Proving myself

Still uncertain, but with less need for certainty

I have found, at various times and in different places, that I need to take a long break. From: something. One thing. Several things. Everything.

I’ve never managed to take a break from everything. I believe this is properly called death and it’s a tough one to come back from.

Anyway, I used to feel bad about taking breaks. This was a dumb way to feel. All feelings are valid but some feelings are dumb. Fight me. (When I say fight me I mean send memes and songs, or tell me a joke, or say hello. I don’t want to fight but I like to be antagonistic.)

Some things you can’t, or shouldn’t, take a break from. Like, say, showering. Or eating.

Mini-breaks are okay.

Middling-length breaks from necessary self-care and certain responsibilities tell us there is something serious going on, something that requires attention and may merit intervention.

Long-term breaks from these essentials often lead directly to that part mentioned above, the break-from-everything. And while the break-from-everything is inescapable, imminent, awaiting us all, it’s a tragedy to rush it.

After all, one of the best things about taking a break is coming back again. You don’t get to do that (as far as we know) with death.

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I haven’t felt like writing in about, oh, 7 or 8 months. I write for my actual job, of course. Beyond the job writing, though, I haven’t written anything but a birthday list and a few blog posts since the start of this year.

I took a break.

It felt weird.

I kept trying to come back to it.

And failing.

Then I quit trying to come back to it.

Then I started wanting to come back to it.

And now here I am, wanting to and writing and maybe this will be a little one-off hello letter and it will be followed by another break. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. One of the best and most glorious changes I’ve experienced, a change that’s happened slowly but solidly over the last several years, is this immense holy freeing and beautiful lack of desire to prove anything to anybody.

Along with this beautiful lack of desire is a kind of humbling clarity about how many things I’d been doing solely, or mostly, for that purpose.

Writing itself is not for proving something. Writing is for existence, for processing, for understanding, for experience. Years ago when I needed to choose a college major the choice was between music or writing. And I thought, Hm. I do love music. But I can go days without singing and still feel like myself. To go days without writing feels like not breathing.

If this sounds melodramatic, it was. I was 18 years old. Give me a break. (Or fight me.)

Writing itself is not for proving anything, but being consistent, being reliable, being publicly productive: Yes. Let me prove all the things to all the people.

How silly, how human.

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Like so many of us, I lost a lot of certainty in 2020.

Things I’d relied on, taken for granted, things that felt like the foundation of my life crumbled into dust.

And it felt like I, too, was crumbling into dust. Ripping apart, coming undone, unable to find the shape of me, putting hands out in the dark. I wrote frantically, questing and grasping for answers, but mostly for the sound of my own voice. I needed feedback even if it was just an echo. And I got it, and it helped. I had to prove my own existence to myself, find my own form, separate I from we, identify myself outside the entanglement of relationship that had defined most of my life.

It was a rough go.

And, I’m finding, it’s not over. This need to know myself and shape myself for my own purposes requires constant cutting of the cords. Not just from an ended marriage, but from all sorts of internal obligations and unspoken debts.

If this sounds melodramatic, it is. I’m only 43 years old. Give me a break. This is my very first time being alive.

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Have you ever put things in storage?

You pack them up carefully, sure of their value and meaning. Then you come back at some point, and take things out, and think, Why did I save this?

And you toss it out with a little laugh, because you don’t need it anymore.

Failures, mistakes, and grievous errors

A look back at 2023

Don’t let the title fool you. This isn’t a pity session, it’s a celebration.

2023 had moments of suffering and agony, deliveries of weirdness (both the itchy kind and the delightful kind), and plenty of intensity in forms of issues and obstacles and challenges and change. Oh my! Life, in other words, continued to be life. Unpredictable. Mundane. Terrifying.

And absolutely worth being here for every single minute.

It was a full year. Some things changed and some things stayed the same. I tried a lot of things and I failed in many.

And this is me realizing that even when I fail, I move forward.

Even when I make mistakes, I benefit — or, at the very least, I don’t die.

Even when I make grievous errors — the kind I think about when I can’t sleep; grievous not because they caused an enormity of suffering but because they carry a tinge of shame or horror that I can’t shake, so I re-live and regret these errors with an intensity wildly disproportionate to their actual measurable effect on my life, or anyone else’s — I still get to sleep eventually, and wake up, and in the morning light there’s nothing grievous at all. Just me, figuring it out as I go.

So I’m here to celebrate the absolute triumph of continual failure. If you’re in the same boat, I tip my hat to you. We are pals and partners.

Here’s a short list:

I failed at reaching most of my goals.

I didn’t run or read or learn or travel or save as much or as often as I wanted, not even close. I didn’t get organized. I didn’t move us from our too-small apartment to an actual house (a pipe dream, I knew, but I still put it on my 2023 goals). We will continue being a little crowded and yelling about bathroom usage and tripping over stuff and life will go on. I didn’t solve all the problems I set out to solve or get over all the things I planned to get over. Maybe some of those things need to hang with me a little longer. Some of the problems disappeared anyway. And other things — burdens, issues, stresses that I hadn’t even thought of tackling — dropped to the wayside without any effort on my part.

I failed at parenting.

I failed at many things I wanted to do as a parent, wanted to give the kids, how I hoped to grow and be better in certain aspects of parenting. And yet: the kids are okay. How I am as a person is how I am as parent. I can’t be better or kinder or wiser or whatever as a parent than I am as a person. I’m working hard on myself, all the time, and that has to be enough. Somehow, it seems to be.

We muddle along, we laugh, we get on each other’s nerves, we’re grateful, we’re crabby, we have disagreements, we work it out, we share our joys, and sometimes we all end up sitting around the table, eating dinner at the same time. All this, despite my many failures. WHAT DO YOU KNOW.

I failed at dating.

I tried a few times and I gave up quickly. I thought 2023 would be the year I’d moved on emotionally enough to give it a go. And… it was.

My emotional state wasn’t the problem; my lack of interest was. I didn’t meet anyone with more appeal than a good book or a conversation with a friend. I got tired of looking, so I quit. Will I try again? Sure. Will you hear about it? Oh, definitely.

I failed at friendship.

There were so many times I wasn’t there the way I wanted to be. Didn’t ask for help and support when I needed it. Didn’t have as much to offer as I hoped. So many times when life was too busy and days or weeks went by, when I dropped the ball and let it roll into the gutter and waved half-heartedly at it, like: You gonna get that?

And, miracle of miracles — I am still loved! Loved, appreciated, and supported by people I respect and admire and love. So either I really lucked out on friends (I did) or friendship goes deeper than my failures (it does).

I failed at writing.

I wrote a lot, and I didn’t write a lot.

I had weeks of consistency and weeks, months, of not even glancing at anything outside of work. And yet, I still managed to push out a couple dozen blog posts and a motley assortment of newsletters and thousands of words in notes and drafts and outlines. I didn’t write a book but I wrote parts of a book. I didn’t publish daily or weekly or even monthly but I threw my fingers around on the keyboard often enough to not forget how, and here I am, back at it.

I had some successes this year, too. Some were mountains I climbed, but most were puddles I managed to jump over. I am proud of myself for both. It’s not the bigness of the goal, after all. It’s the effort you have to put in. Some of those puddle-jumping moments were more difficult than the steepest mountain moments, just because other things were demanding all I had, so giving anything was a huge effort.

I hope you’re proud of yourself, too. If you look back and see failures, I hope you keep them in context. Consider this: the earth did a full spin around the sun and we didn’t fall off, not even once.

Happy new year! Let’s make more mistakes!

Ahoy, Reality!

Always looks so different from far away

How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.

—Marcus Aurelius

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I was a full 10 minutes out on today’s run when I got a text: The bus is late. We’re gonna be late. Mom, we need a ride to school.

Now, there’s one perspective that is this sort of thing: Celebratory.

You’re doing something difficult and you get interrupted. Now you don’t have to do the difficult thing! Yay!

For me, the toughest part of any difficult thing is getting started. I’d done that really tough part (the hauling my lazy ass out the door instead of sipping coffee and staring out the window like a sane person). I was even at the end of the first mile, which is the second toughest part. So I’m grumbling, because I just did the two tough parts and I’m getting interrupted before the good part.

Oh well. What are you gonna do?

The time it took to get the boys dropped at school ate up most of my run time, but… I was in the car, awfully close to the park. There are trails in the park. I like trails. I don’t normally run these trails because the park is a little too far away and I’d rather not drive in order to run (seems counterproductive somehow). So I content myself with suburban landscapes and plod down sidewalks. Today I was there, I had just enough time: Let’s go.

And it was lovely and trees and yellow and fall and golden and breezes and nature and quiet sounds and footfalls on the ground and fallen logs and leaves and perfect and yes.

Reality destroys our plans, on a fairly regular basis, which continues to upset the part of me that likes to know what’s coming. But sometimes what you get is better than what you plan.

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Delightful things!

🍁 OCTOBER. Being alive in October makes up for being alive in August.

💥 Going to the Renaissance Festival dressed as monks and re-enacting this scene from Monty Python.

God was with us.

And there were also turkey legs.

🥾 Did you think I wouldn’t mention hiking? HIKING. RIVER. OCTOBER. GLORIOUS.

🧶 Learning how to crochet again thanks to a little (a lot of) help from a friend. On a related note,

📺 Documentaries and lectures and interesting people talking about interesting things. The more niche, the better. Gimme.

🐿 I saw an albino squirrel. No photographic evidence, unfortunately. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

Last but certainly not least:

🎂 My dad. He’s the best. (HI DAD, I LOVE YOU!) Tomorrow is his birthday. He just keeps getting cooler.

💜 Is it Monday? Is it Tuesday? Is it morning? Evening? The kids had a long weekend (no school Friday or Monday) and it’s throwing off my groove. Also, are we done with the whole daylight savings time thing after this year or not? Didn’t they vote on that? I have no answers, only questions.