Vulnerability Bender

I've been on a vulnerability bender for the last month, and it feels like it's killing me sometimes.



It started with writing We Can Become Known in February, and then continued with a bunch of other pieces I've written since then, including I'm Speaking My Truth and Spreading the Word, Because It Does Get Better, and most days now it seems like a pretty good idea to stay in bed with some hot coffee and pretend that I just woke up on some other day a long time ago when I didn't feel so vulnerable.

I'm not depressed really. I'm just really broken open, like a soft meat seed pod that's been split down the middle, and the wind's having its way with redistributing my innards.

My anxiety about it all dresses itself up as shame burning up the back of my neck, and I feel consumed by self-doubt and self-loathing. It creeps in sometimes when I've been feeling open for too long. It's a self-defensive reflex. The scared voice inside me tells me that I'm bad, not because I am bad but because it knows I will stop and withdraw if I feel bad enough. I am afraid of being hurt.

The scared voice inside me is a little kid afraid of the dark. Growth and change redefines my boundaries, and the new limitations those boundaries map out make me feel naked, and not the good kind of naked.

I don't know if it's the moon or the planets or something I elicit when I give off a certain mood, but everyone was tossing their vulnerability around yesterday in a mad fit of self-exposure, and it was both poignant and distressing. I was busted open, I received emails from other people who were busted open, and even my Friday night junk food delivery guy was busted open. I've only ever seen him once before, but he told me how his cat of 15 years had died a number of years ago, and that he'd never had another because he didn't think his heart could take the weight of loving so much. I imagined taking the food delivery guy into my arms for comfort while I pressed the buttons on the debit machine.

I wrote for seven hours straight yesterday until I finally collapsed and cried in the dark, because it hurts to be human, and that was good, even when I punched myself in the hip to keep from wailing out loud next to my open bedroom window. It has been a long time since I cried like that. I needed to let off the steam. It puts trouble at rest to let it out to rabble-rouse once in a while.

The next step in my personal brand of self-therapy this morning, after putting this little number out there, is to have a shower, paint my fingernails bright red, and take the Palinode out for a late breakfast like regular human beings do. I can't lie around being an aching, busted open seed pod 24/7. I like food too much, and there's a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese icing that has my name on it.

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PS.  This is what I wrote exactly one year ago at Aiming Low: "Anxiety, Panic Attacks, And What Gets Us Through". Vive la annual révolution!

PPS.  I just got an email about something huge for me that has been a major part of this whole vulnerability breakdown, and it is wonderful, fabulous, good, really excellent news, which I'm not going to tell you about yet, because life's a bitch sometimes, and I would be remiss if I didn't contribute.

Time Is Pretty Cool When It Isn't Forcing You to Exist Continuously Through Another Terrible January

This is my middle-of-the-night stream-of-consciousness post that I am not going to allow myself to delete later. It's a good exercise. It loosens up the blogging fingers and let's me freak out a little about something not related to my imminent death.


This is me in the tub with my kitty, Oskar, who is ridiculous and likes to be
extremely close to, but not actually in, hot water.

My death is not actually imminent, but it's January right now, and January is when I am pretty sure that my death is imminent anyway. I am sure that I will get cancer again and that my mid-winter weight gain is a symptom of a thyroid condition related to that imaginary cancer, and then I watch a documentary about breast cancer and pink-washing, and I end up walking around the apartment feeling myself up repeatedly and wondering if that spot I keep poking is going to be the cause of my imminent demise or if I should just cut back on my caffeine intake.

I like the way caffeine is spelled. I always say it caff-ay-inn-ay as I type it out.

That's when the visual migraine thing I sometimes get kicks in, and the whole world starts to sparkle in blinding patches like it's all turning into a disco ball, and I worry that it's actually a sign of a brain tumour or probably a stroke, because the visual migraine is usually accompanied by some facial numbness, and I realize that I haven't showered in a day-and-a-half, and, if I am going to end up in an emergency room with a stroke, I want to look and smell better while I do it, so I get into the shower and don't realize until half way through that I am possibly the dumbest person having a stroke ever, so I get out of the shower and drip all over the floor so that I can inspect my face for asymmetrical drooping, and, being that there isn't any, I decide that I'm not having a stroke and finish my shower, after which I take some Benadryl and have a long, therapeutic nap.


This is what crap I looked like before that shower.

The good news is that I'm not dying! The bad news is that I could be, but so could we all. Oh, January. I cannot quit you, at least as long as time keeps functioning the way it does.

Yesterday afternoon, during one of my therapeutic naps, I had this terribly involved dream about smoking pot, those outdoor hamburger figurines from 1970s McDonalds, baby tigers, and the nature of time. It was fantastic. In my dream, time only seemed to function in a linear fashion for those who didn't understand it, but, once you began to understand the true nature of time, it would function more in accordance with its true nature in loops and pockets and waves, and it all resulted in me getting really stoned by accident after having been mislead by a plastic, anthropomorphic garden hamburger in Alabama, and I ended up cuddling baby tigers soaked in orange juice with my aunt, who, not understanding the true nature of time, disapproved of the fact that they were being kept in giant hamster exercise balls. Poor baby tigers. They were sticky.

Time is pretty cool when it isn't forcing you to exist continuously through another terrible January filled with death anxiety.

Somehow, this is all making me think of Edenland. Hello, Edenland! I hope you are having a fine evening, or morning, or whatever time of day you are having over there in Australia.

The End.

This Is The Road My Heart Takes

I have been feeling panicked lately. I tend to feel panicked a majority of the time anyway, because that's just how this Schmutzie rolls. At two years old, I realized that things changed irrevocably in my absence when my toast became inedible while my mother and I were out shopping, and my trust in all things turned into trust in very little. I realized the truth of immortality on my fifth birthday as my cake was passed on from my grandparents to my parents to me, and I spent the day crying in my room. I was an early adopter of deap-seated, mortal anxiety.



When I went to my first psychiatrist back in about 1993 or 1994, he asked me if I suffered from anxiety. I had never understood what this anxiety I had read about entailed. Was it a sad feeling? Was it an angry feeling? I couldn't put my finger on what that word was pointing to, so I assumed I had never felt it. I told him that I must be a very calm person, because I had never experienced this anxiety he asked about. "I think you have a lot of it," he said. "I think that it is probably with you all of the time, and I think its omnipresence in your life has made you blind to it and its impact." He was a smart man.

Of course, when I make major life changes, this general anxiety skyrockets. It's how I do. So, when I quit my job at the shoe store so that I could work freelance from home full time, I felt both elated and COMPLETELY FREAKED OUT OH HOLY HELL WHAT IN GOD'S NAME HAD I DONE I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING.

I love the decision I've made, and I'm fairly confident that I won't be reduced to lining up with my cats to eat out of their kibble bowl, but it's a scary thing to suddenly be your own boss, accountant, manager, salesperson, secretary, and coffee jockey. No one's told me how to do any of this. It's easy to feel like I'm the only one flying this ship from my kitchen table straight into the dumpster just up the alley, because I have no boss daddy to assure me that I will have clients next June.

I woke up feeling quite contented this morning, though, because my dreams have stepped up to take care of me again. Just before I woke up, I was caught in this long dream about my life replayed as if it had been bathed throughout in mediocrity. The pain in it was terrible. Everything was a stab to the heart: my passionless marriage, my high school reunion, my dream husband's desire for children, the suburban bungalow. The concession to convention and necessity over pursuing a more passionate life wove a deep thread of grief and exhaustion through every experience. It's not that that kind of life can't have passion in it, but it's not a life I could have led, and, in my dream mind, I cried for every piece of me that it could not hold.

I woke up relieved to be who I am doing what I do. Having kids would make this more difficult. Having a mortgage would make this more difficult. The burden of a car would make this more difficult. My life, the one it turns out I actually like, is only possible right now because of how it differs from the one I thought my family and culture dreamed for me back in December of 1972.

There are few standards against which I feel I can measure my life, and this used to shake me. How would I know when I was successful? How would I know when I was good at what I did? How would other people be able understand me within the context of the shape my life has taken? This person that I am with my outlaw blend of gender, sexuality, religion, and cultural aesthetics: how do I know when I am following my creative pull and when I am tipping over into becoming the desperado, however gentle?

The longer I live with myself, the more comfortable I become with trusting that I am neither completely lost nor on the verge of shooting up the joint. We're good with ourselves, me and I.

I might find myself panicking at my makeshift desk, because my future has no tidy map, but no one's does, really, in the end. Had I been on the road I thought my family would have mapped for me with a house and children and a car, that would have been interrupted by cervical cancer, anyway. This is how life works. You don't get what you want, and then you get something you never imagined for yourself, and then you get something you want, and then the whole thing gets tossed over for something else, and then you keep going. It's hard, sometimes rewarding, and often unexpected. It's all very messy, and these maps we see charted out for us, the ones we think we see other people navigate better and more accurately than we do? They don't exist. They are a myth our scared hearts would like to be real, but our brave hearts know better.

And so, I'll probably keep panicking, because that's how I do, but I'll do it knowing that this is the road my heart takes. We're good with ourselves, me and I.

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PS. Listen to Iggy Pop's "The Passenger". I listen to it when I want to remember how things are.

I'm Really Quite Terrible At Breathing Like A Normal Person

I feel like Goldie Hawn's character in Overboard when she's gone catatonic in a corner and her four so-called sons are busying themselves by throwing grapes at her mouth, only no one's actually throwing grapes at my mouth, and I'm hungry. Also, I'm not catatonic.



I think what I really mean is that I envy Goldie Hawn's character in Overboard, because she gets to be catatonic and have grapes, while I just get to be panicked about everything I have to get done in the next 36 hours while three cats stare on in bewilderment and refuse to learn how to serve me some damn dinner.



The Palinode and I leave for Blissdom Canada in Toronto on Thursday morning, and before then, I have to design eleventy skillion things, buy extra cat litter, make up extra litter boxes for the cats, launder all the clothes, pick up my coat where I left it at a friend's house, work up some speaking notes for my Blissdom Canada panel called The Art And Science Of Finding Inspiration – And Using It, read half a book, pack my suitcase, make it through a dentist appointment slated to be at least two hours long, and and and and and and and lots of other stuff.



Right now I am hiding out in bed, working from the padded safety of several blankets and three pillows, and I am reminding myself to please actually breathe like a normal person once in a while. I'm really quite terrible at it.

Luckily, my eyes have started to fail me. They won't focus anymore, and they keep registering what looks like sunspots when I look at stuff, so I am forced to stop staring at the computer for a while and actually go shower and find sustenance.

You know it's a great day when the early stages of blindness present a silver lining for you.



Here's to showering! And maybe a sandwich! Heave, ho!

25 Things Of Which I Am Afraid

See also my subsequent list, "25 Things That Make Me Feel Brave".


Bonus extra fear: what's under every manhole cover I step on.

1. I am afraid that we are just as smart as we think we are.
2. I am afraid that, when I finally do go to a dentist, they are going to have to do something, anything, to my teeth and/or gums.
3. I am afraid that I will die by freak electrocution if I bathe during a rainstorm.
4. I am afraid that I will have to spend my elder years living in a tent without electricity because we killed the earth.
5. I am afraid that something might be in my closet when the door is closed, but I feel insecure, as though I need to batten down the hatches, when the door is open.
6. I am afraid that I might be the only one who loves this hard.
7. I am afraid that, when I give blood, the little finger-pricker thing will be missing its spring and will stab me in the bone again like that one time in 1995.
8. I am afraid that I might not have my words when I need them.
9. I am afraid that there might really be ghosts in my apartment, and I just can't see them.
10. I am afraid that the Palinode will die before we have a chance to get very old together.
11. I am afraid that I will die before the Palinode and I have a chance to get very old together.
12. I am afraid that I will run out of my allotment of near death experiences.
13. I am afraid that I will get cancer again, because I had it too easy the first time.
14. I am afraid that, because my apartment building is old, I could fall through the floor into the basement at any moment.
15. I am afraid that I will never have a really restful, comfortable sleep again in my life.
16. I am afraid that I will never be great.
17. I am afraid that I will die in a plane crash.
18. I am afraid that I will become one of those old people who ends up forgotten and eating cat food until someone finds her body months later because I had no children.
19. I am afraid that someone will shut down the internet.
20. I am afraid that I will somehow end up unconscious in the hospital, and someone will decide to give me penicillin, and I will die before ever regaining consciousness.
21. I am afraid that I will never write books.
22. I am afraid that, if I do write books, they will be terrible, and I will look back on them years later with shame.
23. I am afraid that my adult acne will never go away, and I will be the only eighty-year-old still using zit cream.
24. I am afraid that I might be dysfunctional for not feeling sad about the inevitable lessening of the mass production of paper books.
25. I am afraid that, because my concern about my recent addiction to Thirtysomething on Netflix outweighs my nostalgic fear about the state of books, I am much more dysfunctional than I fear.