreams, often about animals, and I awakened feeling glad I’d chosen to wear my mouth guard since I’m sure I spent the entire night grinding my teeth. My family makes me feel fat, out of place, lonely, muted, unattractive, badly dressed, generally ugly-duckling-ish. I know it’s their shit and has very little to do with me, but the attention and comments that come along when I’m at my slimmest versus when I’m filling out my jeans a bit more are astonishingly different. I didn’t think it was affecting me, but it was, and I was just working really hard to fend it off. and then my dreams tell me all about it.

But then I went to my computer this morning, and I truly wish I could remember what triggered it, but I suddenly started to feel like myself again, which now means lighter, happier, funnier, far more at ease with myself. Happy with myself. I’m excited to see the way my real self can click back in so quickly, and I can be aware of the chasm between this person and the one who has to truly struggle to be okay, who has to hear the Greek chorus of critical voices and fend them off. I’m home. I’m safe now. I won’t let those thoughts rule my head or my day, and I’ll take loving care of myself and be grateful for all that I have and the parts of me I’ve been able to discover, and I’ll remember that the path I’m on is one I love.

It just occurred to me that in the past, part of the reason I’ve wanted a girlfriend was to have her as a buffer against those feelings my family arouses. Now I’m learning how to be that buffer myself, and hopefully ultimately how to not internalize those feelings at all, just deflect them like Wonder Woman with her golden wrist cuffs. Kapow!

Content vs. Happy January 17, 2008

I wrote so much more than that measly paragraph yesterday, but I did it on my SmartPhone and the other 3 lengthy paragraphs suddenly did a disappearing act, only just like on that CSI episode, they were really gone. Funny, though – the first paragraph (the one that made it) really says in a nutshell all the rest of what I was allegorically (anecdotally?) telling: this has been a time of such intense growth, this 35+ period. I let someone move in with me for the first time , I had a commitment ceremony (both families, a Rabbi, breaking the glass – the works), I ended the relationship less than a year later, I sold my home and moved up here, I got into the most intense, satisfying, maddening relationship of my life, I started going to Al-Anon (yes, fuck anonymity, it’s Al-Anon and it’s saving my life so I’m damn well going to say what it is), I got dumped, I hit an all-time bottom of drug-withdrawal-like, desperate, eviscerating heartbreak, I went to meeting after meeting and got a sponsor and slowly but surely got pulled out of the chasm, I started teaching, I started cooking again, I started taking better care of myself, I started setting boundaries and “cleaning out” any friendships that were not healthy for me, I stayed single, I kept going to meetings. For over 8 months now, I’ve stayed single, and for at least the last two, I can honestly say I’ve been happy about that, and more content with my life (notice how I’m not saying happier) than I’ve ever been. It’s not the kind of happiness I experienced during the good times with B: that unbelievably heady mix of attraction and connection. That was rarely a “feet on the ground” kind of happiness, and as a result, the other side of it was always a crash of one sort or another. The happiness was neither coming from inside me, nor in any way controllable by me – it depended on the intensity of our bond, on the level of intimacy I felt with her.

This contentedness is different. There’s a book out there called “How We Choose to be Happy,” and while it’s been some time since I read it, part of what their participants said was that real happiness was something steady, almost quiet, like the subtle hum of a generator, rather than the crescendo of the Star Wars theme (okay, I made that analogy up, but it gets the point across). I like my life, very very much. But beyond that, I have come to trust more and more that what is meant for me will not pass me by, that with my cooperation, my life is unfolding just as it should, and that whatever is in store for me is beyond my limited imagining. That’s already been true: I could never have imagined that at 37 I’d be well-off; living in a beautiful, cozy home; surrounded by people who see me and know me and love me. My life is incredibly rich, and in the scheme of things, I’m still quite young. There is much more to come.

But I’m feeling equanimitous (made that up, for sure) at this moment, which isn’t always the case. Just a couple of days ago, it wasn’t. I’m hopeful this blog can serve as both repository and reminder for me, and as always, I greatly welcome the thoughts of anyone else who happens by.

The Truth About 35+ January 16, 2008

is that it’s a woman’s chrysalis time: someone could have warned us, but it wouldnt have made any difference. can you imagine some beautiful, wise butterfly approaching a caterpillar and saying “yeah, that leaving the coccoon thing? it’s gonna hurt something awful, but you’ll be so much freer after it’s over.” big help. we have to be broken down. cracked open, terrified and in unbearable discomfort in order to make truly life-altering changes, otherwise why in god’s name would we do it?

The Journey January 14, 2008

We’re all on it. I just read “AtDD”’s blog and am so moved by her experience and her ability to write about it – I do find that I have an easier time writing regularly when I’m going through a difficult period, which maybe is kind of like saying I like being with myself when I’m having a hard time. A nice spin. A digression, perhaps, but nonetheless a nice way to look at things.

One of my greatest certainties at this point is that not only would a relationship not make my life better, but that I’m still not “well” enough to choose a relationship that would really be growthful and healthy for me. I’m transforming at a rapid pace, yet I have moments of still feeling stagnant, purposeless, heel-dragging, and this morning those feelings surrounded me like a shroud. My program would call this my “disease:” the part of me that tries to convince me my life will be the worst, most trudgingly difficult it can be, rather than the best or an even smattering of both with some even-keel in between. My mom is a super-powered career woman, probably in the top 5% of female earners in this country (doing something she loves and never ever dreamed she’d be doing), and she is always in motion: pilates, private jets to hear her friend the opera singer sing, meetings across town before the 20 minutes of therapy she can squeeze into her schedule, trips to Bhutan, Brazil, London. So, as you might guess, my ideas of success and productivity are ridiculously skewed. I am both homebody and travel-bug, I love to be busy but get stressed if I don’t have my time on the couch with my cat in my arms. It is so fucking hard to discover my own pace, my own path to success and peace when she’s on the autostrasse, whizzing past me and back again. When I was young she once told me to get my nose out of my book because my ass wasn’t going to get any smaller by reading. She’d never, ever dare say such a thing now (she knows I’d never speak to her again), but her example is loud and clear enough to have been yodeled from a mountaintop.

Back to Life, Back to Reality January 7, 2008

Isn’t it kind of funny that the next lyrics are, “however do you want me, however do you need me?” I’m reading the blogs of all these incredibly neat women in their 30s who are “waking up,” in a sense, realizing they are living lives that feel inauthentic in a variety of ways. I wrote to one of them, “do you think this is what happens to women between 35 and 40, but no one ever told us?” I feel very lucky I don’t have children or a spouse I need to step back from in order to find the contours of my own skin – I do think it can be done, but I’d imagine it’s harder to stick to your guns when someone else is persistently there asking if you wouldn’t prefer theirs. Or simply assuming yours and theirs are one and the same.

Every day, I get to ask myself what I want to do, and by and large I get to do it. I’ve started getting back into bed in the mornings after feeding my dog and cat, and reading/napping for a couple of hours. I still get up at 9:30 so (who am I defending myself to?), but I am finding I’m not nearly so overwhelmed by the mornings when I know I can get back into bed for awhile. I’m now reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, and when I got up this morning, I came to the computer and bought cheese-making cultures online (www.cheesemaking.com). It’ll be my cause of the moment, I’m sure, but the notion of living more softly on the earth by growing my own produce and making my own cheese (and maybe bread one of these days) is kind of exciting to me. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll likely have buffalo wings for dinner tonight, or something equally inorganic, but I adore food and the process of making it, so the notion that I could literally feed myself from my own larder is exciting to me. And what better use of my time and space now that I’ve moved outside the city in pursuit of a healthier existence?

One thing that has begun to change for me is that I’m enjoying my own company much more. Truth be told, I’ve always liked my own company once I got past the terror of it, but now I think I’m easing more and more into comfort with longer spates of time on my own. When I think about gardening and cooking organically, though, I definitely think about a group of friends sipping wine and cooking together – by myself it feels too lonely. Not to mention the cleanup’s a bitch when I’m alone. I don’t yet have a community of friends my age here…yet. I’ve generally preferred the company of older folk, partly because that’s who I’ve met through my program, and partly because they’re far less of a threat to me – I can be myself with them (and okay, also feel like a bit of a star) without a sense of competition. Yuck. I don’t feel competitive with people my age who are invested in authenticity, but I haven’t found many in my lifetime, of any age, and most have not lived close by. How would I find more such people, I wonder?

The best time of my life was at a summer college program for juniors in high school. It was the first time in my life that everyone wanted to really talk and be close and be real – we would have daily pile-ups, where we would all lie on each other’s bellies and talk for hours. We saw “Harold and Maude” and cried, made Cat Stevens’ music the unofficial soundtrack to our days, tie-dyed every white piece of fabric we could find, and just loved each other with a completely innocent yet utterly intimate and authentic love I think I’ve fruitlessly searched for ever since. One difficult thing about being lesbian (for me) is that it automatically categorizes contact between women as sexual, making non-sexual affection hard to ask for or realize. It’s really only been in this last year that I’ve been able to give and receive hugs or back rubs without any self-consciousness or worry of someone “taking it the wrong way” – I’ve had to become self-confident enough to know my own designs and not care what someone else assumes. It was an utterly paralyzing thing, especially for someone like me who craves affection, who would have hugged my friends with abandon if that fear hadn’t always gotten in my way.

To find out who we truly are, to fill ourselves all the way out our edges rather than being shaped by the inverse image of others’ molds, that is a worthy journey. What makes me laugh? What turns me on? When do I feel like the “real” me, even if different situations elicit different facets of that identity? Can this blog continue to be a place where I’m able to explore and express that real self? How do I find others in the company of whom I can still nourish that evolving identity?

Happy New Year? January 1, 2008

It’s early, way early for having finally fallen asleep around 2am. I didn’t even think I’d make it to midnight, but there’s some fight in the old girl yet.  I’m debating whether or not to get back into bed – on one hand it feels very decadent, on the other it depresses the hell out of me. Do you ever not know which “voice” to trust? The one that beckons soothingly, almost seductively that I’m tired, wouldn’t getting back into bed feel so good? Reading a book and falling back to sleep? Versus the voice that says you know what path that leads down, and it’s often not pretty, so why don’t you get up and be productive and shake whatever last cobwebs of sadness or melancholy are curtaining your mind. But then, it’s my mom who always needed to be productive, who told me my ass wasn’t going to get any smaller by keeping my nose in a book, and I can pretty much do whatever I damn please because I’m a full-fledged grown-up now. So it’s back, then, to Elizabeth Gilbert’s question as the mantra for my days: what do I really, really, really want?

I wanted an e-mail from B to be waiting for me this morning. Yuck, but it’s true. I don’t know what I’d have done with it, but I wanted it there, forcing my hand. I almost wrote her yesterday. My sponsor and I were doing part of the 4th step and talking about love, and she said that she thought I’d very much been in love with B, and she with me, but that in choosing her, I’d gone as far as I could go without making some major transformations in myself. I hit a bottom in our breakup the likes of which I’ve never seen and hope never to have to see again. I may actually have to go get “Eat, Pray, Love” and quote directly from it, because much to my then-splintered heart’s relief, I think she captured what happened to me.

“a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it” (p.149).

That’s what she did to me, for me. And I almost wrote her to say thank you, that I’m okay, even better than okay, and that I was grateful she had been the best I could do for myself with the tools that I had at the time. She “broke my heart open so new light could get in, made me so desperate and out of control that I had to transform my life” (ibid). She made me feel what it felt like to be truly seen and truly loved.

But I didn’t write her, and she didn’t write me, and that may just be how it is for awhile. I’m 99% sure we’re not going to be together again – have you ever been with someone where the feel of their name in your mouth just wasn’t natural, and it made you think “how could I be with this person in the long term if saying their name doesn’t feel right to me?” Am I nuts? But her name never felt right in my mouth.

And now, I am learning what it means to love and be loved, to love myself without exception, to see that the moments when I feel nerdy or loser-y or alone are not really me, just some old records with really deep grooves. I am learning to be alone and not lonely…in her blog “And the Damage Done,” the writer speaks of how being alone may be the way to discover who we truly are, but fears we may not know that before we’re in our 60s or 70s, and then what? I don’t believe that’s true. I think life is a journey and that each person who enters it in some significant way is here to teach us more about ourselves that we could not learn in the absence of that outside influence, but that there is a point when the work pays off enough to start bringing more positive people into our lives. I’m learning so incredibly much about myself, about how loving through joking sarcasm still slices and puts me on guard, about how full of light I feel when I am able to express my true feelings and be myself without thinking.

I saw Chris Noth in a Starbuck’s on 8th Street the week before last. The reason I’m bringing it up here is that his dark eyes made me swoon, regardless of the body that came along with them – B had very blue eyes, and while I grew to love them (and I am a major sucker for crow’s feet, which she had as much from smiling all the time as from 20 years of smoking), I fall into warm, brown eyes much, much more deeply. My girlfriend before B, C (I’m not kidding) had brown eyes, but they were cold somehow – not lifeless, but not expressive most of the time, either. Like her. So brown is good but warmth is better. Anyway, Chris was much better looking in person than I’d have anticipated: quite tall, casually but nattily dressed, and really, such huge, dark eyes. Yum.

So yes, I think, Happy New Year to all. If nothing else, it marks the start of a new year in which anything at all can happen. At this time last year, I’d never have predicted I’d be here now, so who in God’s name knows where the next 364 days will take me. But life is good. Still hard, but good. No regrets.