Thursday, March 29, 2018

Manipulation, Faith, Creation (Possibly)...





I had the brilliant idea this week that I should do a Throw Back Thursday on the blog, only instead of it being a picture, I should dig up one of my stories from my creative writing class in college and put it on the blog.

In college, writing was my entire life. Everything was copy. Reading through those stories brings back memories, both cherished and embarrassing, of a girl still on the cusp of life.

It’s a bit overwhelming.

But I did find one thing-which, oddly, is a poem-that isn’t too terribly embarrassing to share. You will quickly see why I am not a poet. But this one, which I wrote as a tribute to what it means to me to call myself a “writer”-I don’t know, I like it. It’s nothing, really, but a girl trying to write a poem who isn’t a poet. But here you go:

Manipulation, Faith, Creation

It begins with a word,
One word, one idea,
More are then added
To give it weight.

I take these words
And mesh them together,
I bundle them up
Into a jumble.

Then I begin to roll them,
I roll them flat,
I strip them of their meaning,
Until I can see them clearly.

(this is manipulation)

I press the words,
My words now,
Onto my mold
Until they stick.

They don’t all fit, you know.
Some will have to be-
Sacrificed.
On my altar to Plath and Wordsworth.

(this is faith)

And so I begin to cut,
It’s almost blinding,
Physically, I ache
And wonder how my idols do it.

There, there-
The mess is on the floor now.
And the rest remain stuck,
As they should be.

Now they are burnt,
They are singed into my memory
As though it matters

(this is creation)

Monday, March 19, 2018

Out of My Misery...




Again, I am wishing that I were a poet.

I read a poem this weekend that spoke directly to my soul and said all of the things that I’m about to clumsily attempt to say in far too many words.

I can’t quote the poem, only because it goes to places that I don’t talk about on the blog. I have some boundaries when it comes to what I say here (which probably seems humorous if you know me, because I often don’t have any boundaries around what I say, usually too loudly, in person).

What I am comfortable sharing here, what I have stated before so it’s none too shocking, is that there was a great deal of anger and tension directed at me in the final two years of my marriage. Not every day, but looking back, more often than not. Anger and rage became normal. It got all mixed up with what had always been love. And it turned life upside down before I ever realized what was happening.

My heart and my head began to think of hurt as an extension of caring, as crazy as that sounds. Anger masked itself as desire.

Unlearning this is harder than it sounds. I equated anger with passion and hurt with want. I stand at a distance now from that girl and understand how unhealthy that was. How profoundly untrue it was. The fury was born from frustration, the anger from unhappiness, and the hurt from a complete lack of knowing what to do about this place that we had fallen to.

But it’s still all mixed up inside of me.

When I am offered a hand, a shoulder, soft corners-I don’t quite know how to react. I yearn for sharp edges to know where the heck the boundaries are. How far to push before you push back.

It’s complicated.

Why exactly do I live this out on the blog? I listened to a podcast this past weekend in which the guest, a poet, said that when you write something down you can stand back and look at it and see it from different angles. I agree.

When I write something down, something that pains me to write, to admit to, something that honestly makes me want to crawl under the table and hide-it frees me of it. I have written it down, and now all the world knows for as long as they care to remember. I cannot explain it any more than that.

My words are my freedom and my sacrifice, all at the same time.

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Still Faking This Art of Love...




I feel torn in two.

There is a piece of me that wants more than anything to think that I'm going to fall in love again. And there is a part of me that is screaming that I can never, never fall in love again.

It's just lovely.

This is a hard thing to admit, but I'm trying to be brave. I honestly thought when I got divorced that I would just love Nick forever. That it wouldn't matter that he had moved on, and that he definitely didn't love me anymore, I would just live forever the way that I had prior to meeting Nick-certain that he was the love of my life.

I don't think that anymore. I think that's probably fairly obvious from what I write.

Letting go of the idea that I love Nick was a tangle of its own emotions. That's basically what the blog was about in the past year. Opening myself up to the idea that there could be a human being that I care about possibly even more than Nick-there are days that feels like the most wonderful idea ever, and there are days that I think if I don't shut down all of my emotions right now all of this is going to lead to sure hurt.

Grief is such a strange beast, coming and going and hitting me when I least expect it, and it sort of feels as if I'm standing on a mountain and I keep climbing but I'm never quite sure that I'm not just about to slip and fall and get hurt all over again.

I do wonder at the consequences of allowing myself to fall to such a scary place-will I ever be able to not be scared of being abandoned? I have created such walls within me, I'm not sure that they can ever be knocked down. On the one hand, that seems good-it seems more adult, more sensible. Not to dwell on it, but my marriage had many, many glaring warning signs that I chose to ignore, for reasons that I understand but that are not healthy in the least.

On the other hand, that seems lonely.

It's such a dance-figuring out how much of this is about figuring out things about myself, and how much of it is about allowing someone new in. I don't want to mess it up. I don't want to undo all of the work that I've done to get to this point.

There is a feeling that comes of someone having your back that cannot be replicated even with the genuine joy that comes of standing on your own two feet.

I had forgotten that.

When you are the only one to do all the things, you simply go about doing them. In the beginning, you remember what it felt like for there to be two adults, but for me, in the past two and a half years, I have just gotten used to carrying in all the groceries and doing all the cleaning and all the laundry and helping with the homework and just all of the bits and pieces that go into being a grownup. This is not to say that my girls don't help-they definitely do, and I would be lost without them. But they are kids still, and reliant on me to keep it together.

I found myself telling someone last week that I worry that people look at me like I have some sort of strength, like I manage to keep the girls and myself alive and fed and what have you, and if they only knew how scared and confused and worried I am, they would lose all respect for me. And, of course, as the words were leaving my lips, I realized how vain I sounded. Likely anyone who knows me from reading this blog realized long ago that I don't have any idea what I'm doing, and that I'm fumbling along this path much at my own peril.

For now, for right this minute, I'm going to hold onto the joy that I'm feeling, and try my best not to overthink every second of my life. In the end, I may get hurt, and I may fall all over again, but it's a chance I have to take if I don't want to just stay stuck on the side of the mountain forever.