Writer’s Journal

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Let’s Not Forget the Joy

In a long life, if we’re lucky enough to live one, we will go through hard times. Days, weeks, months, hopefully not years, of challenges both big and small. Sometimes the slowly applied weight of small things can crush us in just the same way we are floored by tragedy. This is a fact of life. The Buddha upon leaving the sheltered bubble of his lavish palace, saw the despair of the world and declared that to live is to suffer. Because of the negativity bias that we all carry in our caveman brains, we tend to focus on these sufferings. Remembering that something caused us pain or anxiety or sadness, protects us from going down that path again. If we remember that we had to run from the tiger behind the bush, we won’t pass that bush again. If we remember that the red berries upset our stomach, we won’t eat those berries again. If we remember that a person hurt our hearts, we (hopefully) won’t give that person our heart again. While this protects us, it also makes us focus on the negative at the expense of the positive. We are also equipped with a fight or flight alarm system that is too sensitive and prone to disfunction. It would rather alert you to a potential threat that never materializes than be cautious and allow you to be eaten by the tiger behind the bush. All of this adds up to brains that forget to remember the joy.

Which doesn’t really make sense because you would think we would remember the safe path and the good tasting berries just as strongly as we remember the bad, but it just doesn’t work that way in everyone. In my last post I talked about what a stressful year it has been for my family. How the slowly applied weight of small things has been weighing on my shoulders. But, let’s not forget the joy that sneaks in unacknowledged and lifts just a little of that weight.

When we add a little gratitude to that joy, the weight is lightened even more. I’m not talking about toxic positivity. “Good vibes only” is an impossible and unhealthy goal. We thrive on the whole range of human emotion that moves us to tears or angers us to action. Trying to only look on the bright side is to deny that the dark side exists, which is toxic denial. We are all the light and the dark and should embrace and share both. When we share the darkness, someone else finds a little light there when they realize they aren’t alone. But, some gratitude, some amount of saying, “In spite of the bad, there was this glimmer of good,” can help us to remember the sweetness of those delicious berries.

In my last post I talked about the stress my family and I have been under for the past year. Of course the world has been under a global stress for at least the last three years, but, hasn’t there also been joy? Hasn’t there been something to be grateful for? (I’m not a religious person, so I’m never sure who I’m offering these thanks to. The universe, I suppose.) When I look back over the past year, I can be grateful that we had the resources to have the needed repairs on the house done. That we could afford a new couch. We could provide the kids with the mental and medical support that they needed. I have a warm home, food on the table, and the opportunity to stay home and be a full time mom to my kids. (Which was really my only dream in life. How many people get to live their dream?) All of the chaos of the year would have been made so much worse without the resources to deal with them.

And the year was full of moments of joy. We went out to eat for the first time in two years. We celebrated the kid’s birthdays at restaurants for the first time in two years. We went on our first vacation in three years. I was able to see my grandma and meet up with friends I hadn’t seen in years. I reconnected with other friends virtually. I saw My Chemical Romance in concert. We went to Stars on Ice and saw Nathan Chen skate in person. I saw Paula Poundstone live for my 50th birthday. I turned 50, as I said before, something denied to many.

Flowers bloomed, books were read, music was heard, new friendships were formed, new things were learned, once again the leaves turned colors and fell. And once again we find ourselves at the end of another year. Or is it the beginning of a new one? Either way, let’s not forget the joy.

A Ramble About Living

Things are incredibly stressful right now and have been for several months. Right about the time I decided I wanted to have a blog and to really throw myself back into writing and creating, everything went a little sideways. There have been things going on with both of my kids, there has been one house issue after another. One requiring the yard to be dug up, another requiring us to get rid of a couch and try to find a new one. Right now we are sitting on ottomans in our very empty living room. All of the issues have required clean up and some level of stress. In September we all had covid, then a couple of weeks later the family had the worst colds they’ve had in years. I avoided that somehow. Now it’s the Christmas season and while I try to keep things as chill as possible to avoid the stress many people feel this time of year, it does require some level of effort and thought. Usually I enjoy putting in the effort and making things cozy, but this year it just feels like another thing on the to-do list. I feel time slipping by and all I feel is exhausted. I can barely make an effort to watch it pass, forget about trying to add some joy to the whole thing. I realized the other day that I have been feeling this way for almost a decade.

Ten years ago I started experiencing panic attacks and anxiety over small things. I have always been an anxious person, but ten years ago it got really bad. I told myself I could manage it. I could exercise and meditate and read books about it and make it go away. Instead I have spent ten years avoiding things that trigger my anxiety and existing in a very tiny life. The avoidance has become a habit and I don’t even think about ways I could enjoy my life anymore. I stay home most of the time and I stress over the few things I can’t avoid doing. I have become my grandmother who never learned to drive a car, suffered from undiagnosed social anxiety, and who lived her whole life as a friendless recluse, except for her family and an occasional bingo night.

When I realized that it had been an entire decade since the worst of this anxiety started, when I realized that it has just become my default setting, that I have just gotten used to it and accepted that I will never do certain things, I decided that I really need to do something about it. Isn’t a decade enough time? Isn’t ten years enough to sacrifice? What am I gaining from living like this? From the limits I have put around my own life?

I was seeing a therapist for awhile, but we didn’t really click and I didn’t feel comfortable being vulnerable with her. I am going to wait until the stress of our current house situation settles down and Christmas is over and then I am going to find another therapist. In the meantime, I have an appointment next week to talk to my doctor about some medication. With the way this anxiety affects me, my life, and my family on a daily basis, I think it’s long past time to treat it medically. I don’t want to live my grandmother’s life. I don’t want to shrink further away from experiences.

I turned 50 this year. Something that I haven’t wanted to freely admit to the world at large. I want to present myself as younger because 50 seems old and out of touch and irrelevant. What could I possibly have to contribute to the conversation as a perimenopausal, middle aged woman? Who will take me seriously? But that’s just a belief system, right? That’s just a thought that I have come to believe and seek confirmation for on a daily basis. I have tried to fill my Instagram feed with people like me. Middle aged, imperfect women and men who are still vital and contributing to the world. Still creating and living and inspiring. It challenges my belief that I might as well spend the rest of my life on the couch (if I had one) in front of the TV because the creative part of my life is over and it’s time to shut up and wait to die. I think this belief that women become invisible in midlife is put out there by the patriarchy to silence and control the very women who have gained the wisdom to challenge their systems of oppression.

I’m rambling now, but this morning I realized something else. I have been given an opportunity denied many. Denied people in my own family. I have been given the gift of 50. Two of my cousins died by suicide before they were 30. Another died in a car accident as a teenager. So many people are denied aging. How can I appreciate this gift? By living. By writing, creating, loving, feeling, speaking up, and supporting my fellow men and women doing the same. I have been allowed something denied to many and I want to appreciate the hell out of that. I want to stop overthinking my life and just live and write bad poetry and ramble on about whatever inspires the words on any given day.

I just want to live without so much fear. Let this be that new beginning.

Little Losses

I have been thinking about all of the little losses we rack up on the journey of life. How many little hits we take to the soul. And how these little dings and hits can sometimes harden us. They can make us more careful about what we care about. We can, without even realizing, hold ourselves apart and not allow ourselves to really love. Because we learn that love leads to loss and loss leads to pain. Of course if we adopt the Buddhist practice of non-attachment, then we know that life is suffering and that we suffer because we become attached. Life is every changing and loss is inevitable, so we bend like willow in the wind and accept the change. But then how do we avoid becoming disconnected and uncaring? I see Buddhist monks that seem to happy and compassionate and giving, yet how do you stay that way while being unattached? What is the difference between love and attachment?

Anyway, that’s not the philosophical question I came here to write about this morning. I don’t want to become hardened and cold. I don’t want to keep the world at arm’s length so I don’t get hurt. I want to remain open and loving and compassionate and caring and kind and supportive and accepting. I want to remain warm and loving. I don’t want the dings on my heart to make me afraid to dive deep and love.

I can feel myself closing. I can feel myself not as open to love. Loving and being loved. I want to mourn and grieve for 50 years of losses big and small and then I want to fold them into the fabric of who I am. Let them settle into the folds like soft, worn jeans. Let them give me comfort that I loved and lost. That I dared to dream and was disappointed. But I don’t want to stop loving and losing and dreaming and feeling. I don’t want to harden instead of becoming softer.

So I want to allow myself to mourn all the losses. And then fold them into me. And become softer for the wear.

A Lifetime of Words

I write poetry because I have never felt like I had the patience to write a novel. Poetry is a quick one off which I usually barely even edit. That’s not a brag. It’s a declaration of my laziness when it comes to writing. Now seems like a good time to talk a little about my writing life so far.

I have always been a reader. From the time I was able to comprehend words on a page, I have been a reader. As a teenager I used to be embarrassed that my primary hobby was reading. It felt like a lazy hobby, but it was what I enjoyed more than anything. Reading late into the night, reading on a Sunday afternoon. My dad and I would go to the library on a Saturday and both come home with a stack of books. He would go to his chair to start on his and I would go to my room to start on mine. At the library, he at first dropped me at the children’s section while he went to look for his books. One day I decided I was beyond the children’s section, and wandered into the rest of the library. My reading was never censored, only encouraged.

I wrote little short stories as a kid. I wrote a story in fourth grade called “A Robot Named XY2” that won fourth place in our school’s young author competition. I started keeping a diary when I was nine years old and I keep a journal still. Paper spanning forty years. My brain never turns off and I need some place to put it all so that I don’t talk nonstop to the people around me (I still talk way too much). “Paper has more patience than people,” Anne Frank wrote on her diary, and she was right. I never even minded writing essays in school. I enjoyed researching things and writing about them.

I started writing poetry in the eighth grade, as many people do. The teen years are so full of mood swings and emotions and change. Poetry is perfect for expressing all of that. I wrote poetry all through high school and into my mid twenties. I never did anything with it. Just wrote it for myself. Once I became a proper adult, with a job, a home, and children, the poetry and creative writing stopped for a long time. I still kept a journal, but didn’t write much else. When my daughter was school age I would give her fun little writing assignments and I would do them along with her. It was when I had her try her hand at writing poetry that I remembered how much I loved it.

In 2016 I started writing very bad haiku. Just three lines about something on my mind or about the day. I discovered that there was a large poetry community on Instagram. I started sharing there and using the prompts that were floating around. It was so nice to know other people who were drawn to poetry for whatever reason. I started getting more serious about it and published a book of poems in 2018. Poetry and writing have had to remain a very small part of my life as a mom, but it is very important to me that I keep this little thing just for me.

Several times over the years the idea of writing something longer has bounced around in my head, but as I said, I was sure I never had the patience for it. A book of short stories maybe. I actually wrote a whole poetry collection that told a story through poetry, but it never felt complete enough to publish. But a novel seemed like way too much of an undertaking. Not that I haven’t had ideas that seemed like stories I would love to read.

But now, now there is a story that won’t let me go. I thought it was many different stories, but they were all just the separate pieces to this one story. My heart is saying this is the one. This is the story I have to tell. So I am writing it. I am giving myself a year to write and research and get at least a first draft. I am still a mom first, and my time is limited. A year seems like a good goal.

This is another thing this blog will come in handy for. Book updates, Process notes. Questions I am asking myself. It feels a little scary to announce to the world I am writing a novel. What if I fail? But it also feels like a commitment to take my writing to the next phase. I hope you’ll join me for the journey.

Sideways Days

I have not abandoned my relatively brand new blog. It’s just that there are days that turn everything on its head. Days that slip sideways and by evening the world is tilted a little differently than it was that morning. I had one of those days about a week ago. Since then I haven’t written anything. I have been very immersed in parenting life and in the realization that things in our lives have got to change. We have been very stagnant and lifeless since the pandemic began and it’s time to get unstuck. Although that is much easier said than done.

I have a milestone birthday approaching this weekend. One of those times that makes you stop and reflect on what and who you want to carry with you into the next decade and beyond. I’ve been thinking a lot about who I have been and who I want to be in the next part of my life. Over the years, between mothering and anxiety, I have really lost sight of who I am and what I enjoy. Even trying to figure out how to enjoy my birthday is proving to be a challenge. What do I even like to do anymore? I have always considered what the kids would enjoy or what my husband would want to do. I have really lost sight of who I am. I think this is a very typical thing for mothers and especially for women at midlife. We’re coasting along, raising kids. working jobs, sacrificing little bits of ourselves here and there and then all of the sudden something wakes us from the routine and we realize we left ourselves behind somewhere. Our kids are older, our jobs aren’t as fulfilling, maybe we still have a dream in us that we thought we had plenty of time to make real.

But now we may have more years behind us than in front. The world may have decided that it is time for us to disappear into the background and give up on hopes and dreams. We may be feeling invisible and irrelevant. Much less hopeful after so many years of watching the world fall apart at the seams. So we wake up one morning and realize that our lives don’t fit very well anymore, but all of the hopes and dreams still hanging on the rack aren’t really our style either. Some will keep wearing their uncomfortable life for lack of an easily bought, “acceptable” alternative.

Maybe there is another way. Maybe we have to craft that life ourselves. Form it out of the scraps of what we do want to carry forward with us. Take the off-the-rack dreams and alter them to fit. Like Andie’s prom dress in “Pretty in Pink.” (That reference should give you an idea of what milestone birthday I’m about to hit.) Our lives don’t have to fit anyone else’s expectation of what they should look like at any age. My young adult years didn’t look anything like that of my peers. I forged a path that in some ways I have felt ashamed of. But in so many other ways it gave me stories that my peers don’t have. It made me see that life can be varied and unexpected and that there are so many, many ways to exist. I don’t see why the rest of my life should be any different. I do not have to accept society’s view of midlife. I can just forge yet another path of my own.

The last decade has been challenging for me. Anxiety ruled the day and it has really robbed me of joy. That is the biggest thing I want to change going forward. One thing I do know I want to carry with me is my writing and poetry. That has been a part of me for decades and the one thing I do know I enjoy. I hope you will all stick with me on the journey ahead.