A Little Dark

There are days where I just totally freak out.  We get a letter saying our taxes were under-assessed and our mortgage payment is going to go up by twice the raise I just received and, Jesus, how are we going to pay for that now that E. is going back to school full time and not working anymore.  And I look around and think we have not had much good news, financially, for a long time now.  I wonder what the hell.  I have worked pretty dang hard for a long time now and shouldn't things be easier.  Why are we so cursed.

The negativity comes in waves:  My grandmother died on the floor by herself, and maybe suffered for a good long time.  I sometimes imagine her body on the floor, and wonder if I should have gone up to see it before the coroner got to the house.  I wonder if it says something about my character that I didn't.

I am sick again at the end of the semester, horrible sick, stomach flu and respiratory sick.  I hear judge-y voices in my head who say this is my fault for working too much and not resting enough.  I tell them to buzz off because sometimes you just catch a freaking virus, okay?

Sometimes I get really lonely for my girlfriends, for the women who know me and all my fears and fuck-ups and who don't need a bunch of back-story and who come and drag me out of my house and take me places.

The kitchen needs work and the house needs painting and the fence should be replaced.  The big dog's anti-seizure medicine costs $80 a month and the little dog has a weird itch on his back but I don't want to take him to the vet for fear he'll need Botox injections or something that will send us off some financial cliff.  Or, God, it's another tumor and he's going to die.

Sometimes I'm plagued with doubts about having moved us here.  Every time the girls have troubles or E. falters on his way towards reinvention or we get a bill I didn't expect or I have a bad day at work, there is a little voice that says, see, you should have stayed.  Who do you think you are.

The pain feels extra painful.  The dark extra dark.  And the crutches I used to use--the drinking, the buying, the eating--they just aren't as interesting or useful anymore.

But here's the thing.  The dark is extra dark but also the light is extra light.  I walk down the street here with a stupid goofy grin on my face because while I am not always happy I am frequently full of joy.  The colors feel brighter and my days don't whiz by in a creepy blur and I'm interested in my life.  The smallest things--riding the cruiser around town, cheering at Nolie's soccer game, drinking coffee in the sun--fill me with intense pleasure.

That sounds crazy.

What I mean is that I think living with a whole lot more uncertainty (but maybe also less fear) makes me feel more alive.  We were rich when we lived in Colorado but I think I spent a lot of time feeling dead inside.  I guess we were living with uncertainty, too, but I had surrounded myself with a pretty thick layer of routine and numbing and security.

If the bad can't get in, though, the good can't either.

This has not been an easy lesson to learn.  I really dislike discomfort and pain and sadness and embarrassment and shame and failure.  Here they are in my face a lot.  It's like every day is a mother fucking adventure in what-the-hell-is-going-to-happen-now.

Everyday is a mother fucking adventure.

That doesn't sound so bad.

I don't know what I'm going to get from one day to the next, or how I will handle it, or what kinds of grace or mercy I'm going to need next.  That feels a lot like being alive.

Martha Beck says this:

"Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive, and expansive. It’s different from unwilling suffering the way the sting of disinfectant is different from the sting of decay; the pain leaves you healthier than it found you."

Maybe all this is just me getting healthy.

Here's the other thing.  I'm pretty sure I believed strongly in "meritocracy" as life philosophy.  I believed if you were good, people would be good back, and if you did everything right and paid your bills and showed up and checked the boxes, good things would happen to you.

Cheryl Strayed, who doesn't believe in God but to me is a beautiful incarnation of God herself, writes in Tiny Beautiful Things, "To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion....  It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising--the very half that makes rising necessary--is having first been nailed to the cross."

I'm not saying I'm Jesus here, of course.  Or that our challenges have even been that bad, in relative terms.  I am saying that I have spent a whole lot of time trying to prevent bad things from happening to me by being good, believing that if something bad happened it was because I was not good enough.

But no.  The darkness is not your punishment.  It is your friend.  The dark things are what lead you to the light.  The cross is what leads you to redemption.

The flipside of trying to always do "right" is I feel like I spent most of my life barreling through to-do lists, forcing things to happen by sheer force of will without even being sure I actually wanted them to happen.  There was so much supposed to happening there.  I'm not talking about morality; I still think we strive to be our best selves, whenever possible, and to not hurt others, and to be kind and loving.  But for a long time I was being someone else's version of that best self.

That is a lifetime of conditioning that needs undoing, because shoulds and supposed to's are dulling mechanisms.  Figuring out what you actually want, apart from what you think you should do, is much more interesting.  And radical.  And terrifying.  And good.