The End of Ambition

In exactly 28 days I will graduate from UCSF as a nurse practitioner.  I will have arrived at the end of 7 years of work towards this goal.  But more accurately, this is the end point of all of my childhood ambitions.  The story of wanting to be in medicine has been one central tenant of my life.  I remember playing with a Fisher-Price doctor set as a kid and loving the stethoscope.  The idea that I could hear the inside of someone’s heart? That is pretty intoxicating.  I spent all my youth dreaming, working towards, and spinning stories about my life as a doctor.  I went to college, took all my pre-med courses, planned, and studied.  And then I worked alongside a wonderful doctor at Mass General.  It was that experience, talking to her, listening to her wisdom, thinking about what my life would really be like that turned me away from medicine.  I knew I wasn’t ready.  I didn’t know how I would support myself and I wasn’t sure that rounding on millions of different patients was right for me.  I walked away from that dream and found teaching.  One of the great, sweet surprises of my life was that profession.  How much fun it was, how challenging, how sweetly innocent, how much I laughed and enjoyed myself.  I had a wonderful time being a teacher.

But childhood dreams are childhood dreams.  They tug at us and push us and nag at us until we come to terms with what is still true about them.  I loved teaching.  I loved the passion and politics of the national arena I found myself in, but I didn’t think or learn about it in my free time.  I read about health and medicine.  In the summer of 2005, my friend the Mass general doctor, gave me the book “Mountains beyond Mountains” about a Harvard doctor in Haiti.  I read this book on the sweating, summer subway and it took my breath away.  Here was the story of someone doing what I had wanted to do.  And my deep dream for this came back to me flashing daggers and dirt.  It wasn’t playing around this time.  It moved me and demanded that I do something.  I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor.  I wasn’t interested in this route or this training anymore.  But being a nurse and a nurse practitioner made sense to me.  My good friend helped me make this decision.  In 2006 I took all my pre-requisite classes, riding out to Brooklyn to learn in a Caribbean-Hasidic neighborhood.  Something you could only find in a city like New York.  My professors were Nigerian.  My classmates were Haitian or from the Virgin Islands.  Very different from Boston University.  I took my classes while packing up my life and history in NYC.

I didn’t know then that I was walking away from one of the sweetest, most fragile times of my life.  In NYC during those four years, I lived in the comfortable love of my twin sister and my husband.  We were a fearsome group.  We took care of each other.  We rolled up and down the streets together.  We struggled and fought and loved each other.  And this sweetness, so similar to my early years, came to an inevitable end when I got on the plane to South America.  In Colombia, I sent my applications to schools all over the United States and waited for interviews.  I prayed everyday for an interview at UCSF.  It had been another childhood dream to live in San Francisco and go to UCSF.  I was a very ambitious 10 year old.  The interview invitation came and I flew to San Francisco from Bogotá and mustered every saint I knew to be with me.  I remember the morning of the interview I was so scared that I found a pay phone and called my sister.  I cried on the phone to her and then sucked it up and worked it.  With me I brought every ounce of energy, magic, and mystery from all the saints and gods I had studied.  I was in Santiago de Chile when I got the news from my sister that my acceptance letter had arrived.  I had gotten into UCSF and would be starting in June of 2008.  I celebrated that night with new Chileno friends and many Pisco sours.

Much of my experience as a student nurse, a master’s student and a new nurse is documented in this little blog.  And now this part of the journey will soon be over.  Yes, there will be many more challenges.  Passing the boards, getting a job, doing a good job at that new job.  There is a lot more I have to learn.  A lot more that will be hard and beautiful and amazing.  More patients and families to meet.  More stories to be shared.  But this graduation is a big deal.  This is it.  This is the end of my ambitions.

And that means I have no idea what is next.  What will be next.  What dreams will be next.  And that feels amazing.  Beautiful.  Freeing.  And a little terrifying for this controlling New Englander.

Camotes en the kitchen

It is nurse appreciation week. And in this spirit of celebrating this new and young profession I have chosen, I would like to share a story that maybe rearranged some inner geography for me.

I grew up in the United States, a white girl in the middle of New England. Every step I have made in my life has been away from this very privileged and specific shelter. Yes, I had my struggles. Yes, I had my pain and difficulties. Yes, they were more than many of the people I grew up with. But they were nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to most of the world. My naive and innocent motivation was to know the world. And that is what I have done. It has humbled me and made me a more aware and decent person. I have chosen to live in a multi-cultural and multi-lingual world. And since I am white, this was actually a choice. One of the many privileges of choice you get being born in this country with a certain genetic, and therefore entitled, make-up. Many things have changed the way that I see the world.  This nurse appreciation week, I would like to share one experience that has shifted things for me.

Since I speak Spanish well, my shifts are often filled with the gift of a new patient and a new family that needs the comfort and necessary support of their language.  I was surprised one night when I was passed a patient who spoke Spanish as a second language.  This is rare. I was told that he and his family were indigenous people from Central America and primarily spoke their native language.  I began our three nights together laughing, talking, and getting to know him and his family.  I knew I was in for it when his family told me, “You speak better Spanish than we do!”  As I moved about his room and did the tasks of hospital care, I got to hear his language and see his way of being in the world.  He was a beautiful man.  Young.  Dying.  And scared.   I hung his first round of chemotherapy and as is my custom, I said, “Congratulations! Here you go”.  And as I primed the pumps and input data for the infusion, he raised his hands to the sky and started saying prayers.  To who and how and what was asked for, I can’t know.  But it wasn’t Christian.  It was another experience of God entirely.

As we moved through the next few nights together I had a chance to get to know him.  To know his beautiful smile and his easy laugh.  To know how four in the morning was the time for waking up and for bathing.  I made him a picture chart for the things he would need and he and his family laughed and laughed at my stick drawings for things like diarrhea and pain.  He was never alone.  He was always accompanied by a brother or cousin who cared for him and talked with him.  One brother was shy and sweet.  One morning he asked me, “Rebeca, te gusta los camotes”.  Did I like sweet potatoes? Of course, I told him.

A week or so went by and when I next saw this man he was back from the ICU after a case of sepsis.  I talked to him and asked him how he was.  We talked about his experience of being so sick.  I asked if he knew why he went to the ICU.  I told him that he had a big infection in his blood.  I turned back to the table to work on getting his medications ready.  I heard him say to me, “But Rebeca, what is blood? Que es la sangre?” Time stopped with this question.  I had a moment.  With all sincerity, I had a moment.  I looked up and heard his question and it occurred to me that I knew nothing about this man.  I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about his world view.  This was clearly not a dumb man.  This was not a man without depth or thought.  But this was a man who had a totally, completely, entirely different understanding of what was happening to him than I did.  He undoubtedly had a story about his illness.  He had a narrative and an understanding of his situation that I had no access to.  His entire family was at his side supporting him, bathing him, moving and turning him.  And they did this with a shared understanding and story about his illness.  And it occurred to me, as I heard his question, how far our experiences were from each other.

And isn’t this the case? How close we are and how far away.  I could bathe and care for this man, but have no idea what he believed or thought about his disease.  And how this is true for all levels of our life.  We look at our parents and have no idea who they are.  We look at our spouses sometimes and do not know what they want.  We will look at our children and wonder who the hell they are anyway.  This distance in the midst of so much intimacy is amazing.  It is terrifying.  But it is how life goes.

I turned around and said “This question makes me happy.  I love to talk about these things”.  And I explained to him and his brother what blood was.  He knew we took it from him everyday from his central line, but he didn’t know what, exactly, it did in the body.  I had looked up his community and tribe, so I knew the very basics of their traditions and geography.  I explained that blood was like the giant rivers that flowed through the mountains he came from.  It was something that flowed through the entire body and could carry things.  Just like rivers could carry food and people and animals.  We talked about how this river flowed because of a pump, his heart, that moved his blood with every beat.  He and his brother looked at each other and said “Just like a car motor”.  And I can only assume that this made sense to them because I know nothing about motors.  We talked about how since this river of blood touched everything in his body, an infection in this blood was very serious.  He nodded and shared about his experience of being so sick.

At the end of our shifts together he asked for my phone number.  He said his brother was bringing me some sweet potatoes and he needed to make sure that I got them.  I am very free with my phone number.  I passed it to his brother and left for the day.  The following Friday, I was taking a much needed break from school and work.  I walked out of my Kabuki-spa induced bliss and saw 15 missed calls from this family.  I was in no mood to go to the hospital to pick up some potatoes, but I called back anyway.  The brother screamed into the phone “WHERE ARE YOU?”  “YOU NEED TO COME HERE FOR THE POTATOES.”  I made my excuses and apologies and made plans to go to the hospital the next day to pick up the gift.  With hindsight, I regret this decision.  The entire family was there that night and I am sure they wanted to give me this gift together.  I wish I had gotten over myself and gotten to the room that night.

The next afternoon I walked into the room and said hello and caught up with the patient and his shy brother.  His brother, all smiles and smiles and smiles, said “We have the potatoes for you.  You need to take them all because we don’t want to get in trouble for having them here in the hospital.”  I was sure it would be a few potatoes in a bag.  And I was so happy for this kindness.  I didn’t expect what the brother pulled out of the closet.  It was a box.  40 lbs of hand-picked Japanese sweet potatoes.  Enough food for my husband and I to eat everyday for two months.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  The patient and brother told me how these were the very best of the potatoes that they picked.  They could be eaten without butter or sugar or salt.  They picked these potatoes and packed them in the fields they worked in central California.

I don’t even know how to say what this meant.  I don’t know how to write about this.  This family worked together at the farm whose name was stamped on this box of potatoes.  And they had decided to give me these potatoes to say thank you for our time together.  That day, I said thank you as much as I could.  I expressed how much this gift meant to me as best as I could.  I laughed and chatted and hung out for a while.  Then finally it was time for me to go.  The brother and I packed up the potatoes in stolen pillow cases and walked down to the street together.  We said goodbye and I started the walk home.

My walk home consists of 10 minutes down a hill and then up a hill.  But adding 40 lbs of potatoes slowed me down quite a bit.  As I struggled down the street and stopped and rested, the rain started.  Big, sloppy, wet rain.  The fog rolled over the hills and the trees swayed with the wind.  The rain fell on the street and the bags of potatoes.  And the smell of the earth wafted out of those bags.  The deep, rich smell of the earth.  And I stopped and smelled the ground.  The ground this family worked and tended.  The ground my family came from just a few short generations ago.  The land my husband’s family stewarded.  The land that I so often take for granted.

Of course, the tears came up in my eyes.  I stopped for the millionth time on the streets of San Francisco and raised my face to the sky.  I felt the enormity of this gift and what it meant.  This humble family had decided to give me food.  The gift of nutrition, of sustenance.  There aren’t many words for this.  But I know in that moment I felt the slow spin of the earth,  how the clouds shift, and my place here very clearly.

About an hour or so after I got home and shared my bounty with my husband, the brother called me, screaming into the phone as was his custom, to see if I made it home before the rain.  I said that I had made it home safe and sound.  I said thank you again.  And this was my last time talking with them.  By the time I got back to work, they had left for their local hospital.  By now, maybe the patient has passed already.  Or maybe not.  But I still have potatoes in my kitchen.  I am still cooking those camotes.  And just as they said, these potatoes are the best I have ever eaten.

Being a nurse means many things.  Our image in the media and among many nurses reinforce how we are selfless and give so much.  I read during this “nurses’ week” about how we never eat, how we never use the bathroom and how we are all drinkers and addicts.  The image of the nurse martyr is well-known.  But that has not been my experience.  My work means that I meet and interact with all sorts of people.  And it means that I get the joy and honor, and yes sometimes annoyance, of  entering someone’s world.  I do not care for people at the expense of my own self-care.  That is a joyless and losing game.  I am a nurse because it means that I get to know other human beings.  This week I was treated to hearing stories from around the world.  Stories of torture, psychosis, gang life, happy marriages, children and grandchildren, death and dogs.  And that is my job.  Not a selfless sacrifice.  Not a god-complex.  Not a pain in the ass.  A job.  A great job.  A job that gives me laughs, tears and camotes in the kitchen.

home

Many of us have waxed poetic about home. Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home. Even the little dog Toto wanted to get back there. We all have a place that we call home. Many of us have to lose it and create a new one at some point. I am somewhere in the middle of all of that. Home feels like a distant memory to me now. That place of comfort, that place of knowing, that place of feeling known. That is a distant memory.

I still consider my home to be 48 Hillcrest Road. That is the house I grew up in. It was a sweet, typical New England home. And I knew it like the veins under my skin. I knew how the big tree next to the porch lost its leaves in late October. I knew where the first daffodils of spring came up. I knew how fast I had to run up the basement stairs to not feel afraid. I knew that the garage held old furniture of long lost relatives that I could pull out and use to create my Victorian fantasy room. I knew the curve of the entrance floor boards because I would lie down in front of the door sometimes. The list goes on. Where extra mittens were stored, where those funny pictures were, where my sister kept her best shirts to steal, where the moss would grow in the summer to lay your cheek on. This was the house that built me. The house where the good and the bad happened. The house that, no matter what, I could come home to.

Like most kids of divorce, I had to say goodbye to that home. My parents held it down for many years and worked hard to keep that house through lots of loss and struggle. But eventually things unravel. And in the unraveling, the house was organized, packed up and sold. And now it is a distant memory. There is no more place to go home to at the holidays, no more family to gather around the tree, no more funny trinkets to touch that once meant something. That is loss. And if you are a kid of divorce, you know exactly what I am talking about. And if you are not, then you have no idea. There are some clubs that you have to earn entrance into. And this is one such club. There is nothing more maddening then when someone who doesn’t have membership tells me how it must feel. But I used to be that girl that thought I understood. I grew up in the 80s and 90s when divorce was still something you hush-hushed. I get the desire to pretend to understand things that aren’t your own. But then I joined the club and had to understand. When my parents broke up someone actually said that to me: “Welcome to the club. It’s real. And now you are part of it.” And that is true. I am part of the club. And I know I am in very, very good company.

Getting older has meant struggling to come to terms with this loss. And for some reason the part that feels the hardest is losing that old house. When we said our final goodbyes, my sisters and I wrote on a closet wall that we loved that house. A heart-shaped final mark on what was once our exclusive territory. We had battled so much against each other, against others, against the lost parts of our family in that place. But in the end it was our home, our house, our place to come back to whether we wanted to or not. It’s been about 7 years since we capped the permanent marker and closed that closet door. A lot has changed since then. Things have unraveled more, life is not what I expected, and there is too much unsaid. The grounding that our old place gave us has disappeared. And I know that I am at a loss much of the time without that.

I am grateful to be in the position of setting up a home with the man that loves me more than I knew was possible. And this time it feels like the real deal. I have moved every few years for the last 17 years. I do not have a good history of establishing a community, of settling down, of choosing and sticking with things. And I am very nervous to lay down roots in a place so far from where I come from. It feels like strange territory. Dreaming of a future, thinking of planting a damn garden, buying nice furniture. It’s so unsettling. I feel sometimes like I am living a dream I forgot to have. And the simple psychology is so obvious. I don’t want to know that loss again. I know how easy it is to blow it. But then I look at the faces of the people who love me here, my friends, my husband, the mountains and ocean that surround me. And I feel like maybe I could do this. Maybe I could set up shop again. Maybe I could have a home.

I will keep some matches close by for burning it down though. Because I am really good at that. And right now I need to cling to my old talents until I figure out how to keep some kale alive in the garden.

Miranda says it better than me.

Again, I am not alone

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about my internal life.  The personal conversations that I have inside are what make me sit down late at night to write.  I am not easy on myself.  Most people aren’t.  My great weakness is to judge my insides against someone’s outsides.  This never leads to anything productive except the occasional inspiration for how to wear skinny jeans or what boots are new for the season.  Most often it leads to a deep darkness and emptiness.

I most often catch  myself comparing what is to what could have been.  Another dirty little game of the mind.  It’s like strip poker but without anything to ante up except your sanity.  I think what it would be like to have the people that least understand me begin to understand me.  I think what it would feel like to be recognized and loved by the very people who can least see me for me.  It is at these times that darkness sets in and the fog descends like a June day at Ocean Beach.  I don’t think clearly.  I don’t breath right.  I go straight loca.

For many reasons, the last few days have been heavy and dark.  I have been learning to sit with the darkness for many years now.  I learned to accept it.  I learned to grovel and roll around in it.  I am learning how to not attach a whole story to it.  I am learning to just let it be.  I am also learning to ask for it to be lifted.  This morning the curtains started to be raised on this latest iteration and I did what I am starting to do more of: turn to the experts.  People have struggled with life for as long as we’ve been around.  What I am feeling is not new.  People have spoken and written about this inner life for as long as we’ve had the voicebox to vibrate frustration and fear into language.  So I turned to my most trusted friend of late, poet David Whyte.  I opened up his book of poems and I found this.

Sweet Darkness

 

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

 

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

 

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

 

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

 

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

 

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

 

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

 

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

 

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

 

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

 

is too small for you.

 

So I will sit in the darkness for a while and the sweet confinement of this aloneness and learn.  I will remember that the night has eyes that see me for who I really am.  I will learn that only darkness can strip me of the foolishness of the day and push me to be who I really am.  And I will untangle myself, thread by painstaking thread, from a past that still desperately clings to me.  And I will try to walk towards a world that isn’t so small.

I am not alone on this path.  Many people have gone before me.  Hell, if I can figure out how to put this body into skinny jeans and still look cute I can figure out this path too.

You are not alone

I am a left-coast, New England, sarcastic, educated woman.  That means many things. That means that I am very privileged, even if I didn’t grow up that way.  That means that I have a few masters and multiple careers.  That means that I know who won the Florida primary and maybe don’t know who is going to the Superbowl.  And it also means that I don’t talk about God.  Ever.  Really.  It’s not appropriate.   What I love about my upbringing is that I can make fun of almost anything. I can swear and laugh at stupidity, in fact this is a must.  I can get in heated, aggressive debates about maternal death rates and the Congress of late 1990s.  But I can’t talk about God.  This secularism makes sense when you come up on the very ground of separation of church and state.  And secularism is important.  Very important.  We all can see that when Susan Komen separates herself from Planned Parenthood because of non-secular pressure on a secular issue.

In the last few weeks I have been in the trenches.  Darkness and I are well acquainted.  Mr. Cohen says “there are cracks in everything, that’s how the light gets in”.  Maybe the cracks that I feel when I walk around trying not to cry or hit people with my umbrella are there for something more positive than to drive me nuts.  I am prone to heartbreak now.  I used to be a lot tougher, but now I am prone to daily heartbreak.  I feel things or think things and am overwhelmed.  And there it is again. My heart breaks.  I feel it breaking.  My little ticker is just getting shredded.  In the last few days this has gotten harder and I am finding myself on my knees a lot more.  If Leonard was right, then these cracks inside of me are doing exactly what they are supposed to do: letting the light in.

Recently I was asked to share my story in a way that I never have before and it got me thinking about what the “light” has meant for me.  In my early years, I thought God might do me some favors.  But since I didn’t go to church and I was told by a few friends that this meant I was going to hell, I thought I better make some pacts with the devil.  I grew up and got into new age stuff and then decided to study religion as my major in college.  This was a great way to learn about God but not let in any of what the mystics talked about.  And that is how I stayed for a many years.  I could tell you all about the history of goddess worship.  I could blab on about what Jesus meant when he said in the gospel of St Thomas “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”  But I never really knew what this light could do for me.  Until I lost my mind and I didn’t have anyone to call for help except the light.

I know that the only way out of a dark night is with some light.  And for me, that has meant relying more and more on prayer and something greater than myself.  I know so clearly that if I get in the way and try to fix everything with my mind, nothing good will come of it.  If I sit back and let things go then it tends to work itself out.  When I am sitting alone eating food and a sweet new friend stops in by chance and we laugh and talk, that’s something else taking care of me.  When my thoughts are literally making me insane and I have a meeting with someone more interested in how I am doing than our project, that’s the light shining.  When I walk into my home scared, stuck in expectations from a decade ago,  thinking I will not be met with sweetness and instead get rocked and held by a man I have known for so long, that’s a fucking miracle.

I doubt I will become a bible thumper.  I doubt I will say, like one patient said to me,  “Girl I am too blessed to be stressed!”  But maybe what’s coming out now is something more authentic and not quite so New England.  I am not interested in facts and analyses anymore because it doesn’t help me though the hard nights.  I am interested in that still small something shifting inside of me.

Here’s one way that happens for me.  If you can get past the fuscia lipstick, you might just enjoy this.  Check out Jill Scott.  She kills me.

Why not me?

“I am not a fast thinker.  I write, slowly, to know what I think” -Gregory Maguire

It is a new year and many things have shifted.  They have shifted slowly and without my permission.  The first week of the new year a good friend called me and told me her news.  Outside the sun shown through whispers of clouds that should have been heavy with rain.  An errant hummingbird buzzed hungrily in our flowerless backyard.  And the succulents turned to the sun.  I said “Things are changing”.   Forgive my attempt at description.  I’ve been reading a lot of Murakami.  If I was Murakami, right now I would actually turn into that hummingbird and then marry a cat who lived in a tunnel next to the sewer.

I can see clearly through the San Francisco winter sky that things are changing.  Whether I like it or not the axis of my world is tilting and migrating in another direction.  And this change is asking me,  clearly, to let go of the past and to make room for the present.  I always knew that growing up would be scary.  I just never knew that it would require a daily delivery of courage on some scratched plastic platter.  This present moment that I am staring at looks full of possibility and chance.  But I only get to step into it if I am willing to make my own way in the world and let go of the old ways of me and my crazy ancestors.   The big challenge lies in my willingness to let impermanence happen and to let things move forward.  I have never been good at this.  But over the holidays something shifted and changed for me.

I was very unhappy over the holidays.  I felt very sad, like many or most people.  I was heavy with history and hopes.  I spent a lot of time staring into the distance.  I felt like I was in some Victorian soap opera of love and loss, without the corset.  But each act of suffering is a chance to get comfortable with this inevitable part of life.  And to get better (maybe) at dealing with it.  And out of this time came a new willingness and understanding that I didn’t have before.

As a nurse working with people who are very sick, I often question my motives and understanding of what I do.  I have spent the last 18 months trying to understand how people do this job.  When I walk in a room I see people who are very much like me.  They may look different.  They may be richer or poorer.  They may be younger or older.  But ultimately, they are human and they are exactly like me.  I do not see a great chasm between my apparent health and their apparent illness.  Many people who work with this population have to make it an “us/them” situation because it is the only way to show up at work.  I can’t seem to do that, but I understand people who do.  Recently I was listening to Carolyn Myss speak about illness.  She is a well-known healer and teacher in the world of energy medicine and I was surprised to hear her anger and disgust at the way people approach illness.  She said this: the first thing people think when they get a horrible illness is “WHY ME?” Their massive ego, natural need for distinction,  and fundamental entitlement leads them to struggle with this question.  The better question, the more humbling question, is why NOT me? What, exactly, is so special about me as a human being that means I shouldn’t get sick?

When I heard this angry lady share I was shocked.  I stopped my walk along the sidewalk. This lady was so angry and talked with such force it was hard to listen.   She reminded me of Kali, the goddess of scary shit who is meant to rip away our illusion.   I realized that although I have yet to struggle with a horrible illness, I ask this question all the time.  I sit in my meetings, with my journal, and in my sadness asking this question: Why Me?  Why was I born this way? Why did these sad and lonely and sometimes horrible things have to happen to me? Why did I have to go through this? Why am I still going through this? And it occurred to me (in the way only insight can) with a slap across the face that this was my ego, this was my entitlement, this was my superiority that led me to ask this.  The better question is why not me?

And really, why not me? What is so incredibly special about me that I shouldn’t have suffered the particular difficulties of my little life? Nothing.  Staying in the “why me” of my life means that my ego gets to pretend to untangle some fundamental flaw that I have.  I get to spend all these hours trying to piece together why these things have happened to me. Why I have spent years smoking and eating and drinking and running to get away.  And by staying in this all I do is smoke and eat and drink and run.  Nothing changes. There is no growth in this question except the infernal spinning into the center of a story that is no longer real.

Asking “why not me” means that I am free.  The pain and hurt of life is just something that happens.  It is just something that happened. Asking why me affirms the arrogant belief that life should somehow not be painful.  Life is painful.  It is also joyous and beautiful.  But it is painful.  Horrible things happen and my unwillingness to accept that makes only one more victim in the big parade of pain.

In the last hours I have had the chance to practice this again.  The superficiality of conflict and hurt set me right down in my old ways.  Why ME? I cried.  Why is this happening again? Maybe I’m getting smarter.  Maybe my neurons are starting to fire faster.  Because pretty quickly I got to why not me.  And that ended it.   With that I got to move into more space and honesty.  I got to have compassion for the hurt I feel without making it a big story or adding to the hurt by lashing out.  I got free.  And it is this freedom that creates more space for me to move forward into a new part of my life.  I don’t know what will come of it.  Things are changing. You never know.  Maybe I will end up talking to that tunnel cat or learn to fly with that hummingbird.  Or maybe I will just wake up everyday, mind my business, and  get some business of my own to mind.

Una salida

Lately the world has felt very tight.  Things have been crushed together and shoved into pieces and there hasn’t been much room to breath.  Anger, deep sadness, mild hopes for death, self-hate, and eczema have all mashed together to make my day to day pretty unbearable.  I see now that this was a choice I made.  I made the choice to be sad.  And I don’t regret it because of what came out of it.

In the last two weeks things that weren’t clear became clear. I am tired of talking in metaphors. And I am tired of pretending. I am a master of pretending. I am a master of hiding it all. I was raised by a master.  Although this skill has often left me lonely and very vulnerable, it has also helped me. I have learned to show up even when I didn’t want to. I have learned to mimic and mirror others so that everyone feels comfortable, except me. And as I move towards a new year and yet another birthday, I am tired of it. I have spent so many years keeping my secrets. Keeping all my shit covered up tight so that no one knows that every night I go to sleep afraid.

I am the woman who has spent years hoping lipstick will cover up all the words I wish I’d said. I am the little girl who hopes every night will not be the night. I am the fat teenager who measures and seethes and hates and shoves food down her throat or burns down the kitchen for days. I am the poor angry bitch smoking secrets in the corner hating every rich little girl who walks in the bar. I am the addict who ruins her life and her love just for fun. I am all these things. And I am none of them.  I have been all of these things.  Some days I still am.  But who I really am has nothing to do with this.  And I am starting to realize this, or maybe re-realizing it in another way.

In the last two weeks I sunk into all of this.  I was totally obsessed with my thinking.  I was chasing my tail thinking that if I thought more about my thoughts and my thinking then I would be free.  I was trying to cure my sickness with the same sickness.  It doesn’t work that way.  I think we are so proud of our big brains that we forget that the only thing that will free us is to stop thinking and let our hearts sing a little.  At least I forget to do this.  And what is beautiful about this life of mine is that when I forget about these things and get stuck spinning around into my own little trench of darkness, something usually lifts me out.  There is always some kind of salida. 

Sunday morning at 0730 it was pouring rain. Rain like buckets. Rain for the cats and dogs. And after a night shift I walked out into this rain. I had a little umbrella and my legs to carry me home. I walked out ready to do my normal music/planning walk home. But the rain drowned out my thoughts and my wet shoes forced me to focus on each step. And in this meditative wet puddle-jumping walk I lost it all.  All the shit. It fell off of me. I stopped in the middle of the quiet, rainy street and put down the umbrella and held my face up to the sky. I let it wash over me, all the rain, all the bullshit I carry with me everyday. The history, the stories, the ego, the competition, the absolute commitment to conflict. All of it. I let it go.

And that is grace. For me, that is a miracle. I felt my heart unfold. And it hurt. I felt the petals of my little broken heart open.

And then I went to bed. Because what else are you supposed to do? Grace and moments of clarity aren’t all that special. They are beautiful, and they are ordinary. So I went to bed. And I dreamt all night of orchids. Gentle, fragile, beautiful orchids.