_You Must First Change Your Life_

Dateline Thursday 17 June 2021

I've had an inadvertently lazy morning in the midst of mild uncertainty. Am I packing up a flat? Am I not packing up a flat?  No idea. And I'm actually not overly concerned (or as not overly concerned as I am inherently; I mean I AM president of my 'Overthinker's Anonymous' chapter).  And in doing so, picked up a book that highly irritated me last summer and am looking at it with a different filter: Rachel Carson's biography of a mentor/friendship between Rodin and Rilke.   It comes back to me at a time when I realise I am being offered a friendship with whom I share a deep sceptism of one another. And she is dying. And the offer is sincere, it feels honest and timely. What are these gifts the Universe brings us home? 

It also comes at a time when I am being forced into awkward positions by a friendship and work relationship that makes more grief that it brings nurturing and joy.  The extraction is not easy. There isn't yet a clear path of departure or sense of whether anything can be salvaged. It is long running - 20 years. It is a friendship that has seen out marriages and divorce, death, life, and in-between. 

On a separate page, have you ever bought tickets something for something, thinking 'Yes, I amust at least attend [insert event],  if only to embarrass my children  should they have children with geriatric tales of  sexploits. Then get this overwhelming sense of 'meh,' the closer said event gets?

Not quite dread, just an itch of knowing you panic bought? That when you bought the tickets you were a different person and you've moved passed that phase now?

 You know that you'll go, you'll see, you might even participate but that at the end of it, you'd rather be back at your gorgeous hotel room with your book, etc?  Eyeing the exit, surreptitiously glancing at your watch? 

 

And then...it ceases to be a thing of concern because now all of the energy get redirected to the US and making plans for an experience that will inevitably be painful and heartbreaking? Am I thankful at times for Pandemic rules, making the decision for me, and for being brought back to the reminder that self-love is self-responsibity. Just because I can, doesn't mean I have to. I get to choose how I walk my walk. 

Yes, well. It will be an experience, maybe it will even be mine.  But not right now, thanks muchly. Another pause on the ol' sex wall construction, but never mind. 

I've spent the last week doing extreme crochet, dodging jellyfish and working my way through other people's memories.  I've listened to audio books because my eyes will still occasionally swim with tears.  And the last two weeks have felt like a weird collage of Dread Pirate Pre-Covid.

News of my friend B's shook me hard. It came on the back of the pain of one of my high school besties struggling with the death of her oldest friend and cousin.  (Never underestimate #Cousintime). Slowly, my plucky yet ghoulish optimism has returned, though it definitely has an edge. 

And in the midst of everything, I am making progress in my dating life and with co-parent.  A major reset had to be had in the wake of all this triggering. My dad's decline feels so much like watching my beautiful GG  downhill that I am left shaking at how I failed her in the most basic wish: to die at home, having had her hair done, a manicure and a steak from the Pine Club.  The last three, those night have hallucinations. But she definitely wanted to die at home. And I wasn't there to try to facilitate that.  I was too deep in the mire postnatal drepression to advocate for anyone, even myself.  

Slowly, the last years, I've let that guilt and sense of failure fall from my basket. I'm not even sure why I felt it was mine to carry, outside of the social conditioning to be a 'good girl,' to be 'sweet.'   What does that actually mean? In the conditioning that I was subjected being sweet meant doing what you were told, even when you were set up to fail. It meant knowing that your needs were not ever of real consequence and that you were duty bound to stuff down everything you felt until burned a hole (in my case literally, 2 of them) through your guts. Until you simply cannot do that anymore. 

Until you realise you don't owe anyone anything, after a certain period of time. No matter how amazing something felt in a moment, no matter how you almost wanted to will it to be more, will yourself to be 'more,' but for whom?