walking on spiderwebs, or cage / page / stage / rage

I live caged gently in charts. Little black grids on white pieces of paper. Or black marker on a white board. I write in tally marks, numbers, skill descriptors. I write in red pen. These grids contain my feelings because my feelings are too big and threaten to overwhelm me, shut me down, reduce all forward action to zero, leave me in a valley of couch and comforter and unending ache. I am somewhat afraid of my feelings. So I give them numbers. Anxious, zero to five. Sad, zero to five. Happy, zero to five. Suicidal ideation, zero to five. Zero to two is for passive death wishes; three is when I start searching for my safety plan. Where did I put that again? Self-harm urges, zero to five. I have been in recovery for self-injury for seventeen years. I know this because i have a cat who is seventeen years and I got him as a kitten the year I went into recovery. Cats have finite lives though, and this one is doing less well than I would like, but he's okay. He's around right now. 

Sometimes i have to live in the right-now because the bigger landscape of my life towers over me, distorted gothic thing that it is. The sky looms big and heavy like it will come down to suffocate me with cloud. Buildings are *so* tall, they sway in my vision like they want to fall down on me. 

I like it in my apartment. It's safe here. I can hear my neighbors' muffled conversations. The woman down the hall has a dog, a big one by the sound of the bark. I'm glad my cats haven't taken umbrage in such a way that would involve fluids.

I have to push to go outside most days. The gaze of strangers is unsurprisingly yet somehow unexpectedly searing. I walk with my eyes cast down, looking up in little flicks, half-second increments. It is illogical how I reduce the field of my vision even further than it naturally is (natural about 5% of "normal" seeing). This is how disabilities collide. I blind myself further. 

My father always told me to keep good eye contact with people; that's how they know you are trustworthy. But if good eye contact is a learned skill, then how can you tell people are not lying to your face? 

I can't see faces very well. I have to stare and stare. My eyes point in different directions. My pointed stare makes people who don't know me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable too, so much raw visibility on everyone's part, so I don't do it that often.

This is not "some days" for me. This is my every day. 

I find a deep joy in writing, in running my journal, in being with my friends and my husband and reading books and petting my cats. But I am alone a lot. It takes self-discipline to do work, because I don't have the structure of an office, the white noise of other workers working. I go to coffee shops a lot to simulate this environment, but they are not without peril. The screaming toddler(s). The man who wants to talk to me despite the fact that I am clearly working. Internet that suddenly goes down. 

Discipline and responsibility. I hear the voice of my father when I say those words in my head. 

Yesterday I went outside to do work, but today I think I will stay in. It's not good in my head right now. I mean, even relatively speaking. I have a whirlpool of fear and self-doubt sucking at my heels. I have an enormous work task that seems possible or impossible depending on what moment I'm inhabiting when I look at it. I am pretty much motivated by fear right now. I can't reach joy today. 

I'm scared of being a disappointment, always, eternally, not good enough, frantically working to keep up, keep my secrets, keep going.

I pretend I'm good. I pretend I'm well. I'm really good at pretending I'm well. Therapists even have a fancy phrase for what I do, something about performing better than I actually am...I call it "masking." It happens unwittingly. Haha. I was just having a moment there. No, I'm not that sad. No, I'm not that scared. Let me say something funny to make us comfortable. 

[Apparently people-pleasing is a maladaptive coping mechanism. But my superiors in the workplace really like it when I am consistently pleasant and do what they want. People in positions of power do not express concern for my needs, my differences, or my emotions. Those things get in the way. 

I would like to say that I believe I am smart and capable as others tell me. That I am up to the challenge. That I will continue to be up to the challenge. (Am I being unclear? The challenge of living in the world.) There is a steel thread in me that I was born with. It's thin but strong. It grew with me in early childhood, when I learned the pattern of being absolutely terrified, all the time, and having to act anyway. Act: do, move my limbs, move in the world, think, react, be capable, don't let them see how weak and afraid I really am, achieve, achieve, achieve. As I grew into a young adult, I built a core around the thread--a core of self, not just survival. Creative acts saved my life. Art and writing saved my life. As I grew into a woman, teaching helped me locate myself deeply as a giver and a guide.

I thought my childhood and teenage years would be the worst thing that would ever happen to me. By far. No close seconds. But then my mom suicided (three years ago Sept 21) and that perspective changed. I can't know what's ahead. I can't worry enough do enough rituals enough compulsions pile on enough covers to protect me from the future. << It's been three years and I'm still like this.

I heard somewhere it's National Suicide Prevention Month. 

The reason I'm putting this on my blog instead of deleting it is to say fuck you to mental illness. To stigma and judgement and appearances and people-pleasing and the bottom line. I am alive. Sometimes completely; today barely. But I am alive. 

I wish it genuinely felt like enough to celebrate being alive.

When someone with mental illness or a disability says fuck you stigma, there is a rallying cry from allies. Oh yes. Fuck you stigma. We should be more open about these things as a society. But only in the most abstract ways. When it comes to the practical details. Well. That's tricky. No one wants to really deal with that.

*

I don't know if I'm re-starting this blog or not, for real, or if this entry is just a one-time deal. But I do know that I began the blog with this theory of RADICAL OPENNESS (fuck you stigma). I began this blog not even imagining what was in the future for me. And somehow I'm still here. Straining my neck. Chin bobbing just above the surface.

Here's a video. I'm teaching a class pretty soon and I want to do a section on sublimating trauma through poetry. I found this amazing talk and poem by Rachel McKibbens. It allowed me raw access my emotions, for once. It gave me permission to write this. I churned out work like a demon yesterday. I don't know if I am capable of doing any work today, but...I listened to her talk and it gave me permission to write this, at least.

Donne said that no man is an island

Recently a friend wrote this sentence in an email to me: "I used to be a HUGE oversharer before social media was a thing." I thought about social media. Lots of people just put up pictures of their vacations / parties / marriages / children at their finest moments and call it a day. I actually know of numerous people who have deactivated their Facebook accounts b/c the competition got to be too much. They feel like everyone else is saying, I have the best vacation, the best husband/wife, the best baby. With the implication of, and you don't. I got the feeling that this friend who emailed me feels like sharing their life, in all of its dimensions, is frowned upon.

I have a problem with the term "oversharing." Also, the word "needy." "Oversharing" assumes that no one wants to hear your personal stuff, that it's impolite or socially wrong to share your personal stuff, that we should all walk around projecting only positivity and the more shallower dimensions of our lives.

Everything looks shiny; no one allegedly has to feel anything except YAY YAY YAY.

When really, I think it's a continuum. At my old job, I sure as hell would not share personal things with certain people. Especially administration. Most jobs are like that. But I think it's okay to share things with people who are your friends or close colleagues. Because what the heck are friends for if you can't be there for each other during the positive *and* negative times?

My friends are some of the best people ever because they have listened empathetically to me and really been there for me, especially over the past year-and-some-months, when things happened with my mom. Or they have distracted me with wonderful things like coffee and Indian food and visits and children and simply the beauty of their presence. I never feel judged by them. And I in turn feel special and honored when they come to me with important emotional things. Like: wow, they trusted me enough to ask me to listen. I feel capable and strong when I can support them.

The word "needy"gets kicked around a lot, just like "over-sharing." "Needy" pathologizes the idea of interdependence. As a culture, we live under this delusion of self-sufficiency, like that's the ultimate thing to strive for. It's very American. Or United-States-ian, I should say. But when you dissect it, the idea of INdependence is fundamentally impossible unless you decide to become a hermit on top of a mountain. And then what happens if you break your leg or need to go into town for food?

Each in their various ways, my mom and dad raised me to believe that self-sufficiency was the ideal. In  reality, they were not self-sufficient, but I was raised to believe that I should strive to be. I think they thought they were doing me a service. This created a schism in my thinking which still continues. On one hand, I feel the old emotional pull: do it yourself at all costs. Appear strong at all costs. If you can't, that's bad. Other people will take advantage of you OR You're weak. Incapable. Less-than-adequate. 

On the other hand, I know my reality, and I try really hard not to judge myself for it. Ahem, I'm not saying I succeed in being nonjudgmental, but I try. Yeah, sometimes I need. Everybody needs. And sometimes I NEED. And everyone in their life goes through a period of that NEED too, whether they admit it or not.

I think about need, and sharing, and interdependence also as it applies to teaching. I think about it a LOT. When I went through teacher training in grad school (ages ago… yikes!) I was taught that students are people, that learning is collaborative (students learn from the teacher, students learn from each other, the teacher learns from the students), that each student will have a different learning style, that it's okay to be honest with your students when you don't know the answer, that it's okay to be vulnerable and to expect (and accept) your students' vulnerabilities.

Then… I taught at a certain place for awhile and it really made an impression on me. The culture was rather the opposite of the way I'd learned to teach. Not necessarily through word but through example, the ideal classroom was presented as: the teacher makes the rules, the students follow the rules, the students get punished if they don't follow the rules, each student is an information bucket into which you deposit key skills, and then they somehow translate those skills into a well- or poorly- written paper and then you grade them. Nobody needs to be feeling their feelings all over the place b/c there's no room for that in the syllabus.

I really tried to be that latter teacher and I did not do well being that teacher, and it burned me out. I had colleagues who taught at that place, and still do, who somehow managed to be a combination of the former teacher and the latter teacher. Or colleagues who were so untouchable (some concept called tenure of which I know not) that they could be the former teacher and the administration could go… fly a kite.

If anywhere I thought I could succeed as the former type of teacher, it would be in the teaching of writing. Whether you are writing poetry or a thesis-based argument, the idea of empathy is important. The ability to accept  and not vilify emotions is important.

Now that I'm feeling a lot better, I'm going to start revising / submitting my own work again in January. I'm also thinking about teaching (as a concept), because I really miss it. But, especially given my geographic limitations, I don't know where the right place is for me, if any.

20 things : Radical acceptance is going to drive me more crazy rather than make me more serene

1. I was riding the bus home (of course?). The second leg of the ultra-annoying-because-it's-cold-and-two-buses-early-morning-Tuesday-yoga commute. 

2. I felt rather centered. 

3. Plus, I'd been in terrible pain all yesterday evening and this morning. We did some serious shoulder stretching that actually relieved it.  

4. As we lurched along, I reflected on my progress of late and thought I've been doing pretty good. I have been SLOWLY desensitizing myself to the World of People.

5. In order to get better, I have been doing these things, in order: therapy, meeting friends, poetry stuff, and yoga. Every week. And it's still challenging to get most of them to happen --everything except meeting friends.

6. But I'm starting to feel good because it's less challenging now. Thought I'm frustrated with the crawling pace, I'm also starting to be more okay with that too. 

7. So I'm contemplating these thoughts, and I go to get off the bus. 

8. As I'm walking up the aisle, I let go of a pole too soon, the driver slams on the brakes, I severely unbalance and run into a crowd of old people waiting to get off at the front.

9. I could feel myself fall forward, try to stop myself, know I'm going to hit them. I'm helpless in my momentum.

10. I hit them.

11. I rain a hail of apologies on them. Not just like sorry but SorrySorrySorrySorrySorry! 

12. This old man turns to me and gives me the look of death. Like, "you're nothing." Like, "I curse you and your future generations." And then slowly looks away.

13. The bus doors open. They get off and proceed to the intersection. 

14. I stay farther up the street and have a panic attack. 

15. Finally I make my way to my apartment, barely able to keep it together.

16. During my, um, surrendering process, this thought occurred to me: what would it be like for me to be able to forgive myself? Especially for stupid shit. Stuff I can't help. Stuff that's an accident.

17. I monitor my every move. I'm choreographing all the time. I rarely stop being self conscious. 

18. Monitoring and choreographing is a life-long trait. That is not a Jill-had-a-setback-after-her-mom thing. The self-loathing I feel when I slip up is also perpetual. Post-mom-suicide, the amplitude is higher.

19. But, you know, what if it weren't? What if I could somehow stop hating myself so viciously? [I can't believe I'm blogging this to the entire goddamn internet. Well, theoretically.]

20. I see no concrete way forward to this goal. It's like saying I'm going to build a rocket from recycled cereal boxes and shoot myself to the moon.

Here's a photo:

Choose Life

20 things : Opposite Action ftw / wtf

1. So, opposite action is a DBT concept wherein, even (or especially) if all one's emotions are screaming that one does a behavior that isn't helpful, one does the opposite behavior.

2. I realize that if you are reading this and have never worked a recovery program with behavioral elements, it may sound like I'm in a cult or something. For those of you who have known me since 1995 or so, you know this therapy has helped me greatly before, and now it's helping me rebuild again after what happened last year.

3. For some reason my immediate grief response was extreme social anxiety, bordering on agoraphobia. In general, the action-urge for anxiety is to avoid the thing that makes me anxious.

4. [Note that avoiding was a useful and protective device at a certain point in human evolution. Is that a saber toothed tiger waiting for me in the brush? I'd better hide until it passes by.]

5. People make me anxious. Thus, 99.875% of them I would rather avoid.

6. But then I'd never leave my house. Which is sort of what happened in April when I had that relapse bit.

7. Needless to say, never leaving the house would end up with me bitter, angry, ever more phobic, and possibly dead before my time b/c isolation leads to the Circling Thoughts.

[....]

8. Exposure therapy is a thing they do for OCD and phobias. For example, if a person is deathly afraid of dogs, she might start out looking at pictures or videos of dogs, then move to, I dunno, five minutes of a dog on a leash in the same room with her... And end up where she can pet the dog or have it lick her hand and such.

9. The idea is that the patient participates in increasing levels of exposure. She sits with the frightening experience until her fear comes down. Allegedly, her brain can't maintain a fear response with the volume cranked to 11 for an extended period of time. When her brain processes the fact that nothing bad is happening as she looks at the video of the dog, the anxiety will "naturally" start to abate.

10. Although I've had OCD all my life, I had never done an exposure before starting my second round of DBT in 2012. Honestly, I was a cognitive-behavioral therapy hater for a long time because of one bad experience when I was a teenager.

11. I don't want to overdramatize, but every time I go outside, it's basically an exposure.

12. When contemplating the recent (about two weeks ago now) ending of intensive outpatient treatment, I wrote in my therapy journal my continuing recovery just seems like a lot of self punishment, with much alone time and extensive amounts of exposures. Basically, at my worst, I don't want to be with others, nor do I want to be with myself.

13. My prediction has panned out, sort of. But I haven't launched myself into the downward spiral of fear that indicates I am at my worst. I'm managing to mitigate the alone time pretty successfully, but it's challenging. The exposures continue to feel like sandpaper scraping a fresh wound.

[....]

14. When I interact with most people, I just don't feel like I'm behaving humanly...  I'm frantically searching for what a human says, how a human moves in the space of the world. And when I get it right, my internal response is somewhere between whew that was close and I've Accomplished Something.

15. When I (feel like I) get it wrong, my breath stops and my head starts spinning. And I want to be home immediately.

16. Home is usually far away. But not as far away as it was when we lived on the south side.

17. Although it is painful, I can see the ways in which my anxiety is coming down. I'm more spontaneous. More talkative. More gracious to others and also (er, sometimes) to myself.

18. I even went to the coffee shop to write yesterday. That was impossible... basically up until the time it was possible. I didn't know if it was gonna work, but Mike suggested starting out with prompts and exercises instead of a blank screen / sheet of paper and that was super-helpful.

19. The thing I have to fight against, or as my DBT therapist would say gently push away, is my rabid desire to be better than I actually am, even though recovery is a process, and rationally I know that.

20. Going to the coffee shop and writing was a HUGE deal. But there were many small unglamorous accomplishments that led up to it.... perhaps I'm writing this entry to myself as well as to you. It's very hard for me to acknowledge the small steps that lead up to the bigger ones. I mock myself, like, whoa, big deal: I went to the supermarket. When it really is a big deal dammit.

That is all.

20 things : loose pages, gathered

1. The reading went smashingly on Saturday night.
2. I'm actually grateful to my angst for motivating me to prepare well instead of putting off or ignoring preparation.
3. Afterward I did the feared thing --I mingled a lot, talked to everyone who wanted to talk to me.
4. Even though I knew most of the people --some well, some peripherally --it was so hard to receive love from them.
5. Like they were touching a tender place that wanted to be touched, but the touch was overwhelming.
6. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of all three of us poets who read that night. We did well.
7. I don't think the audience realized that this reading for me was my re-entry to the world, and how vulnerable I really felt, standing up there.
8. It was a return to that performance space in my head that feels like pure joy, but also, I was so vulnerable. For example :
9. I almost didn't make it through the closing poem, "In Place of Speech," which I've done 100 times. I almost lost my voice for the tears that wanted to break through it. But I finished the piece.
10. After I left the bookstore I felt like I had mastered something. Or re-learned a hard thing that I had forgotten how to do.
11. And the only feeling I felt that night was accomplishment, and I had a celebratory drink.
12. But on Sunday I started to feel a little ... strange. I'm usually pretty good about naming feelings and their motivations, but not the Sunday strange feeling.
13. On Monday after some journaling I figured out what it was.
14. That reading was me, stretching to achieve. That reading was me, at the limits of my current capability.
15. Friendly faces had asked are you teaching in the fall? and are you holding out for a really good offer on your manuscript, or has it already been accepted?
16. And I felt : sadness, derision, longing. The thought that entered my mind in the breath I took to formulate my answer was I want to die now.
17. If only. If only I were able to teach. If only my MS had an acceptance letter from anywhere I'd sent it. If only I hadn't lost a year --perhaps more, because I still don't quite feel capable of it --and had been sending the MS out relentlessly, in different versions, sending chapbooks....I can't even look at it yet. Their questions were like pieces of my previous life washing in with the tide, slapping and stinging my bare legs as I stood in the wet sand and let my heels get sucked down into it.
18. Borrowed Bodies is out of print. The press has shut down. After that, I have no artifact that says, I'm good enough. I have to be a lion. The rejections, which used to just pass through me, now slice me open when I receive them. Is this change permanent?
19. Will I get better?
[.................]
20. This morning I woke up and I wanted to cry-- not just to cry, to cry so much that I let myself become unhinged with sadness-- because being unconscious was so much better than being awake, yet it was time to wake up. I got up and made the coffee instead,  b/c that's what I'm supposed to do.

Here's a painting [click to make larger] :

Bird Brother

Talking to the blind eye

So I wrote this poem based on three things:

1) I was charmed at AWP by a panel called something like Readings and Performances in Digital Media which featured, among other things, a guy who wrote perl scripts to generate poems within certain parameters. When he read them it was a cascade of language that generated a pleasant emotional heat.
2) A conversation with a friend, at the end of which we made it our goal for the week to talk to our injured parts.
3) Anagram divination.

***


Talking to the Blind Eye

A lithe gilt knot. 
Bed yen.

Gal knit to debt, 
heel, 
yin.

Bind heel, yet talk gin to.

Taking blithe, 
needy lot.

Tiny ink 
to bleed the lag.

A picture of the eye that is completely blind. As you can tell, I wear my hair over it. This is because I'm self-conscious about how it has a will of its own and stares off into nowhere.

20things : long sigh

1. Today I feel like it's nearly impossible to go on.
2. I may have bottomed out a bit after the group transition.
3. I'm trying to access my creativity and having some probs.
4. I made two collages and re-dyed my hair. Same dark red as before.
5. I'm unhappy with the one collage but like the other and the hair.
6. Totally punted working on website for new journal.
7. Concentration levels minimal.
8. Every piece of news I pick up is sad.
9. Or I find the grain of sadness in it.
10. Lay down but couldn't sleep.
11. Tried various self-soothing things but didn't feel soothed.
12. Want to rip out my brain and stomp on it.
13. Sometimes I want to physically be alone-alone-alone to match my aloneness feeling on the inside but it's not feasible.
14. I punted on the website because I would have to cancel Ravi's pet insurance to recoup money for the hosting fee.
15. Even though he is no longer with us the thought of doing it is just...................
16. I wish something delightful would happen.
17. One minute I'm like {{{{RAGE}}}} and the next I'm like :sad:
18. Why won't you write me back motherfucker?
19. See what I mean?
20. I hope this is just a stage.

the grief grind

Last night Mike informed me of an email that he got four days ago wherein my uncle said that my aunt --his sister --was going down to GA for some furniture and possibly boxes of mom's stuff. She's flying down and renting a truck and driving back.

Mike and I can't drive like that.

I told him (Mike) that I wanted to go through those boxes and that we should tell my uncle to send the boxes up from GA and that I'll plan a flight to eastern PA to go through them. Soon, because my aunt can't store all those boxes and I get the feeling my uncle does not want to have them.

A lot of contradictory things bother me about this whole situation. 

1. The four-day lag from Mike receiving the email, to me knowing about it, informs me that I need to take over email communications and... I'm not quite ready to do so. Four months of intensive outpatient therapy has gotten me to a place where I can process my emotions while being safe in the world. It has put me back together. It has not made me all better. I'm scared of getting PTSDmail.

2. I'm ticked that they're dealing with the household items without me when the will named me as the person who "inherited" it.... and I understand the many reasons why they are doing so. Which include geography, power of attorney, and possibly the fact that they think I am crazy to deal with it, since I can't even answer a fucking email yet... and I don't necessarily want to be the person on the front lines with this one.

*

Mike says he reads my uncle's tone as being rather taciturn about his own emotions while at the same time taking care of all these horrible things that would be rightfully triggering to anyone. To me, my uncle's coping strategy makes it difficult for people who want to express their emotions --oh like me for example --because it sort of comes off as harsh. 

Not that his coping strategy surprises me. My grandfather was entirely like this. Even my mother was, to some extent. And I did it for all the years that I was at The University Previously Known As My Place of Employment because "getting it done" was way more important than feeling my feelings about whatever "it" was. 

In all the offices I worked in I was described as "sweet," "cheerful," "perky," and "bubbly." My teaching evals always said I had great rapport.

*

I'm really really not looking forward to making the Philly trip to look through these boxes, but I want the control of being able to look through the boxes and pick out the few items that I want. She left all her stuff to me. In a way, it feels like all I have of her.

I'm even dreading the phone call to my aunt to arrange things.

No one in my family has contacted me since the funeral to say, hey, your mom died. The circumstances were really weird and complex and horrible. How are you doing with that?

And, my uncle has put out vague feelers, but I'm still using Mike as my proxy --I just need a few more weeks to hammer it out in my head, get some strategies in place... 

I just... I would like to be asked, you know? Even if I'm not ready to talk.

*

I'll be more up front: the past four months of intensive outpatient therapy have gotten me to a place where 1) I don't want to self-injure every time I have emotions, 2) I'm not pushing those emotions away, and 3) I'm able to leave the house and start going to readings again, for example, because I have some cognitive strategies to reduce my anxiety. 

I'm trying to be as clear and open as I can about this. Remember, this blog is accessible to the world. I'm being open because I believe it is so wrong that our culture presses into us this idea of emotions as weakness and/or as counter-productive. THIS CONCEPT BROKE ME. I am angry about it. So I'm blogging my recovery from it.

The intensive outpatient therapy, called DBT, is a big-picture therapy. It's a subset of cognitive-behavior therapy. It focuses on examining broader emotional patterns, on replacing inaction and stagnation with action, and calming down self-destructive urges and behaviors. It has saved my life twice now. 

But this therapy, which I am being discharged from tomorrow, is in a group setting, and I have had SO MUCH SHIT to work through. I've focused on fairly broad treatment goals to maximize my time there. I am sort of looking forward to getting back to my former individual talk therapy, so I can hammer out details of how to go about picking up the phone to call my aunt.

*

Frankly I'm scared. I've got on the docket today:

Sadness and dread about planning the trip to visit my aunt and the boxes. Anger at being put in this position when I'm not quite ready for it, yet I do need to deal with it. Fear that my relatives are judging me as batshit crazy thusly ignoring me and the somewhat paradoxical fear that they think I'm going to be "all better" now after four months, when my journey with processing the grief is largely still ahead of me. 

Errands

I went on my first solo outing today in awhile. Probably since before I started group.

I think I'm supposed to begin being able to say it specifically. Probably since before my mom decided to end her life this past August. Wow, that was extremely uncomfortable.

[I wonder how many people are reading this and whom. I re-read the sentence and don't hit delete.]

Solo, meaning I did not have any assistance getting out of the house (namely a ride), nor was I going to see someone.

I took the 48 to REI to investigate their winter boot sale. And came away with a nice pair of boots. North Face. Waterproof. Stylish for being so good in the snow and wet.

And then I waited at the bus stop for 20 minutes. The temperature with wind chill was 16. First the cold stung my face and made tears run down it. Then my face went completely numb. I got on the warm bus with the young moms on welfare who all seemed to know each other and talked about the vicissitudes of bureaucracy and people who smelled like they'd been drinking quite a bit since before noon. My face thawed. I felt class-conscious and race-conscious and very aware of where my own inadequate, ridiculous self ended and other selves began. I felt just the smallest bit of happiness that I had accomplished it.

Even asking the question of myself, has my rabid social anxiety come down a micrometer? --this makes me want to not dwell even for a second on what I believe to be the answer. I don't want to jinx it.

Thinking about the new year...

Lots of people take stock in their new-year posts; I'm thinking about what's coming up. Soon I will be leaving group. It's inevitable. They said they want to discharge me in January. It's mondo-bizarro how these complete strangers have come to mean so much to me. Well, some more than others... and most of the "some" have already been discharged. So I can say I'm on the tail-end of what I consider my cadre: peers in age and stage. Which means I gotta get my ass out the door soon. But what next?

I was talking to A about a week or so ago and she suggested I "work with the energy of the solstice" (so yeah, it was around Dec 21) and consider, in a playful way, the concept of starting over new. She said it was important to consider it as mental play, not a serious undertaking. I didn't know what to make of her comment at first so I put it on the back burner.

During some idle time when I got home I turned it over in my mind. I could see why she said to not consider it seriously. I take everything seriously, perhaps too much so. When I thought seriously about it, I started to cry. So many things have just gouged the hell out of me in the last four months that the idea of starting over new is like... hello? I'm barely scarred over! Give me some time! But as a "pretend" question, it made me feel a bit liberated from my sadness.  I thought about last January, when I was starting my "year of quitting." I never imagined the ending it would have, or should I say, the last third of the year. Act 3. What if I started over on my year of quitting? [Note: I think my blog was on tumblr at this point so you might not know that I had sarcastically referred to taking a year to solely concentrate on writing, publishing, attending and giving readings as my year of quitting. Like quitting the job that sucked the life out of me for something that doesn't pay but is super-fulfilling.]

I remember now with great nostalgia the anxiety that, then, had made me cry. I was taking a huge leap of faith and I was doing it in the shittiest part of the year for taking leaps: winter. I had to fill a blank slate (woo, mixed metaphors) not knowing if my endeavor would be successful. One of my fb status updates at the time was "looking at design blogs and crying." Well, in my world, art begets art. I started myself on a disciplined schedule. I submitted every workday in the beginning --I would say the first 3-4 months. I kept up the momentum on faith, until the acceptances started coming in, validating my decision. I would say the best part was April through July. I was ON FIRE. I was so happy. I was so not prepared for what August would bring.

Now, despite my recent (and for the second time!) publication in MiPOesias, and upcoming pubs in RHINO, Hayden's, and Bone Bouquet, my submission pipeline is low. I feel like I don't have a lot of work to submit.

That feeling of having nothing may be false. It is false. I haven't been writing at the speed I was --I was generating 1-2 drafts A WEEK. For eight months. But I haven't published all of it. And I wrote a chapbook-sized sheaf of grieving poems, some of which have to be good enough to revise.

[Note: can you tell I've become worse at writing blog entries? It's my ability to concentrate. It's gone way down. I can't put together ideas as fluidly as before. Nor can I read a book all the way through. Or watch a whole movie without great restlessness. I don't watch them in the theatre any more-- at least for now. Therapist J says that this restlessness and lack of concentration is normal when experiencing grief. She also says it could go on for awhile.]

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is even though I have great anxiety about "my year of starting over," I began "my year of quitting" also with great anxiety. And that time it was fruitful. I showed up and did the work and I was successful.

There's this little (actually it's not so little) voice, the anxiety voice, that says, you never knoooooowwwwww about the future. You might not be any good any more. Maybe you broke yourself. 

But I leapt before and it was good. Maybe I can do it again. I'm lucky to be in a financial position to try it. I don't have to go back to some thankless job. I can do YWI part-time and maybe everything will be okay. Not grand, but okay. I'm shooting for okay.

and stuff

I woke up at 4:10 this morning and couldn't turn off the thoughts. What could I have done to prevent her from doing what she did? I'mabaddaughterbaddaughterbaddaughter. Even though by now extensive therapizing has convinced me that this is not a fruitful path for my brain to go down. I folded up some thoughts and put them into the Universe Box but still could not go back to sleep.

My mother killed herself.

She sat on the couch for four weeks while she starved to death.

She would not allow anyone to intervene.

These things happened.

I need to say it. Because I can't believe it. Because it fucking blows my mind whenever I think about it or whenever I'm not thinking about it. For example, when I'm trying to sleep. I wonder if my aunt can sleep. I wonder if she's having nightmares. Or if she's put it behind her. I can't call. I can't email. They don't email me or call either even though they have my number / address. I probably wouldn't answer if they did call. I want to ask DO YOU FEEL THINGS ABOUT THIS? Because I feel things. I feel many things. I want to throw up just thinking about it. The holidays this year (Thanksgiving-birthday-Xmas) have sort of divided between happy moments and being a fucking sham. That is, I'm the sham. I shamble. I try to move and talk like a human. I make small talk. I come up with talking points in advance.

I went to a reading this weekend. I had to read a thing. And before and after I had to talk to people. It was short. It went well. Livingdeadgirl looks / acts so real.

It's a real wasteland in there. My brain is. Sometimes (like, all the time) I worry that there is no coming back from this.

I Want to Believe

An insight A gave me

So I had a TWO HOUR intake interview for the intensive therapy thinger where I am hopefully gonna learn the skills to grieve my mother appropriately and maybe stop being a hostage to such intense social anxiety. The interview was exhausting, but went really well. I almost didn't make it; I was so anxious. The woman who interviewed me said she wanted to "work it so that I was in one of her groups." We did hit it off, had a great rapport.

I love when it works like that, and people don't suck.

Anyway, allllllllll that talking about my extensive history softened me up for A, who was very good to see today. At the end of our work together, I posed an offhand question. Why did she think my emotions were coming out as anxiety / anger and not sadness.... which seems a more obvious emotion for grieving? She thought a moment and said, "Maybe because there's no fight in it. Sadness. It's like a surrender."

And really, she did nail it for me right there. What do I have a problem with? Being vulnerable. What makes one really vulnerable? Surrendering. Imagine how good it would feel to lay down my arms.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA like that's going to happen. Well, I'll need to do some work on my psyche before it does. I'll need to. Because the situation I have now is untenable. I can't live my life like this.

When I went into recovery nearly fourteen years ago, it was like building a whole new, healthy person from scratch. I had to decontaminate myself of all the toxicity that had been passed on to me and sort of start over. Somehow I got the idea that living well = fighting. Surviving. Being in control. Because the old me was so so soooooo out of control.

I wonder if the ability to surrender, or rather the inability to do so, is also the key to why I have fibro. Just a thought. I have to go cue up "Eye of the Tiger" now.

And here's a picture in case you didn't feel like reading all those words:

Pool

sinkholes

I got back from GA on Saturday. The service was okay. Even though I was raised Catholic, I am intimidated by churches. Especially southern churches. I feel that their participants are a moment away from bursting out with themes of punishment and hellfire. 

I did end up delivering the eulogy, which a lot of people gave me praise for. It ended up being a slightly bigger deal than I thought... I thought there would be several speakers, but I was the only one. The minister was like, And now Jill Khoury will speak on behalf of the family. And I thought, actually, I'm just speaking on behalf of me. The family did not approve this message beforehand... this could end up going badly. But it didn't. 

I spoke from the heart and didn't tell any lies. So there.

And now, after it's all over... 

...I'm sort of trudging along. Things seem possible, doable, one moment, and overwhelming the next. I told Mike that I was gonna go to a workshop this evening and he said it was good to get back into the swing of things. And now, after having a 20-30 minute interaction with someone who asked detailed questions about the aftermath of my mom's death / the service, I feel totally drained…. like I can barely make it to therapy and then meet a friend for lunch.

So I don't know if I'll get a second wind this afternoon and end up workshopping… Apparently my mom left me a note to read after she passed and gave it to my aunt, who gave it to Mike, who gave it to me this morning. I'm saving it for my therapy session to open it. Apparently she enclosed it in a book called Heaven Is for Real, which I'm like….. oh crap. What is this?! I'm not sure what I believe re: heaven / hell, but don't leave me a book with a title that seems like it wants to instruct me eschatologically on what is and what is not. 

I feel bad for having missed the past several workshops and I have lots of poems to workshop. 

I just want to crawl into bed now though. 

This morning I looked up how to respond to sympathy cards on the internet. Rather, I looked up, on the internet, how to respond to sympathy cards. Apparently some people say you don't have to send thankyou cards and some people say you do. I was going to make it into a sort of therapeutic crafting by handmaking my thank you cards. Now I'm looking at the cards I made and thinking these are too bright and colorful. They're totally wrong. Fuck this. Do I make new cards? Do I even bother? Do I go back to bed and not get out? Option C is looking appealing.

And wtf is in that note my mom left for me?!?! I thought we really said all we had to say and left it on a good note. Now she ends up having the last word, whatever it is.

Throwing myself back into work

So even while everything is sort of crumbling around me, I find it consoling to work on work. Anyone who admonishes me, oh go ahead, take another pill that'll solve everything has no idea how grateful I am that pills make it possible for me, right now, to not be losing my composure completely as various actions play themselves out in GA. I'm all for "better living through chemistry" as they say. It made my 17-year-old self able to leave the house twenty years ago, and today chemistry is helping me be out of bed, thinking and working, without my emotional core breached and spilling all over the house.

On the DS-HUM listserv, Kevin Gotkin (at UP) shared a film that he produced. To get the most out of this blog entry, you should really go watch it before reading on. It's about half an hour long though, so I understand if you can't go see the whole thing. But at some point in your copious free time, you should.

This film, as I understood it on 0.75 cups of coffee, is about disabilities making possible genuinely and innovative views on, and thus methods for conceiving of, artistic production. Toward the end, this film Rupture, Sometimes focused on a woman, Jessica Feldman, who spoke of her experience with seizures and then being on medicine to ameliorate the seizures so she could function and produce in our larger normalizing society, which she recognizes as "linear." Her own experience before that, because of the disorientation of periodic seizures, had her perceive time as "ruptured." And she says that while she is glad to be productive, she misses the opportunities that "the rupture" offered her in terms of knowing the world differently.

This kind of ties into an idea I formed when writing up a sort of personal artistic statement for Prosody a few weeks back. I never got to include this idea in the show, but I'm coming to realize the benefit, the artistic fruitfulness of what I'm calling creative navigation. For a long time I saw only the obstacles of having a disability (or several). I was disheartened about how there will pretty much always be obstacles. We're not going to transition into this universally accessible society in my lifetime. But now I'm beginning to see that the process of working around / among these obstacles can be incredibly fruitful. It's causing a shift in my own poetics that I can't quite articulate yet because it's still happening. 

If you have a disability, you get thrown into the vicissitudes of your own idiosyncratic body, or brain, like, a hundred times a day. 

For me, it's like all of a sudden I'm thrust from a situation which is normal for me and my own idiosyncratic body / brain, and then something new comes along to add to my experience. 

I am legally blind, have fibromyalgia, OCD, and PTSD. Going out into the world is really challenging. Like, psychologically taxing. Even when the event I'm going to is something that's supposed to ease the burden, like yoga or massage therapy. Simply getting there and back can be so stressful that it almost-but-not-quite cancels out the good that happened at the session. 

Just when I think I have my shit together, so to speak... just when I can say, all right, I've reconciled with these certain obstacles, there are new ones. And all I saw, before I paused to reflect on it, was the stress. 

In the moment, it feels like someone picks me up, turns me on my head, holds me by the feet, shakes me around until I flop like a ragdoll. Then this "force" plops me back down at, for example, the bus shelter and says, okay kid, back to your regularly scheduled program.

But maaaybe it's worth considering the alternate vantage points that this very wobbly, ungraceful, and out-of-sync journey opens up for me. I don't know the answers yet for myself, on how this POV-shift (from stress to access --and the thing I'm accessing is a different part of my artistic brain) will redefine me and my art. But a shift is coming. Really, it's already happening.

FAVORITE MOMENTS of the film: 
Georgina Kleege about "dismantling simple binaries"
Kleege again: "all of the messiness of lived experience is ... wiped out of the philosophical discussions of blindness"
"gradations, shades, and registers"
Kathe Kudlick about "alternative soundtracks"
Amanda Cachia "generative aspects of disability"
Jessica Feldman "time doesn't actually function the way linear history describes it"
[and I appreciate all the music credits as they happen-- new stuff to d/l from itunes]

Weird stuff that happened this week.

Okay, the post to fulfill that title would take up volumes, but here's a list. You know I like lists. These are in no particular order.

1. I learned that my Gran has serious age-related dementia. She is 93.

2. Gran cornered me (she is good at this, for she operates a walker and it adds like 2x to her personal space) in the doorway of my guest room, just freaking out with anxiety b/c she knows something is wrong with my mom but THE FAMILY HAS DECIDED TO KEEP HER IN THE DARK and I had to pretty much lie to her (is how I saw it) about the situation. This happened several times. I had to leave GA a half-day early. This was to make my goodbye constructive and decent for my mom, so that I would not leave a trail of psychological carnage and salted earth behind me. My family has never told the truth. I had years of therapy to untwist my brain. They were pushing me back in that direction.

3. I saw a woman on the plane wearing an ombré hijab. It went from pale blue the top of her head to dark green to dark blue. I remember when I was working at DU, how I thought those corn-fed preppies had nothing on the Muslim girls when it came to pure glamour. They worked it. I don't know I feel about ombré as a trend, but maybe I will end up picking up a piece or two. It's better than neon. I tried to find a picture but they wouldn't load so if you want to look some gorgeous ombré hijabs you can see them here.

4. My cats welcomed me home last night and are now installed in each of my pockets. They are all like "mow!" and "mew!" and "we love you" and "pls dnt lv us we <3 are hoo-manz!"

5. Sadly for them, we are staying in the hotel the next few nights so I can get my stuff together for the Prosody taping on Saturday. Mike said it would be good b/c I was having more bug freak-outs at my mom's. They have ants. Which brings me to #6...

6. I asked my husband to check my body over for ants. Which I was pretty sure were there but maybe not. So you see OCD, still rolling strong. It has not kicked in yet because a) I'm pretty sure those things on my legs are hives created by stress and overheating and b) I'm chock-full of nice meds from therapist N, who has really be helping me through all this.

7. I saw my husband step up like he has never stepped up before, dealing with family members, making flight arrangements, making sure I got back to a safe environment. When he could have INSTEAD been like "well, we're leaving tomorrow so suck it up." Then again, this is the guy who waited with me in the psych hospital ER (this was like 15 years ago? more?) for ten hours to protect my fragile emotional state from the detoxers and peeps that had gone off their meds who were sort of violent or just weirdly twitchy. I love him, I love him, I love him. If you work with him or are his friend, give him a hug; give him a break. He's been through a lot helping me get through this stuff with my mom.

Just a PS for casual readers of my blog who don't know me very well. My mental illness has been stable for many many years. This is a serious break b/c of all the SHITE that has happened at once.

PPS to my friends who have helped out with Team Cat and everyone who has just sent their well-wishes, prayers, and healing energies, thank you. You really are my extended family, and I love you. My mom has made her choice. Now I've made mine. To live well. To celebrate life, and friends, and creativity. To attempt a removal of the emotionally toxic elements in my environment.

PPPS: I have to go b/c Ruskin has just knocked my books & crap off my desk with his big butt. This is a sign that he wants Second Breakfast and will not be denied.

<3 <3 <3
Jyl

There's a splinter in your eye and it reads react (R-E-A-C-T)

Haaaaay internet bitchez what up?

Okay, I tried being casual just there (which I mistyped causal) but I like you. And I'm not casual with people I really like; I'm serious. 

I've got this serious dilemma. 

You may have already been caught up with my life to date, or at least the one I share in blogland, but if you're not, maybe you should read back a few entries until you are caught up... if you want to help me make this choice. If not, fuck it. Keep reading voyeur. I know you're there.

This house here that I'm sitting in right now is a safe place because Pam says it is. I think stepmom Pam may have been created from part-goddess parts.

Then there is my dad who, when I said, pre-morning-coffee: Gee I'm sorry I slept so late; I was up all night worried about my kitty cat.... responded with YOU KNOW I FEEL A CERTAIN WAY ABOUT PETS SOME PEOPLE MAY THINK IT'S HEARTLESS OR CRUEL BUT YOU REALLY HAVE TO LOVE THEM IN THE MOMENT AND THEN WHEN THEY DIE OR RUN AWAY YOU NEED TO JUST REPLACE THEM AND LIVE IN THE MOMENT YOU CAN FORM THE SAME LOVING BOND WITH ANOTHER PET SOME PEOPLE MAY SAY THIS IS CRUEL BUT FOR EXAMPLE [..... minutes pass ......] YOUR MOM AND THAT DOG OF HERS WERE REALLY CODEPENDENT TO THE POINT WHERE IT JUST WASN'T A NORMAL SCENARIO dad you know mom herself isn't a normal scenario BUT WHAT I'M SAYING IS IT WAS UNHEALTHY NOW INSTEAD YOU SHOULD..... 

My dad actually talks like that. His default unit of communication is The Lecture. It lasts from 5-10 minutes. I have gotten good over the past few days at not giving a crap. Or rather at fake giving a crap. This is different from when I was growing up. Then I really gave a crap about everything that came out of his mouth because he was my dad. And I was raised to do so. Ditto mom. She really isn't a normal scenario. I don't mind faking it. I love him. He's my dad. I love mom too. They did some pretty stupid things back in the day, but I love them. Pam has semi-reformed my dad. My dad is driving me to Pittsburgh for a thing. He's good. We just don't see the same on a lot of stuff. Mom is still doing stupid things. But I love her anyway. Yes, I'm being vague here. The stupid things they did aren't really relevant to this post. 

Anyway dad in this particular cat lecture kept rolling on like a 18-wheeler that's lost it's brakes and is on a slight slope downward. When I was younger I would have freaked the fuck out that he was talking about my cat that way, because I depended on my dad to understand me. Now I'm 37, I have a load of friends that I pretty much consider my extended family, and also did I mention, right now I'm on lots of medication. So I was like in my head: hm dad, fuck fuckityfucknuts where is the coffee.... 

But it takes little pieces of me away, whenever I have to fake it. My dad says ridiculous things all the time. I mean reeeeeee DICK ulous. His views on gun control and immigration are... ahem, they do not match mine. And without Pam there, he feels free to expound even if I ask him not to. Because he speaks in the all-caps voice, and I speak in the regular typeface with lots of dashes and interruptions-of-myself / or / slashes / like this / voice. 

If dad were the only thing getting under my skin (HA I made a joke there b/c my skin was all scabby before my dad got under it), this trip would not be making me so crazy. But there's one more leeeeettle straw that is breaking my back.

Back, back, back in the day I used to live here. In this town. And when I wasn't living here, I was living about 15 minutes south.

Some crimes were perpetrated against me by a certain man. Not a relative.

And this town holds all these memories that I didn't even realize would come up when I was by myself, under a fair amount of stress.

I thought this afternoon hm this could be a clue as to why I don't visit here that often.

I feel like to go outside I should dress up in a floofy head scarf and big sunglasses (sunglasses, check). Like Jackie Kennedy.

I don't believe this person, this man, is living here anymore.

But when you have, for example.... say you have a really ugly dresser. 

I have a really ugly dresser.

Say it was bought for you by your dad who has very masculine taste in furniture when you moved into his bachelor apartment when you were 17 because mom was not a normal scenario.

It was bought for me by my dad..... 

and I was looking at it when... this man... not a relative... was perpetrating crimes against me. Not crime, crimes. Repeatedly for several years.

This dresser is still in the room where I'm staying now. This dresser has followed me through 1, 2, 3 yes I believe it's three homes in the Allentown-Bethlehem area. 

And it's not the only scenery that surprise-haunts me.

My dad and I were doing some errands today in the car. Vroom, drivey-drive. You don't walk anywhere around here because you drive. Dad likes to drive. He likes to drive scenic routes sometimes. Todays scenic route, featuring some of the best scenery of Allentown-- it is seriously nice scenery --took me past several places where I remember the details of certain crimes. 

Last night, before this all even happened, I dreamt about him. The man. I dream about him in Pittsburgh sometimes too. But not very often. And when I dream about him in my own house, I wake to my life, my independence, my I-can-leave-if-I-want.

So I'm thinking about coming home. My dad already agreed to drive me back to Pittsburgh and back in a few weeks to do an important poetry thing. Nobody besides my dad and Pam (and Jenn?) know about this because it's been all Ravi Ravi Ravi where the fuck is Ravi. But I could just not go back with him. I would stay a week at home and then come back with Mike for the shore trip at the end of that week. 

But I am worried about incurring the, I won't say wrath, because my dad doesn't do wrath anymore... incurring the pissed-off of my dad.

*     *     *

I can't take this shit anymore. I'm going to list the shit now, just to recap.

1) We got fleas.
2) My OCD, the fleas, and the extreme heat of August interacted very badly, creating lots of scabby wounds all over me which I imagine are all flea bites, but which, in fact, are most likely not all flea bites.
3) I retreated to my parents' villa in sunny A-town which is well-appointed, cold as a fridge, and has stepgoddess Pam.
4) Back in Pittsburgh one of our cats vanished.
5) My husband starts freaking out and we are apart. I mean he is being really productive and amazing, but he is still hurting too.
6) I start freaking out here but in a slower, more protracted manner, including varied and sundry elements of PTSD badness, remembering crimes, etc.
7) if I go home, I will have to face the reality of my gone-cat-gone, and the imaginary but sort-of-real fleas.
8) if I stay here I will have to deal with the PTSD and to a much lesser extent my dad.
9) Either way I have at least another week of here. Which has goods and bads that even out. If you look at it as T = 7 days.

Am I still making sense bloggerinos? Help me make this choice? Deliver me some insight? 

I guess I still have some poems left in me, though this isn't one of them.

So every time I leave a session with A I dread crossing the street. The immediate surroundings outside the yoga studio are noisy, crowded, and frankly a bit gross. The dive bar on the corner (past which I have to walk to get to the intersection) spawns bees, a smell of decay, extra sidewalk debris, and afternoon drunks milling about. 

If I don't leave the house with payment for A, sometimes I go to the drive-through bank across the street to use the ATM. Lately they have stationed a security guard outside the drivethrough, which has one or two lanes staffed by people, and then a lane for the ATM. The security guard leans against the wall staring down the long narrow parking lot to the street. It makes me feel awkward, much as I feel awkward caning down the sidewalk to my bus stop. There's a whole gauntlet of people slumped along the wall, and they're pretty much watching me. I mean I can literally see their heads turned in my direction, gazing at my progress. Not all of them of course. Some are on the phone or busy attending to children or talking to each other. Incidentally, I felt this way (about the bus stop) before I used the cane. But the security guard is the one I'm thinking about right now. 

So I'm coming out of a rough sesh, and picking my way across this annoying intersection where beer trucks are making deliveries, traffic is backed up, and people like to gridlock. I approach the entrance to the bank parking lot, and I see him. I don't know if it's the same guy all the time. My eyes don't render the face very well. Just a guy, white, stocky build, uniform, mirrored sunglasses. I enter the parking lot. I'm caning down its empty narrow length  toward the ATM. 

I feel like I'm on the runway. Like I'm doing my little turn on the catwalk or something. But (if it's not bloody obvious by now) not in a good way. I'm channeling the fire, the solidity of A as a defense, because she dropped some A-bombs on me at the end of the sesh (I dislike when she does this, but it doesn't happen often) so ironically I'm channeling her spirit because my own aura feels frangible. My brain is a roiling stew of anxiety and racing thoughts. I get closer and closer to the ATM, idly wondering if it's illegal to be a pedestrian using the drive-through. I didn't used to wonder about it, but now there's been this uniformed guy for the past two weeks.

So I've decided to just not look at him, to look at the ground halfway between him and me. And the distance grows less and less, and finally I'm veering toward the ATM. And today he speaks to me. 

"I don't mean to startle you..."

"You didn't." Because he didn't. I knew he would be there and I was watching him watch me. But he doesn't know that. However, it was kind of him to say so, because most people don't think about the fact that 99% of the time, their voices DO startle me because I don't sense them coming. 

"I don't mean to startle you... but ... you're good."

I sort of tilt my head at him, sizing up his comment, and how I'm going to respond. 

On the way to my appointment with A, I already took out my visually-impaired ire on a guy who was loading his car and decided to put all his crap in the middle of the narrow sidewalk and not move it out of the way even though, if he were paying attention, he could see and hear me coming down the block. 

For as much ire as gets channeled into some of these blog entries, I don't actually express it to the appropriate party most of the time. Today though...

When I was finally RIGHT UP ON the car loading guy and his pile o' crap he was like, "Oh shit, sorry," and I muttered something non-amicable. I didn't swear at him or anything, but still felt a little guilty for not accepting his apology. My parents raised me to be polite. Painfully polite. Self-effacing, even. I do accept the apologies of people most of the time, and I felt this guy was being particularly stupid. And he got my push-back. 

Because I think sometimes it *should* be okay to not accept someone's apology if you don't know them, if it's not an accident, if he was being particularly unaware or inconsiderate. And he was. 

I know that I hold most people to a far-higher standard of interpersonal consideration than average, because *I* am *always* hypervigilant of my body, my stuff, where it is and where I am and if it's blocking or inconveniencing anyone. And most people just aren't aware aaat aaaallll. They put themselves where-ever and expect you to just go around them. 

For example, people who hold conversations in the middle of busy sidewalks. I can't get riled about them because there's just too many. Apparently it's human nature and I'm the one overly conscious of my own taking-up-of-space. 

Back to the guard and my already-roiling stew of anxiety. 

I've heard his comment from other people too, the "you're good" thing. From repeated analysis, I believe he means that "although you are using a white cane, you move with the grace of a person who has more vision than I assume you have." I'm not okay with his judgment because it's normative. It's privileging the way "regular" people move. When I am seen as coming closer to the standard, I'm called "good." 

But his expression was friendly. And my brain was already full of too many problems. Personal angst and obsessing about family stuff. Leftover outrage from an essay I read this morning in the Kenyon Review detailing a / the latest egregious human rights violation.

I made a rare decision to let it go. The expression on his face was friendly. He was (like they nearly all are) well-intentioned. He really had no idea what his comment actually said to me. He thought he was paying me a compliment. So I just smiled and said thanks. I used the ATM. And then I bid him to have a good day as I walked away and I knew he was watching me still.

20 things : after

1. Ok so welcome to after.

2. it's thin like a napkin, friable, leaves crumbs in the couch

3. he said he still has scabs on his mouth and tongue from the fucked up intubation

4. the feeling I have when I hear this / is part of after / of what comes what comes next / next meaning the rest of our lives

5. want to stick that feeling down down subzero down

6. wake up time to not think about this

7. two wandering poems that I've found homes for in the last few weeks, for example

8. ... and yay and lunch. 

9. right out of the hi-def bright blue sky a ribbon of canaries and they each fall flat on their little conical faces --and black droplet eyes --and brown & yellow fluff --and wings amputated--

10. immediately I fell too into deep sleep and my face hit the sand and the sand filled every opening

11. who is going to pull me / us up the laughter of babies and sand in my mouth

12. she sent me one of those memetic surveys where you have to talk about yourself in the most inane way / I'll answer like I was him instead I'd rather be / I'd rather put my throat in the way instead / busted throat not really you are being melodramatic chakra

13. ... and tonight I'm supposed to have a beer and be all smiley at the reading.

14. it is true that I'm glad to leave the house even though hi-def sky even though canaries

15. feathers curl up like fur I think that one is a mutated color he's so cute

16. zip the mouth up and tap tap tap tap head held proudly

17. while all the lower beings cogitate on our worst punishments 

18. no I've forgotten about it by now don't remind me

19. So how are we feeling today?

20. the cage is white metal bars / pleasant / the fluid upward arc of the roof

20things : car

1. I was there and he wasn't.
2. I was in the middle of the street and so was he.
3. I would say three paces separated us.
4. He'd turned left on red. The light had been red for several seconds with no car activity.
5. What O&M people taught me to refer to as an "all quiet."
6. I didn't even hear the -- how did I not hear the engine?
7. The city is all engine.
8. It was a T intersection. The cross-street was one-way left.
9. The traffic light's only options are a red light and a left turning arrow.
10. So if you are walking you have to walk on red or else you get people turning in front of you.
11. They are affronted if you try to go. So, walk on red.
12. But the cross street is one way away from me. It dead-ends. There should be no cars in my path when the light is red.
13. Granted the intersection is confusing. For pedestrians.
14. But for cars there are two options: red light or green turning arrow.
15. The light was red. I started crossing. No arrow.
16. And then flash.
17. Yes I was using the cane I can hear someone carping were you using the cane I use it all the time now.
17. (Funny how it's my dad's voice I hear when.)
19. It was like shoomph there-was-your-almost-death shoomph.
20. He was on his way to another red light and didn't want to miss it.

quick update

So, the reading went really well yesterday. Decent turnout. I read all the vulnerable stuff, with the little scaffold I had built for it and the whole thing was paced really well with only a few awkward moments. Andrew did well too. I hadn't heard his work, ever, really. Not like that. It made me --what's the opposite of retroactively --proactively? miss him. I just really realized oh dear, he's leaving. But I'm so proud of his decision to go back to school. And there were pictures. Many pictures.

And the first day of teaching went well today, despite some mild chaos. I took the hour that I didn't have to be in class and explored a few floors of the Cathedral so I could get my bearings better. I think that was a maybe-not-entirely-kosher thing to do; I was supposed to be somewhere else... but I feel more comfortable with the building now, or at least the parts of it I have to go to.

The kids are pretty great. Eager writers, sense of humor, open, energetic. I like having that energy reflected back at me, you know? Compared to the times where I've put it in and... well... yeah. This is going to spoil me. But it will also get harder. The pace will pick up.

I might blog some of my freewrites / writing exercise responses. We end up doing a lot of them and they get pretty surreal and fantastic. I like writing with the kids. There's a good group energy happening.

Okay, lesson plans are done for tomorrow. Time to collapse. After six months off, I'm kind of outa shape :)