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.

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.

The great effort of the last 11 years of my life has been to turn my anger into something softer, calmer, kinder.  It has been to take all the reasons I was so angry and feel them so they weren’t in charge anymore.  And I have done a really good job of that.   I have learned that peace and quiet isn’t terrifying.  I have learned that anger does nothing to protect your soul.  I have learned that life is more than just a fight.

But this last week a few things happened that inflamed me.  They literally engulfed me in flames.  I was laying in bed and I couldn’t even breath I was so angry.  I started to pray and for some reason pictured Thich Nhat Hanh.  This is the monk who taught me everything I know about anger, its dangers and how to be free of it.  And in the center of this anger explosion, it was his face and his presence that I prayed to.  But it didn’t work.  I had to get up and pace.  Get up and take benadryl.  Get up and brush my teeth.  And then finally scream and scream until I cried.  Yes. It was that wonderful.

Of course, I took this as an opportunity to beat myself up.  Aren’t I more evolved? Aren’t I free of this? Aren’t I calmer?  And the answer is no.  In life you get it all.  You get peace and anger in the same life, the same year, the same week.  And sometimes, when it’s bad, the same breath.  Sometime I feel like my real work might just be to take whatever comes up and feel it.  Feel it without telling a story about it.  Feel it without fixing it or changing it.  Just feel it.  Whatever it might be.  Whether it happens once a year, once a lifetime, or once an hour.  Maybe it’s about letting feelings mix without forcing labels on them.  Letting them all exist, in the same person and the same heart, without restrictions.

This made me think about this patient that I recently met.  They have a long, complicated history and not the best future.  During the good, old 1 am heart-to-heart, this patient said to me “I’ve been through so much no? Sometimes I wonder why.  But the thing is this: I want to live.  I want to live because life is so beautiful”.   I walked out that morning and couldn’t get this out of my mind: this little, frail, sick person who is suffering the ravages of this disease looking at me through a breaking fever with so much passion for life. They were literally glowing from the inside.  It was undeniable.   I have never seen someone more alive.  Someone so alive in the midst of death.  I am not a fortune teller and I don’t know what this patient’s story will be or how it will be written, but death lurks around them.  And even with this, even with one of the longest, hardest stories I’ve known, this person is burning with life.  Because it isn’t simple.  We are not just alive or dead.  We are both.  Everyday we live, we get closer to our eventual death.  Every time we choose to numb out and not be alive, we are further from the life force that breathes through us regardless of whether we want to be here or not.

So it is this complex.  Life and death are webbed together.  Anger and peace exist in the same moment.  Maybe in the anger of this last week, I can still be peaceful or at least try my best not to harm others.  Maybe in this patient’s death, they can still live fiercely and beautifully.  Maybe there is just really, honestly, truly nothing that is black or white.

Somewhere in the years of sadness and the dark, sticky shame of self-loathing, a little seed of vanity and narcissism has taken root and grown in the mud.  And I never noticed it (too much) until now.  It shows itself in funny ways.  Like when I am driving around SF or going out for a walk or meeting people for drinks.  I see many, many people.  I don’t know these people.  I think: Who are these people?  Where did they come from? And how can I not know them? How can they not know me? And it always strikes me as so funny that I could think that.  First I thought it was because I think of SF as so small and such a little city.  But no, it’s just that I can’t believe that things exist without my personal stamp of approval.

Once a few years ago, I was with a bunch of people in a part of town I don’t really hang out in.  We ran into a girl we went to school with and started chatting.  This girl looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.  I don’t think I know you.  Who are you again?”  I was floored.  I was shocked.  I couldn’t BELIEVE that this girl didn’t know who I was.  I am Rebeca.  Hello? Bow on down little girl and pay your respects.

Man.  Sometimes this giant ego of mine makes me howl with laughter and shame.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small town and had some modicum of success and exposure.  Maybe it’s because I have big dreams and have always sacrificed them for safety.  Maybe it’s because I never felt “ordinary” life was good enough for me.  Or perhaps it’s closer to the truth to say that “ordinary” life was too good for someone like me.  Who knows why we turn out the way we do.

What I do know is that becoming curious about my thoughts and the way I live my life has been interesting.  Since I am not in a particular story of suffering for the moment, I don’t have to rip the past apart and I can just take a gander at the way I live without a lot of drama or tears.  It’s been weird.  I was born to sing opera arias and rip my clothes apart and burn my house down.  Not sit on a quiet meditation mat and wonder about my breath, while trying to see reality and live in the present.

And what I see is different than what I expected.  They say “more will be revealed”.  What’s being revealed isn’t the sadness of the past or the dysfunction of the present, it’s just vanity and ego.  That’s it.  I see the discomfort I have to just come home and cook and go to bed.  I see the squirminess I feel to think of having to clean and do the laundry and just live an ordinary life.  An ordinary, daily life.  Yes, it’s true that this kind of life, this level of comfort and routine makes me feel suffocated.  And I always thought that was because of a variety of childhood traumas and dramas.  But maybe it’s not that simple.  Maybe ordinariness and my giant ego’s rejection of my own ordinariness has a lot more to do with it.

Buddhists sometimes say that enlightenment is actually very ordinary.  I have always-surprise surprise- wanted to be enlightened.  I remember in one very dramatic and probably wine-filled soliloquy to a friend, I said “You know what I want for my life? You want to know what my goal is? For my ego to die.  I want my ego to die!”.   Ahhh yes.  So much easier said than done.   I think the first step is being able to see the size of the ego.  And man, talk about humbling.  To see the size of this ego.  Geez.  It’s gonna be a long, messy, probably bloody death with a lot of singing, bodice-ripping and burning.  Lucky for me, I was born for that kind of drama.

Sabbam Dukhum baby.  Sabbam Dukhum.

I love speaking Spanish, but there are a few reasons why sometimes it makes me laugh and feel just a little resentful.  At my job, there aren’t too many nurses that speak enough Spanish to really get to know the patients who just speak Spanish too.  I consider it a real privilege to be one of the few who can chat, joke, listen, and get to know these diverse and amazing patients who are often left alone with their illness in the silence of a monolingual world.  I met a man who unionized with Cesar Chavez,  a privileged South American who was tough as nails, a beautiful grandmother who sang herself to sleep every night, a campesina who could laugh at the doctors when they tried to scare her into eating hospital food.  The list goes on.  Being a part of these patients’ days is the best part of my job.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I am reminded that if I didn’t speak Spanish I wouldn’t have to deal with some particular jabs.  The most common gasp of horror is that I have no children.  More than once I have been asked what, exactly, is wrong with me? Have I been to the doctor? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my womb? Questions just a little too personal.  Luckily, I consider almost nothing too personal.  My favorite story about my broken womb and womanhood came from a hilarious grandmother with a glass eye.  I kid you not.  She would sit in the morning saying her prayers, smiling her big beautiful smile, with her glass eye not dilating and not moving.  She loved boleros and we would sing “Sabor a Mi” together.  She got into it with me one day.  ”Pero Rebeca, pero porquuuueeeee??”  Why didn’t I have children? Why? I gave her my little answer…I wasn’t ready…hadn’t done it yet…we’ll see.  She hmmppffed and hawed and smiled at me.  When I went to say goodbye at the end of a few days of work together, she said to me: Rebeca, I think you need to let me pray for you so you will have children.  I figured, what the hell, I could use some divine intervention on a lot of levels.  She held my hand and prayed to the Virgen de Guadalupe, asking her to help me get pregnant as soon as possible and to feel the pain of all the sick people in the world during the labor so I would understand sickness! What? What a hilarious and horrifying prayer.  I hope it doesn’t come true.

Recently, I was reminded of this double-edged bilingual sword when a patient looked at me and said gently, “Rebeca, I wonder if I can ask you a question I have been thinking about since yesterday”.  I said, of course.  He then asked me why on earth I had to wear glasses when I had such “ojos bonitos”.  He told me that wearing glasses made me look very old.  Indeed! When I told him I couldn’t wear contacts, he said: Get the surgery! Go to the eye doctor! Come on! Stop wearing your glasses.  Best of all, el señor wouldn’t let it go.  I’m surprised he didn’t start calling me vieja for the rest of the day.  I was a little offended and taken by surprise.  No almost 35 year-old woman wants to be told that they look old.  But what are you going to do?

Speaking another language is a gift and one that I love so much in my life.  I am lucky on many levels.  But when you get told that you are an old, dried up, childless, glasses-wearing lady, it can make me wish I couldn’t understand any of it.  But just sometimes.  In the end, I will deal with a few bossy comments if it means that I get to sing boleros and salsa with my patients.  It is in these rooms that I feel the most authentic and the most at ease in my job.  Being a nurse is a very weird job.  And it is the first time in my entire life that I consistently feel that I don’t fit in.  But cantando, hablando, y bromeando with patients reminds me that there is a place for me here.  So I’ll take the comments and criticism.  It’s worth it.

Sometimes I have to wonder if I have been living in reality.  Sometimes my blindness, even though I am reminded of it regularly, still surprises me.  If our thoughts make our reality, what’s reality if you aren’t really paying attention to anything that’s actually happening?  I think of the many relationships that once meant the world to me and are now a thing of the past.  I think of the story I told myself for so many years about who I was and where I came from and how that story got burned up in front of me like a flaming cross on the front lawn.  Yes, it was that violent.  And I think of the things that are yet to come.  The stickers that I haven’t even noticed yet.  The years that will come and the stories that will be revealed as false or not quite what I thought they were.

And in the sadness of this, I also think about the memories and the people that have shaped me.  And I wonder if those times that made me smile and feel like myself most are what I spend my time focusing on.  Maybe the only thing.  It hurts to let go of those moments when I felt seen.  To know that they are gone for good.  And maybe I am no different from anyone else that spends time lingering over the past so much that the present doesn’t have any space to expand or grow.

June is a month of anniversaries for me.  Some are good, beautiful.  Some sad.  13 years ago the first person to handle me with gentle, loving kindness shuffled off the mortal coil.  She was a friend of great, grand proportions.  And I feel ashamed when I think that maybe her memory has made more of what we had together.  And I can’t help but wonder if we would still be friends today.  I’m bad at keeping in touch and that was always hard for her to handle.  When she scooped me up, I was so young.  We held hands through so much.  We laughed and cried, talked about boys, and made plans for the future in our small town.  We started our adult years still in touch, still talking.  And who she thought I was meant the world to me.  She made me mixed tapes, she answered the phone and talked for hours, she wrote me cards and letters.  We loved each other in the way two high school girls do, fiercely and innocently.  Her words and love opened doors for me and for that I remember her often with so much affection.  And in my moments of blindness and my moments of shifting shadows, I wish she was still here to make it better.  Because my memory of her is that she always did.

Maybe because I grew up with so much insecurity, with so many things unknown and unsaid, with so much change and flux, I grasp and pray and struggle to hold on to things.  I want a family so badly, a family that will hold me no matter what, that I have often-too often- forced bystanders into this role.  Spend one night singing Patty Griffin with me in the fog and you are my sister, irregardless of whether you really want to be or not.  Drink in Irish Bars with me and you are my cousin, the one I screamed with in the pool growing up, whether you like it or not.  Work next to me day after day and you are my mother, the one I need so much, even if you have your own life and kids.

My job doesn’t help this either.  The folks that make it through, the ones that fight with grace and kindness no matter how it ends, are the ones with family.  There is a patient who loves to walk laps on the floor, but she is never alone.  She is my age and her father walks next to her, accompanying her, on every lap.  There are sisters who raise money and get every person they know to join the bone marrow registry.  There are cousins who show up and make even the doctors laugh.  There are mothers who would rather sleep in the waiting room then leave the hospital where their son is.  This commitment, this love, this connection, is not something I have.  And I miss it.  Deeply.  Completely. Even if I don’t really know what it is.

My family has done the best they could with what they had.  And I’m not angry anymore about the things that have shown me what they are.  And what I am.  But once you see the truth, once you see the sticker, you can’t lie to yourself anymore.  And what is left is the sadness, the loss of the story that made the world seem less lonely, less scary.  And I can’t help but wonder who would show up for me if I was in that bed.  I miss the time, not so long ago, when I was sure that I had a long list.  I don’t.  Not really.  Too many things have happened over the last 5 years that have forced me to see the sticker and peel that sucker off.

On nights like tonight, on months like June, when anniversaries and questions are the only thing that fill an empty night, these are the things I think about.  And I am grateful to have a little, foolish blog to share how I feel.  Even if just for a minute.  So thanks for reading.  Thanks for reading.  Thanks for filling up some of the holes.  Wanna sign up to be my cousin? Just let me know.  There are a lot of open spaces on the list.

And our first instinct, our most natural impulse is to ask why.  Why me? Why now? Why this? This is a seemingly worthwhile question and one that I have spent many years trying to answer.  Why gives us a chance to claim some power from the situation, learn something from it, understand another’s perspective, take some part in it.  There are times that the answer leads to something valuable.  But most of the time it just keeps us mired and rolling in the same pit that the original hurt came from.

I have made a career answering the question why.  I spent lonely nights in my early years rolling this question across my bruised tongue.  Trying, wrestling, struggling with the whys that hurt me so much.  And I got really good at finding reasons for almost anything.  I will never forget the first time I took this private skill to the streets.  I was sitting in study hall with a girl named Shannon.  She was so upset because a boy had done her wrong.  The drama was high.  The tears were flowing.  I’m sure there was some shouting.  After all, this was high school in Rhode Island.  And I stepped in with my explanation of why.  I broke it down: this dude is this because of this and he did this because of this.  And it was a good explanation.  It made her relax, it gave her a different perspective, it let her take a deep breath.  She looked at me and said thank you, you are so good at that!  And with that I was hooked.

I have spent years breaking down the whys of life.  I took people, situations, stories, and conflicts apart for dissection.  I was good at it.  I liked doing it.  It made the hurts of life seem less scary and terrible.  It also made me have compassion for people, broadening my horizon enough  to see other perspectives.

All good things right?

Wrong.  I spent so many years spinning stories, creating reasons, and excusing behavior but never saw that I was doing just as much harm to myself as the original hurt itself.  Because asking why gives cruelty and misbehavior the power to be right, the power to be real, and the power to keep us involved in stories that don’t serve anyone.  And most dangerous of all: asking why implies that we could have done something to stop it.

This week I thought a lot about my friend and her situation.  She asked: Why did this happen? It got me thinking about how I have spent so many years asking why, why, why.  And I have never come to any satisfying answers, never any final understandings or peace.  Why has only led me to ask more questions.  And in the end, that is the purpose of this word.  Why keeps me stuck in a story of my own making.  Why keeps my ego grandiose or self-hating enough to not notice that there is a whole life passing me by.  Why steals me of my serenity.  Why robs me of peace.  Why keeps me involved in superficiality.

Originally why was a vehicle that allowed me to know myself and the world around me better.  But the car got clunky and junked up.  Instead of taking me somewhere new, it just drove me around the block and deposited me right in front of the same old dump.  I spent years asking the questions: why do I hate myself so much?  why do I prefer ripping everything apart rather than building something beautiful? Why, why, why.  And this led me to some important realizations,  down a rough and raw path that has hurt like hell.

But it also led me to this.  The end of why.  There is no reason why.  If I pretend like there is then I just stay stuck in the same story.  I can talk and detail and file away 100 reasons why I have enjoyed destroying things so much.  And these stories are funny and sad and awful.  But they aren’t me.  They are not the things that define me.  They are just things that happened.  That’s it.  By asking why I have pretended that I had something to do with it when I don’t.  Cruelty and viciousness don’t have reasons.  Those of us who have suffered at the hands of fucked up, limited people can’t claim responsibility, not even a little bit.  But we do when we ask why.

Today I walked down the sunny streets of San Francisco thinking about this question why.   And for today I let it go.  The stories.  The sadness.  The truth.  And I just smelled the jasmine and felt the sun on my face.  Because in the end that’s all that actually matters.  This moment.  This day.  This time.  The whys don’t matter anymore.  The whys are just another way to keep me enslaved to my little, angry girl ego.

On a night shift a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking care of a person who has spent many years studying theology and philosophy.  After midnight we sat and talked about God and about the larger powers in the universe.  I asked him the question that has been nagging at me since I started this job: how do you make sense of God now that you have cancer?  Deep shit for the middle of the night, but this person responded in the kindest way possible.  They said this: “if I assume that God has anything to do with my cancer I am assuming that some part of God is cruel, that some part of this greater power has capacity to harm.  And I’m just not willing to do that because I know it’s not the truth.”  In short, shit happens and there isn’t any greater reason for it.   That perspective took my breath away.

There is no why.  There are stories.  Horrible cruel stories everywhere we look.  Evil companies that are trying to privatize water.  Families that rip each other apart.  Little 2nd graders who get jumped into gangs by their older brothers.  The list goes on and on.  And holding on to the why gets us no where closer to a solution.  It just makes the muck deeper and harder to get out of.  Today when I saw what why has done to me and for a few moments stood in the world without it, there was so much space, so much room, so much peace.  And from that space, things get to change, shift, grow.  There is energy and motivation to do something instead of just talking and telling stories about it.  Maybe.  Just maybe this is the way that I get to find my freedom.  Stop asking why and start asking what.  What next? What now? As usual, I don’t know if this will work.  But I can always hope.

I have enjoyed making fun of love.  I have barked, snorted, chortled and howled at stupid movies about love.  I have listened to other women and men talk about it and had to force myself to not roll my eyes.  And while I was doing this, I really believed that I was right.  That I knew what it was about.  We were all just dirty, lonely animals trying our best.  Love was an illusion that we reached for in an attempt to behave better.  But it wasn’t real.  It wasn’t steady.  And it certainly wasn’t patient.

In my new job, I am surrounded by women with many different life experiences. I also have the great luck to get to know patients and families.  And this new exposure has started me thinking.  Since I have hung out most of my life with people who think and act like me, I have had no great teachers on love.  But now I am getting used to being around it, or at least contemplating it from a distance.

Questions about children. Pictures of families.  Conversations about wedding plans.  Stories about many years married.  Notes on heartbreak.  Hands held.  Parents calling to check up.  All of these tiny images that are starting to shift what I had defined and filed away.

And then I go home and I look at what I have.  And I am floored.  Truly surprised at what I haven’t seen.

Growing up, I had no expectations for marriage.  Young girls usually dream on some level about having a family.  I didn’t want a family.  I wanted to work.  I wanted to produce.  I wanted to save things.  My dream, in all honesty, was to become a doctor, work in a small village, get paid in chickens, and get pregnant by some stranger who left and never came back.  When I think about this it makes me laugh so hard.  The young have the time to add nuances to their fantasies.  While most young girls were thinking about their wedding day, I was dreaming about what country I would live in and how I’d have to remember to sign legal documents to claim full parental rights.

And of course, like most childhood dreams, this didn’t even come close to happening.  Instead I got married, eloped, at the age of 22 to a man I’d known for 2 months.  We have been married now for almost 12 years and in that time have done it all.  Almost everything that can happen in a marriage, including the end of it, has happened to us.  But somehow we are still together.  And in some strange way, it is better now than it ever has been.

When I come home now, I am floored at what I haven’t seen.  I am so surprised that I have been married this long and never knew how incredibly lucky I was to be so well loved.  It hasn’t always been this way, but it is now.  There is some unspoken, new mandate for kindness between us that I have never known in any relationship before.

And I can’t believe it.  I can’t believe that I have to let go of the righteous snobbery that let me laugh at people in love.  I am really going to miss being a know-it-all.  But I wouldn’t trade it in.  I’ll take my starry-eyed optimism for now.  Maybe I can swallow it because I know the other side of the coin.  Maybe I can accept this now in my life because I know that I can survive without it, since I did for so long.

And maybe I can learn to just sit back and enjoy it.  I’ll try.  But only if I can make fun of myself later. At least just a little.

We say that change is inevitable.  That it is scary and overwhelming for everyone.  But I have devoted my life to change.  I have reveled in moving and changing and rearranging my life so that the slowness of routine never caught up with me.  And I have enjoyed every second of that.  Yes, I’ve gotten overwhelmed and shed some tears or screamed some swears in the middle.  But I’ve always gotten up and moved again because that is what makes me happy.  Change.

But this last bit of change has left me wondering if I am actually done for a while.  We moved two times in two weeks.  Packed our stuff, moved to dream apartment #1.  Dream apartment turned into a crazy ex-girlfriend and we packed our stuff and moved again to dream apartment #2.    Somewhere along the way I started thinking that instead of being young and adventurous and ambitious, I was just plain foolish.  Movement is good, but too much movement leads to blown knees and rusty joints.  And I feel like I am hobbling around a bit now.

So the question is why am I always running?  Why is routine and stability the end of me as I know it?  Just last night I was out on the town for the first time in a while.  The SF weather was too perfect and everyone was out on the streets straight chilling.  I stood out next to the bar and smoked my cigarette, my rum and coke melting inside.  And as I looked at everyone I realized that my time, for this, has passed.  I have spent years smoking outside of bars, knowing the best places in town before yuppies swooped in and changed it.  I have spent so much time wearing my leather jacket and being loud and crazy.  And it was great.  It was so much fun.  But I looked around at everyone last night and realized that this is now over.  It felt, at that moment, like my younger years were done.

Not many people get the opportunity to see this clearly.  I think that most people have plans and make decisions that make them older.  They have kids.  They buy a house.  They make some move that settles them in a new order.  But I have never done that.  I have shied away from that at every turn and every corner.  So instead of having my youth taken away from me by circumstance and not even realizing it, I am in the place of actually deciding that this part of me is somehow shifting and morphing into something else.

And I don’t know how comfortable I am with that.  I find myself wanting to share how crazy and nuts I once was, how I was once the life of the party, how I was once this or that.  But that makes me sound like Grandpa Simpson and honestly no one wants to hear some lady’s stories about the glory days.

What makes me most uncomfortable is that this means that I actually have to choose what’s next.  I have to create it.  I am not interested in the things that used to bring me joy.  I am not interested any longer in moving, uprooting, shifting everything just to see if I’m still good at it.  But that leaves me wondering what I am actually interested in.  And I guess that has always been my question.  I have never wanted to live a life of quiet contentment.  I have never wanted to cook myself dinner every night and do the dishes before bed.  I have never wanted to do chores or weekend parties at the shore.  I have wanted this big, gutsy, bloody life.  But now I am starting to think that this part of my life has played itself out.  That it is over.  That it is time to move on.

When you come from a small town, from a family with too many cracks in it, it’s hard to imagine what I could create that would make me happy.  Running and moving has made me whole, but it’s also made me tired.  What is next feels totally unknown and suffocating.  I have no models for what I could like or love about the next part of my life.  And I guess that’s good because it gives me freedom to create.  But it also gives me the freedom to totally fuck it up.  And I guess only time will tell which one will win out.

I guess I’ll keep my boxes just in case, in the end, it doesn’t work out.

I have the privilege to meet and learn about families and patients and intimate dynamics on a daily basis.  People and families handle sickness the way they handle life.  There are many times that I have seen such infinite kindness and love that it makes me cry when I leave work.  I think of one couple who will not be separated.  They laugh and joke and call each other baby even after 3 years of fighting relapse after relapse in a life together that has been too short for this much stress.  And I also get to see the ugly.  The sad.  The disconnection.  The disease.  The scraps.

Once watching a patient order me and other nurses around, I tried to lend compassion and disappear to create enough space in the room for his endless anger.  Because I got that.  Me and my endless anger have certainly dominated spaces much bigger than a hospital room.  And as I cleaned and fussed and did my job there, I noticed his family and how they moved carefully and quietly around his anger and violence.  How they hoped and huffed and puffed around him.  How they accepted scraps, pieces, thrown and scattered of what is supposed to be love.

And I can’t blame this patient.  Or the family.  Or the situation. It is a situation that is common.  People get together.  All these people with huge holes and sadness and they try to love each other.  But when love is defined as some sort of abacus of give and take, there just isn’t enough to go around.  All that is left is scraps.  Scraps shiny, brilliant, beautiful from a distance.  That’s the thing about this kind of love.  It always looks better from a distance.

And of course, because I think about myself a lot, I have been evaluating the scraps in my life.  The shiny, brilliant pieces of something that seems like love but isn’t.  I have been in and out of darkness for most of my life and what I know is that shiny scraps have often been what coaxed me out of the blackness.  But they haven’t been enough to keep the sun shining.  And I love the memories and the sweetness and the beauty of those scraps.  Those times, those stories, too much wine, too much gossip, too much revealed, too high of a price.  But they kept me alive at a time when I didn’t know how to live.  And this is not a new story.  This story of mine is so old it’s hard not to see it.  It’s a pattern so gaudy and so obvious it’s a bright purple and orange Pucci spring maxi dress.

Today is the first day of spring and it’s time for spring cleaning.  And part of my spring cleaning is letting go of these scraps.  Letting go of these things that are not serving me.  What I know is that if I have to curve and curl and try to be someone I am not, then I am not in the right place.  And isn’t that the whole point of this thing? Isn’t it all about becoming so much yourself, so truly your own damn star, that there isn’t any other choice but to shine?  And a star can outshine some scraps any day.

But shining isn’t always easy.  But it’s getting easier.  These last few weeks I have had practice.  I have told an old man to stop teasing someone I love.  Clearly, with love, I said: stop.  I have moved away from situations that made me hurt and made me feel unseen.  I have tried to be careful and clear with the relationships I can’t change but won’t let go of.  I have tried to create a space to be happy, to shine, to be more than a little shadow of myself.

So I try.  I keep trying.  William Blake, my birthmate, told me “the true method of knowledge is experiment”.  So I will experiment and keep trying to find the perfect alchemy for my life.  I will keep trying.  Searching just like Melquiades, to turn common metal into gold.  And I will start with those shiny, winking scraps that litter the road around me.  I will see if I can take them and turn their lessons into something of worth, something of beauty, something that I can use to heal.