More of This & Less of That

Reflection on 2011

2011-12-31T23:33:00.000-08:00

These questions are from a Mondo Beyondo email I got recently. I'd link to it, but blogging from my iPad is hard. I'm still visiting family right now, and we had a nice low-key NYE, watching TV, sipping champagne, and laughing.

My one goal in 2012 is to be ABD by the time I turn 30 on November 29. That will require a lot of hard work, and I'm scared, because I feel like I spent seven months of 2011 working on studying for my exams, and I've not gotten nearly as much done.

But before I start fretting over the new year, and the possible end of the world, if I believe the Mayan calendar, I wanted to take some time to reflect on 2011.

1. What did you create?
I created a great many poems, including many about fashion, and my body, and the intersections of fat, queer, and disabled. I created new friendships, a PhD exam reading list (putting 120 books on a list--technically three lists--doesn't sound difficult, but, believe me, it is). I created a beautiful presentation of my poetry and activism at NOLOSE. I created a safe home for my beast babies and myself. I created a syllabus. I created some meals to keep me fed, and I created a support system for myself.

2. What challenges did you face with courage and strength?
I didn't kill myself in 2011. I faced many challenges, and handled them with varying degrees of courage and strength. Some were minor, like the challenge of being out of my apartment and with other people, which is a struggle for me, because of my social anxiety disorder. I helped comfort my family when my niece was in the NICU for her first month of life. I kept going and didn't quit, even though this is the hardest part of the PhD program yet.

3. What promises did you keep?
Promise is a difficult word for me, because I kept my word on many occasions, like when I fulfilled the duties of my three jobs. When I paid my bills. When I kept appointments with doctors and friends. I don't know if these are exactly PROMISES, though. But I do try hard to keep my word.

4. What brave choices did you make?
Quitting midwifery school was really difficult. It wasn't the right time for me, and after what happened with my niece, I don't know if I could ever bear the burden of such responsibility, but I've never quit anything like that before, and it was difficult to make the right decision for me. Also, staying alive is always a brave and difficult choice.

5. What are you proud of?
I'm proud that I was able to take care of myself, and reach out to people when I felt that sucidal ideation returning. I'm proud that I taught a really great class this fall, and that I got an inclusive, non-discrimination policy on the syllabus used by every incoming first year composition teacher at my university. I'm proud that I have become an aunt, and that I'm going to be a damn good aunt. I'm proud that I did the hard work of starting to really heal from my disordered eating background by working with the Fat Nutritionist. I'm proud that I'm someone my friends love and trust, and my professors wish well, and my family loves and respects (even when they do an awful job of showing it). I'm proud that even when things are difficult and even when i feel like I'm failing, I never surrender.

Looking Forward

2011-12-28T19:22:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite ways to use a blog is to help me set goals and hold myself accountable for them. I'm wary of New Year's resolutions, but I am a huge fan of goal setting, and since the new calendar year usually coincides with the start of the spring semester, I often do make resolutions.

Last year I didn't do so well at reaching the goals I set, and I still have many of the same goals. Mostly I want to change some bad habits and establish new ones. 2012 is going to be a big year for me. I'm turning 30, and that feels huge to me. I'm terrified of it, and struggling mightily with feelings of inadequecy over everything I haven't yet accomplished by that age. I have this idea in my head of who I want to be, and how I want my life to look, and over the years, especially the past three years, I've come a long way toward making my expectations closer to the reality of who I am and what will actually make me happy, but it's still hard to get old whilst being single and facing a very uncertain future.

So 2012 is going to be all about mindfulness. I want to be present in the moment and focus on what really matters. I want to create environments that allow me to be present, to be happy, and safe.

This year, I am studying for my Phd comprehensive exams, and studying for and passing those exams is my number one priority.

I want to write a poem every day, to focus on re-establishing the habit of writing every day. While studying, my writing has taken a back seat, and even though I'm told this is very common, it makes me greatly unhappy, so I need to fix it.

I want to clean and organize my apartment so that my living space doesn't contribute to my stress. This will involve developing routines like always doing my dishes and cooking more regularly, as well as the intial cleaning and organizing phase.

I want to develop a regular practice of yoga and meditation. It doesn't matter if I do this at home or in a class. Learning to be present in mind and body is crucial to my life and work and I must make time for it.

I want to be more frugal, and pay off my credit card debt before I turn 30. This will mean cooking at home more, not going on ridiculous clothes shopping sprees, and trying to wean myself off credit card usage for all but the essentials, like bills.

In the fall of 2012, I will officially go on the job market, which is terrifying. I've had jobs before, obviously, and I teach now, but the academic job search is an inscrutable, scary prospect. I dowanna. But I must. I'm hoping to get a fellowship so I can stay a fifth year and finish my dissertation, but I can't count on anything.

I want to develop regular habits of self-care: brushing & flossing my teeth, using my face creams, taking my meds & supplements, and, as I already mentioned, doing yoga and meditating.

I'm sure I will have numerous smaller, more specific goals each month, but this is what I hope for in the new year.

I'm sure I'll expand on and tweak this in the coming days and weeks.

Scent Memory

2011-12-08T21:17:00.000-08:00

I'm wearing this sweater right now that smells like a girl I loved in college. She used this coconut lotion, and her whole dorm room smelled like it. I bought this summer at Whole Foods, when I recognized the bottle, because I loved that lotion and that smell. I don't usually think about her when I use the lotion, but tonight, the faint smell of coconut on the cuff of my sweater sleeve brought me back to freshman year, finals week, sitting on the floor of my dorm room and trying to study for a developmental psychology final. Or how she and I would have tea parties in my dorm. I have a thing about tea. An entire huge cupboard in my apartment now is devoted to tea, and in college, it was a drawer in my desk. We learned to knit together, and we were both from the Midwest, and several times she rode with me when I drove back home. Wet wool. Icy window panes into which we traced our names. Her amazing back massages. Doing yoga to stretch out in rest tops on that 18-hour drive.

I've been thinking of my undergrad alma mater a lot lately, because I've found a tumblr written by current students, and it tears at my heartstrings. What I wouldn't give to go back and do it all again.

I'm twenty-nine now, and college feels so far away. My ten-year high school reunion is over this holiday break, and I'm not going, but I'm feeling desperate to find a memory book I made at 18, to be opened in 10 years. I'm worried my parents somehow threw it out, because I also can't find my yearbooks, despite searching every time I go home.

I've grown nostalgic. I'm of an older generation now that my niece was born. I'm not one of the young ones anymore. I'm torn about aging. I'm terrified of turning thirty.

When I was in high school and college, I hid my silver bullet vibrator in a silver box underneath a bunch of lavender sachets, so when I smell lavender, I have an instant reaction of getting a bit turned on.

Day-old wine spills instantly take me back to my junior year abroad in Paris.

Christmas makes me feel so nostalgic. I think of my childhood, and of every year since then that I've trekked home to be with my family to celebrate. Every year but once.

I'm going home in three days. I can't describe why this song and these memories all feel connected, but they do. It's a romantic song, but for me I think I just love all the domestic details. And the smell of this sweater.

Parenthood

2011-12-03T19:50:00.001-08:00

My dog at 4 months old

Lately it feels like I'm surrounded by babies. My puppy is a baby dog, and I must have cleaned up at least as much piss and shit in the last few months as new parents do. My sister-in-law gave birth, and I became an Aunt, a friend got pregnant and miscarried. Another friend got pregnant. Also, I'm a doula. I'm not taking clients right now, because it's hard to juggle alongside my PhD, and it's also difficult to be around pregnant women when I am pretty sure (as are my doctors) that I'll never be able to conceive. I'd love to find a way to adopt in an ethical way someday, and I'm holding out hope for that, but that will be a long way in the future. As someone who has devoted a good deal of time to studying pregnancy, birth, and babies (I am also a student midwife, though that is also kind of on hold), it's hard to know it's something I'll never experience.

When I was a child, I was known as the Little Mother for how I tended to my brother and my cousins. No one ever questioned that I would be a good mom. I even told my parents when I was in junior high, that I wanted to be a mother so badly, I was determined to do it when I was ready, regardless if I was married or not. I kind of intended to be a single mom, not that I'd complain if I had to do it with a partner. That seems funny now. But not funny ha-ha.

I spend so much time looking at parenting resources, whether they be blogs or books or catalogs of stuff to buy for a child. I can hold my own with a group of moms, talking for hours about breastfeeding, episiotomies, potty training. To be honest, part of why I became a doula initially was so that I'd have an excuse to concern myself with such things. I remember it distinctly. My friend had just passed her PhD exams, and we were celebrating, talking about how much we wanted kids. She confided in me that she and her husband were going to start trying to conceive. She playfully joked with me that I should do, and we could be pregnant together. She didn't know how tempting that was for me. Hours later, drunk, back at home, I was researching sperm donors. But I knew that I couldn't have a baby for so many reasons. Especially not on my own, as a lesbian, in the beginning of a PhD program. So I became a doula instead. I registered for a class that night, and was certified within a year. At the same time that I was becoming a doula, my friend was struggling with infertility, and my sister-in-law miscarried their first child. Meanwhile, in my PhD, I was studying maternity in poetry during the 18th and 19th centuries. Motherhood pervades my life, yet I am not a mother.

During the darkness, the time recently when I was as depressed as I have ever been, a friend of mine told me that being a loving guardian to my pets is a big deal, and does matter. She wrote:

One thing I've learned from being a vet's daughter for 23 years is that loving an animal is. . . remarkable. It's singular and powerful every single time that kind of interspecies bond develops, not because that kind of love has never occurred before or because it is particularly unique and un-doable by anyone else, but because every instance of that bond actively makes the world a less shitty place. And holy shit that matters. Every time you have rescued an animal matters, and every time you choose to give them food or cuddle them or take out their crap, that matters, and frankly? Every time you don't take out your anger or sadness or misery on them, because they are smaller than you and you have power over them, THAT REALLY MATTERS.

So I have embraced pet parenthood. I am even taking my puppy home for Christmas (the kitties are much happier staying here with the petsitter), and I might not ever be the mom to a human baby, but I can parent pets my entire life, and I will make a difference in the lives of those animals. And that does matter. There's so much derision for people who treat their animals like their children. We're portrayed as comical, pathetic, and immature. But there is little about my "lifestyle" in general that is mainstream acceptable, so here's another thing. It's hard watching others progress through the normative stages of life (school, marriage, children) and get told that I am lacking because I'm single and childless. I struggle with this a lot, because I'd love to have a baby. I'm still not sure if I want a partner. But all I can do is live the questions, try to be happy, and not to die. That sounds histrionic, but I mean it. Stay alive. A simple, surprisingly difficult goal.

VoiceOver

2011-12-03T11:43:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been watching shows such as The Wonder Years and How I Met Your Mother which look back on a life from an older age and reminisce. How often we wish we could see into the future and know what the correct decision to make would be. How tentative I often feel with my impulsive decisions, worrying about regret.

That place of unknowing (the present) holds something special that can't be accessed except through nostalgia, and there is an uncanniness to our memories; we see ourselves, familiar yet strange, even perhaps even grotesque.

I lived in Paris once, and it's exactly the kind of thing that, even whilst doing it, I was aware of how I would forever after look back and get to say, "When I lived in Paris..."

Today in my memory, I think of cobblestones and smeared dog shit, and snow blocking the light from my skylight window.

This isn't a post about Paris.

It's about the fact that I keep waiting to get to the point in my life where I'm living the part that I'll be retelling into old age. Meeting my partner, having my kids, publishing my first book, finally landing a tenure track job, buying a house. But it's not happening. I'm single, infertile, unpublished, jobless (well, I have three jobs to make ends meet, but not THE job), and forever renting.

I lived in Paris almost ten years ago. I was 21, and my whole bright future was before me. I'm trying not to feel cynical as I type that, because we just can't know what the future holds.

Right now, I'm trying to, as my favorite quote in college, from Rilke, urges,

...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

When I took off my engagement ring for the last time, my finger felt so empty and it made me so sad to feel it bare, a constant physical reminder of my inability to control my destiny, so I had a simple silver ring made, inscribed inside, live the questions. I hardly ever wear it anymore, because my fingers are bigger now from so much piano playing, but it's a testament to how important this quote has been for me.

The point is to live everything.

I am not the mother of any child, nor am I someone's wife, but I am the guardian of three cats rescued from a shelter, and one puppy from the pound. That's not nothing.

Break Blow Burn

2011-12-02T23:13:00.001-08:00

Folding laundry today, walking the dog, grading papers, I realized I've become accustomed to the mountains. I have made my home in the desert, and I'd rather not leave. I'm from elsewhere, and this land feels strange. Most of my friends can't wait to escape, and, yes, this conservative town has its flaws, but the mountains conjure something for me. They are sublime, in the true sense of the word; pleasurable because terrifying. Their magnitude and might.

Two months ago, I adopted a French Bulldog puppy instead of killing myself. It really felt like it was one or the other, and though I didn't want to be alive any longer, I knew I didn't have it in me to leave a mess for someone else to clean up, so to the animal shelter I went.

Two weeks ago, I became an aunt, and my niece remains in critical condition in the NICU. Fear and a carpe diem esprit and prayer have become automatic around here.

In a year, I will turn 30, and this terrifies me, though I'm not entirely sure why.

I never really left, you see, because I knew I would be back. I'm not the same, but I'm still here, if you'd care to listen.

XIV

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me

—John Donne