Where HAVE I been?

I ask myself that question pretty much daily. Whereever I’ve been, I think I’m still returning.

The short of the story is that my brain went through a little, shall we say, battle with itself and most days I–whoever *I* happened to be that day– felt like merely a spectator. I won’t bother to revisit the many terrible thoughts that plagued me for weeks; I was electric and numb, all at once. Frozen in the ice of a deep deep depression, I would thaw quickly when the mania hit, then freeze again. It was excruciatingly hard, and coming back from it has felt excruciatingly slow.

But this news…I weighed myself yesterday. I am still below the Awful Number that used to be my cue to exit this life should I hit it. What a terrible way to give away my power to a digital read out on a scale, but I did it, for years. I had all of these perameters set up for myself, and should I veer outside of them, the punishment would be severe. I was master and executioner.

Still, I was relieved that I didn’t see The Number.

Oh, what a waste of time, those lines I drew. I observed as others drew them, keeping their lives structured and tidy, everything in its place, this time for this thing, this time for that thing, etc. As much as I believed that what my life needed was more structure, I realized that I was just as bad as those who keep an PDA/day planner like their lives depend on it…my structure just wasn’t as visible. What it didn’t allow for was room to move and think in a new way. I was stuck in a loop of shoulds and aughts, feeling more and more empty as the days passed. And I realized just how many people in my life march to that same drummer. Yuck.

So that’s my work now.  Less mind-structure, more time devoting myself to feeling –and living– a life without soul compromise. Today’s message from the Universe was timely: 

 You might call it spiritual logistics, Meghan, but sometimes you have to move away, to get closer.
Or you might just call it weird.
Either way, it helps to remember it from time to time.

It does help, yes. Reassessing what I need, how I can achieve it, what I can learn from the lessons of the past months. There’s a very strong part of me that wants to leave Denver and all its baggage behind. I miss the openness of Montana, and yearn for the simpler life…chopping wood, mending fences, collecting eggs, walking out my back door into a massive wilderness area.  Pot lucks with the neighbors across the field. Bon fires. Friends who aren’t afraid to show their humanity, who believe foibles are just the flip side of courage. Give me a huckleberry hunt up the Blackfoot, a hike in fog up Bass Creek, wading in the Flathead with Cora.

Give me peace, and legs strong enough to carry me out of this choked wilderness.

I’m thankful that getting to and from work requires 12 miles of pedaling with a decent hill in the middle of it all. That may save me from the slide and checking out entirely.

1) You do not know what you do not know.
2) Like you, people come to the table with baggage.
3) You are OKAY. Really.
4) You will not be forgotten by those who love you.
5) Silence is not punishment.

That last one is a real doozy. My father is famous for using silence as a weapon. One false move and he acts like you’re invisible for as long as he deems it necessary to send you a message…without words.

I told him to shut up when I was 14. He did, and for nearly two years he spoke as few words to me as possible. His mangy nothings were like thick, choking smoke I passed through every morning and every evening. The dinner table was the worst. Scraping of fork against plate, my mother trying to make conversation, the pit in my stomach from knowing that I caused this, I was the one, and he would make me, us, pay.

Years later, as my parents were preparing Thanksgiving for friends,  my father was drinking, hard–his martinis are famous for their deadly kick–and my mother made the mistake of saying something to the effect of “don’t you think you should stop now?” Dad ended up walking out–on her, on their guests–and when he finally did come back, he promptly filled a glass pitcher with water, set it next to his place at the table, and ceremoniously drank from it for the rest of the evening. You know, to make a point. After, he didn’t speak to my mother for almost two weeks. Emotional maturity at its finest. My sister called to report “this may mean the big ‘D’(ivorce).” She’s prone to hyperbole.

I’ve always been the one to call back if I think a conversation ended on an awkward or sour note. I crave closure. I need things to be okay, need to know that I will not be pushed into a space of silence over which I have little to no control.

Busy busy, filling the silences. With food, with words that come too fast, with explanations and hypotheses and speculation. Eating my way through uncomfortable gaps in conversation, ingesting whatever comes my way as a means to soothe the anxious beast inside. My mind doesn’t let me forget for long, though; really, there is no prescription that will lessen the panic induced by silences. The only pill is my head aligning with my heart, and telling it #3, again: You are okay. Really.

I face a situation now wherein my struggle with silence is being put to the test. It has to do with a friendship, and, I suppose, a battle of wills. What I know, for certain, is that I don’t want to keep being the one who calls back, the one who reaches out, bridges distances, misunderstandings, fear. I am tired of always making  the effort, only to find that it doesn’t really change anything. Like when I wrote my father a letter telling him that I was in love with a woman and he wouldn’t even open it, let alone talk to me about it. It took my then-girlfriend calling him at the office–a rather monumental gesture–to even get him to acknowledge the letter, but still he wouldn’t open it. “I’d rather go on suspecting something than to have it confirmed,” he famously remarked. Forget about who was at the other end of that missive, his daughter, freaking out daily thousands of miles away in Montana. To this day, we have never spoken of that letter. I do not know if it remains unopened.

In attempting honest dialogue with those that I love, I have opened myself to vulnerability and, all too often, profound disappointment. I have also projected a shittonne of thoughts, actions and ideas onto imposed (or so I think) silences in an effort to “figure them out” and I’ve come to find that I’m often very, very wrong. 

Trouble is, in this case, I know the person imposing the silence quite well, and though I wish I could chalk it up to the usual busy schedule or self-absorption, I’m not so sure that’s the case. There’s much back story here, but it’s not worth the screen it’s typed on.  I have been forced, by way of the triangulating dynamics of this particular friendship and the overwhelming feelings of  creates in me, to look at why, exactly, silence unhinges me so. 

In getting to the root of it, I am thrust back to places I uncomfortably inhabited, places that remind me just how alone I’ve been all of my life. Surrounded by people, yes, not for lack of friends, yes, but most definitely alone in that I was the product of “benign neglect,” (my mother’s phrase which she finds amusing) and don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel outside of things. So often I was left to fend for myself, ignored by my siblings, dismissed by my parents, who didn’t know what to do with this emotional tinderbox of a kid. I sought love and affirmation –comfort–the only place I knew it to be: in a box of cherry Pop-Tarts; in a pan of  pasta with shaker parmesan, butter, garlic powder and dried oregano (after school, just in time to catch the latest episode of General Hospital), at the bottom of a box of powdered donuts. Usually, after chowing down, I went to sleep, only to be woken by my mother calling me to supper. More food. More silence. Stuffing. Desperately seeking: satiety.

The challenge in all of this is to find a way through and around the constant barrage of food. This is not the crappy crap of my old institutional cooking job. Sure, a lot of this stuff is old-school and easily identifiable as rich and over-the-top, calorie-wise, but it’s also tasty. And when you’ve ridden 45 minutes in, worked 8+ hours on your feet, and have another 45 minutes to ride home, you kind of want food. You even tell yourself you’ve earned it, which can be yet another slippery slope.

Our staff lunch/family meal usually consists of leftovers from the party the night before. I often find myself eating a really small portion of whatever it was, knowing that if I ate as much as I wanted, I’d be way over my daily points allotment. The better days, one of my coworkers does a nice stir-fry and I can pick out mostly veggies, and I feel sated and content that I’ve been reasonable. All the leftover desserts? That’s a kind of nightmare, and my new tact is to avoid them for as long as I can (until at least lunch time), then allot a bite or two along with a cup of coffee, and call myself good.

I’m tracking all of this stuff, which means that when I get home, dinner is usually totally veggie-centric, not too big, and all I get. I’m thinking all of this will keep me on track– that and the fact that I’m riding so dang hard in the cold just to cover the 6 miles there and 6 miles home.

I am feeling much more like myself these days, more able to hang on with something other than my fingertips. I have not hiked like that in well over a year. I used to hike like that almost every weekend.  I fell fast asleep last night by 9:30, and woke a little sore, but not too bad. Talk about showing up. My body did it AGAIN. I am so proud. There is still hope. THERE IS HOPE.

I didn’t realize just how unmotivated I’d become until this past weekend when I felt motivated, able to focus, able to be helpful around the house without feeling like I was dragging a boulder along behind me.

Yesterday, it was just me, Daisy, the wind and the trees. Snow on the trail. Light on the water, light framing holes in ice up Jasper Creek.  Rock formations covered in bright green mosses and aspen marred by the horns of elk.

I was home again.

What fascinates me about this journey is the people who show up for it, show up for me. I’ve been pleasantly surprised. It’s a new way of understanding what friendship is. I’m most grateful for the friends that push through their own discomfort and are willing to meet me in a place that’s not familiar (or too familiar) and simply ask how I am. Check in. Longevity helps–those who have known me a long time understand that what I’ve been going through lately is not me, per se, but a part of me that’s trying to grab the wheel and throw me in the ditch.  These friends recognize my attempt(s) to shift into a better way of being, a better way of seeing. I am offered patience and love, boundless, constant. I am told that I am not alone.

Then there are the avoiders. What we don’t understand, we put away. I understand that we’re all fighting our own personal battles, and who wants to put oneself in the midst of someone else’s bloody mayhem? It’s not for everyone. But it’s where I am now, and it’s not created by my own hand or some attempt at self- sabotage. I’d prefer to keep the drama on the stage, thanks. What I’ve learned this: One can be compassionate, present and a good friend without taking on the mess. There’s no need to hold up a mirror, or rely solely on relative experience to access another’s depths. Really.  

What our culture seems to lack, most of all, is forgiveness. We hold ourselves and others to an impossible standard, expecting change overnight, growing irritable when the same things come up again and again and again. But this is life. Life is not linear, nor does it shed its skin (emotional baggage) and move on without ever looking back.  That’s one of the reasons there’s nothing worse than a reformed-anything. It’s so easy to project our own shortcomings on to others when we need to keep those reel-to-reels to ourselves. The old bootstraps are a waste of time and breath…no one has them any more, no one wants them, and to hell with anyone who suggests that pulling them up makes one lick of difference.

Forgiveness.  

Like an alcoholic in recovery, I am in one-day-at-a-time mode. One bite at a time, one walk at a time, one choice to be healthier/happier/more HERE at a time. ”People always want things from you,” said a friend of mine recently. Yes, I thought. An open heart, curious intellect and unwillingness to stop the search for peace attracts all manners of seekers. Thousands of dollars in therapy later and I’m seen as the one with all the answers. It’s odd–I’ve been the one on the listening end so many times that being on the other side takes some getting used to. I am learning to ask  for what I need more–part of my ability to survive in the midst of all of this depends on my asking. I was beginning to pull back so much that when the shit really hit the fan and I was crying for hours every day, I didn’t let anyone know. I did it in secret, often behind the closed-door of my office while I was trying (ha!) to work. The more I did it, the worse off I was. I was afraid of scaring the people I loved the most. What I didn’t count on was that they weren’t going to let fear carry them away in the same way that it had taken me.

So for the time being, this particular doctor is not in.  Only time will tell who remains in this circle of light, growing brighter every day, and who recedes.

The trip to my Saturday meeting was breezy– as in tailwind most of the way– but still vigorous. I had rain gear on because it wasn’t really clear what was coming from the sky, and while those clothes kept me warm, it was a lot of extra weight and a real sweat-catcher. It’s a bit odd to show up at this full meeting where folks are just waking up and have these rings of perspiration around your midsection like you’ve been in the boxing ring or something.

As expected, the ride back down South to work was a bit tiring– straight into the wind and I hadn’t had breakfast yet. So I stopped en route and got a little veggie and egg wrap thing, threw it in my bag, ate half an apple, and made it over the hill to work. The food was a good idea, because we were busy, and the staff lunch, while delicious, provided me small portions of rich food. By the time I was done with work, I was tired. This was my first 8 hour shift at the club in ages, and I was busy the whole time. It felt good, but when I got on my bike, seeing the lower Queen Anne Saturday night traffic, I opted to ride the lesser of the hills back through Fremont. Never easy, and I did feel a bit tired, but I made it.

Today I’m tired. I have a coffee/walk date in an hour, followed by helping a friend move later in the morning. I may limit that walk, and I may not– I need to take a moment to check in with da bod and see what we need. This kind of tired feels good– it feels like I’ve been using all my parts, burning off the carbon, or something. The other day a friend told me her big motivation for getting/staying in shape is to never feel like she can’t do something. To feel like any activity offered is an option. That resonated with me, and it’s a freedom I haven’t always known.

It can lead you to believe that the world is better without you in it.

It can keep you from moving foward with confidence and purpose.

It can cloud your judgment. Word become weapons; silences are bombs waiting to detonate.

It can make you cringe at the very sight of yourself.

Isolation.
Self-recrimination.
The hidden.

Forgiveness.
Sure-footedness.
Waiting it all out.

Message to the ether: I’m getting this now. There may be a way out from under all that I’ve carried, a way to replace the bad, faulty mirrors of my vision with more realistic ones. But like my own skin, this skewed way of seeing is all that I have known.

Today: how to push RESET, or BEGIN, and not DEFAULT.

How to embrace the real and discard the rest. How to speak without leaving scars. What compassion tastes like. Let it not be sour, let it be sweet.

It was 55 minutes that I didn’t think I wanted to take for myself, but did. I never cease to be amazed at how thin, how permeable, that wall between I can and I can’t really is.