#20 The mistake you keep making

somewhere not close to a starbucks

I’d meant to leave for California, really, this coming Wednesday, even though I’d meant to leave in March and then meant to leave the fifteenth June and definitely definitely meant to leave this past Saturday. I ended up leaving last night. 99% of what I had to do was done, but like always these days I found a reason to extend it, to smooth out the tasks and give myself more time because in this season of my life everything takes more time.

My car was packed and the first AirBnb guests were already in my house and I was staying at a friends while I wrapped up that 1%. And then yesterday I did the thing I knew I should not do, and like all things we do that we know we should not do it went badly, and then all of the sudden I couldn’t leave fast enough. A year of dragging my feet and feeling like I would never leave the woods, and it turned out I could just get in my car and go. It took less than an hour to get on the highway, and now I’m in Virginia, and tonight I’ll be in Nashville. It always goes slow, it always feels like it will never end. Then it ends.

Because I was angry and nauseous and hell bent and not sad and wracked and wistful, I did not play the theme music as I drove away. I didn’t do the thing where I look into the rearview mirror and watch the place that kept me fall away so it could imprint to memory, or walk around the garden and say goodbye to the plants. I didn’t drive slow past the Roost or stop at the cafe to make some comment about my last latte for a while, or do any of the things I was genuinely afraid I was going to do. Like almost all of the endings that have come to mark my life, I did what I am somehow designed to do, which is just look forward and not back at all. This is a strength and this is also a weakness.

The thing I did that I knew I should not do was go to see the person who I’d imagined I’d been in a relationship with, who I was only able to imagine I’d been in a relationship with because they are an entirely unavailable human being, which means they’re safe to imagine such a thing with. It went exactly as I expected, exactly as it’s happened before, where I show up with my heart all bloodied and on offer and they say something about timing, or confirm that I did not matter to them in coded words that a certain type of individual are practiced to use. I can see it from a different plane, I can see a version of me trying the same broken loop to complete a cycle that will never close, a version of me that walks through a door that says this will never ever work but still thinks maybe, and sometimes if I let my mind run its crazy, it will tell me this part of me will never be fixed, that I will always be driving to their house to ask for my worth, that I will always leave hollowed.

There is a very bright urge to not write about this at all, as if this part of me some how renders all else less. There is a specific shame that comes with being a forty-three year-old that knows better who still does it anyway. But I am so tired of the trope we buy and sell that hides our growth until it transmutes into an esteeming quality; I am so tired of our glorification of the after and our disgust at the process; I am so tired of my own disgust at the process, the idea I can let bloom until it’s all the reality I know: that if only I wasn’t this way then I’d be whole. It is because I am this way, it is because of the mortifying and humiliating experiences I can deliver myself to by my own willing hands, that I am whole.

Being a human is a fucking mess. A severely embarrassing, often humbling, confusing mess, and being a human who is trying to not hurt themselves in the same ways they always have is an even worse mess. But being a human who doesn’t allow themselves the grace of being human, of being exactly who they are at exactly all times, is torture. I don’t want to speed this part up so I can point to it and say “oh I used to do that,” as if that is a more worthy position, as if “there” is some better place. Here, in the full middle of it, I just want to remember that this, too—even with all these hateful words and thoughts and emotions that swirl around and inside me, even with all the terrible feelings running through me—is important, is perfect, is sacred, is beautiful, is the point. And I suppose it’s worth mentioning, what we do here is always what determines our there, anyway.

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Ten Things Right Now

Because I’m traveling, this week’s Ten Things is less verbose. I’m sorry, or you’re welcome?

1. A website that just publishes chicken selfies.

2. Mar Grace writes about the Second Arrow.

3. I have no idea why I call Ryan Gosling “Ryan Gosling Jr.” but I do.

4. Not your grandma’s microdosing.

5. This Ezra Klein op-ed on futurism was v. good, as was the linked article within it that I had to read four times.

6. I read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings in three days. V. good.

7. Listening to a lot of Agnes Obel which pairs well with the audiobook Bittersweet by Susan Cain which asserts something about how people who listen to melancholic music are more empathic which yes, lols.

8. On this week’s Quitted Emily interviews me about still being in the liminal space, and I talk about taking off my skin suit and hanging it in a closet, ego deaths, not feeling like a writer even though I’m a writer, etc.

9. Harvard sifts through what was pandemic drinking; ethanol causes brain damage in single doses; the DSM is flying off the shelves;

10. Lisa Olivera reflects on taking a break from social media.

11. Quitted gets its first press, paired with a red: “EarthGarden Merlot Cab Sav because, like the wine there’s a lot of depth to these chats – but boy, is it satisfying to consume!”

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