I'm a Parrothead - 1-3-11

I’m declaring guerilla war on my misery. I’m going all out. How? By taking a vacation from my life. One day a week – at some point in each week – I’m deliberately ignoring everything bad. It’s not a New Year’s Resolution. I just miss my God, to tell you the truth. I’ve been avoiding talking with him because even when I’m doing great and feeling fine, as soon as I start talking, really talking, something about the inescapably raw intimacy cuts me to the quick and I start crying. It’s when I start talking to God that I feel things are at their most hopeless and that I feel myself so distant, so terribly far from the me I know I am made to be and from the we we used to be. I just avoid it. I feel clotted with the admonition to praise and worship, with the expectation of gratitude when, if I was really authentic with him as I used to be, all my misery would come out. And I’m so sick of crying. To be perfectly honest, I just don’t know what to say to him. I’m mute but full of unformed words.

And I’m tired of it.

So I’m declaring a state of vacation. I’ve been getting so bogged down with all the things I want not manifesting and feeling tremendous pressure to visualize better and feel good that I’ve snapped.

It’s too much to swear that I’m changing from here on out, that I won’t feel anxiety or discouragement from now on. As soon as I say that, I immediately feel – you guessed it – more pressure. That’s what’s been breaking the steady stones of my peace like a chain gang. And I’m sick of it.

I don’t have any answers, and the questions are still there. What am I supposed to do with my life? Am I going to lose my friends if I keep burrowing into my own head like this? Why am I not my size 6 again yet? Was two years of freedom all I had to expect? Will I always feel so cheated and bitter and dissatisfied by my choice to show love the door? Am I neglecting my relationship with God by avoiding him like this? Am I a patient enough mother to my fur-baby? Am I supposed to be more of a woman somehow?

ENOUGH!

For one day I don’t get to feel bad. I don’t get to worry. I’m not allowed to wonder, see, or feel anything negative. The constant simmering question of, “But if I let go, what if nothing happens because no one takes over?” is silenced. Every time something negative hits my brain, I will just open myself like a tunnel, a garbage shoot, to let it sing right through me. In one ear and out the other.

For one day I get to pretend that I am pretty and thin. For one day, I get to see myself as successful and fulfilled. I get to make believe my God is enough and all his promises are true for me. I get to be Mary and not Martha. I am allowed to dream and imagine that good things are actually intended for me, stamped with my name and address. I get to pretend I am good, and clean, and forgiven of my darkness and my black thoughts toward children and others, that I am pleasing to someone, that I am delighted in. I get to float along like someone who feels they actually deserve good things, like I have the right to dream whatever I want.

For one day, God, let’s get lost. Let’s spin out that lovely bubble lovers are so good at creating. Let’s forget all my failings and all your distance, and let’s make believe we are exactly as we are meant to be. Let’s get lost.

Tomorrow will be here soon enough. But it’s not here yet.

Another New Year, Dammit - 1-2-11

Another year. I can’t be so naïve as I used to be, wondering with happy anticipation what the year would bring. The old, old exercise of picturing the next New Year’s Eve and looking back on all that had happened. Would this be the year I would fall in love at last? Would this be the year I would go somewhere exciting, do something bold, be the woman I always hoped to be? Would this year I face some challenge and overcome it? The year I know who I am, what I want, where I’m going – would this be that seminal year? Would this be the year I see as the turning point in my life that angled my trajectory up a bit? Would this year my life actually invites me in?

God. How long has it been since I actually asked those questions, when my hope outlasted my winters? New Years 2008, I was giving up on love and dating and my parents bought me The Secret. New Year’s 2009, I was down to breathing in and out in my bed, counting down the minutes until my parole was up. New Year’s 2010, I was shattered. New Year’s 2011, I’m smart enough not to wonder what New Year’s 2012 will herald.

I do want to go forth and reintroduce myself to my life. I want to dig out from my barricaded burrow and see friends again. I want to stretch and start running with something worthwhile in my hands. And at the same time, I don’t want to move my flabbed self, don’t want to go to gatherings where I have nothing of my own life – and therefore of my own self – to offer. Part of me is stymied by the new truth of the falsehood of loneliness I always tried to believe. To accept that there really is no one out there for me, no one to notice me, no one to fight for me means there’s no one to prime myself for. So there is left only me to receive all I’ve worked for. So I am left with work as the only fulfilling thing to look forward to. A project, a job, a mission to better someone’s life. Is it enough? No. Will it be? Yes.

And even though I am trying to choose hope, to choose a belief that good things are coming, I dread the thought of 2011. The only life that ever invited me to its little party was loss and pain and disillusionment.

And I just don’t think I can take another year like the last three. I just can’t.

I mean, there has to be a break in all the bad. There has to be a point where the pain has to end. All those promises about victory and desires fulfilled and purposes found and plans to prosper and not to harm have to come true in this lifetime. They can’t just be for the afterlife. Why on earth would anyone come to God then? If decades from now is the only promise met and want given? There has to be some year in my life where I’m lifted from the rocks and rescued from the waves. That is the seminal year. Not when great deeds are done and great loves discovered. Just when the pain ends.