circles and belonging

 They had announced the grief circle would form down by the stage at 11, but as I wandered out from the coffee station it still hit me like a wall.

I recognize clearly that this is probably all in my head, a tactile projection, but I still swear I can feel the weight of that circle as I approach it. It’s almost like a haze in the bright light, a rippling of color and texture, like a mirage. There is a portal surrounding them, a gravity to their presence, and I realize that one thing I will not do is cross that barrier.

I have come to a weekend retreat for jewish women. A sisterhood gathering of sorts that a friend has been trying to sell me on for year. Come! She tells me, there are activities, but you don’t need to do the activities! There are massages and yoga and tie dying stations, but you can just drink! Many people just drink, there is a 24 hour bar and a majhong table and a tight bright community that is fine if you just want to chill!

She is a lovely woman, who sees clearly my need for community,but doesn’t mention that fact that is apparent to me the moment I arrive and that was probably worth guessing far before I decided to join ...that a large 48 hour slumber party is, most likely , powerfully, deeply not my scene. I feel as if I am cosplaying teenage youth group. 

So staring now at that wall of grief now, that hugging, sobbing, singing sisterhood I am deeply aware of many things, but chiefly this is as alienating as anything I have experienced in a long while. More alienating than a frat party, more alienating than Taylor swift concern, more alienating that that first time I went to karaoke and someone told me I just needed to stop holding back. A group of my peers, mourning an event worthy of all that grief, is like a sinkhole I can’t even dip my toe. I can’t even stare directly at it

I go the long way around back to the clubhouse so I don't have to touch the forcefield of trauma and bonding that is occurring and sign up for something that is tantamount to a religious tarot reading and sit there and swirl in the sense of being both too too old to go to summer camp and yet far too young, cynical, and ironic to hug and cry and sing. And yes, they are still singing. I ponder my limitations. Am I just too emotionally stunted, too out of touch with my own grief? my own dark sadness. Truthfully, I feel like a fraud. Like someone who trolls funerals or calls someone who just lost a friend and goes on and one about that one time they met him and how deeply they were touched. I feel unreal, a ghostly haunting on the deep and bonding womanhood that seems so clearly presently all important to every participant other than me

Later I go to my reading and contemplate my own inability to find community within my community. It’s a stunning reading. It calls out my hunger, my need is my famine. It tells me to look in, to look at my memory, which is represented as darkness. to find peace in what I am rather than acting like a kid at buffet licking all the treats to find the one they want. I say something and she cries. More tears and I am vaguely touched and mostly very happy she does not touch me.

One dark truth I need little delving into into is how little, ultimately, I want to touch and be touched by these women. How untrue my desire for community must be when the very thought of a hug, a hand, a friendship circle of hand holding, makes my skin crawl. I don’t know what to make of this but I elect to not share this with my weeping oracle.

But something rings true and I relax. This stranger with a homemade deck of cards comments that I might just be different, and thats okay. It's obvious and dumb and one funky thing to say to a total stranger when your own hobby is kabbala cards. But it's true. I might authentically still need to find a community, but perhaps its okay that this is hard to find. Perhaps it is true that my desire to just hang out, have difficult one on one conversations in dark halls does not a party make, does not a sisterhood form.

I sit with that in the hot tub and am joined by another woman. She is a writer they have flown in to do a reading. She is cynical and funny and is very excited to be here for the free booze and the 10K miles gap from daily life and like a true writer tells even tremendously mundane stories with incredible humor and tenderness. I follow her to her workshop and listen to her speak because she doesn't sing once and there is nothing I like more than a story about anything that is told well.

Perhaps another darkness I can plunder is that my memory is now so hazy. So slippery and fickle, and things that feel familiar can feel as alienating and off-putting as they do comforting. Many things I once clearly related to are more ghostly than I wish to admit. A dark truth is that I once had stories to tell, so many memories to share, but now I just want live others memories. I am vampire for the meaning in others, a parasite of cabals long forgotten.

Is there a community for this? A place where you can find not so much a new sisterhood as a safe space to absorb the reminiscence of others and be born anew?

 I guess its highly unsurprising I have abandonment issues. You know, if you know me. Know my origin story and all that.

Still its so humiliating. Its one thing to mourn, curse and in general deeply resent familial loss, or some shitty shitty dumping action.

But what to do with the slow icy freeze out that is almost closer to a ghosting from a whole community that you thought might be a touch of your found family, but in truth was just killing a very long time with you and is now probably is giving this even less thought than you might prefer to believe? 

I dunno. I just can't let it go. Even though I am horrified, humiliated, just completely ashamed to admit it.

It's not just horrible. It's dumb.

Part of the astounding stupidity is, naturally, that I actually kind of knew this would happen. The signs were always there. The signs of strained awkwardness over obligatory shared social situations and a touch of "lets try to make this deeper" that seldom stuck. Those seeds...well over time grew into very oddly overly chipper curious and polite check ins at parties and events and actually, over time. became moments of just suddenly, seriously, finding myself alone in a room at a social gathering, one just bustling moments ago.

And I would say it, sometimes, out loud. I don't feel welcome. I don't think these are my friends any more. I don't think these people actually like me.

And even with all this , more confounding and frustrating was, in retrospect, my urge to fight it. To reach out...to produce events and coordinate gatherings to reignite the passion of friendship love affairs that weren't actually anything more than tantamount to the one night stand you stretched into a 3 month relationship because your were B-O-R-E-D.

Only this wasn't 3 months, this was 10 years, and this wasn't something based on a too many drinks and pretty eyes, this was weekends away, and late nights and all sortsa shit that doesn't just normally proceed, not one, but several people slowly making it evidently clear that you are now, pretty much, disposable in their world.

Which is to say, I thought they were my friends. And I thought they cared. Despite evidence to the contrary. And still I miss them.

Yeah. Bummer.

And now, beyond all reason I find myself pissed.

And yes yes, I am perfectly clear you can't be angry with people just because they don't like you. And yes, I realize I have no right to resent it when people choose to spend time with people they actually like, and not spend time with people they don't.

But because I am not comfortable with just being hurt and humiliated. I am pissed.and I am retconning the shit out of all of this and pretending it mutual so it isn't what it really is: rejection.

But honestly, what is it about being rejected that makes you want to to plot revenge, to hurt back, to want to reject back?

I wonder if it has something to do with wanting to fill the absence of feeling...with something. Wanting to cure the seemingly unjust inequity of concern with a shared experience. even if that is experience is nothing fun.

Or maybe it is just straight immaturity.Dumping mud on your best friend because she went to play with someone with better toys.

There is no good answer. And frankly, there is no point in pondering a situation you fully have no power to affect. It is what it is. Sad. Pathetic. Over.

acceptance

 A friend of mine and I were talking the other day about loss: specifically loss of a friendship or relationship wiht a loved one (not a death per se) and I noted, at some point, you just have to accept your general lack of power in a situation to really move on. He asked how you get okay with that. And I didn't have a great answer, but I have some thoughts.

1. This is a little bit about getting okay with injustice: Often when things go down, we struggle, internally, externally, interpersonally to accept that things are just, put simply, unfair. You are being asked to carry the weight, or being asked to let go when you don't want to, and it isn't the door that opens a window or whatever. It isn't opportunity. It just sucks. Most people have a very hard time with this concept. That something bad has happened to them and there isn't a reason, there is just a void, a sad reality, a mourning. Your parade was rained out and the town didn't band together even stronger than before. It just didn't happen. 

I think people have a problem with injustice because a universal sense of fairness makes them feel safe. But of course, this is bullshit. Young children are killed in shootings. There is no justice in that. Trying to convince anyone of the sense of fairness in that illicits its own stash of very unpleasant and revealing thought processes we best not engage in.

Does this mean there is no justice, that fairness is a farce that we should abandon? Absolutely not. Striving, personally and interpersonally, as a social norm and societal goal to be fair and just is part of having a successful happy society. It is a core tenant of pro social behavior. It is critical. But believing we should strive to act just, be kind or fair, because it builds a better world is different than believing you should do so because there is inherent justice in the world,  or in life.

And so maybe you are religious. You believe in a just deity, a kind faith, the scales of balance. I think that it is still tenable to believe in a such a world order while still letting go of the idea that your immediate environment is governed by just balance.

I will explain: 

2. This is also about accepting the limits of your personal scope: which is to say, that as unsafe as people feel letting go of justice, they also have an even harder time accepting scale.

I would like to posit, based on nothing other than my personal upbringing and my puny brain's thoughts, that if there is a universal order, someone at the wheel, a collection of deities controlling reality, or an octopus in the sky, than that is pretty epic situation, and if justice is one of their key drivers, it is probably happening on a bigger scale than you can fathom. Which is to say, the dinosaurs migtht have died so we little flesh monkeys could walk the earth, but if you ask a dinosaur, they aren't going to be thrilled with the fairness of that equation. 10000 years of a just equation might be pretty fucking unfair for those skimming by for 100. Expecting life to be fair on a personal scale just because the universe might be isn't necessary logical.

So I guess I am saying: accepting that bad things can happen and we will never see the justice of those occurences is, sometimes, just critical in deciding what choices still exist for you to move on and try to be okay.

Once upon a time I had to accept that someone I loved just..for whatever reason, wasn't going to have me in their life any more. My dealings with this includes a variety of ways I could change this and a bunch of interpersonal dealings around how this might go that would make this okay for me. Just. Fair. Okay.

But the reality was that it just wasn't okay. It was never going to be an okay thing. That didn't mean I had no choices. I just couldn't make it okay. I could move on. I could find other things to love and be okay with, but those choices and actions wouldn't make this particular personal suck any less tragic, awful and unfair for me. This was my story. My story included that fucking awful thing. That was that.

But acknowledging that also meant I could decide to do things (or not do things) associated with, get right with it, as it were, and move along. I could leave the door unlocked because that made me feel good, but not because they had to walk through it to make that choice okay. I could also lock the door. Those were my choices. Nothing else.

Which is to say, sometimes you just have to accept that your life contains a shitty unfair and unhappy thing. It doesn't mean you have to be unknd of unfair, it doesn't mean all things will be unkind or unfair, it simply means you are powerless to change that a bad thing has or is happening. And you work with that, not against it, or around. Stop pushing the boulder, than is actually a mountain. It is attached. It is now part of the landscape. You don't have to like it, but you would do better visiting the ocean than trying to bulldoze over  that shit.

I need a better visual

 

The Theme for the week is pernicious trauma and the fundamental necessity of seeing and being seen.

I have been watching the Sinner. Without going into an indepth review there is a quality about the main character that makes the characters, the very traumatized and emotionally vulnerable characters trust him when they are so past trust that they no longer, really, seem to hope. 

It is something, something born of his trauma that lets him see them. There is something in him that unflinchingly stares when others look away. There was a quote, I once read that noted that Joan Didion "her life to noticing things other people strive not see" and that resonates, in this thought. And yet I think it is more. I think some people, without choice, even without consent see things others either cannot or will not. Be it their trauma, or their choices, or their fundamental disposition, or something bred over time with experience and environment, lets them see into spaces others will miss. Like an emotional tetachromacy. Not really unique in chemistry so much as an accident of time and place, in a world that seems increasingly interested in creating spaces to hide.

I have, since I was young, often looked at things a little closely. It annoys most people, I think. Seeing the ugly with the good. Some call it pessimism. Others just find it exhausting. I don't know. I notice the crumbling foundation of an amazing house. I don't think my insanely awesome friends are especially beautiful or smart, even though I love them deeply. I do know that that outfit doesn't work for you. I do wonder at the missing flavor in many dishes I eat. Although man do I love to eat. I seldom hear a statement and think that this is fundamentally true. I experience curiosity where others might experience revulsion, and it just feels right. It is how I experience life and love.

But enough about me for the moment, because I think, broadly, globally and personally, there is healing in seeing. Because how can you fix what you cannot see? I think love is seeing and being seen. You hear people say it, the first time they fell truly, madly in love, they felt seen. Personally, I think we owe to those we love to see them, to look at the all, the experience and validate the all, even if we don't like it. Especially if we don't like it. Letting them show us their trauma, their flaws, their possibilities and limitations is part of that love. Sometimes we need to pretend to look away, but never blind ourselves to the all that is them.

Globally, I feel the same. We have all heard that phrase "love it or leave it". Missing the whole point. We can't leave because while we may not like, but we DO love it we can't feel safe because we saw the flaws in something we care about. Loving means seeing. Caring means you look.

Which is exhausting. Because there is so much to see and so much more to heal.

Which is where I come full circle. This week I have come to really notice, to see on a personal level how trauma never leaves. It just grows inside. Like a ring in a tree, at best like complimentary gut bacteria, at worst like a deadly parasite.  And either way it needs to be tended. It needs to be managed, and to manage it we must see it.

And make no mistake. This doesn't mean we let it take over. This isn't an argument for sunken investment. Not an argument for becoming our mistakes or doubling down on our trauma until it is all we are. If this is a lifelong condition, this trauma, then love necessitates we study it, and we learn to address it,  to hate it with all our love until it becomes a meaningful detail, not our only defining characteristic. 

We must admit that our joy and beauty comes with pain and threat and fear and greed and confusion if we are to address things. We have to see the poverty if we want to address it. We have to see the cracks in our foundation, or our outdated and often cruel history if we are to solve it. 

 I was watching Shrill (spoiler alert) and there is this big scene, where the guy who has been calling her and texting her and flirting with her suddenly tells her he just doesn't see her that way

and it kind of goes downhill from there, with her humiliated and him basically gaslighting her by claiming that she projected feelings onto his constant stream of affection

and first can I say that was SO SO SO a portland singles moment.

but also I keep thinking about this, and the fundamentals of romance, and how they aren't always sexual, but we aren't really taught that love can be complicated and people's feelings need be considered even if our needs are confusing

so let's dissect this...

this guy, in the moment, mentions that she is currently his favorite person. and on some level I believe him. it would be simple and one sided to suggest he was just using her affections for his ego, when the show implies he has found someone he adores but doesn't want to be romantically be with. As a person, especially a straight man, such feelings are complicated, because of a history we all know but I don't need to get into in which men can feel violent or sexual but not intellectually enraptured or romantically drawn without the above feelings being part of the picture.

but also, anyone can see that the odds of confusion were high. and there is no doubt that he was deliberately enjoying the romantic moments that had no potential for him without communicating clearly and explicitly because he was scared of ruining something that was amazing for him (platonic love is under valued in our society and thus complicated to pursue) and doing so at the clear risk of her emotions, which is, to put is bluntly, selfish. How much can you really be falling for someone, even as a friend, if you are just hoping their emotions will never get in the way of your needs? It is also possible he wanted her on some level as more as a friend, and wasn't ready for THAT and construed the next step (physical) as a promise beyond what he was ready to pursue. our very hetero monogamist and commitment centered world creates cognitive dissonance around these moments, because we cant just say, without being insulting "I kind want this, now, but may never want more"

we have all been in relationships in which one person didn't voice, explicitly, the scope of their needs, because if they did they were worried that they would lose what they already had. in which someone had, perhaps even despite their best intentions, implied but not stated, that a situation was different than it truly was to get or keep what they wanted. It is called leading someone on, and whether it is to get laid, or keep someone around to feed your ego, or to develop a friendship they really need but don't understand themselves, it is still putting their own needs before another.

which is a no brainer. it isn't okay to, even indirectly, create a false bubble because part of becoming a kind human being is giving a crap about the other person in every situation. But I also want to blame society here, just a little bit, which teaches us that hard conversations are to be avoided and needs must be simple. which teaches us to blaze ahead and hope what we want is truly what the other person wants, even when it is self evident that isn't the case, and to manipulate situations that keep a dream alive, even at the expense of real connection. a society that is far more enraptured than the romantic impossible than the deep and beautiful if slightly dirty and uncomfortable reality. which makes us want all loves to be easy, even when it is the nature of love to prove itself through sacrifices big and small.

so how might this have gone differently? how might he have been a bigger man. well, from that start, when he realized that he was falling, in a friendship kinda way, he could have been clear, pulled back from his hearts instinct and said it aloud. you are so great, it is hard to find someone you want to be friends with. he could have talked about him complicated feeling for those he was romantically interested in. he could have pulled back, even when he wanted to lunge forward, with an eye towards her feelings, early on, and understood that he might be risking what they had, but that there might be the potential to truly be friends, if he gave her the space to want that too. and frankly, he could have said it. " I need a friend right now, and that is hard to find, especially one as cool as you" and let her walk in, OR NOT.

but who knows. we are also, if we are being honest, often the last to even know ourselves. and being so clear, so honest, takes confidence and self awareness that can often come long after the moment has passed.

so we are all rational adults, right? we earned that title. through bills and exercise and taxes and early hours and mortgages

I dunno.
I hear it all the time ..." I have to do what feels right".  "I am gonna follow my gut"

So if your gut has never lead you astray, if you have a history of making sound decisions to lead to personal satisfaction, then believing in your instinct, well, that is just sound logic

But it is a funny thing, these cycles of abuse. they tell you to do what evidence has shown is wrong, time and again, to ensure your past of mistakes

I had this friend, the other day, she told me all about her plan, he plan to do this thing. it was not a very smart thing. we listened and we knew she wanted validation. that it was right. that she was right. that she was a rational adult.  it was a bad bad plan and she wanted validation. and when she did not get it she stated she wanted to do what felt comfortable.
And all I could think was 'what makes you comfortable hurts you"

I had another friend, slowly moving out of an abusive relationship, ask me to trust her, and I had a similar thought. I want to trust you, but right now you are so invested in bad ideas that it is hard to believe you can be trusted to make good ones

it is unfair. punitive. it probably sounds unkind

but part of breaking the cycles of abuse. be it a relationship or an addiction or self-destruction of a less common brand, it is to recognize when you are going out of your way to get comfortable with things that just don't make sense so you can feel comfortable with cognitive dissonance of your fuckery. when you train yourself to see zebras and unicorns in a perfectly fine horse, when you convince yourself that your own logic cannot be proofed by another's you lose the ability to be taken at your word. which is to say, you cannot display to the world that you lie florridly to yourself and then expect open and honest communication. you will not get a vote of confidence from me when you are demonstrating a lack of fitness

there is only one way out, and that is out, away and with a panoromic view that let's you reset your compass

sometimes you only notice the vastness of your landscape when you step too far back,  and you are suddenly struck by how some huge stories loom only as their end makes them finite.

a romance scanning decades in tiny moments and huge punctuations. marriages and child birth and graduations and birthdays and illnesses and recoveries. 

breakfasts shared together, 

books read in tandem

frustrations and annoyances and questions overlooked for the greater picture. 

all the innate and subtle little gestures that become habits of affection as you continue to build and sculpt your life: buying a favorite food at the grocery, saving the last bite, making a joke at the right moment, brushing a forearm

you think those moments will just continue when they become so much a part of you

how can they not? 

growing up with my parents around one of the only things clear to me was that they had a great romance. great, in the way only a real world romance built on love and trust can be. awesome in its incredibly domestic ways: picking each other up for work, taking the same sunset walk every day. not a world spanning, war torn, tanned and youthful romance, but the kind of bond built on the beautiful and sad, the comfortable and sometimes ugly. 

it was a strange thing to behold, so close. whereas some of the families around us clearly had parents that revolved and evolved around their children, mine were like satellites to each other. they may have had love for others in the family, but they were locked on each other.

I don't mean to make sound unrealistic, or schmaltzy. I don't even mean to claim I understood it. It wasn't mine. I have no right to bear witness.

But growing up I knew one thing: you could find your best friend and love your best friend and want to see your best friend every day. and that could be good, and that could be enough. 

Today my father died. And I will mourn that as any child would. But when I step back the part I just can't look past is the vastness of their story now finite. One of them continuing a thousands memories that make up almost the whole of their life and existence. It is blinding and sad and beautiful. It is less like a giant light extinguished as a shift in the landscape that puts so much in shadow. You can still see it in the back of your head. feel it there and guess its warmth, but that is only expressed in the wistfulness of the shadow it now casts.