Quiet Life, Wild Heart

I like to think of myself as a learner, because I love school beyond all measure. I love embarking on new subjects, learning new things, figuring things out.

Turns out, I’m only good at learning intellectually. When it comes to things physical, creative, visual — I’m a big weenie.

I first started noticing this when, despite my desire to learn Shiva Nata, I don’t actually do it. If I do start it, I manage about 30 seconds before I freak out and stop.

And now, I desperately want to create visually. I love photography, I love doodles full of color. It’s a doodle and yet I can’t even get started because what if I do it wrong?

I can roll my eyes at myself — how does one doodle wrong? — and still be resisting doing this with all my heart and soul.

Turns out I know I can learn intellectually, so the prospect of being a beginner is fine. I know that I won’t be a beginner for long. I know I have the skills to do it.

Learning something else — it’s like I don’t even have the vocabulary for the learning I want to do. Terrifying.

Since these things are central to my wild heart, I need to plow forward anyway. I need to have some conversations with my demons and see where we end up. Because it’s too important not to.

It’s occurring, to me, suddenly, what a good little girl I’ve been all this time.

I did my undergraduate degree in three years, so I could save money. I took everything I was supposed to. I never wandered over to all the other departments to see what they were offering, even though I’m a scanner to the bone whose list of books read look perilously eclectic.

I went straight to graduate school, got a tenure-track job, and bought a house. All things I wanted, sure, but all so safe.

And when I left that, I went straight into the city and new 9-5 jobs.

I never did quit everything to become a poet. I never did sleep around. I never did go to good leather parties. I never wrote like a motherfucker the truths that tear the world apart. I never fully dove into spirituality and tarot and everything that comes with it.

Some part of me has been so stuck in the practical, in making things work, that I haven’t taken the time to dream.

I’m out of town right now, visiting my Beloved’s family. We had envisioned this as a kind of mini-vacation, complete with resting and coffee shop time and working and general recovery before my surgery on Monday.

What the hell were we thinking?

• Beloved grew up in a college town. It’s move-in weekend. Enough said.
• We’re eating out all the time because we didn’t plan otherwise, even though we could have. Correction, I didn’t, and I could have, if by “could” we mean “is capable of” instead of “had any brainspace for.”
• My sinuses are, predictably, unhappy, which is making doing work at coffee shops insanely difficult. There’s too much noise, too many people, too much energy. I always forget just how supportive routines at home truly are.
• There’s a whole drama about a cat, one we might end up adopting if other avenues for her rehoming don’t work out. I’m busy holding my tongue, because who the hell gets a kitten and then gets pissed off that she’s … acting like a kitten? They aren’t exactly known for being calm and sedate.

We’re going home tomorrow, thank the Goddess. But in the meantime I’d love to get some things accomplished that I don’t think I’m going to get accomplished.

I really do belong at home.

There is something about seeing old friends again, the kind of friends with whom, though you haven’t seen them in five years, you settle right into meaningful conversation, that makes my heart sing like a plucked string.

I’ve really been missing the real in my friendships lately.

The Beloved and I had a minor meltdown this morning about money.

It all started with her declaring she needed to order stuff from Staples for the new school year. Our pattern goes something like this: We articulate a need for something, nearly always reasonable, and because it’s reasonable, we go ahead and do it without looking at how it fits into the whole. Which, of course, leads us to spend more than we have coming in, which isn’t hard when you’ve got one breadwinner, one student, and several different chronic conditions.

We’re contemplating an ADD coach for her, because I do think that she’s some basic skills away from this being a lot better, but have you ever priced out such things? The first person we looked at charges $1200 a month, which is practically what we spend on rent. The person we’ll probably go with charges $500 a month, which is still more than we can afford. But I’m not sure we can afford not to, not if we’re looking at the big picture.

Right now it feels like we’re so close to things being really awesome. We’re on the same page about what we want and how we want our lives to be. We’re on the same page about the bigger choices. It’s just this stupid day to day stuff that kills us.

This morning I went to a new ENT, because my fabulous new internist had sent me for yet another round of sinus CT scans, only to get back a report that used the word “opacified.” Yeah. Not a word I want associated with my head.

So there I go, with my three sets of scans, my list of every damn allergy medication and procedure checked off, and yet I was still worried that I’d have to sit through months of more antibiotics and waiting, because that’s often how new doctors are — suspicious of the patient, suspicious of the prior doctoring.

I walked out with surgery scheduled for the 22nd. Of this month.

I’m happy about it. Not happy I need it, but happy I was trusted, happy that I might finally get some relief. Apparently the major drainage channels in my head are completely swollen shut, which is just not helpful.

Now I’ve just got to come up with the list of instructions for Beloved since, bless her, she can’t intuit things like how to take care of sick people on her own.

It’s been about seven weeks since I stopped feeling like I had the flu every. single. day.

It’s been amazing. Truly amazing.

And yet I’ve known that I’m still not truly well, that there are still other things going on that are affecting my energy, my stamina, my overall well-being.

Last week’s doctor’s appointment sent me for a CT scan of my sinuses, to see if that long-standing chronic infection was still there. Not only was it still there, but it had, overall, gotten worse. Now the report includes words like “opacification.” In other words, there are parts of my head that are entirely closed off that shouldn’t be.

Even though this is probably not new, even though I’ve probably been living with this for years, getting that report did what getting those kinds of reports always do — took what was part of my everyday and highlighted it as Not Normal. Right now I’m hyperaware of my sinuses, of my blocked breathing, of the heaviness and the drainage and the overall level of fatigue and exhaustion.

It’s nothing like it was before, when this same fatigue and exhaustion was complicated by hormonal pills that really decimated me, but still. It’s bad enough.

It’s bad enough that a normal person, one who hadn’t gone through what I’ve been through, probably would be taking time off and demanding immediate action. It’s not to my credit that I’m just going along.

Still, I’ve got antibiotics arriving this evening, and I’m calling the ENT first thing tomorrow. I suspect surgery is in my future, because I’m not sure this is something antibiotics, even with steroid help, can really fix. All of that is good. But man, I feel kind of crappy.

Full disclosure — I’ve been a teensy bit in love with Ashley Judd since I first saw Ruby in Paradise a million years ago. Okay, probably twenty years ago. Point is, I adore her for reasons I can’t quite articulate.

Or rather, I couldn’t articulate.

Did you know she recently published a memoir called All That Is Bitter and Sweet? I finally got it from the library after weeks of being on the wait list. Ironically, I got it at the same time I got Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe’s recent memoir. I read the Rob Lowe memoir first, and it was about what I expected: Stories from his coming up in the movie business, sweet anecdotes about his life, and a sense of the heart of this public figure. He wrote it himself and while it isn’t going to win any writing awards, it wasn’t the kind of celebrity-penned memoir that has me asking them why on this Earth they didn’t spring for a ghostwriter. It was sweet.

I expected about the same from Ashley Judd’s book. I was wrong. So very wrong.

There’s very little in this book about her movie career. It gets mentioned here and there, but it’s not the focus. The focus is on three things: 1) Her international work to promote women’s equality and stop human trafficking and the spread of HIV/AIDS; 2) her by-any-measure neglectful childhood; 3) her recovery from the dysfunctional behaviors that such a childhood caused.

It’s amazing. It’s hard to read in places — the stories of women who are selling sex out of a lack of economic choices or, worse, who have been enslaved are brutal. But the image of her brandishing a wooden dildo to teach a field full of Indian truckers how to successfully use a condom slayed me. That’s my kind of girl.

But while I’m full of awe and admiration for her international work, it was her story of recovery that has most moved me. You know you’re in trouble when you read about someone going into inpatient recovery work and you think, “Oh, I wish I could do that.”

The kind of behaviors she had taken on to deal with her dysfunctional childhood were the ones that are, often, hardest to see and name: codependency and rage. In the face of things like alcoholism, abuse, drug addiction, gambling addiction, eating disorders, and all of the other things that we can see decimating families and relationships, it’s hard to think trying to control the world and being mightily pissed off “count.” But they do.

And oh. I identified so strongly with her.

My childhood didn’t look like hers, which included stretches of basically being left at home to fend for herself while her mother and sister were developing their act and her father was caught in his own addictions. But that’s part of the problem — my childhood didn’t have any of the obvious markers of dysfunction. Well, not many.

And that’s how it happens. That’s how we deny our own experiences. The fact that my dad “only” hit me a handful of times “doesn’t count” — even though we spent years tiptoeing around him and his violent anger. The fact that my mother has not, to this day, been able to validate and acknowledge any emotion of mine “doesn’t count” — even though that emotional mirroring is a crucial piece of a child’s development. Moving every three years to another far-flung military base made everything worse, because I didn’t have any long-standing relationships with non-parental adults who might have mitigated some of this.

For lots of reasons, my childhood was scarring. For lots of reasons, it set up in me behaviors in response that do not serve me. They do not have to make sense to anyone else, although I suspect they might.

Thanks to Ashley Judd, I can name this now. Thanks to Ashley Judd, I have the opportunity to learn how to be differently.

I should be at a wedding right now. A dear friend of Beloved’s is marrying a classmate and friend of Beloved’s brother. Beloved is the Best (wo)Man. I was supposed to be the Brain, the helper mouse who keeps the logistics running smoothly without bothering the happy couple. I was also the second-string photographer, since the bride’s father was once a professional photographer and would be doing the majority of the shots. Except, of course, for the ones he was in.

I’m still getting the hang of knowing what I can and can’t do, what I can and can’t say yes to. In retrospect, I should have declined when they asked me, because there was no way I could have pulled this off without massive damage to myself. I thought I could, if only I rested enough beforehand. The five days of 95 degree heat and 90% humidity took its toll on me, but even if I had spent every hour of that long weekend in bed and basking in the chill of my perfect air conditioning, I couldn’t have done this.

This is the stuff that gets me. It’s easy for other people. It was easy for me once. You’d come home tired, sure, but kind of satisfied, full of the experience of whatever it was you spend three days running around for. But these days, I only come home tired, so tired that I can’t focus my eyes, my body aches, and I can’t actually think straight. That’s a different kind of tired.

I’m so sad that I’m not there, and yet I’m so glad to be home, here on my bed, alternating episodes of Bones with small tasks. I’m so glad to be taking care of myself.

Even though it sucks on so many levels, there is something freeing about declaring that I need to say no to everything that is not my routine: leaving the house for the dayjob, the grocery store (every other week at most), and the occasional short dinner with friends. (The latter feels more and more optional.) It means I don’t have to agonize over decisions. I don’t have to weigh things. I just decline, gracefully. I just put my actual life first.