Big Change, Fear and Loss, and the Need to Let Go

test paint patches drying on our new condo's walls.

I had a dream last night that my cats were bored. I looked at them being bored, and I thought about how they could live for 20 boring years in my home, or how they could live for five brief but interesting years out in the world.

I spent the remainder of the dream weeping inconsolably for the horror of my actions, because safety to the point of boredom had robbed their one shot at living of most of its potential for meaning. There is little worse than that.

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A few nights before that, I dreamed of a giant, illustrated bumble bee. It had a large mouth filled with triangular, menacing teeth. Its mouth opened in the shape of an engulfing wishbone and scooped up an entire dog, which was barking at the bee. The dog didn't know that the bee could eat it, and it believed until it was swallowed whole that its barking meant something or would have some effect. It didn't.

The bee didn't hate the dog, or even want to scare the dog. The bee was just doing what the bee was made to do, which was to eat what was in front of it.

My dream kept juxtaposing my position as observer and my identity as self on top of the bee and the dog so that I became confused about whether I was the bee eating or the dog being eaten or the observer neglecting to step in and change the course of events. I felt powerful and annihilated and guilty.

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Taking out our first mortgage and being in this limbo space of not having moved yet but preparing to do so has me anxious. It has me feeling like I can't play anymore, like I have to take everything that much more seriously now that the walls that house me are mine.

In a lot of ways, this makes my life much more secure, but rather than that translating into a feeling of security, it's translating into a heavy feeling of loss and fear.

I am sure that this will pass. This is a natural reaction to change. We mourn what we will no longer have or experience, even if that experience was not ideal, and we fear what's coming, because it hasn't popped out from around the corner yet to show itself.

I think I need to take Maira Kalman's advice: go for a walk, empty myself out, and let wonderful things happen.



That walk will end with me buying paint for our new home and heading over to start the work of making it ours, and I am excited about putting ourselves into the space we live for the first time together. We are banishing Rental Apartment White forever!

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PS. My 40th birthday is on December 29th. I'm celebrating my birthday by raising $2,650 with Charity: Water to bring 40 people clean water for life, and we're already 24.5% there!

So, as a gift to me and to the world, let's make this happen.

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.