Behind me are all the memories and experiences of my life until now; my childhood, my young motherhood, my important relationships, raising my children, the deep sadness of un-perfection.
I can wait here and feel the cold warmth of all those things behind me, pressing onto my back. If I put this burden down, I will not be holding it any more. I will not have the dark comfort of armfuls of pain held close to the chest.
But if I leave it behind — taking only what I can hold — then I am saying to myself that the past is the past. I am aware now that putting it all down does not mean I will forget all the memories I have brought with me and the feelings I have about them, but I am used to carrying it all. I am used to being the person who keeps the love and the hope and the regret on behalf of people who aren’t me.
I am afraid.
It feels like this is the opening chapter of the second book of my life (at least, if the first book was as big and unwieldy as a Tad Williams paperback), and the time ahead of me will be new even if there are bittersweet moments.
I have chosen small tokens of the years before now: notes written by a ten-year-old about what they want for Christmas; artwork made with crayons and glue and misshapen clay over the years, the uglier the more cherished; photos of people and times that come into temporary clarity when I look at them. I have thrown away more than I am going to keep.
And I am afraid, but I am hopeful.
I am crying but they are not tears of despair.
This is how much I have cared and loved and lost.
These memories are mine to do with what I will, and some of them will fade with time and I will not remember them any more — but such is life, such is a lifetime, however long or short.
We cannot take every memory with us. We do not have to take every memory with us.
I did not think that turning forty-five years old would bring me to this terrifying and delicious precipice of change. I did not expect the cool winds of lands I have not yet traveled. I did not consider the possibilities that wait for me as I ponder how and what to choose.
I have worked hard at breaking the chains that have wound around me since childhood, made of links that my parents gave me, then of links that I picked up and welded into these chains myself. I have co-created my own pain and fear alongside the lessons and wisdom that wounds have given me.
If I take the rope already tied to the rocks and trust it to hold me as I descend through the fog below, I will be, as Samwise Gamgee said, “the furthest from home I’ve ever been.” Like Sam, I have misunderstood what I mean when I think of home. Like Sam, I feel every cut so deeply and when I cry, it is because it hurts so much that I cannot take the burdens of those I love.
The time of my life has now brought me to this place, and I can either sit and refuse to move because I will have to choose to do it, rather than letting life push me here and there, or I can believe that I am strong enough to hold the rope and lucky enough to have new chances and new choices and new lands before me. I can remind myself that I bring with me everything that I have learned and everything that I have not.
I can desire to have both a long memory and a beginner’s mind. I can take what wisdom I have and use it as the foundation that grounds me, so that I can build whatever is coming now.
I am afraid, but I won’t stay here on the edge. I am taking the downward path into a future full of hope.
what if the steps I take turn out to be mistakes how can somebody like me learn to say
come what may
my daddy always said nothing worth doing comes easy
time is not your friend time is not your enemy
no amount of waiting will make you ready no amount of fear will keep you, no amount of fear will keep you safe
Keep You Safe, The Crane Wives
I want to say thank you for being with me as I write and weep and change and grow. I am realizing that what I do here is from my soul, but it is not just for me. I am grateful for you.
cw: old grief, metaphors of violence and harm to self
I have been sorting through boxes of things that we stacked in the garage when we moved here several years ago. Four years ago? Five? … I checked, it’s been almost five years.
We collectively wanted to go through every box and decide where our combined stuff should go once we arrived and settled in, but we didn’t finish this because a) chronic illnesses, b) moving, and c) the emotional land mines contained in most of the boxes.
When we moved here, my parent-child relationship with my second eldest was still in a highly catastrophic state. During a particularly painful conversation about his future, he had said he didn’t want to be part of the family any more, and I agreed but had to continue holding onto my responsibility as much as I was able until he turned eighteen and could legally do whatever he wanted. The months between moving and his eighteenth birthday were exhausting and haunting and I don’t actually remember very much of it.
NOTE: I am using he/him pronouns when I talk about him because those are the ones he was using before he left, and I refer to him by the name he chose at that time as well. My kids have all been gender-nonconforming in different ways, and even if I don’t have a relationship with someone any more, I am not going to misgender or deadname them.
Losing him has been a pain that never goes away. I have cried to my therapist and to my partners. I have wept from the bottom of my heart where I keep the things I don’t want to forget. I have been sick with grief. And I have both wanted to hold onto it so I can’t forget, and also didn’t want to carry all of that with me and experience it again every day anew. A person can’t hold that much pain and expect to function well enough to continue existing, at least not in my experience.
I have done my best to grieve and let go as I’m able to. Every June, his birthday month, I go through several weeks of mourning again, whether or not I want to be doing it. My body keeps the score and I have to let the grief in me move through until it has passed and I can remember the light again.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Litany Against Fear, from Frank Herbert’s Dune
He took most of his things with him when he left; we wanted to make sure that he had everything he needed to have and whatever he still wanted to keep. No matter how horrible that time was, I never wanted to make his life more difficult, and I did my best to be the best parent and person I could be through all of it; I am not sure that I succeeded. I did my fucking best.
There are always bits and pieces of old things left behind when someone who’s been with you for the better part of eighteen years decides to move away, and there are things in my boxes of stuff that have the potential to knock me over. One of the things I found, that I had forgotten I kept, was the lockbox we used to put his meds in so that even if he was gone all day, and didn’t get home while I was awake, he could still safely take his prescription medications. The moment I saw it I realized I had just stepped on one of those land mines, and the only thing I could do was step off the mine and let it blow me up. My hands started shaking and I felt like I was falling. I moved the box to a different pile, for some reason. I think my intention was to make it easier to look at it again later, but I honestly don’t know why that made sense at the time.
Concurrently with this, I had opened many boxes of books and household items and did not recognize almost a quarter of what I’d packed up. There are books that I know must have come off my bookshelves that I am not sure I have ever seen before. There are kitchen things and personal things that I know are kitchen and personal things because that’s how they were packed and labeled, but I don’t know where they came from. It’s like I was living my life without looking at it because it would have killed me to see what it had become.
this isn’t the first time I’ve lost memories and time.
I have barely any memories of my childhood. There are years’ worth of blank spaces that seem in my mind’s eye like a black nothingness. I know I was alive and experiencing things, but they are gone.
The unexpected thing, for me, has been realizing that my ability to intentionally forget the things that hurt me, doesn’t come with an awareness that I have forgotten something. My mind tucks it away so quickly and carefully that I don’t even know it was there or that it happened. When I try to remember what it was like around then, to try and peel away the corners of the giant memory-hole-sized piece of metaphorical duct tape, the only thing I can access is a weird feeling of running in a direction that I wasn’t looking in. Almost like I was running headlong but looking to the side so that I couldn’t see what was ahead of me.
I rely pretty heavily on my memory and my ability to be very intentional and specific about what I am doing and why, so finding these big gaps is seriously upsetting.
I didn’t think that any of my adult life with children would require this kind of invisibility cloak. It hurts to consider what it has cost me, and it wounds me to realize that I only do this when it’s the only way that I can survive it.
if I can’t trust my memories, what can I trust?
I have to trust my written memories when I have them; journals and blog posts and shit I said on Facebook or the artist formerly known as Twitter. I have to trust the memories of the people who were loving me and supporting me, because they can remember things that I forgot.
This isn’t to say that I am ready for a firehose of information, because I don’t think that would be good for me. I’d probably forget more things just to make sure I was going to be okay.
I’m paradoxically grateful to my own mind for doing its best to keep me safe and okay, although I am still in shock from the realization that there are things I definitely forgot on purpose, things that are still close enough to me in time that I would have thought it would be reflexive to recall them.
I’m not sure if I’m okay, but I can’t stay here in these feelings for too long.
I’m not actually sure how to define ‘too long’ — I guess what I think I need is to have long enough to process the feelings and give them the time they deserve, but not long enough for my mind to decide it’s been too much.
Part of why I write here is to bleed off some of the pressure of the years of trauma and grief I’ve experienced, but it’s so hard to write when it really hurts. I often can’t give myself anything but the freedom to cry and stay in bed for a little while.
There’s no resolution here for me, but I think it’s important to use my personal writing to reflect whatever is actually going on at any given moment, because what if I forget again? I should give myself a way to remember, if that’s what I want to do later.
cw: frank discussion of harm to oneself and to others, capitalism
I’ve been pondering the ways in which I don’t fit into the dominant culture, which I think is related to my personal experience of being neurodivergent.
When I say that I am neurodivergent, I mean that I’ve recognized myself over and over again in other peoples’ descriptions of their own neurodivergence, and in clinical descriptions of autism and ADHD. It has made it easier for me to understand why I do what I do and why I don’t do other things. These days, I am seeking to know myself better, through therapy and through long periods of introspection, which I am fortunate to have.
There are a couple of ideas that are competing in my mind to be foremost, but I think it’s because they are all tangled up together but are equally valid and important things to consider.
I want to take a moment to note that I dislike the term ‘neurodivergent’ because it seems to imply to me that someone like me is considered negatively different to a ‘neurotypical’ person, when it seems to make more sense to use our language to acknowledge that there are multiple kinds of people with multiple kinds of minds and thought patterns, which does not make any one of us better or lesser in a ranked way.
1. a profound sense of justice manifested in how I view the choices available to me
When I reject the concept that exploitation of people or resources is just, it becomes antithetical to believe that any of us should put anyone else in a position of exploitation.
Capitalism in our current socio-economic structure seems to work only when one is willing to exploit others in order to participate in it.
This is definitely a problem because if I don’t participate in capitalism, I won’t have the kinds of resources available to me that I need in order to access things I would naturally categorize as human rights: shelter, food, health care. It leads me and others like me to find ways to live outside this capitalist structure, in ways that aren’t exploitative and that encourage shared ideals of justice and reciprocity and care.
Capitalism as it functions currently seems to result in a strengthening of structures that are inherently violent, very specifically our carceral system, which shows up almost everywhere. Every problem that we have with one another needs to be addressed in non-carceral ways, but it is so fucking easy here to resort to power-over to get our needs met. We invite law enforcement into every place we occupy, and law enforcement is not our friend. Even if it helps us in the moment, we are wounded by it because it adds to the harm done to others.
Do you remember in the first months of the COVID pandemic, in 2020, when it was pretty common to see people saying ‘I don’t know how to explain that you should care about other people’? This is how I feel about what capitalism has done to our ability to treat one another with compassion, empathy, and justice.
2. the concept that making no choice is in fact a choice on the side of the oppressor
I think this idea contains an assumption that the choice in question is between a harmful choice and a non-harmful choice, but there seem to be precious few of those kind of clear-cut choices. The world is made of grey areas, and we have to rely on our own internal sense of right and wrong to weigh our choice; we have to continually do the math of harm (yes I know I link that essay a lot but that’s because it ALWAYS comes up for me).
My internal need to live my beliefs means that I wrestle constantly with what choice I ought to make, and what it means if I try to opt out of the system that is forcing that choice.
An example of my own comes from the ways I used to try to participate in marketing and operating my business (I was a freelance web designer and web developer for over a decade, and dabbled in consulting for others doing their work primarily online). If I charged the kind of fees that would mean I could stay financially ahead of my household bills, this was more expensive than my target market could afford; so if they really really needed it and couldn’t find another way to get it, they would have to do things that were harmful to themselves: overworking, borrowing money at high interest rates, or choosing to pay me and then not being able to pay their own bills.
It was so goddamn hard to know that I was offering a service that was so important that it would drive people to harm themselves to access it. I think that marketing should be clear and offer ethical choices, although the prevailing message to all of us in that niche at the time was that we should utilize psychological tactics of scarcity and fear to induce people to spend money they didn’t have so that we could ‘be paid what we were worth.’
My solution, which I didn’t like very much, was to try not to use any of those tactics in my marketing, which meant that I often didn’t know how to make my work visible to those who might need it. I was trying not to participate in capitalism on one side but on the other side I was hustling so hard to pay the electric bill that I had regular panic attacks and still wasn’t bringing in enough money for us to live on.
Eventually, I went to work as an IT engineer, which was fairly horrible. I burned myself the rest of the way out and when I left that job, I had nothing that I could do because of the harm I had caused to myself, and the harm the system had caused me.
3. we should be able to participate in reciprocity-based systems of exchange in order to get our needs met
I think it probably makes logical sense, that we could create a system that took everyone’s needs into account and then enabled us to make choices based on harm reduction and justice, rather than clawing our way forward and trying not to see the scratches we’ve left in other peoples’ flesh.
It is really difficult for me to express these ideas when I am writing about what it costs to work with me as a death doula, for example. In order to say that I am not going to charge everyone the same amount, I see that I need to explain why, and then I get into the weeds of trying to unpack concepts that don’t necessarily just click into place so that a person can then decide how to interact with me if they need to.
I believe, based on experience, that the only way a system of reciprocity can exist is when we understand ourselves to be wholly who we are as individuals, when we accept that we have needs and that it is natural to ask for them to be met, that there is no shame in asking, and that we can trust that others have also done the work of knowing their internal worth. We can trust that something we ask for won’t result in harm if we trust one another to say ‘no’ when we can’t do something. And we need to also learn to find the edges where it’s less harm to put in more effort than for the other person not to have that need met. Then we pull together to hold up the person who gave more when it was needed, so that they can recover.
We seem to have internalized a particular harm, probably skewed toward people who were raised in abusive religious families, that we must forgo our own comfort in favor of not making someone else feel that they have not gotten what they wanted. Additionally, we bring an assumption that what needs doing must be done by us, whether or not that is actually true. We don’t know how to untangle our personal ability to meet needs from our own feeling of unmet need, so we default to the thing that makes people the least angry with us, whatever that means for us.
when disaster and ruin want to see this world end I know that I’ll get through it by the side of my friends
all the love I can muster, I will give it to you though I know that you could doubt me every word said is true
and when the fountains run dry and turn this world into stone I promise on my soul that you won’t be alone
These are the things I’m doing to try and swim across the swiftly-moving river of capitalism in America:
I refuse to put prices on my business website even though it’s probably obscuring why I’m doing that (still working on this one)
I have internalized a way of speaking to others that assumes they and their needs are equally important as mine
I am learning to say ‘no’ when I truly cannot do something, which means I have to do A LOT of internal work
I am doing my best to operate in our society with the balance of the math of harm foremost in my mind, and not trying to over-analyze a choice after I’ve made it
Sometimes I make it across the river, exhausted and exhilarated, and other times I manage to crawl onto the far shore after being swept downstream further than I was before.
It sucks here, doesn’t it?
I don’t know how we can make it better for all of us until we can all consider these kinds of ideas, and I think that there is a cross-section of us — the ones with a ‘rigid sense of justice’ — that can grapple more easily with these ideas, but we don’t know how to bring this up to people who aren’t predisposed to worrying as much as we do about what every single choice might mean.
Golly, sometimes I can be a bummer.
Tell me, if you want to, how this plays out for you. I want to know what you understand about all of this so that we can feel the relief of knowing we aren’t alone in this.
