A snippet of conversation...

 “Who's there?" Bubby says as soon as I open the door.  I walk into the family room and her face lights up.  "Hi Pussycat!  Thanks for coming.  It's so good of you to come.  You can't stay long, you're busy. Come sit down.  You'll just stay for a little bit.  I can’t offer you a thing.  I don’t know what’s in my Frigidaire and I can’t get up, I…”

“Hi Bubby,” I say, kissing her cheek before taking the seat she indicated.

“How are things?  I can’t offer you a thing…there’s water in the kitchen.  And a glass.  And maybe some nosh, I don’t know.  I can’t offer you a thing.”  She says “water” like my dad does, so it sounds like “wooder.”  I am momentarily embarrassed that I trained myself to say “water” instead, just like I taught myself to say “on” instead of “oin.”  Bubby’s house is synonymous with “nosh” in my mind, and I feel a pang that there is nothing to eat on the table, not because I’m hungry, but because it’s symbolic of the changes occurring.

“Things are good, Bubby,” I say, taking off my jacket.  “I don’t need anything, I just ate.”

“How’s school,” she says before I’ve finished.

“Work’s good,” I say.  She forgets I’m not still at school and can’t really understand the concept of an internship.

“You work hard,” she says, nodding, like she knows she’s right.  “You always work hard.  All my kids work hard.”

“How are you feeling?” I ask, trying to get a word in before she asks another question.

“I’m fine.  That school you go to, it has a good reputation.  I never hear anything bad about it.  You do good work.  You work hard.”  These are not questions, they are statements.  “And you love it.  You work hard but you love it.  You work hard but you love what you do, baruch hashem.  You work like a dirty dog.”

“Everything is good though, Bubby,” I say.

“You never complain.  You work hard and you never complain.  You cook for yourself?  You make yourself dinner?”

“Yes Bubby.  I…”

“I think that’s so good.  All you kids cook for yourselves.  I don’t cook anymore.  I put the thing from the Fridgidaire, from the – the freezer--in the…um…the…I put it in the…um…”

“The microwave?”

“Yes.  I put it in the microwave and…that’s it.  I don’t cook anymore.”  She nods, finalizing her last statement

“That’s okay, Bubby.  And you’ve got people helping you here now.  Don’t they cook for you?”

“Yes, they cook, the other day she…uh…what’s her name?  Not this one.  The other one.  The one that comes here sometimes.  At night.  She comes at night.  She made chicken.  It was alright.  She made it in the kitchen and gave it to me, and it was alright.  It was alright.”  She continues without taking a breath.  “Your father won’t let me drive anymore.  And the doctor, he doesn’t want me driving anymore.  But I told them I know I can’t drive right now, so we’re just going to wait and make a decision later.  We don’t have to decide now.  I’ve been a good sport, but I’m not going to give that up.  I don’t go far.  I go to the beauty shop.  I go to…you know…just right up here.”  She points.  “Down…” she points in the other direction, “you know…McDonough…no, not that one…Liberty…down near where Aunt Jean used to live…anyway, I go down to…you know that place to buy groceries.  I go down there.  And I go to Betty’s.  And I visit Aunt Faygie.  And that’s it.  That’s all I do.  I don’t go anywhere else.  But they say I can’t do that, and I tell them they can’t take that away from me yet, for the thing there.  But that’s what they said.”

“Well Bubby, I think everybody is really worried right now.  And you have all these people here helping you that can take you where you need to go.  You just tell them you need to go to the beauty shop or go shopping and they’ll be happy to…”

“We’re not talking about it.  I don’t go far.  I just go to the beauty shop and to visit Aunt Faygie and…”

“It doesn’t matter how far you’re going.  Things can happen, even just going down the road to the beauty shop.  Things can happen in a parking lot.  You know that from when you hit that pedestrian before…and everything was okay that time, but Bubby, you’ve got to listen to your doctor even if you don’t want to listen to Daddy.”

She laughs.  “He takes good care of me.  I know he just…he worries.  Does he worry?  He worries.”

“We all worry, Bubby.”

“I know, we all worry about everybody, honey.  We all worry.”

“We’d worry less if we knew you weren’t driving.”

“We’re not talking about that,” she says.  She folds her arms to let me know the conversation is really over.  There is silence for a moment as I listen to my heart pounding in my ears.  How do I contradict my 87-year-old grandmother?  She isn’t a scary woman, but in this blur of a conversation, my heart hurts as I try to figure out how to be her granddaughter and also protect her.  How to convey my respect of her authority and age and wisdom.  How do I give her the respect I need to give based on the very fact that she is my Bubby, and also let her know that she is wrong.  That I disagree with her.  That I am in a position where I need to protect her.  This is a woman I have never seen cry, even when my grandfather died.  A breast cancer survivor, a woman with 14 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren, my grandmother serves 42 relatives for Passover seders.  She makes salads so big she uses garbage bags to toss the lettuce with the dressing.  She yells at me when I carry dishes to the sink, telling me to sit down and stop doing so much.  You don’t disagree with her.  You don’t tell her what she can and can’t do.  She uses lines like “I’m your Bubby and you listen to me.”  And so you do.  You just do.

But none of that matters now, because we’re not talking about it.  That much is clear.  It’s a conversation we will need to wait to resurface and, maybe then, I will have better answers.  Maybe then I will know better how to say it…or maybe not.  Maybe it will still make my heart squeeze in a rhythm not my own. 

“The lady who helps me…you know the one?  She was here the other day.”

“Which one?” I ask.

“You know the one.  I can’t think of her name.”

“Was it Paula?”

“No.  The other one.”

“BJ?”

“No.  The other one.  I don’t know why I can’t think of her name.”

“What about her, Bubby?”

“Why can’t I think of her name!  You know.  The other one.  This is so silly.  Why can’t I think of her name?”

“It’s okay.  Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t get old, kid,” she says.  “Getting old is for the birds.”

I laugh.  “I’ll try not to,” I say.

“Why can’t I think of her name?” she asks again.  “She has the same name as me.”

Finding Home

When I was a kid, I loved going on vacation.  I would wait for it, wait for it, wait for it…  I would look forward to it, ask about when it was coming, be SO EXCITED to go, and then, about a week before it was time to leave, I would balk.  I would start dreading it.  I didn’t want to go.  Vacation meant a change from the routine and, as much as I loved going places and seeing things, I liked the comfort, routine, and ritual of home.  Once we were on vacation, I was fine.  But I loved the feeling of coming home.  I could not wait to pull into our long gravel driveway, to run up to my bedroom, to find my cat and hug her and squeeze her until she was totally pissed off and looked like she wished I had been pulled away by the undertow of the ocean that left salt in my hair and sand in my shoes.

Some things, I’ve learned, change as you get older and others don’t. This pattern of both wanting and dreading change is something that remains constant.  I look forward to changes.  I love the excitement of going places, of changing things up, of seeing something new, of doing something different.  But afterwards, I love the feeling of coming home.  I love the settling into the routine, the calm comfort that brings.  I love the ritual of returning to what I know.  I think it is a good place to be, this loving both sides of this coin. 

If you count college, which I do, then in the past 9 years, I have moved 8 times.  Considering I just turned 26, that means I have moved almost every year since I was 17.  That, my friends, is a lot of moving.   

When I was a freshman in college, I remember talking to a friend who was getting ready to graduate.  “It doesn’t seem like you’re home here yet,” she said.  I was in the middle of what we’ll call “Bad Roommate Experience Numbers 1 and 2” so she was correct, but I asked her how she knew.  I was happy—except for the roommate stuff—how did she know I wasn’t really home?  “Because,” she told me, “you still call your dorm room ‘your room.’  You don’t yet call your room ‘home.’”

And I didn’t.  Not for the first year, because it wasn’t home.  Home was home—home was where my parents and sisters and cats and dogs lived.  My dorm room was ‘my room’ where I happened to stay for 9 months of the year with 2 very different, very—shall we say interesting­­—roommates.  Roommates, however, are a story for another time.  My roommate stories have nothing to do with home.

My next two years at college, however, my dorm room became “home.”  I loved those little rooms.  They were mine.  They were safe, and quiet, and they expressed me and who I was.  College was a safe place with my own rituals and routines and community.  Home was still home—the place with my sisters and my parents and my cat that looked pissed every time I showed up.  I had two homes then: the home of my childhood, and my home with my friends and my community.  I may not have always loved college or known quite what to make of it, but the space I lived in was mine: the community was a part of me and I was a part of it, and that very fact brought me home.

In Ohio, the first year was hard.  I had what we’ll call my “Roommates from Hell” experiences that I can only just laugh about now and, although I lived in a large apartment, I had only one small room I stayed in 98% of the time.  This room was smaller than any of my dorm rooms and had only enough room for my bed, my desk, and a very small path to walk between them.  That space, though, belonged to me.  It was my haven away from the insanity of grad school, from the chaos of living 9 hours away from everything I knew, and from the craziness that often occurred outside of my door.  As I settled more and more into my life in Ohio, it became home.  I had no choice—I was there, and I was in it for the long haul.  The home I pictured in my mind was my home.  My space.  At times, I was homesick for my family and for the scenery of the East coast.  There were times I wanted to see “my mountains” so badly it hurt, but in my soul, I was also home.  The home I grew up in slowly became “my parents’ house,” and whichever apartment I was living in was where I wanted to be when I craved going home. 

There were times, of course, when it didn’t feel like home: the three months I lived out of garbage bags because the apartment was infested with bedbugs.  The time the police searched my apartment for drugs because they smelled incense and assumed I was smoking pot.  The time I felt I had lost the safety and community grounding me and I couldn’t find a place in the world or in myself that felt even remotely like “home.” 

When it came time to apply for internships last year, I seriously considered not applying.  My life felt like it had fallen apart and was only just starting to be pieced back together: how could I leave when I had only just found home?  How could I voluntarily pack up and leave the place that had both torn me apart and also handed me back the pieces?  How could I dare to start over in a new physical home when my own internal home was missing?  I wanted to pull down the metaphorical gravel driveway of my soul and throw myself onto the bed I knew was mine that would welcome me with open arms, as if it had known I was missing and had been waiting for me to come along.  I consoled myself with the fact that I would be going back to Maryland—my original home.  I would be, I told myself, going home.  Home.  I would be going back to a place I once called home.

Perhaps it is because the 8^th time one moves in nearly as many years, it takes you longer to claim the place as home.  Perhaps moving 9 hours away, even if it is to the same side of the country you were raised in, is always difficult.  Perhaps I am just not in the right place.  Maybe it’s because I haven’t given it enough time, or maybe the events of my past few years have led me just to be a little less trusting.  A little less likely to open my heart.  A little less likely to believe I can safely claim a physical, interpersonal, or emotional space as “home.”

All I know is this: this house is not mine.  It doesn’t make sense to me—the house that is--and I still, 4 months later, feel that I am walking into someone else’s space.  No matter how I clean it, it still feels dirty.  The light switches are perpetually in the wrong place.  The shelves are too high, the ants continue to march through my kitchen, and the heat sounds like someone let loose preschoolers with a combination of hammers and tap shoes into my pipes.  There is a distinct sense of not belonging that is pervading my time here.  As I work to continually reaffirm my belief that I am worthy of safety, worthy of community, and worthy of respect and friendship, this feeling of not belonging brings an uneasiness that is hard to overcome.  It is easier, almost, to sit with the not belonging than to challenge it.  It is easier to believe this not belonging stems from the unworthiness I’ve known for the past year and a half.  This sense of not belonging in my body, not belonging in community, not belonging in relationship. 

I know I am not alone in my struggle to find home.  From Dorothy clicking her heels three times, to country singers singing about country roads, to old adages claiming that home is where the heart is and Robert Frost claiming that home is where “when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” it seems this struggle to find and define home is universal.  Ideally, of course, home would not be a physical place.  Ideally, I could walk around knowing that I am home in my soul, in my body, in my heart.  When I have a secure base to go from—when I have a strong physical sense of home—perhaps I can get there, but I would be lying if I said I could find home that easily.  It is wrong to want that physical haven?  That safe place that belongs to me?  The community surrounding me that lets me know, in spite of my sense of unworthiness and non-belonging, that I actually belong?

What is home for you?  Where is home?  Have you found it?  What would it take for you to get there?

Chronology of Photographs, In Words

I am currently reading Pat Schneider's book, "Writing Alone and with Others." One of the writing prompts she provides is to bring up a mental image (or an actual photograph) and begin writing with "In this one you are..."

The following poem is what I came up with. In my "real" version of it, I played with the formatting and I like it better than I can present it here. (Darn you, Blogger, for limiting my creativity and stifling my style!) I changed the orientation of the paper to be horizontal and the three stanzas are in side-by-side columns. The entire poem then fits on one page. Some of the same lines then even line up across the paper, and that's pretty nifty. It kind of gives a physical demonstration of the meaning I want the poem to have, too, which makes me feel like a real writer. It also makes me feel unnecessarily obsessive about small things, but that's besides the point. It's kind of beautiful, even if the poem itself isn't altogether fabulous.

You should write a "In this one you are..." poem. Close your eyes for a moment and look for what image comes to you. Then share with us what you write. Or don't. Or do share it somewhere else.

Chronology of Photographs, In Words

In this one you are trusting. See how
it emanates from your eyes?
In their hazel-green-grayness, they are your
eyes, trusting the world the way
a 24-year-old should trust a world, you are
beautiful
the way you wear your body, the
smile that shows the world
you. You
are a living, smiling, trusting daughter of dreams and earth
you live life quietly, out loud, see,
there, right there, how it carries in your voice?
It’s quiet, you, embodied,
living your words in your voice.
You’re young and the world’s uncertain
you know this, but you’re young so
trust this one. This one is for trusting, yes, so
trust it. In this one
you are
trusting.

In this one you are hiding. See how
it fills your eyes?
They are your eyes—the hazel-green-gray
holds fear, but you,
a 25-year-old waiting to be unbroken, you are
beautiful
the way you wear your body,
trying to fill it with something you believe you lost, but--see it?
It’s there—just there—beyond the
cloak of uncertainty,
the way you try to smile to show that you
are living, still,
a brave daughter of the world
you live life quietly, on the page, see
how it carries your voice?
It’s quiet, you, embodied on the page,
it’s your voice, still.
You’re young and the world’s uncertain
your very cells know this now
but you’re young so
trust this one.
This one, too, is for
trusting.

In this one you are changing. See how
that confidence fills your eyes?
The hazel-green-gray depth of your eyes
holds wisdom,
a 26-year-old, loving the world, you are
beautiful.
The way you wear your body,
proud of the past it embodies, you are
confident, sometimes, and
gentle when you’re not—you
love the world and the place you take in it.
A living, smiling, wise daughter of
courage and faith, you
live life quietly, out loud, see
how you share it with the world?
You’re young and the world’s uncertain
but also for loving, so
trust this one. It will be hard, yes, but
in this one
you will also be
trusting.

Why not now?

As I climbed into the van for work that would take me back to the metro station, I shook my umbrella out the door, tried to smooth my beyond-help wet hair, and breathlessly said hello to the driver, “JP.” 

“Is this rain ever going to stop?” I asked, half just to have something to say, and half because I was incredibly grumpy.

“Well if you ask me, “ said JP, “I think it’s a sign.”

I settled in my seat as JP put the van in drive.  “A sign?”

"Yeah,” he continued.  “If you ask me, I say it’s a sign.  I think the Lord telling us it’s the end.”

I laughed.  I mean really, what else do you do?  “You might be right about that,” I said.

“Think about it,” JP said, chuckling, “we had the earthquake.  We had a hurricane.  And now we got flooding and tropical storms, and this is just in 2 weeks.  People got their roof falling in, roads closing down, schools closed, people out of electricity again...”

“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” I said.  “Kind of scary.”

“I'm tellin’ people,” said JP, “it’s the end.  Ain’t nothin’ you can do but get good with yo’self.  If the end is here, and this is it, nothin’ else is goin’ to matter.  Everybody get all scared or run around like ‘the end is here, the end is here,’ but not me.  I just tell e’rybody I gonna spend this time gettin’ good with MYself.  That’s what we all should be doin’.  Spendin’ this time gettin’ good with ourselves.”

“I like that, JP,” I said. “That is what matters in the end, isn’t it?”

“Now’s as good a time as any,” he suggested.  “It might be the end.  It might not be.  But it’s as good a time as any to get good with yo’self.  Might as well be now.”

If it was the end of the world…what would you need to do to “get good with yourself,” as JP put it?  What does that mean for you?  What would it take for you to “get good with yourself”?  What’s stopping you from doing it now?

Self-Care, Part 2

I learned something about myself tonight. 

Until tonight, I did not really know what it feels like to allow myself to be angry.  I thought I did.  I know what it feels like, but I didn’t really know what it was like to allow myself to BE angry. I can intellectualize my way around just about everything.  I can come up with fancy words and metaphors and stories, and I can think my way through a whole heck of a lot.  I can come up with neat little word packaged emotions for you that fit the description of what the emotion feels like, and I can come up with about 10 different interventions for working with it, but I learned tonight that sometimes, I’m pretty much just full of crap.  Feel free to call me on it in the future.  I see it now.

I don’t really want to put words on it just yet, because…well…it was kind of intense and my whole body feels kind of raw from the experience.  Raw and wired.  I need to get to bed, but there’s no way that’s going to happen right now.  Words are how I understand things and put them to rest, so I think that’s what I need to do. 

Things have been building for me for a really long time.  A really fantastic friend sent me a care package, which I received this weekend, to remind me to take care of myself…and I tried.  I really tried.  I can honestly say I made a concerted effort this weekend, and actually, I was feeling pretty proud of myself for that.  I was ending this 3-day weekend feeling pretty good, thanks to some really hard work I did because, for me, self-care is hard work.  It’s not something I do naturally or well.

I have some reservations about this week for several reasons, and I know that certain aspects of this week are going to be difficult for me.  I’m not 100% sure how to deal with that yet, but I made sure that I had as many things in place to make myself able to deal with this upcoming potential trigger in as healthy a way as possible.  I’m really trying here, folks.  I really am.

I made a really fabulous dinner (potato and chickpea curry with rice…yum!), and had just finished that, was washing dishes and listening to some of my favorite music when I got a phone call.  The details of the phone call aren’t necessary, but the caller essentially (a) told me how irresponsible and negligent I had been this weekend and (b) told me how I had let them down.  This caller is someone who has a significant impact on my life and, as much as when I was 5 years old, if I feel I have disappointed someone, I will pretty much fall apart.  I did not miss some big essential duty.  I did not mess up anything.  It was merely this person’s viewpoint, without having all the facts (although she should have been able to know, really).

The work I had so carefully done this weekend crumbled like a house of cards.  I turned to a not-so-healthy coping strategy, which helped, but not enough.   When I get upset (angry, sad, really anxious, whatever), my body shakes.  I hate it in a really big way, but I couldn’t stop it from shaking. 

I ranted in my head and attempted to rationalize away my anger and frustration, but couldn’t.  I needed an outlet.  A physical outlet.  And I needed it sooner rather than later.  I grabbed a pillow from my bed and squeezed it, hard.  Didn’t work.  Harder.  Nothing.  And then, I just…I snapped.  Really.  Something inside me just went “POP,” and I started beating the hell out of my mattress with my pillow.  Again.  And again.  And again.  And again.

I am more than certain that I looked like a crazy person.  My hair fell out of its clip and went all over the place as I walloped the mattress harder and harder.  I must have been screaming, because my throat hurts like you wouldn’t believe.  And I wasn’t just angry about the phone call.  I was angry about what’s to come this week, and I was angry about self-care being difficult, and I was angry about things I swore I wasn’t angry about any more.  I was angry about things I didn’t even remember being angry about.  It’s like the anger is stored in my muscles, and when I gave it the chance to surface, the memories and the emotions all bubbled up my bloodstream.

When I couldn’t raise my arms again, I put the pillow back on the bed, and walked back into the living room.  The poor dog was cowering behind a chair, having never seen anything quite like that, and I laid on the floor and cuddled with him, saying, “I’m sorry” over and over and over and over again.  I tried to convince myself I was apologizing to the dog for scaring him, but we both knew it was more than that. 

I am very conscious of my mind tempering everything I’m writing right now.  “Calm, now.  Calm.  Calm.  Calm.  People don’t know you turned into an angry idiot this evening.”

And really, you don’t.  Of course you don’t.  But I need to share it because it’s important, and because I can update my self-care post from yesterday.  Yes, sometimes self-care is about dental floss.  And sometimes—sometimes, it might need to be about beating the crap out of something indestructible and letting some of those bubbles rise to the surface. 

Nobody ever tells you self-care can be a very scary experience.  But it can be.  I know.  My body still doesn’t want to let it go.

Self-Care, Picasso, and Dental Floss

I have the beginnings of about 5 different blog posts, none of them particularly interesting or worthwhile, and all of them very stuck.  I can’t seem to land on a topic and stick to it right now, and when I do find a topic I want to write about, the thoughts stick and can’t pass through the birthing canal from my brain to my fingers to make it onto the page.  It’s painful, I’ve gotta say.  There are lots of reasons, some of which I’ve even identified, none of which I want to go into.  So they’re just going to stay stuck and we’re all going to be happier for it.  Maybe. 

So instead, I’ll write about something easy, fun, important.  I’m going to write about self-care. 

Stop laughing! 

No, really now.  Stop laughing. 

C’mon, that’s not nice.  Just listen.  I might have something to say.

Are you quite finished?  Thank you.

So, self-care is important.  I should do it.  You should do it.  The world would be a happier place if we all just self-cared more often.

Hmmm…this post isn’t working out so well, either.

See, I have a problem with the word “deserve.”  Many people, when they say “take care of yourself,” follow it up with “…you deserve it.”  The concept of being “deserving” indicates to me that there are some people, then, who DON’T “deserve it,” and I just don’t believe that’s true.  If we get into the “deserving” piece, I can always think of people who are more “deserving” or whatever than I am, and can’t really think of anybody who ISN’T deserving.  Maybe it’s because the media always tries to shove down our throats that we “deserve” whatever it is that I am so opposed to the idea. 

For example, think of all the women you know.  Can you think of one woman who doesn’t “deserve” to have shiny, thick hair that smells like Strawberry Breeze?  Me either!  I mean, really, when you get pissed at somebody (since you were older than junior high), do you ever think, “I hope your hair gets thin and smells like swamp scum, because you SURELY don’t deserve to shampoo your hair after THAT behavior.  Noooooo siree, no shampoo for you.  I’m taking my Strawberry Breeze Shining and Thickening shampoo AND the Clean Rain conditioner and GOING HOME.” 

When I was a kid, we had a tape of stories we listened to in the car.  One story’s main character was an elderly woman who lived by the motto, “people get what they deserve.”  I have heard this, particularly over the past year and a half, from various people, in various ways.  “Karma’s a bitch,” some people say.  “What goes around comes around.”  “They’ll get what’s coming to them.”  Basically, I don’t believe it’s true.  People DON’T get what they deserve (good and bad) and, in fact, many people get things they don’t deserve.  That’s just a fact.  I’ve seen it happen.

So, when people tell me “take care of yourself, you deserve it,” I kind of get unnecessarily irritated.  (“So you’re saying there was a time when I didn’t?” or “oh I do, do I?  Well exactly how much self-care do I deserve at this point?  Do I have enough “you deserve it” points saved up to earn a hot bath?  How about candles?  Have I earned candles?).  Maybe I am thinking about it wrong, but it irks me.

It’s different, though, when people say, “you ARE worth it.”  That, to me, is completely different because, yes, there are times when I haven’t felt/don’t feel like I am “worth it”—with “it” being time, or money, or just plain and simple attention.  To say “you’re worth it” is reminding you/me/whoever that it’s okay to take that time.  That your body, your mind, your spirit, is deserving of that love and attention.  It’s taking away the “deserve”—which indicates that you had to do something in order to earn it, and just says “you are worthy of that love, simply because you are.”

Deserve feels like I’m working for something, although I didn’t know the rules of what I was working for.  It’s like I worked, worked, worked, and suddenly, I “deserve” something, although I never know how much I “deserve,” quite how much I earned.  If I’m going to work like that, give me a token economy chart so I can cash in my chips at the end of the day.

Worthiness feels like something more inherent.  It’s present on a more bodily level.  My body brought me through another day.  It put up with the wear and tear, withstood the physical and emotional miles I put on, and for that, I should take care of it.  It is worth taking care of so it will continue carrying me.  My emotional and spiritual self withstood the trials and tribulations of another day.  For that, it is worth caring for, so I can ensure it will continue to help me through the day.  I don’t always believe this or know it to be true, but it’s easier for me to swallow than the whole “deserve” thing.

Or at least, that is the distinction in my mind.  If you have a better way of thinking about this and I’m completely off base, let me know.

Back to self-care.  We all know the drill.  It doesn’t have to be something that costs money.  It doesn’t have to be something big.  It just has to be something that makes you feel good, that replenishes you, yada yada yada.  Right?

The thing I’ve never understood about all that is this: what if you don’t know?  What if you don’t know what’s going to feel good, or what is going to replenish you?  What if you can’t figure out what’s going to work?  Or what if you just can’t bring yourself to take the time?

One of the bigger “a-ha” moments of my life in regards to self-care occurred while I was flossing my teeth.  I’m not kidding…flossing, for me, is generally an act of pretty radical self-care. 

About a year ago, I was making a concerted effort one evening to engage in some basic self-care, so I was flossing my teeth.  As I flossed, I looked in the mirror to see what I was doing, and when I did, my eyes found my eyes in the mirror.  I put the floss down and stood for a few seconds, looking at myself, holding my gaze and looking—really looking—at my face, my clothes, my body, and in particular, my eyes.  As I did this, I started to cry and realized: it had been about 6 months since I had looked at myself in the mirror and really allowed myself to see inside.  Of course, I had looked in the mirror, but I had only seen the pieces I was fixing: my hair, my teeth, my make-up.  In those 6 months, my entire world had changed, and I was unwilling and unable to look myself in the face.  I felt sure I would see someone else entirely looking back at me, but also couldn’t bear the thought of looking the same when everything about me and the way I thought about myself had changed.  When I finally allowed myself to look, it was powerful, and emotional, in a way I can’t find the words to describe.  It was like allowing myself to see myself as whole.  Like seeing myself in a photograph, when I had been picturing myself fractured and abstracted like a painting by Picasso.

Self-care is hard work.  It’s harder than taking care of others.  It’s harder than putting one foot in front of the other and marching steadily forward.  It takes real, conscious effort, and most times, I’m not even 100% sure what it means. 

I have a feeling, though, it might start with some dental floss.

The Question

I’ve always been someone who can write into an answer.  There have been very few times when I have true “writer’s block” in the sense that the words just won’t come.  Not for very long, anyway.  Sure, sometimes the words I WANT won’t come, but I can usually get something on the paper. 

I’m pretty darn stuck right now, though.  Actually, I’ve been stuck for quite some time.  There are just these couple things I really want to write about.  Have to write about.  But I can’t.  I just can’t.  And I don’t know what to do about that.  I think I’ve written around it (and around it, and around it, and around it….) but I still can’t write it.  It just doesn’t want to be written. Or it does, and I just can’t do it. 

Can you sense my confusion?

This stuck point in my writing, though, is also a stuck point in my life, see?  It’s causing problems.  All sorts of problems.  So, if I could just write it, give it an outlet, maybe I could reach some clarity.  Maybe something would be clarified.  But I can’t find the point of what I want to say to say it.  Hence the meaning of the word “stuck.”  Unable to proceed.

How do I give voice to this struggle?  This is the question in my heart.  One of the questions in my heart.

What are you going to do?  How are you going to make a difference?  Where are you going to put your words—your tools and weapons—to make a change?  This is the next part of it.  I want—desperately want—to make a difference.  To make a change.  Not with everything, but about one issue in particular.  I want to make a change in the one area I feel silent about.  I want to speak out about the one thing that shuts my heart down and puts my emotions into hibernation.  I want to feel angry and empowered, and I want my words to fly from my brain to the page, from my heart to the page, and I want to know that someone will read my words and their struggle will be eased.  I want to know that, because I hurt, that one less person will have to hurt.  I want to know that someone, somewhere, will benefit.

But I am silent.  And silenced.  I continue to hold my breath—and my tongue—to protect us.  Them and me, for if I protect myself, I am also protecting them, and this is what I don’t want to do.  There is no one stopping me but me, so I am angry at myself, and the struggle continues. 

Even the people who know this struggle—who know of my struggle—they ask, “how are you?” and they mean it.  And I tell them, “some days are better than others,” because I know they mean it.  They look for more of an answer, and I fall silent, avert my gaze, change the topic.  Some days ARE better than others, but that is not really how I am.  To tell you how I am would be to break that silence, and breaking the silence is hard.  Too hard.  So I don’t.  Not today, or now.  Breaking that silence would let you know things about me that you probably don’t want to know.  Things I keep hidden.  It would reveal how I really am.

We all have struggles we have difficulty voicing.  We all have places where we are silent when we want to speak.  How do you give voice to your struggle?  Have you?  Would you?  Will you?  Is it important to you to break through the silenced places?  How will you do it?