Doing Things

Impulsively, I bought a ticket to the FKA Twigs performance in Chicago on November 15, and used travel funds from a canceled flight from last February to buy a plane ticket, and reserved a room and a car, and arranged to go to Chicago from Nov. 14 to Monday, Nov,. 18. In typical fashion, I am now feeling anxious about that maneuver. I have another couple of days to cancel the trip for free, and I'm tempted. It's weird, too, because I also really want to go. I am alternating between feeling like it'll be a great thing to do and you only live once, versus a sense of wanting to consolidate, save money and energy and "be sensible." I did work in a brief visit to the Chicago Botanic Garden, where my application for a post doc is being considered, and the PI with whom I would be working is interested in meeting with me, and introducing me to a student of his who is working in Cactaceae. But it's not a scheduled interview and I am not feeling like I am a strong candidate for that opportunity, so, really, I mostly did that just to try to justify the trip. The room is only about $225 for four nights, and it's in a guesthouse a block from the lake, in what looks like a great neighborhood. 

Still don't know what to do, but maybe I'll decide or just let inaction decide for me and just go. 

Prostate cancer follow up was good news, with PSA levels back within the relatively normal range, at 3.6. I still might have the one year follow up biopsy, or I might wait for year two, which is the conservative recommendation these days. Consultation appointment for cataract surgery tomorrow morning, and it will be great to ge that out of the way. Manuscripts moving toward being ready to submit for publication. 

A friend of mine is visiting from the 8th to the 11th, and then another friend is visiting the afternoon of the 11th, and I met yet another friend for lunch yesterday, so it's been weirdly social. The friend visiting from the 8th to the 11th will be staying here, and we've skirted romantic interest in each other for years, but this visit feels 100% platonic, which seems to be the only thing I can handle these days, battered, bruised and bewildered as I am. She and I have always been 100% up front about where we are in life, and I find it so much easier to enjoy people's company after a couple years of CoDA recovery too. "I am not emotionally available and look forward to seeing you but I don't think I'll want to be physical and I'm absolutely in no shape for a relationship." Sentences I have traditionally not been able to utter. I feel capable of causing a lot less harm than I used to, which harm often arose out of my selfish desire to get what I wanted without regard to either my own or the other person's well being. Combined with my tendency to want to be nice, and do what people want me to do, so they will like me; a tendency that also causes harm. I also will have to work while she is visiting, and instead of being weird about that, I communicated it, which helps relieve a lot of my anxiety. In the past, I probably would have thought I had to clear the schedule for the visit but then been anxious and wishing I could get some work done the entire time. 

I finally girded my loins and bought a new(ish) car, a 2013 Subaru Crosstrek. I had been wanting a Toyota Tacoma, but the Crosstrek is pretty highly rated for offroad, and it has great gas mileage. The one I snagged is in great shape, it seems, knock on wood. It's so weird to be driving a car with air conditioning, a stereo, etc. Like, a rental car., But it's mine. Well, it's the bank's. 

The next thing on my list is to buy some clothes. The last time I bought myself a new shirt was 2011. People have given me shirts as gifts or whatever. Well, I did buy a special button down shirt back in August of 2017 sort of in response to a request, but that shirt accrued some weird symbolic significance and last New Year's Eve I incinerated it. Haha. So, I want to get some new clothes. Maybe I will be more comfortable and confident at interviews if I look a little bit less like a poverty stricken grad student, although I'm sure that people, especially interviewing for post doc positions, are used to that. It amazes me how expensive nice shirts are though. Wtf? It's a shirt. But it is what it is. 

One other self care thing I've continued is canceling all screen time about 90 minutes before bed. I cheat sometimes, but in general, I haven't had any technology in the bedroom with me at all, overnight. That has been very helpful. Facebook continues to be a mixed bag. Sometimes it can still feel so fucking toxic, but generally my approach has been to post and run, and not get into much stuff with anyone. I do sometimes scroll through other people's posts, but that can be fraught. 

Storage unit now for down comforter, car title, printer. Doing things. Might as well. Why not? 

The Big Getting It

Talking at or past or around. It's strange how it feels. There's an effort involved. It's not only about common ways we construe successful interactions, like "understanding," or "being heard." There's an extra element. 

Getting it. 

I have started insisting on that element if I am going to spend much energy to get intimate with someone, friend or otherwise. And it's an absolute, in a lot of ways, because it can't be manufactured out of conversation. Consensus or improved understanding can, definitely. Or at least a kind of shared whiteboard with certain things in common, illuminated and in clear print. But the real thing, getting it, happens. It doesn't take labor, effort, negotiation or explanation.

It's similar to a joke in that way. There's people who get a joke, and there's people who do not. There's not really anything in between. And the people who get it need no more words, and the people who do not get it, well, no matter how much explanation, that mysterious moment of getting it will never happen. Other moments are possible. It's even possible those who did not get it will eventually laugh and say, "Oh, haha, I get it now, thanks." But the real juice, just getting it? Never going to happen. 

I am looking back on my life and realizing that I didn't really pay attention to this a lot of the time. I figured, well, it's too much to ask, that the people I pay attention to get me. And that I get them. I have long reinforced my own sense of how "weird" or "different" or even isolated I am, by staying in efforts and attempts with people who just do not get it. Social media sure presents a shit ton of chances for people to just not fucking get it. More than anything, I think that's the issue that reinforces loneliness for me, on social media. 

I'm not talking about disagreeing or engaging in other ways. Those dynamics are rooted in getting it, when they are at their best. There's the disagreement that arises out of not getting it, and then the labor of trying to reach a common language, and sometimes, with some people, that labor is worth doing. Most of the time, it's a fucking waste of time, and I engage less and less with those efforts. I operate from a whole set of axioms. It can be exhausting to try to get someone up to speed on those axioms and find out what theirs are. Sometimes worth it, sometimes not. 

Then there's getting it. I know many friends who get at least parts of it. There's my free jazz friends who get that, who at least seem to. Cactus and botany friends who get all of that. Recovery friends who seem to get that. Etc. So compartmentalized getting it is definitely possible and can be okay, even if partial. It is demonstrably true that a great many of my cactus friends do not get my radical, patriarchy dismantling politics, that is for damn sure. There are some compartments that very rarely even come close to each other, let alone lend themselves to natural understanding. 

But getting it for real is way beyond these compartments and categories. Getting it and being gotten with another person is a global experience, a 360 degree intuition. There can be moments or even entire areas where there is a lack of understanding, but that doesn't affect the overall, global getting it. My oldest friends from elementary school and college both get me in the global way, and the details sort themselves out. 

But I have tried to go for the deepest connections possible with some people who I think just did not get me, nor I them. I took partial understanding and some compartments, both ways, and told myself it was okay, the Big Getting It was not realistic anyway, and not to be expected. After all, you're weird, no one ever gets you. 

The last partnership had a lot of this. A definitely understood certain things about me, and I understood things about her. But the two of us did not get each other. And yet we tried to make a life together, and spent almost six years "working on" getting each other. 

This is exactly like trying to explain a joke for six years. 

I'm acutely aware of it now. I can't picture ever trying something so futile as that again. It's lonely, it's too much work, the joke isn't funny if it has to be explained, everything has to be limned out and explained, everything has that risk of falling flat. Big huge swaths of deeply held values can easily be abandoned or left clunking around, misunderstood. A, for example, never got how I can be simultaneously the most optimistic, compassionate, kind, tender, vulnerable and idealistic person as well as dark, cynical, into the darkest and most grotesque humor, sarcasm, and the darkest comedy. I never got how earnest she was about everything. Her intellect does not play around, and mine is always playing around. These are not trivial differences. 

Lately, I've made a point of sharing things that are important to me with people I am somewhat interested in or attracted to and observing very carefully if they get it or not. Or exploring what they love and are enthusiastic about and seeing if I get it or not. I don't have to like it, or agree with them about it being incredible, but do I get it? Do I get them? Do they indicate that they get me? This is not trivial. I've abandoned the requirement so many times that it astonishes me. I've also taken it for granted. I am not inclined that way anymore. I have known a lot of people who tried, and with whom I tried. I can see the practical benefits of trying, with certain people. But not with my intimates. No wonder I have had deep trust issues in so many of the most intimate connections I have "tried to" form. We just didn't really get it. 

If I am going to go deep with anyone from now on, itself a doubtful proposition, but if I am, I don't want to always be explaining the goddamned joke. 

My Foolish Heart

Fuckin' A, I have been dealing with a wealth of anger and self criticism, combined with embarrassment and shame. I hadn't exactly identified what was going on until I went to Prescott for a couple days and pretty much avoided social media. It was funny, because I had resolved to greatly reduce my social media time and be more introverted up there, but then I tried to use the hotel wi-fi and it didn't work, and I felt betrayed. Like, I wanted it to be MY CHOICE to avoid social media, not because I COULDN'T get online. We can be odd that way. 

As it was, I spent most of the time eating, sleeping, reading the extraordinary Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet (which I had heard of only because it was burned by idiot white people at Georgia Southern U), and feeling angry. I had some radioactive sentimentality around A, since Prescott was a "romantic weekend getaway" town for us when we were together. In fact, we had reservations for Valentine's 2017 before she dumped me to fuck my former college roommate. I was somewhat surprised by the various memories of our visits there. One in particular, when she was waiting to hear about her post-MBA job with the big corporation where she's now an executive, and they were delaying, and she was distraught on the way home, sobbing so hard with disappointment that we had to pull over. A day or two later they did call and offer her the job, but the whole thing cast a weird pall over Prescott. 

I had wild dreams, both of the nights I was there. Deeply numinous, symbolic, disturbing and feeling cathartic. In one dream, I was attempting to make amends to A over the phone, and she was moaning and moaning, having orgasm after orgasm, as if that was the appropriate response. It was super strange. There were many other very vivid dreams that I failed to write down. I consciously avoided lying in bed, scrolling on my phone, and I think that opened up a big space for my unconscious to show up. I think I'll avoid screen time for an hour or two before bed for a while. 

As I kept experiencing the anger, I was finally able to put my finger on the cause. I was cutting into myself, angry at my own gullibility and foolishness, as I was characterizing it. My enduring tendency to believe what people say to me rather than observe their behavior. My easily hopeful response when a kind word is spoken every several days or so as proof, in spite of days or months on end of being way down on people's lists. Of blaming myself for things that are not my fault. Of feeling ashamed and foolish for having a wild and open heart willing to take risks. 

It was important to me to make contact with this and realize how poisonous my own company was. I have since started easing out of a lot of that excoriation. But I still look back on parts of my life and wince and just feel like a goddamned idiot. Like, dude, the writing could not have been more clear on the wall. What incredible contortions I went to, to try to ignore it or minimize it. How blinded I can be by a promise, a statement, a sentence, as if it is a tiny floating scrap of wood to grab onto in the middle of a goddamned ocean of indifference. 

I look forward to releasing a lot of this feeling of being a fucking idiot. I want to learn from it. I want to be far more discerning, self protective and sharply realistic in the future. I don't want to be overly guarded or bitter or mistrusting, but I definitely want to take whatever fuckers say to me with a grain of salt, and watch the goddamned movie with the sound off. Lean harder into the actual behavior. BELIEVE what people show me. 

It has become brightly obvious to me that people really do show me who they are. All I have to do is believe them and stop buying the bullshit that they speak with their mouths. This has been such a self-destructive and toxic pattern in my life. Awful especially because of course human beings are capable of saying anything at all. As I've mentioned before, if one is also capable of *believing anything at all*, well, it's a recipe for a fuck of a lot of gullible fucking foolishness. He said, kindly, to himself. 

And another area where a lot of anger was coming up for me was around the strange endeavor of wishing it were true, or wondering whether or a bunch of experiences in my past were true and real, let alone the words, at so many junctures of my life. And then it hit me: judge by the fruits. Judge by the results. Of course it wasn't fucking true or real. Stop making excuses for people. Stop being Mr. Existential who rescues the appearances by strategies like "well, it was true at the time, but it isn't now," or whatever. That is just noise. Judge by the fruits. As harsh as it may seem, look at who is showing up for you. If they aren't showing up, then fuck whatever they said in the past. The truth is right here in my face. I simply have to accept it. One can't be important to people and be disposable at the same time. One can't be loved and not worth someone's time. One can try to tell oneself a thousand stories to make these things true. True love is measured in attention, time, interest, connection, appearance. Showing up. Asking. Wanting to know. Giving time and attention. True love has nothing to do with utterances. People can say any goddamned thing any time. 

But the truth is, people show me how important to them I am. It doesn't matter what they say. If people behave like I'm disposable and an afterthought, then that is simply what I am. All the words in the world, no matter how much I might want to hear them, mean jack shit. I *know* in my mind that love is a verb. I feel like I'm getting it in my guts. 

The Straight Life

I drove way over to Chandler last night to get some New Mexican food at a pretty good place over there—chicken enchiladas, Hatch chile, not too bad—and drove by A's house on the way back, curious and feeling like maybe I would get some kind of something from driving through that neighborhood. 

A has completely landscaped the front yard with xeric plants, a great choice, but it looks super manicured. Not my style at all. Then I saw the house itself, embedded in its suburban context, very peaceful, nice and quiet. And it suddenly was starkly, completely clear to me. 

I fucking hated it there. I mean, it was quiet, and it was amazing living in a house that my partner had bought, not having a landlord, and having a yard. But really, overall, I was just pretending, the entire time. There's no art anywhere, there's no culture. It's just a suburban neighborhood where no one talks to anyone else, no one visits, everyone's yard is nice and clean and manicured (even though there is no HOA), everyone parks their cars actually in their garage, etc. Everyone is white. There's no community at all. No music, no one out walking, ever, really, which, looking back, just feels so weird and surreal. I used to go out walking every night, and I'd go running several times a week. I am recalling now that, most times, I would be completely alone for entire three mile runs and long, 90 minute walks. 

I think this settled, rooted, isolated and somewhat class conscious life must be important to A. I think she loves it there, not sure. I would rather live either a little more out in the desert or in a more urban area, such as where I am now, with the train going by, an artist landlady, a funky place, near a university. 

It's wild that I thought I had to pretend to live that straight life in dull fuckin' whitebread suburbia. It's a big part of why the partnership failed. We never went anywhere any more. We used to go to art openings, concerts, plays, bookstores. But Chandler is like Stepford, and it really became clear to me driving by last night that I just hated it. I hated the way she kept the house, all squared away and boring. I hated the way she controlled everything, including my diet. I hated the schedule of chores, the whole deal. Hated all of it. Haha. It hurt to lose it at the time, very badly, because it was so placid, comfortable, supportive and such an oasis of relative peace after a lot of scruffy living for me. But give me scruffy. 

And I want a partner someday, if I ever have a partner again, who wants plays, reading aloud to each other, poetry, painting, mess, concerts, weird friends, probably in an actual city that has actual culture to offer. A partner who is clean but not a control freak, who can be spontaneous, who doesn't wrap her diet and everyone else's up in duct tape. Who is affectionate and emotionally available and warm. Who isn't obsessed with work and social climbing. I've had much better domestic matches in the past, and while those partnerships were problematic, at least, for the most part, I felt far more at home and congruent, culturally. 

The straight life is not for me, even though I am sober. I do not live a straight life even though I live a sober life. I can't take the pretending. The lawn mowing, the wall scrubbing and painting, the towel rack shopping, the menu planning. I admire people who can do it, sure. But whenever I try to do it, I am always play acting and pretending, and it always kills my soul. 

32 fucked months

I was reflecting a little on the initial impulse for this blog, way way back in March of 2017, when there was a heavy astrological transit just starting, and I had lost my entire personal life in a very painful breakup. Then I was thinking about what a weird trip it has been, and how many challenges along the way. 

-diagnosed with depression
-realization of codependency issues
-serious difficulties finishing my prospectus and defending it
-moving into a house with a man who was in early sobriety and had just lost his partner to suicide months previously
-in the middle of grinding lab work to prepare a full plate of DNA extractions
-working with several different software packages for the first time, using challenging data and methods, experiencing repeated frustrations for months
-pretty much constantly fighting impostor syndrome, raging self doubt, incredibly low self esteem and a repeated, almost daily urge to just quit everything, including life
-tumbling through the grief around the breakup with A, and then major and unexpected discovery of what I still think of as the most important connection of my life
-but trying to navigate that through the dark
-losing that
-diagnosed with prostate cancer
-detached retina and months of complications
-enormous struggles whipping the dissertation into shape
-now, as that draws to a fairly smooth close, trying to move forward on preparing manuscripts for submission to journals
-engaging in a constant job search involving writing and re-writing to customize research goals, teaching statements, etc.
-an almost daily experience of doing new things that I have never done before and never with a feeling of being truly prepared
-no idea where I will be living come December 15, only a little more than two months from now

That's an overview. The internal states have been truly desperate and awful a lot of the time. Less so since the glories of the road trip this summer, with a lot of softening up, opening up, and the ability to just grieve and be more accepting of how things are. Moving out of the last place, as nice as it was, was very important for me. Too many associations. The new place, although temporary, has been great. 

The things I have managed to do in spite of everything include remain loving and open, kind and compassionate. Remain friends with people. Stay sober, work on emotional sobriety, continue to recover from codependency. Practice self care fairly well with healthy food, sleep hygiene, meditation. Maintain recovery community connections. Stay focused in spite of repeated setbacks with the dissertation and just keep plugging away, with as positive an attitude as possible. Keep looking for work in spite of fierce competition and not much response. 

I am fairly amazed that, with the mysterious universe's help, I've managed to show up for all of this. One day at a time, sometimes more like one hour at a time. 

Heartbroken but still breathing. 

Committed to Memory

Once, when I was meeting a friend of mine and this friend's three year old daughter, in a city I had never been to before, I had no coffee at all in my chilly hotel room, and had to face the crowds of "free breakfast" guests in the lobby. I had traveled away from sunny Arizona, and I woke up in the early morning to grey skies, drizzle, and temperatures in the 50's. But the heat, which was central to the whole hotel and not able to be controlled in one's room, was not on, and I was amazed by how cold I was and how warm everyone else seemed. 

This was a strangely designed hotel, with all of the rooms for several floors arranged around a central courtyard, in which was a little fake river, and a pond with fish in it with a little footbridge over the pond, and a breakfast area where a few men, black and Latinx chefs, one of whom wore an actual chef's hat, made one's "free" breakfast to order. It has always been extremely onerous for me to put clothes on, venture to public spaces for coffee, and handle the morning in that way. I've taken to traveling everywhere (when I go by car) with a little red coffee pot I bought in Alamos, Sonora. I have found that, even in upscale, more expensive hotels, the in-room coffee service is usually just not reliable. 

The travel coffee pot. Next to a pink Eiffel Tower. 

In fact, it is so unpleasant for me to either have shitty in-room coffee or venture out into the public in the morning, that this particular visit, on day one, involved a weirdly unforgettable trip to Target, of all places, in the pouring rain. 

There is a sense of the mundane and even tiresomely banal having been suffused with absolute magic from this particular visit, and for a long time, I tried to talk myself out of it, but now I just accept that it was what I experienced. Each and every memory, including a forgettable, comfort food lunch in a vividly remembered cafe in an old house, outside of which were towering, huge sunflowers. A flying spoon. A park next to a river. The smell of leaves in autumn in a place that has autumn, months before Arizona even has late summer. A trip to the theater. A balcony in the warming October sun. Weirdly, a vivid memory of paying for parking using a phone app. The local higher end grocery store with colorful skulls in which were planted Haworthia limifolia. 

My friend arrived with her child after I was already well-caffeinated. Her daughter was quite shy, which is totally understandable. A weird hotel with a little river and a pond with fish, a glass elevator, a strange man. Somehow, what seemed the best thing to do for this child, was to sneak my colorful foam earplugs (another travel necessity) off my nightstand and then try to hide them behind a chair. Exactly what she was thinking, and why this seemed to be just the way to handle the weird situation in which she found herself, I will never know. 

Was there something particularly magical about these soft foam shapes? Did they seem almost edible, or as if they would be sweet? Did they seem important in some other way? And why was the impulse to try to hide them? Was there the thought that, once hidden, then, later, she would be able to sneak them out of the room? Was she just the messenger from the universe telling me to listen more, to listen closely?

I recall my friend intervening and admonishing that the magic items ought to be put back where they were. And I think my friend's kid was resentful and reluctant, but went ahead and did indeed put them back. I know that I said she could have them, but warned that they had been jammed in my ears, and so were probably germy, and so her having them was probably not the greatest idea. 

I don't recall exactly where the three of us went this particular morning, but it was probably the park by the river. I spent a lot of time alone on this visit to this strange city, in the autumn, wandering the streets, without a car and without any kind of plan. I also stood at my hotel window and watched people come and go at the liquor store on the corner. One of those urban, lottery ticket selling, half grocery store liquor stores, where some who went in were just buying milk, or bread, and some, cigarettes, and some, liquor. 

It was a brief visit, but, again for reasons I am not trying to understand or figure out, generated a series of indelible, unforgettable memories. Sometimes we pass through experiences in our lives that just have a lot more numinous weight and shape to them and that's that. 

It occurs to me that there is a great temptation to avoid experiences that will have this kind of weight, because whether one speaks it, or even intends it, one is making a serious commitment. The commitment is not to a person, or a future. It's a commitment to the past. To assent to always carrying it. To know, well, if I go ahead and do this, I'll maybe never forget it. And that means it will always be with me. There isn't much that's always with us. But what is, what we cannot remove or forget, is the kernel of our story, and there's no heavier commitment than that. People come and go, earplugs vanish and reappear, coffee pots and rainstorms in retail parking lots and curtain calls and October light—it's all ephemeral. 

But some times become us, and as long as there is us, so those times are. And I think the universe is kind enough to ask, first, "are you sure?" and sometimes, for which I am grateful, I've been brave enough to say, yes, of course. 

Love and Delight

I just finished Ocean Vuong's novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous,  and was reminded by the incredibly tender, honest, immediate, passionate, shy, yet bold love story therein of a very simple place in life. It's when we meet and get to know someone in whom we, quite simply, delight. 

Love, romantic and otherwise, has felt clouded and heavy for me for a good while now, and one of the great gifts of Vuong's novel was the reminder that, at its best, this wild, fierce, gentle and direct encounter with a single other human being is really just about sheer unquestioning appreciation, the natural desire to be in their presence, the way being in their presence has that feeling of home, of welcome, of natural and easy time, spent in simple delight. Vuong captures these plain, unfettered experiences very well, and it was a wonderful thing to be reminded of. 

It may well be that circumstances complicate these simple feelings, sometimes quickly. Like Blake's Sick Rose, these immediate joys can be destroyed, and the arc of many of my partnerships has been similar: what starts out as flat out joy and appreciation, delighting in the everything-ness of someone, their way of talking, thinking, laughing, their smell, their taste, their humor, their way of being in the world in all ways, has often, eventually, become fraught, problematic, troublesome or heavy, one way or the other. This also reminds me of Seamus Heaney's Blackberry Picking. 

Blackberry-Picking

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

***

I have no idea what it is that creeps in between me and the sheer delight I initially feel for particular women (I'd say, a total of four, in the sense of utterly clear, unfettered, simple, unmitigated delight in who they were). But it has been a regular pattern. I suspect it is "presumption born of boredom," as one of my tarot card reading guidebooks warns about the Four of Cups, that sulking, sullen lad turning down one of four perfectly fine cups with which he has been presented. 

I do know that, through a series of deeply altering forgiveness and equanimity meditations last spring and early summer, I discovered, as I wrote about here, that I had never gotten truly free from a few of my earliest attachments, which were absolutely rooted in sheer delight. I also felt, somewhat surprisingly and with a sense of deep resistance, as I read Vuong's novel, the realization that I had not yet properly grieved an ex who has died, and with whom I thought I had reached settlement. An astrologer told me once that my Capricorn Moon means I never forget anything, ever, and that it takes me forever to process things, emotionally. The entire past 31 months in my little trip through Hades seems to bear this out. Well, truly, the entire past 42 years or so bear it out. 

The most important thing in the midst of CoDA recovery work and inventory around my relationships, is for me to be reminded of this simple, joyful, admiring, appreciative, delighted spark that has drawn me to people, friends or otherwise, but especially women with whom I pursued a romance. Even if subsequent reality can sometimes become quite heavy, dark, troubled, problematic and often, impossible, it all starts with that simple, innocent, unmediated and pure impulse of delight. 

And this realization is quite timely, as I recall some of the happiest experiences of my life from two years ago this exact week. I don't need to resist, interrogate, diminish, dismiss or otherwise be in some sort of oppositional mode in regard to the plain and simple fact that they were, in fact, some of the happiest experiences of my life. It's okay that they were. It's true that they were. And that's enough to honor. Another reminder and gift from Vuong's novel: we must honor the truth of our own experience. It is crucial to our sense of wholeness to hold the truth of it close, and not talk ourselves out of it. 

Sorcery and other hobbies

I've been feeling very introverted, intuitive and tender lately. I can easily be more powerfully somewhere else than my actual physical location, the past week or so. It's a time of very much living in my imagination, and in my gut sense of things. Probably a natural side effect of a lot of work on the PhD becoming much more streamlined and focused, and spending a tremendous amount of time alone. 

There's been a lot of nostalgia, also, and some memories blazing, banked high. It hasn't bothered me. There's a phase of grief and loss where the memories sting or even stab, and feel like the sharpest knife. Then there's a phase where one can also remember, and be amazed, and wonder how in hell such things were even possible, and be glad. I'm not there 100% of the time, but even a few months ago such a grateful recollection wasn't even conceivable. 

I lack the sharp mental focus I really ought to have, to be more efficiently honing the dissertation, but I am working anyway. It is what it is, and has to be as good as it is, and that's that. Some fascinating employment opportunities are out there that I have applied to, or I'm in the process of applying. A couple of long shots, a couple of probably good fits, who knows. It's all just a matter of rolling the dice. 

I got the impulse to go to Chicago to see FKA Twigs in November, since I had unused travel funds from a canceled trip last February, tickets to her show are only $34, the tour is getting incredible rave reviews, I never go to concerts like that, I've never been to Chicago, and she's not doing any shows out west. So I booked a flight, a car, a room on the lake, and I'll be there for the weekend, Nov. 14–18. Why not? It turns out Roscoe Mitchell is doing a show the same weekend, so I bought tickets to that also. Talk about contrast. 



Mostly I am simply not resisting the hermit energy of this time. I'm not trying to do anything, really. Intuition is extremely sensitive, as a result. My mind is pretty quiet, which is unusual for me. I guess it's the benefits of a regular meditation practice. Maybe just a phase. I'll take it, over the relentless discomfort and pain, as well as astronomical highs, of the past while.  

from the Marigold Tarot by Amrit Brar

Offering and Moving On

Another aspect to going where one is invited is related to issuing an invitation oneself. After the invitation, there are a lot of levels of entanglement that are possible. "Would you like to spend your life with me?" There's a lot of possible answers to that question, including grey areas between yes and no, or let's talk about it again in a while, or I would like to, but I can't, or. All of the maybes can be kind of tough to figure out sometimes. But I've been realizing a few things around this whole theme of being invited and issuing invitations. 

One is that I have been too afraid of rejection at certain times to issue a clear, committed invitation. The other is that I do have a long history of issuing invitations that are not accepted, as well as turning down invitations issued to me, or accepting them grudgingly, etc. The whole exchange has not been free and easy for me, on either side. 

It occurred to me yesterday that the simplicity, clarity and solidity of issuing an invitation and being told no and then accepting tat no and moving on is a difficult cycle for me. I'm not skilled at accepting rejection, at not getting what I want, at not "creating the outcome" that I feel I ought to be able to create. 

But the phrase went through my mind last evening: "In these situations in your life, you made it clear what you wanted, you offered it, and it was turned down. There is actually nothing more to do than that. After it's turned down, that, my friend, is that."

It's maybe perfectly clear to some people that this is how life works, but it came as a revelation for me. So the flip side of not chasing is of course just accepting rejection. The gift I offered was refused. That's that. 

As stinging and stark as that seems, it's also freeing and very clear. And it cuts through that repeated experience I had when I was a child and then a young adult, into the present, of constantly trying to offer my gifts to people who are unable or uninterested in accepting them. I have tended to be extremely attentive, very generous with my time and interest, wen I am into someone. I want all of their gifts. I think there have been some who have wanted the same from me, and I've been unwilling to give. And then I have given, and they have been unwilling to show up. 

The meeting of these energies isn't perfect, of course. But in general, it feels to me now that it is not just going where one is invited, but also having the courage to offer and then the resilience to accept rejection. This whole cycle has been one I have shied away from many times. It has kept me from trying to publish writing, from being more active in music, from pursuing people I was interested in, from letting go and moving on from people who have said no to me. 

The boiler plate remedy for codependence is often said to be "letting go." But I think letting go has a ton of different dimensions. I think one form of letting go is to either accept an invitation or clearly say no. Another form of letting go is to courageously issue an invitation and then accept rejection if it is turned down. Moving in these ways through interactions that are worn more lightly, where, one feels, no matter the outcome, one will probably be okay. 

A trip, for sure. 

The bathroom at the Shamrock Country Inn, Shamrock, Texas. Do you think it's inviting?