Discoveries 2020

I thought about intentions. It occurred to me that last year I did not set intentions here — instead I set firm, yes/no, admirable goals that required the participation of other people and large systems, and that participation was not forthcoming — AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED.

But I don’t want to add anything, to ask more of myself for 2021 (except to write more). I do not need to improve myself, I need to improve my circumstances, which will, as ever, require the participation of other people and large systems. So it seems kinder not to write about how I succeeded and how I failed, but to write about and eventually look back on, what I discovered this year.

1). Nature. I get it now. Some kinds of outside are more helpful to me than other kinds of outside. I don’t have anything especially insightful to say about the goodness, the healing power, the deep centering effect of nature (fine, Walden, but as an urbanist I’m generally vexed with Thoreau who, by the way, wasn’t at all far from town and continued to benefit from community and the urbanity that was on offer). I didn’t get it before, really. I get it now. I need it now. And I am grateful that my apartment, while lacking private outdoor space, is pretty much on top of an extraordinary network of unpaved trails. This year I walked on the Appalachian trail!

2). Walking. I liked walking instrumentally. (Before 2020, I liked a lot of things instrumentally. I was a one-woman orchestra of instrumentality. That’s another discovery in itself.) It was absolutely my favorite way to move through a city, to learn about a place, to get from A to B. But I didn’t value it as an activity in itself, I didn’t have a practice of walking. It wasn’t hard enough, strenuous enough, I should have been running, walking for its own sake was boring. And then running became fraught and scary, with three significant injuries in 2019. So I walked just to get out (into Nature!), and I left my headphones behind and settled into walking as a thing in itself, as a meditation, as a practice. And it’s something I do with Will, and sometimes with Milo, and it’s lovely. When I walk, I release myself from always having to do the hardest thing. And in so doing, I see more. I feel more. It feels better for me.

3). Baking: This is a silly one that just occurred to me: This year I discovered that my yeast breads failed not because of insufficient kneading but because of insufficient rising time. I haven’t attempted babka again, but I made three (maybe four) batches of challah that were very good.

4). Asking for help: Oh wow. Wow wow wow. I had 100 networking interactions this year, or, about 75 more than my prior lifetime total. I am very sad — sad doesn’t even begin to cover it, exhausted, enervated, despairing, furious, confused — that none of these has resulted in a new job (yes, I know. It’s not me, it’s 2020). At the same time, I recognize intellectually that this is a big deal. This is new behavior for me. This is the result of a lot of work on trusting myself, trusting other people, recognizing that I am worthy of help, that help and collaboration are the only ways to move to change. It’s a sign of curiosity, imagination, hope. I wish the rewards were here now, that my new behavior had been instantly and comprehensively rewarded. Oh well. Seeds, deep roots not shallow ones.

5). Productivity is bullshit: Really, really for this one, I should win an award. The Nobel Prize in Mindset Renovation. Yes, it took a pandemic and a crushing decrease in salary. Yes, it might all go away when I commute again (especially if I’m commuting to an adjacent city for what might be the best job ever). But I no longer thoughtlessly hurt myself by saying “I got nothing done today.” There’s always more to do. I’ll never be most productive. Days are different from one another. Productivity for its own sake is meaningless, or worse (I’m pretty sure I’ve written that before). Sometimes the most productive thing to do is wait. Sometimes the most productive thing is the thing I did 1 or 10 or 100 days ago that I didn’t recognize as productive. Sometimes the most productive thing is a walk. Joy and productivity are on different scales.

6). I am less anxious: I am many, many things, and I feel many difficult emotions. I am very worried, excruciatingly worried, about my professional situation. As I have been since before I started this blog. Reading my posts from 10 years ago made me sad. I want to work till I’m 80, and I am worried that I will instead stumble through the next 15 years until social security kicks in (actually 17, maybe 20 to get the maximum monthly benefit), grasping, yearning and never really finding the right thing, and finally leaving the field in defeat. No one else believes that for me. So what? I am still scared of Daniel, although less so with each day, with each legal motion, with each smile from Will that reminds me that things are so different now. I worry a lot about Milo, who makes decisions I don’t like at all. And with all that… I am less anxious and was less anxious in this anxiety-riven year than I might have ever been. It’s all that nature! And love. Many things I thought made me anxious and therefore unloveable, un-live-with-able were functions of the impossibility of living with a man who wanted only chaos — he was a malevolent dictator of chaos, and think about that for a minute. I don’t do chaos. I don’t find it sexy or enlivening or compelling. It doesn’t make me feel more alive. It only makes me anxious. Will’s love and my own years and years and years of my work and Milo (who always communicates even when he isn’t behaving) and my friends and my family have made me less anxious. And, honestly, once I realized that I had made a terrible mistake about one thing that you kinda have to get right to have a great life, and that that mistake reverberated through 24 years of career decisions and crushed some of my dreams of motherhood and some of the losses are entirely unrecoverable… I realized all that, that in fact I should have known and didn’t, that I did in fact misread every signal that I did in fact fail to figure it out for myself for a very long time… and I am okay on the other side, there seems a lot less to be anxious about.

More than Z, and liberation

I have a memory of being very, very young, in the backseat of a car, with my head on my grandmother’s lap (it was the 1970s, children were never safe while in motion). I looked out the window at the sky and the stars and asked my grandmother if there were more than 20, because 20 was the biggest number I could imagine at the time. She said, “There are more than 20.” I then said, and my heart bursts with love and pride at this tiny girl creature who could only count to 20 making this gorgeous imaginative leap, understanding intuitively that if one measurement stick didn’t work you could try another, believing that new frontiers might be legible with new language, “Are there more than Z?” “There are more than Z.”

There are more than Z. That’s what I am trying to do here, now, ever after: get to more than Z, to comprehend and play into what appears to be infinite.

I am asking the hardest questions:

What is good work and what is the place of work in a good life?

What is the distinction between listening to oneself and complacency or overwork? What are my rhythms of rest and work, creativity and following?

How do I wait in a way that feels good? How do I make feeling good — as opposed to productivity or justification of my space on this earth — satisfying?

Liberation isn’t having the answer to those questions, liberation is the pursuit of those questions.

I am not feeling liberated, today. I am feeling tired, sad, held-back, adrift, craving progress and craving release from needing progress. The familiar tug of addiction: I need a win, I need a new one regularly. I need a win that will convince other people — by which of course I mean me because other people aren’t looking at me — that it’s a win. I would like to be wise, so wise, about my dissatisfaction. I would like to know what it’s telling me other than what I already know.

Since I was that tiny girl creature in the backseat, I have struggled to be heard and understood, to be seen. The slow job search, the job dissatisfaction, the not-enough-work-to-fill-the-day coupled with the feeling of futility of trawling LinkedIn or more outer-ring networking, and Daniel’s continued efforts to invalidate my humanity by making me wait for what is mine– these are mountains of lead on those buttons, a Dead Sea of salt in those wounds.

The enforced lull of pandemic is both giving me an opportunity to heal and enhancing my vulnerability. No wonder I am tired. A gut renovation of my mindset.

Yom Kippur & liberation

Cheating! But I’m in a hurry.

Liberation is not responding to a tantrum email, although I needed reinforcements for my restraint. Liberation is deciding not to take the bait, not to explain myself to him, who chooses not to see, listen, value, understand or change. And to live, calmly, with the fact that he believes the same about me: that I choose not to see, listen, value, understand, or change. It’s erev Yom Kippur –the divine will sort out who is right. Neither of us are right, or wrong. Darlings, says the divine, you are partly right. Now please be quiet.

I imagined this today:

“Hello, police? I’d like to report an attempted fuckery. No, by email, not in person. Suspect is a white male, age, 68, bad with money, full of entitlement, convinced that his view of justice is, in fact, justice.

Pardon? No, he’s not a stranger, exactly. I lived with him for 24 years, but in all that time I didn’t know him. I know him now, now that I’ve left.

The details? Oh, so, he’s having a tantrum at me by email. He’s trying to draw me into a fight about money. He’s trying to set the boundaries of the argument so that they advantage him, and leave aside facts that change the story. Pardon? Yes, yes, I get it. This kind of crime is quite common.

Also, he’s trying to draw me in, to get me to fight on his terms, to defend myself, when I have nothing to defend or justify. He’s trying to convince me that justice is what he says it is, which is what advantages him and hurts me. Yes ma’am, I know. It’s textbook. I studied law, so I remember the elements of this crime.

And, well, here’s the worst part. He’s talking about responsibilities, saying I am shirking my responsibilities to our child. I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the laughter. Yeah. Yeah, I know. That’s why I called. That’s the heart of the charge, because that is some serious fuckery right there.

So, can you send someone? Write a citation? Maybe a stern warning? Because, he can’t keep getting away with this, right? The law is on my side.

Sorry, what did you say? I didn’t catch that. Oh, yes, yes ma’am. Exactly, that’s right. I am on my side.”

Xenia, Ohio and liberation

Xenia Ohio has nothing at all to do with this post. I didn’t want to cheat by using “ex” for X in my alphabet. Xenia, Ohio was the trapdoor in the geography game Daniel, Milo, and I used to play at the kosher restaurant after we picked up Milo up from the late school bus on Tuesdays. You say the name of a place (city, state, county, country) and the next person says a place that starts with the last letter of the place you named. You can spend a whole dinner just on the A-a places (Alabama, Alaska, Argentina, Armenia, Albania, Andalucia, Australia, then someone would slip in Arkansas or Alicante just to break the rhythm). Xenia was the response to Halifax.

Is there a deeper meaning here? Do I want a trap door? Yes I do. I want a Xenia, because after Halifax there was Fairfax, and I have no response to that. No place to go.

I am angry because people want me to write. My oldest friend, my lover/boyfriend/partner, and, now, Daniel. Here is what I wrote about that;

How to Get Divorced

Start by falling in love.  Falling in love with a man who said, half my life later, later, “You really should write a novel.  I mean it.  And you’re not getting any younger.”  I thought, “But don’t you know what I would write about you?”  Then I realized, that was the point.  He wanted to be mythologized.  He wanted to be set down as epically, heroically, grandiloquently bad.  And it would be my job to do it, as it was my job, always, to do the taxes, unload the dishwasher, fill out the forms, walk the dog, change the filters, to keep the machinery of life running smoothly.  All right.  I’ll give him the first paragraph.  I married a man who diverted his prodigious talents into the boring, predictable, mundane, ceaseless effort of fucking around to avoid the fact of his mortality.  And who will die nevertheless. 

So… there.

I am angry because I do not know what I want, now. I know I want to write (but what? how? why?). I know I want a job, and during this endless day in which my only professional obligation was to send two emails (no replies yet — I just checked my sent items folder to confirm I sent them. If no one replies do I still exist?), I decided to set aside some time to think even more about what I want from a job, because my answers — which I think are clear and comprehensive — don’t seem to satisfy people who ask. I couldn’t come up with anything new. Will says I should (must?) make something, “not just talk about making something.” Now is the time I must (should?) say to Will: I am sorry I haven’t read your stories, which I asked you to give me. I am scared of them. I am scared because you thought of plots, scenes, characters, motivating incidents, and I never have. I have never thought a novel, never brought a story to conclusion — I am not even divorced yet. I am scared of what you made and realizing that I can’t make.

I can’t make. I have made. I mean, I made Milo, who is now in college in another city, adhering to some of the rules meant to keep the show on the road, breaking others. I made him into someone who showed up on my 50th birthday zoom call last night, and made a lovely, loving speech to Will, thanking him for bringing me happiness. I made a life with 20 people in their zoom windows telling each other funny stories about me and sending me love and happy to be there. That’s something. I make many things but none of them are tangible. I make safety. I make experiences. I make joy. Can’t monetize any of it.

I want more, but I don’t know the shape of the more (or the moor, were I to try to rewrite Wuthering Heights. I am resolutely Jane Eyre. Daniel imagined himself Heathcliff and made(!) Catherines out of all his mistresses, needing Jane to stay behind and manage the estate. What would it look like to drop Jane into Wuthering Heights? Cathy has already flounced, swooned, staggered prettily into Jane Eyre, and got locked up in the attic for her trouble.).

I want: to earn(shaw?) $200K a year. Not from writing! I am grounded, ever so, in reality.

To work with people I respect, more specifically with women I respect.

To be in give and take with my ideas and others. I am so tired of feeding myself all the time.

To create. Make — oh, too much too much! Create is a verb I can manage.

I want trust, security, and good tools. Why is that so hard and elusive? Why do people not hear and understand when I say exactly these things? I am asking for what I want, and people respond by asking me what I want. (The Alabama/Alaska/Arizona/Angola A-to-A loop.).

I can’t show and not tell. I have been invisible for too long. I don’t trust showing. I have been showing for years and not many people have cared to see. I thought I was showing Daniel how to be kind, how to be faithful, how to be attentive, how to be honest. I thought I was showing people who employed me that I was valuable and smart and worthy of more and better work. Show don’t tell might work in writing but I haven’t made a success of it in life. So I tell, and tell, and tell, and tell. And people still wrinkle foreheads and ask me, so what do you want? I want to them to notice I”m showing, and stop asking me to fucking tell them.

Waiting and liberation

Yes, of course. It takes time. And we are all waiting now. Sometimes I’m vague or expansive about that “we.” (We and liberation?). “We” meaning, usually, people I imagine to be like me. My imaginary friends — or enemies, the boundaries get porous in my head. Lower-middle-aged, upper-middle-class white women. (I’m lying about that. I’m definitely middle-middle-aged.) But now, really, the universal we applies. We are all waiting, all suspended. Aren’t we?

It is agonizing to be waiting for the divorce and its constituent parts: Daniel’s reply to my opening offer, the filing or not, the sale of the house. It is agonizing to be waiting for any movement at all on the job search. I will imagine myself into a new phase on Tuesday, something more diligent, more creative, more successful– low bar, that. I will admire, or at least respect, myself for the dissatisfaction with my current position and my determination, my knowing-in-my-bones that I deserve more, that what’s on offer in my current place of business is absolutely not how I’m going to flourish, and I can insist on flourishing. (Right?…. right? Do we agree on that?). Or, at the very least, I can aim for it. I can get closer and closer. I can aspire to get closer and closer.

And with all that, it’s probably easier to be doing this in a pandemic, when stalled is the human condition. A greater proportion of we than usual is both stuck and unmoored. Ungrounded and unable to fly.

I miss strangers — that’s what I really miss in the pandemic. I didn’t see my family and my dearest friends very often before, but I saw strangers every day. I saw what they wore, how they walked. I wondered where they were going, what they wanted. I took cues from them: yes, an iced tea is a great idea, thanks for the silent suggestion. What are you reading and can I surreptitiously photograph the book jacket so I remember? My routines weren’t quite set enough in this new place/new life for regular strangers– the people who tell you whether you are late or early, based on where they appear on your shared route. Milo and I had so many regular strangers when he was growing up. Did they notice when we disappeared from their paths, when Milo took a different route to school? Did the morning dog walkers in the park register my absence? I was a reliable regular stranger myself.

Wanting and liberation. The Buddhists — maybe not the real Buddhists, the imaginary Buddhists in my head — say that freedom from wanting is itself liberation. But my liberation alphabet is the opposite. Freedom from desires is not my medicine, not at all. Asking myself what I want and meeting that want, or thinking about it, or yearning even harder and accepting that my yearning has nothing to with the pace of delivery or certainty of relief. That’s my liberation work for now.

Work and liberation. I can only sigh at this one. I am working, I am. I am working at a pace that allows for other pleasures, like lingering in Will’s arms for hours, hours! on a recent morning. For conversations with Milo. For joy. I am working as hard as I am going to work now. Liberation from self-doubt. From yelling.

Victory and liberation

That’s not what this post is about, unless writing itself is a victory over lassitude, or fear, or circumstance, or the external and internal forces that muffle me. I just wanted to see the word victory. I yearn for victory.

Visibility and liberation: It would be a victory to be visible. Or maybe my victories need to be visible to me. I am trying to shine, to show up, to take up space, to get bigger. My hand is waving wildly, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick MEEEEEE.” And… silence. Enveloping invisibility. Silencing invisibility. My belief in my accomplishments, always tenuous (tenebrous?), fades a little more with each unanswered email, each week that passes after the initial interview.

Virtue and liberation: There is no overlap. My conception of virtue is vicious, eviscerating to me. I will not achieve liberation by being the kindest, the nicest, the most self-sacrificing. If so, I would be wondrously free by now — but is the kindest, the nicest, the most self-sacrificing ever really free? No. It’s the “ests” that shackle her (always a her!). “-Est” requires comparison, and liberated people make our (our?!) own measuring sticks. I will be kind, I will be nice. I will call a halt to the sacrifice of my own self because I only have the one and I’d miss me if I disappeared.

Virus and liberation: I do appreciate the time for reflection. I do. I expect I will look back on it as an important time.

Variability and liberation: my mood, my mind — all over the place, as if to make up for the strict limits on where my body can go and has gone. That itself is wearying. I will wake up feeling fine, buoyant, victorious, even. And then I’m sad, heavy, confused, purposeless. There’s no cause for the shift — it’s like swimming across a cold spot in the ocean. It’s just there, and me in it.

Value and liberation: I have value, whether liberated or not. I have value, I am valuable, I value myself. I worry that I get closer to losing that thread every day. It’s not actually a thread. It’s a thick, well-twisted rope. I can rely on it to hold me. It’s hard, though. I’m not feeling at all valued professionally or valuable. Where are all the people who should want me? (Pick me! Pick me! Pick MEEEEEE!). Why are they waiting so long, or making me wait so long? Enough.

Vision and liberation: I’ll know it when I see it. And I know that I will see it.

Undone, almost, and liberation

Far, far, far from done. So far from done. And almost undone.

Why do the wicked prosper? The question never gets old, although what really makes us insane is the unasked second half: “Why do the wicked prosper while I do not?” And it’s interesting and abstract until, until, until someone I know to be truly, deeply, unremittingly wicked is wildly prospering and I am not. And I am increasingly desperate.

My ex has so much money and is so broadly careless that $20,000 left his bank account in one month last year without his noticing. Another $600 a month has been siphoned off since January, and he didn’t notice that, either. My lawyer discovered that as we prepared for our latest effort at negotiation. I admit I don’t check my transactions daily, and I don’t study my bank statements, but I’d notice that. Meanwhile, I sweat spending $48 (including shipping! including fast shipping which I didn’t even want but there wasn’t an alternative) on a pair of ethically correct pan-gender lip balms sold by a black-women-owned small business. And another $48 on a bathrobe which I don’t need, but I wanted, I just wanted.

I am allowed to want and then to satisfy that want. And I am allowed wants that seem so big they will never be satisfied, or I fear they will never be satisfied.

My relationships are in order, that is my mantra. I am alive, I am in exceptionally good health. I have everything I need to get through the day.

And I’m suffering. And the only real liberation from suffering is death — I don’t care what the buddhists say. But, accepting things as they are in the moment, without needing to change this moment, does take the edge off. Probably more effectively than shopping, but I’m not sure how much I want to test that.

Truth and liberation

The truth is… many of the worst things have already happened, and am I living through, with, around, and in them. Daniel stopped loving me (I think he started, he just didn’t want to see it through, which is the characteristic of his life). I have gained weight, and it’s okay now (“now”= this minute, because I am wearing my skirt high up on my torso, where I am narrowest, rather than where I think my waist is), but if you had said to me in March: in addition to the divorce dragging on, the job search slowing to an imperceptible pace, COVID stretching through the end of the year, in addition to all of that, you’ll gain 10 pounds I would have said, take that one away first. Milo is living in a situation I foresaw with horror, in the house of his father’s outrageous, glamorous, and easeful lies and he is unwilling, unable to grasp the crowbar of truth and crack the edifice– and I don’t blame him.

The truth is, I didn’t get past the first round interview for a job that sounded absolutely perfect, after prepping for 8 hours. No amount of prep revises my professional past, which is nothing to be ashamed of, and also not what they wanted.

The truth is, so much of the world I inhabit professionally is made-upery, which WordPress wants to correct to made-dupery, and that is also correct. It is guesses without standards, assertions of good with no proof, experiences of good that evaporate, a vast, prestigious confidence game.

The truth is, my relationships are absolutely in order, in loving, abundant, generous, truthful, rich order. And my lover says, “Yes, and you can still want more than that in your life.”

The truth is, I am no longer worrying about using this time well. Which might mean I’m using it well or it might not but it doesn’t matter because “using this time well” has no meaning except what I give it.

The truth is, while is painful for me to work unseen, unheard, to wonder if I am disappearing, this deprivation is sharpening my own sight, hearing, and boundary lines. I am developing customized x-ray vision, lenses of self-compassion, clarity of perception of a fuzzy, wobbly, out-of-whack world.

Sign-posts and liberation

There aren’t any.

Well, that’s part of the problem, right? I am looking for a sign that says “Congratulations, D, you are liberated!” Which means someone else put it there, someone else has decided that I am liberated, done, approved, free. When all of these decisions are mine, because that’s the essence of liberation. Along with its ephemeral, ever-unfinished nature.

Dammit.

I say I hate making my own path, except it’s the only thing I’ve ever done. I say I crave the certainty and the landmarks and the milestones of the established way of doing things, except I had no interest in actually working for a law firm, or a consulting firm, or in a system with clearly legible metrics of success, and I had plenty of chances to. Dammit. Dammit. Dammit. I’m a desert plant that fantasizes about being a fern. It’s fucking hot here in the desert, and I am so so so thirsty. Shouldn’t I just find some deep, damp, cool woods, maybe next to a nice stream, and root into that nice, mulch-y, wormy, fecund soil and be green all the time?

Sounds lovely, but I’d drown. Because I am a desert plant. Or maybe an iguana. Whatever — I’m not a fern.

Jews like me don’t get tattoos, but if I did get a tattoo, perhaps it would say, “The right place is not the same as the easy place or the comfortable place.” This fact, the facticity of it, seems like a deep design flaw in the world, or in me, or in iguanas.

Here’s a sign. When Will was upset with me last week and used a simile to explain why, I didn’t say, “that’s not the right comparison.” It occurred to me to say that, but then I realized, it was in fact the right comparison to Will, because it spoke to his sense of boundary violation and discomfort. And I could listen and hold that. (I never ceded that ground to Daniel. With Daniel, I could get the guillotine for jaywalking, so I policed his comparisons with great force. It’s not the same. Seducing and sleeping with someone else while your wife is pregnant, nursing, the mother of a toddler is in fact not the same as your wife never buying the birthday and holiday gifts. Cleaning your wife’s hair out of the drain is not the same as honoring her person-hood and behaving with integrity towards her even when it’s hard. Not the same.)

Here’s a sign: Why? Why do I need “an elevator pitch” to describe to strangers the complicated, intricate, relational work I do? It’s important to funders, and I didn’t convince them, so I’m looking for other work. But I was, as I was writing, starting to criticize myself for never being able to articulate what I do and why it’s important. But why? Why is that wrong or bad? The casual vocabulary of work doesn’t fit me, and most people don’t know how to value me or what I do. That’s not my flaw.

Here’s a sign: Why? Why do I need to weigh what I weighed 10 years ago? Health is not a reason. Why do I believe “she’s gained weight” is an appropriate thing to say about anyone except, perhaps, an infant or a person who was ill and is now recovering, something said with relief? In my life, “she’s gained weight” has always been said with mild horror, some schadenfreude — a warning. My lover, whose opinion is (only) mildly relevant here, revels in this body, praises this body, embraces this body, has loads of fun with this body. (That I’m fretting over it all means this aspect of liberation is incomplete… which merely means its an aspect of liberation.)

Here’s a sign: After starting this morning in a state of near elation about tomorrow’s job interview, I now feel depleted, as if everything I’ve written and thought all day about why I am both interested and interesting with respect to this role is trite and boring and just off. And I recognize this as an entirely predictable part of the cycle of creation.

Here’s a sign: Liberation and other life goals are connected in opaque, unpredictable, elusive ways. Getting this job (or the job I interviewed for last week) doesn’t necessarily prove or disprove anything about liberation. What I’m doing to get these interviews is essential and helpful to me whether or not I get the jobs. This is the scary but necessary realization of liberation — it’s compatible with continued economic insecurity, frustration, and other fears. Liberation only ever solves the problem of being unfree. Being unfree contributes to economic insecurity, frustration, vulnerability to the bullshit of others, but they aren’t all the same. I’m not liberated into a perfect life. I’m liberated from the ideal of a perfect life.

And still, I will always be a desert plant or slow-blinking iguana who sometimes thrills to the heat, the intensity, the endless endless sky, and occasionally yearns for a damp, chilly forest floor.

Various R words and liberation

Rest — there has to be Rest in liberation, but I create

Resistance to that rest, because how can I rest until I am liberated? Ignoring that it’s essential to rest along the way.

Repetition — liberation is so repetitive. The chains weave and lock themselves around me when I’m not resting, when I’m resisting truths, and I have to unlock them and myself again and again and again.

Does that count as a Revelation?

Reason(s) — I cannot reason my way into liberation. I know, I’ve tried. My intuition is there, I just chose not to believe that is a reliable guide to

Reality, which I have encouraged others to define while I follow along. I am, intellectually, an immigrant, a translator, a diplomat, finding myself in a world I didn’t make, and flourishing, and I could

Release myself from criticism of how I have done things in the past. Last night I found myself

Re-living the corrosive story that I am not successful in my career, which I tell myself without

Reflection on what I mean by success: I have almost always been interested, well-paid,

Respected and respectful of others. Sometimes I made things better, and I rarely made them worse.

Resources– here’s where I get

Resentful because I think people I envy got more and I was left to figure it out on my own, which is

Ridiculous, but then again I am moving outside of reason and putting aside trying to find reasons and

Root causes so that I can see that I am liberated to the extent that I can choose to

Rest.