Coming of Age

27.May.2009

“I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am—where one begins…”

–Rilke

 

“Not long ago I was looking at photos of myself at various ages and weights—way before the neckular deterioration began, way before the fanny pack of menopause—and I could see how gorgeous I must have looked to everyone else…Twenty years! Why did it take me so long to discover what a dish I was?”

–Anne Lamott

 

I’m finally starting to feel like an adult.  I’ll be twenty-five in three weeks.  The other day I bought a green shirt.  I put it on, did my hair and looked in the mirror.  It was the first time in my life that I actually looked like an adult, really, truly.  I’m not sure why I’ve never felt that way before; I’ve often felt a little mature for my age.   The moment seemed magical.  This shirt is the color of a freshly painted kelly-green tractor and my eyes reflect it perfectly.  I was wearing my favorite eye shadow.  My hair was wavy and pulled back loosely, my neck was framed by a pair of beautifully artistic earrings I bought at a market in New Zealand.   I was showing off my newly acquired sun-kissed (burn) glow. About four days a week I go through my twenty-minute beauty ritual, which includes actually washing my face, applying light make-up and not hiding my hair with a headband.  I guess this was one of those days where I cared enough to put on the earrings.

There I found myself, standing in my bathroom staring at this woman in the mirror.  She was no longer a young woman, no longer a girl. She had lived many lives, left things behind and had many adventures ahead of her.  She was someone I felt that I had known once, or would know in the future, but in this moment she was a stranger.  I paused for a moment in front of my mirror and stood up a little straighter.  This woman looking back at me had a glimmer of wisdom, endurance and other things that continue to remain unnamed but add up to beautiful.   She held herself with true confidence and I was startled when I learned that I was her. 

I’ve read a lot of books, been on plenty of airplanes and endured some big stuff, but never have I fully seen myself as an adult.  I don’t know that I’ve ever felt really at home in my own skin, but in this brief moment I did.  I haven’t been able to shake the feeling. It feels like it’s haunting me. This adult-looking-ness is new to me. I just don’t feel “there” yet, even though I don’t know where “there” is.   I’ve been walking taller, standing a little prouder but still something in me is screaming at myself to slow down!  Something is telling me to just stop, to just rest.  In my heart I want to pace myself, allow myself to learn, make mistakes, to endure the moments as they happen with all their messy emotions and unnecessary dramas.    I want to embrace being a twenty-something but for so long I’ve been trying to achieve forty and feeling very far behind.  I think I would rather gather around the women who find themselves truthfully at their age and learn from them what only they can teach me. 

For now I think I will embrace the twenty-five year old woman I see looking back at me through my very own eyes and I will do my best to record my twenty-something dilemmas so that when it is time I will pass on the wisdom I learned about beauty and love and self and life and God.  I will live at peace with now and embrace the surprising beauty as I come of age. 

Remember

26 May 2009

I must remember …

Not to turn my faith into something it is not about

Not to struggle with what should be resting

To keep my head up

To sing the songs I love most

My creator

My creation

That everything is meaningless

That there is more beauty than darkness

I must remember to breathe.  

I Will

22 May 2009

I will sit in the park, at the lake

I will stare at the mountains and their snow.

I will read my words

I will read the words of others

And I will live in love with them.

I will enjoy this day

Dwell in it’s silence

And be haunted by it’s beauty

I will get lost in the blue,

Sky that surrounds me

Today I will love all that is God

And be loved by all that is God

I will.

Possible Reasons for Feeling Dead Inside

7. April. 2009

I woke up this morning

Even though I did not believe it

You were not here

Neither were my eyes open

Something in my core felt cold

Something deep inside felt empty

I didn't dream last night

And it had not been raining

There was no peace

I woke up in a sweat

Too many blankets

I reached, but for nothing

Ad nothing is what I found

And still I cannot validate nothing with firm belief

Those flowers are not real

And there is no one who can love me

Not when they can't see me

Not when I won't let them

Is that why I can't see you?

Feel you?

You won't let me?

Can it be? 

My god is just like me?

Me This Way Too

November 2008

 I see the world in color

In hues of gold and emerald and blue (those are my favorite colors)

And I know that these are all simply hues of you

That all that is right and true shines ☺

But I know that, even though it’s hard to admit

You enter this attic

This place where most days the darkness shines as bright as the night

I’ve searched for a way out

A hole in the floor

But you come in through this door that seems to only have a handle on your side

And you come

And you sit

And when I throw a punch you don’t duck

You never wince when I cry “What the Fuck!?!?!”

You let me shrink back

Into my corner

and wish that I could accept the gift of hope

from my donor

You see I gave all mine away

To little refugee from Pakistan

Whose grandma’s in prison because mama became a Christian

I gave it to the girl whose daddy raped her

I gave it to the baby in India whose mother died in the fire and just needed woman to hold him

I gave it to the 15 year old

Whose daddy dropped off another bottle of wine at the park where all the skaters go

I tried, I tried to give myself some of this hope

But I ended up on a cement floor, cold and with flea bits

And if you want to see my legs, I have the scars to prove it

I ended up broken and with a skewed version of God

Who loves you but lets me fight for myself

Because you see as much as I give,

I find it so hard to accept

Accept that this love I’m sure exists is given by God who fashioned it for me

Who knew that when I was 5

At the first glance of pornography

Knew that hope was something that would be hard for me

But if “God is love and love is real”

Then there has to be a way around this pit

I have not found it

Not yet

But damn it, I will!

Because even though I did this once,

I am not one who shrinks back

I am one who rises to a challenge

That when she is damaged

She ignores the blood

And just keeps on swinging

Because in the end I know this match is won

And even though I’m damn good boxer

I know that this is never going to be fun

So here I sit in my corner

Debating in myself this gift from my donor

The one who lends His eyes , His tears, His voice

And on the best of the worst days, His very life

And I don’t know exactly what this means

But I know that I have to fight

For me, for them

Because the least of these are worth it

With all my might

And so these colors that I’m convinced shine so pretty and bright

Are meant for you and that in giving of these things, my favorite things

Of seeing how the Infinite loves you

Knowing how my heart longs for you

To know…hope

that I have a tendency to love like this God

A God who would give His very life

I sit stunned

Because

It took me dying to see

That even though I don’t think I’ve ever truly believed it

He enters into my displacement

Enters into my innocence rapped

And He does love me this way too

 

Do Not Speak of Casualties

April 17-18, 2009

When Hemingway’s wife lost all his writing he stayed, for a while anyway.  I couldn’t bear that.  When the fire happened and all was lost the only person to blame was someone I didn’t know.  There was no personal connection, no one I could look at daily and hate because they had killed the deepest thing in me—my writing.  This time my computer just crashed, but it is no one’s fault.  I feel bad for the poor mac guy, but I warned him I was going to cry.

I cannot recreate what is gone.  I can only mourn it.  Part of me is dead.  Yet again I encounter a grief that I do not have words for.  I encounter the death of something I loved.  I encounter what I believe to be a living hell.  Will what comes next be so good that it will justify the loss of the last year of work? How about the previous fifteen?

To think, it died as I was backing it up.  This is the cruelest and sickest part.  The part that makes my heart miss more beats than it already does.  This life of mine, it’s a tragedy.  All the tally marks say it’s true. Do I get something good soon?  Am I being set up or conspired against?  I write on paper and it burns.  I write on computer and it crashes.  Why do these bits of me keep evaporating into thin air?

It makes me afraid that I won’t ever be whole again.  Not when I know these pieces of me are lost forever.  Not when I feel like there is no hope of recovery. 

Despite the vivid dream I had last night, my book is still gone.  It has not magically reappeared on my new hard drive.  And despite the three year old tantrum, full of crying and “why is this happening to me! It’s not fair!” my computer is still only a shell of what it was.  It feels like an imposter. They even cleaned the screen.

I am in a state of hysterical denial.  I try to tell someone what happened and I just end in nervous laughter. I’m trying to embracing this place, be here in this moment and not anywhere else. But I just don’t what to be here.  I just don’t want to be in this place of constant sorrow.  The line that keeps running through my head is…

“Oh the pain of searing loss.”

So at what point does my mindset change and how?  I cannot convince myself that it didn’t happen, that it didn’t matter (and by “it” I mean many things.)  But I am a writer.  I know this much to be true and it is my worth right now.  I know my book is not dead, just taking another form.  Going in a different direction.  I wrote about a page today.  I’m not sure how much because I wrote on receipt paper while working and it’s in my pocket right now.  It’s good. It’s a new introduction.  An explanation of where I want the book to go, the impression I want it to leave.  If anything this has made me determined to study writing, maybe go somewhere with it.  However, I still don’t know what that will look like.

 

What will my life be made of?

 

Hemingway taught me never to speak of casualties.  But I’m a girl and I’ve lost everything more than once.  He was sure his early stuff wasn’t that good.  Neither was mine, except that this was not my early stuff.  This was my second round and maybe I am not as humble as him but, the second round was the best stuff I’d written.  

Uncertainty

8.27.08

“All these people who wrote of my life both inner and outer wrote with an absolute assurance that I had never felt.”  -Ernest Hemingway

 

            I have never felt assurance in my life.  I have always been concerned with how things would ebb and flow.  How they would shift beneath my feet or the room would spin around me. I’ve always been aware of how everything can be taken away.  How in my reality nothing is eternal.   I find in myself these thoughts that at any moment I won’t be able to go back home (wherever, whatever that may be?), that all I have will be gone, that those I love will be no more or at least not with me.  While I have this family unit that is mostly free from divorce and all lives in the same tiny area of the world I still have experiences of distance from people and an overwhelming amount of short-term relationships. 

As far as I know I have always been standing on some kind of dry, shifting soil that refuses to let life dig deep with it roots.  I have a family.  Parents that are not divorced.  I lived in the same town, the same house even, my entire life.  And still, security is a word that has always been slightly allusive to me.   Something in me never allowed myself to feel at home.  In my memories I only ever remember shadows of home.  Being someplace that I really know isn’t home, but yet brings me the sense that it is close.  These moments are usually when the scent of salt water fills the air and there are mountains in view.  It has also happened in a small cottage in the mountains of New Zealand surrounded by a family and fireplace.  Every once in a while I find a leather sofa that bears some resemblance to what I believe home could be; but these things were not my roots, the history does not exist in them. 

This is something deep and personal to me.  If my parents and family knew I felt this way they would feel betrayed.  They seem to have a very different view of what my quaint life was. It was full of Christmases and birthday parties and family and happiness and all these things that I simply thought were agonizing or non-existent.   

When I was seventeen I left.  I didn’t run away.  I wasn’t kicked out.  I just left and moved to the next town.  I stepped out on my own as much as I could.  I got to a point when I knew that it wasn’t far enough away.  So I hopped on a plane and flew as far as I could.  I landed in New Zealand and then found my way around the world.  I was surrounded by this makeshift family that I love dearly, but still felt in many ways, very much alone.  As I wound my way around Earth I stopped back in at home, feeling more out of place than ever.  I then packed up one more time and headed for New Zealand again. 

It was in New Zealand that things started to resemble what I suppose “home” should be, but with a major difference.  Now people who came and went just like me surrounded me, only I was planted for a little while.  Thus began an overwhelming amount of people coming and going and while I felt roots beginning to penetrate, the seasons came and went with such a great harshness that the roots were scared to grow and were never fully as strong as maybe they could have been. 

            Here I stand at age twenty-four completely unsure of everything.  I own a very dilapidated wardrobe, some books, a backpack, a laptop and recently acquired a fifty dollar couch.  I borrow my friend’s mattress and I sleep on the floor.  For the last six years I have lived semi-nomadic having slept in fifteen bedrooms that were considered my own (that is not counting three months of mission bases and hostels across the globe).  A year is so long that it makes me ill just thinking about it, therefore commitments are not long ones.  I live in a city that I have never been to before.  I’ve been here four weeks and still don’t have a job.  My money is gone, my friends and I have histories of three weeks, with the exception of one, but we have spent most our relatively short friendship on different continents.   

            For me I guess, life is what is in front of me.  My identity is caught up in what I do.  So when I don’t do anything, then I am nothing.   The part of me that is calm and rational (very small part) knows that this is nonsense.  That actually I am not what I do.  Sadly the other personalities rioting inside of me don’t spend enough time with calm and rational.   My friends are those in front of me.  I have many relationships with people who find themselves all over the world and many of them I love very deeply, but my immediate is my reality.  It is very rare for me to really miss someone, and almost as rare for me to miss a place. 

            So there a few things I seem to feel I am missing.  Security and home I seem to equate with each other.  And yet I am missing the thing, whatever it may be, that makes me want to stay anywhere longer than a couple months.  I seem to fill my backpack with these roots that long for fertile soil.  I have yet to discover a place where they even want to be rooted. 

            What I’ve done is shut the door and started over.  This is the first and only conclusion I have ever come to.  I guess the door is a very solid thing in my mind, but the things that lie on either side of that door are unknown and blurry.