Passion and excellence

Today I am thankful that spring is making inroads (although it will be cold tomorrow).  I am also thankful that I figured out what was wrong with my outfit today, so I won’t make the same mistake again (a big sparkly girly necklace with a detailed cardigan was too girly for me.)

Last week in a comment on a post of Belette’s, I said that I was didn’t trust passion, so I had to find other names for it to make it okay.  She asked to hear more, so here I go.  I wonder what I’ll find out.

I don’t trust passion.  I don’t trust it because it is flamboyantly, definitionally out of the ordinary.  It’s a solar flare, a shooting star.  I don’t trust it because I don’t see how it connects to the hard, sometimes boring, usually relentless work of getting things done, making change in the world, taking an idea and doing something with it that makes a difference.

A moment’s thought reveals that this is a silly dichotomy.  I imagine that people who have strong passions are in fact motivated by those passions to get up every day and roll a big heavy rock a little bit farther up a steep forbidding hill.  People use passion in fact to fuel hard and relentless work. My problem is that I get so caught up in the work that I lose the thread of passion.  The work becomes its own process, its own motivation.  Getting things done drives out the reason for doing. Passion looks like what motivates other people to make work for me (in a good and bad sense — I have a job because my boss has a passion for what we do).

If you were to ask me what my passions are, I wouldn’t know how to answer.  I can tell you about my interests.  But I don’t think anything I undertake rises to the level of passion.  Wouldn’t I have to be better at something if it were my passion?  Wouldn’t I know more about it?  Wouldn’t I be an expert, spending hours and hours to the exclusion of all else on it?  I don’t feel like I can claim anything like that.   I can tell you that I love things, but I will be very scared that you will  show me how much you know about them that I don’t myself.  And then I will think, “Oh, I guess I don’t love it as much as I thought,” as if your superior knowledge crowds out my emotions (superior knowledge trumps everything as far as I’m concerned, actually).

When I see someone who is passionate, I am likely to respond to his or her energy, but what really really gets me charged up is seeing someone who is really, really good at the task at hand.  I’d rather see that than passion.  Passion seems almost performative — “Look at me!  I’m up here all aflame with my passion!  Whoo-ee — I’m burning up the stage.”  Being really good at what you do means focusing entirely on the doing of it.  If it’s related to another person, then the focus is on that other person, but not necessarily on an audience.  It’s arete.  That’s what strikes a chord in me.  I don’t need a life of passion.  I crave a life of arete, and I am so very far from it.  But that distance doesn’t depress me (at least at the moment).  I am just thrilled that such a thing as arete exists, and that I can be exposed to it from time to time.  It’s glorious.

Notice that it’s taken me 600 words in to a post on passion to mention Daniel.  We have passion, and we have hard and relentless work.  Marriage, or at least my marriage, is where passion and quotidian struggles are irreconcilable.  And quotidian struggles usually win.  If I could put a tired and wry half smile into words, I would do that now.

 

Infertility awareness for fertile people

I oughtn’t blog during work hours, but Milo is home sick and I want to write this post now, before I start working from home, so it will stop rattling around in my head.

I fill most of my prescriptions and Milo’s at an independent pharmacy.  The pharmacist can be a bit cranky sometimes, but he’s gone out of his way for us and been very gracious on important occasions.   Today, I spent $65 in his store on two prescriptions for Milo and some other odds and ends.  As we were walking out, he said, “Dorothea, imagine that times three” — he has three children.  I was preoccupied with the bill, on top of a $50 bill at the doctor ($20 copay, and $30 for a rapid-strep test).  I said, “Oh, we couldn’t afford it.”  He said, oddly, “Why not?”

This pharmacist filled all my clomid prescriptions.  I didn’t rely on him for the trigger shots — it was easier to do a mail order pharmacy since that’s what our infertility practice recommended.  (Mail order, or more accurately, phone-order fertility pharmacies abound.  It’s a booming business.  The phone reps have their own efficient languages and gently ignore the teary voices and stress-clenched vocal cords of the women who call them.)  But he knows me.  He knows I came in for clomid.   He knows I haven’t come in for pre-natal vitamins.

I said, again, walking out the door with my back to him, “Well, you know we tried.  You’ve seen my records.”  And I walked out.  I was maybe 20 yards away when I thought that I should go back and talk to him, explain why the exchange was troubling to me.  But Milo was with me and the pharmacist can be brusque and defensive.  So I didn’t say anything.

And now I can’t stop thinking about this incident.  I’m caught in meta-thinking.  I don’t know if I’m upset, exactly.  I don’t know if I should be, or have to be, or might be able not to be.   But I do know that I resent, deeply, the energy that I am spending on this particular psycho-intellectual hamster wheel.  I can decide not to be upset, but it’s a decision.  It’s an allocation of resources away from upset-ness.  It’s not automatic.  Being upset may be the default, but it’s got its own costs, obviously. In any case, I’m thinking about it.  I can’t not think about it, except with the application of more energy and effort, which I’d rather use for other things.

This is another one of the wounds of infertility.  You have to think about things like this.  I counted the number of words in the exchange above.  21 words.  I have been distracted for more than an hour by 21 damn words.

It’s like wondering if someone is being sexist, or if a weird incident is weird because you’re a woman (or, presumably, gay or a racial or religious or ethnic minority, or a particular social class, or have a physical difference).  You have this flow-chart of analysis: can I get upset? Was it truly weird?  Is it just me?  Am I too sensitive?  Is it okay to feel how I feel — once I actually know how I feel?  Can I blow this off?  Will it resonate weirdly so that in 5 hours I will blow up at someone for no reason, except this will be the reason?

The difference is that the pharmacist wasn’t trying to be infertility-hostile.  There’s no equivalent of racism or sexism or anti-semitism for infertile people.  But, dammit, the blithe belief that everyone can control their own fertility, or “just adopt” or find tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatment, or that the f*cking treaments will actually work all the time, and the way that the blithe believers unwittingly treat people who are infertile is… it’s something.  It’s a proto-“ism.”  It’s not kind, and they don’t even know it’s unkind.  Their ignorance is just hurtful.

And from a f*cking pharmacist!!  This man’s livelihood depends on bodies not working quite right, on large and small physical and chemical failures.  Maybe he believes too much in the efficacy of his own products.  Clomid works, right?  The shots, the pills, the treatments, they work, right?   Yes, they do something.  Just not always what we depend on them to do.

Maybe everyone has their own version of this weakness.  Everyone, perhaps, has their own version of the hamster-wheel, the echo chamber, the flow-chart.  How many times have I unwittingly set this cascade off in someone else?

Are there any colors left for those omnipresent ribbons — pink for breast cancer, red for AIDS, etc?  I want one for infertility.  I want to start an infertility awareness movement for fertile people.  Everyone would learn the following: 1. Don’t ask, don’t assume.  Just be gracious.  Focus on the person as she is, not on the back story you think is there.  2. Seriously, don’t ask.  3. No, really — don’t f*cking ask, because the satisfaction of your curiosity is not worth someone else’s tears.  4. Talk about something else.  Shoes are always a good topic.

 

Poem for Wednesday

I happened to sleep well last night.  But even if I hadn’t, I would do Poem for Wednesday.  Two fun ones, by Dorothy Parker:

OBSERVATION

If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.

Dorothy Parker

RESUME

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.                                                                     
 
 Dorothy Parker

A short break

In the last 10 days, I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep (7 hours of sleep) exactly once.  Most nights, I’ve had 4 or fewer hours.  The cognitive impairments of being sleep deprived are tremendous and staggering.  I have a feeling  — and all I have these days are feelings since thought is beyond me — that staying off the internet in the evenings might help, so I’m going to pause on blogging until sleep comes back.  It seems like the right thing to do.   I hope to be back by the end of the week.

Reconsiderations

Today I am thankful for a few quiet moments while everyone else is occupied.  I have spent two very nice days with Daniel and Milo on a short trip out of town.  It was lovely, really, but also exhausting.  We are three intense personalities (I’m probably the least intense of all of us), and I need a few minutes each day when I am mentally and physically out of reach.

So no sooner did I decry Eileen Fisher then Sal at Already Pretty, who is a good deal younger than me, wrote a post about how fabulous they are.   I admit to having a soft spot for their ad campaign, especially these two pictures

I’d like to figure out a new silhouette.   My stylish sister-in-law keeps telling me I need to wear drapey, flowing things on top (just like she does!  It’s not a coincidence!).  Perhaps I’d also like to be a drop-dead gorgeous Asian model.  I can dream, can’t I?

And here’s what I’m not saying in this post.  I knew this man slightly several years ago.  I don’t think highly of him (does that mean I think lowly of him?).  And reading his perfectly nice story about his perfectly nice second baby made me sad.  It smudged my otherwise happy long weekend with Milo and Daniel.  It stole my sleep.   I am sick of being ambush-able.  I am sick of being small about other people’s happinesses.  I hate hitting the pothole of my not-best, not-generous self.  I hate being distracted from the people I love by this absence.  When will it be over?  Oh, never.

40-lescence

Today I am thankful that Daniel and I are getting along again.   We had a very useful conversation at 1am on Friday, and Daniel listened with great respect and patience.  Last night, I finally got a decent night’s sleep.  Today, I pledged to cook more simply or less frequently during the week (my mother, bless her heart, convinced me).  Daniel’s relief was immense.  I’m a feminist who had to be talked out of the kitchen.

Okay, so I’m 40.  Have I mentioned that?  I’ve thought more about my age in the last few weeks than in the four decades that preceded it (actually, I remember once almost hypnotizing myself with the utter weirdness of being 7.  I thought and thought and thought about it until it didn’t make any sense.  I was transfixed with the strangeness of the awareness of my own existence).  My working theory about 40, or one’s 40s, is that in terms of physical presentation they are adolescence all over again.

The face:  I look hard and, I hope, generously at women in their 40s.  We’re not as beautiful and fresh as we were, and not as extraordinary and handsome as we will be.  (Except you, Sister — you are ravishing as always.)  Women in their 20s are beautiful in the way that bright colors, confetti, and cake decorations are beautiful — there’s all that energy and life just exploding out of their sweet faces.  Women in their 30s (sigh) are beautiful in the way that flowers are beautiful — it’s youth tempered with wit and knowledge and and therefore completely compelling.  Women in their 50s are beautiful in the way that landscapes are beautiful — they are themselves, unique, and rich.  Women in their 60s are beautiful in the way that mountains and the sea are beautiful — they are strong and commanding and change in the light.  And I’ve run out of metaphors for women in their 70s and 80s, but see the best of them here.   But in my tired, pressed, 40s, I’m in between.  And tired.  I remember too well how I looked, honestly just yesterday (although in my early 20s — oy, a style trainwreck and a face that looked like 6 water balloons in a plastic bag.  I did get a great haircut at 20, although it wouldn’t suit me now at all.)   I look like a black-and-white photocopy of a not-bad picture of myself five years ago.

The clothes:  I tried a few days ago to wear open-toed shoes with tights.  This is not even an open question anymore.  All the cool girls do it.  I could spend the next 2 hours pulling photos from the Sartorialist of all the various Euro vogue editrixes, but you get the point (several weeks ago he posted a photo of a beautiful woman wearing Dansko clogs.  My heart melted.  The commenters were perplexed.)   I couldn’t do it.  I looked down at the reinforced seam of my tights and all I could think of were all the bad reinforced toe nude-for-caucasians pantyhose peeking out of bad patent-leather sandals I saw in the 1970s.  I love the look on absolutely everyone else.  But I lost my nerve.

I think clothes are more important than ever.  Once women move into 40 and beyond, there is enormous pressure on us to disappear, fade away until we are safely, adorably old.  Dressing well — very well, to be noticed, to be attended to — is my way of staying in the picture.  I have no intention of disappearing.  I’m here to stay, thank you.

And yet, I can’t find the wardrobe that matches my resolve, my budget, and my inability to bear anything remotely constricting.  Perhaps I haven’t fully inhabited my resolve.  Maybe I’m actually torn between wanting to kick ass and wanting to disappear a little tiny bit (just for a little while, just so I can catch up on sleep, work out a bit more, relax a little).  Maybe I don’t know what I want my clothes to say about me.

But leaving semiotics aside for now (must we?  we must) I can’t find those “pay full price because you’ll wear it forever and it’s perfect pieces” — not ones I can afford.  Nothing that’s easy to find fits right, especially across the middle.  Jeans — oh please.   I have given up wearing trousers because most of mine don’t fit.  And good ankles run in my family, so I wear bright tights (with closed toe shoes) to draw attention away from the bags under my eyes and the weird pulling across my hips and around my backside.  If I had even a wee spark of entrepreneurship, I’d take this frustration and start a clothing store or website or brand with exactly what I want.  Perfect t-shirts for less than $35, perfect cardigans (15% cashmere, 85% cotton), perfect jeans, perfect skirts.  T-strap pumps with 2-inch heels in every color.  Ankle-strap wedges that don’t cut into my ankle bone.  That pair of black shoes that is so perfect it is the only pair you need when you take a trip for a week to Europe (not that you’d ever travel with only one pair of shoes, but if you had to, it would be those shoes).   Purses that aren’t too big, aren’t too small, with lots of pockets and light as a feather.  And, magically, nothing would cost more than $150 and it would all be manufactured under conditions of bliss.  I’d call it “Perfect,” and I’d be very happy to shop there.  The fact that only Eileen Fisher seems to have tried to undertake this, at about twice the price — and that I have no spark of entrepreneurship at all — stops me cold.  I don’t want to wear Eileen Fisher, or pay for it.  Clearly, I want the impossible.  Just like 13-year-olds who want to be big and free and protected from consequences and cruel and sweet and forgiven all at the same time.

Trying to figure out clothes and countenance is hard.  Trying to write intelligently about them is perhaps harder.  I appreciate Already Pretty, Une Femme d’un Certain Age (doesn’t she look amazing?  The ankle boots — to die for!), Style Underdog (scroll all the way to the end.  Do you remember Miller’s Outpost?  I do!), and That’s Not My Age all the more after trying, for several weeks and several drafts, to write this post.

Pressing the change button

Today I am thankful that I can once again begin posts this way.  I stopped doing it and my home life went all to pieces.  I stopped sleeping well.  I stopped working well.  The “life all to pieces,” not sleeping, and not working well are all related.  They may have nothing to do with the thankful business.  But I’m so crumpled up and runned-over that I’ll resort to small magic.

When Milo was tiny and his behavior was out of control, we would tell him to press the change button.  Daniel bought one of those “easy” buttons from Staples, and for a while that was the change button.  I need a change button.  I need an easy button, too.  Daniel and I are back to behaving crappily towards each other.  We feed off the others’ stress like germs in a petri dish, and there’s a whole lot of culture growing in the petri dish of our staticky marriage.  I have completely lost the thread of my intentions.  It turned out they were working, because when I stop intending, it all goes to hell.

The behavior changes that are so necessary are so damn hard.  An attitude of kindness, graciousness, pleasantness is not an action — or rather it’s an inscrutable, to me, mix of 10,000 actions and (much harder) 10,000 non-actions.  This sweet post makes it sound so swell and possible.  But how does one make “don’t be stressed” into a tiny action? Or non-action.  Non-action is my stumbling block.

How can I try harder not to try so hard?  Except at work of course, where I need to try much much harder.   I always zig when I should zag.

I have a draft post with some notes about perfection.  Even when I think I’m not trying to be perfect, I am trying with all of my cells and bone marrow (except at work).  I wish I could write an amazing post about it.  I would note that my dear ex-therapist used to say that when people are extremely anxious, they focus on money, food and… something else (anxiety has eaten my memory).  I would note that in fact I am obsessing about money and paying off my credit card debt and wondering how I came to have it and why I spend hundreds of dollars a month in $27 to $64 dollar increments on things I can’t remember two weeks later (that would be January’s visa statement in a nutshell).  I would note that I am having a very hard time relaxing my grip on what I eat and serve at home — good food is important to me, yes, but I am also anxious about gaining weight.  (Really anxious.  More anxious than I knew until I wrote it.  I am struggling hard with the changes of 40.  40, physically, is an ambush, a tornado falling from a crystalline sky, a sudden solar eclipse.  I thought I left weight anxiety behind in my 20s.  Surprise!  I only left behind the good stuff, not the nasty shit.)

I would note that I live in the un-amusing irony of having to be constantly on guard and vigilant against my tendency towards perfection.

This is not that amazing post.  This is a half-assed post about trying to be less perfect (except at work!).

 

Poem for Wednesday

(so sorry about the formatting — I can’t get it to work.  These are supposed to be four-line stanzas, as the rhyme scheme dictates.  When I try to mess with it, I get double spaces between the lines and quadruple spaces between the stanzas, and I think that’s worse than no spacing at all.  Just follow the link — it’s worth it.)

Love and Work

by Rachel Wetzsteon

In an uncurtained room across the way

a woman in a tight dress paints her lips

a deeper red, and sizes up her hips

for signs of ounces gained since yesterday.

 

She has a thoughtful and a clever face,

but she is also smart enough to know

the truth: however large the brain may grow,

the lashes and the earrings must keep pace.

 

Although I’ve spread my books in front of me

with a majestic air of I’ll show her,

I’m much less confident than I’d prefer,

and now I’ve started pacing nervously.

 

I’m poring over theorems, tomes and tracts.

I’m getting ready for a heavy date

by staying up ridiculously late.

But a small voice advises, Face the facts:

 

go on this way and you’ll soon come to harm.

The world’s most famous scholars wander down

the most appalling alleyways in town,

a blond and busty airhead on each arm.

 

There is an inner motor known as lust

that makes a man of learning walk a mile

to gratify his raging senses, while

the woman he can talk to gathers dust.

 

A chilling vision of the years ahead

invades my thoughts, and widens like a stain:

a barren dance card and a teeming brain,

a crowded bookcase and an empty bed…

 

What if I compromised? I’d stay up late

to hone my elocutionary skills,

and at the crack of dawn I’d swallow pills

to calm my temper and control my weight,

 

but I just can’t. Romantics, so far gone

they think their loves live for wisdom, woo

by growing wiser; when I think of you

I find the nearest lamp and turn it on.

 

Great gods of longing, watch me as I work

and if I sprout a martyr’s smarmy grin

please find some violent way to do me in;

I’m burning all these candles not to shirk

 

a night of passion, but to give that night

a richly textured backdrop when it comes.

The girl who gets up from her desk and dumbs

her discourse down has never seen the flight

 

of wide-eyed starlings from their shabby cage;

the fool whose love is truest is the one

who knows a lover’s work is never done.

I’ll call you when I’ve finished one more page.

Rachel Wetzsteon, “Love and Work” from Sakura Park. Copyright © 2006 by Rachel Wetzsteon. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books.

Source: Sakura Park (Persea Books, 2006)

For better

I am married to a man who cries when he watches Casablanca, which is what we did last night with a bottle of Prosecco and some nice cheese and chocolates to celebrate Valentine’s Day.  A lot of people cry when Humphrey Bogart puts Ingrid Bergman on the plane to Lisbon — and he is one of them.  But he also cries when the cafe rises up to sing La Marseilles in defiance of the Nazis.  And so I have to love him.

Yelling

I’m not going to start the blog with my note of thanks, unless clamor from the comments persuades me otherwise.  It’s starting to feel a little like a treacly  greeting card (not even Hallmark, but something really dire like Blue Mountain — yes, you may love Blue Mountain.  I may love you, but I don’t love Blue Mountain).  I may end with a note of thanks, which would be the gracious thing to do, but I may not.

With that opening, perhaps readers will not be surprised that it’s been a rough couple of days.  I was feeling last week that I was in a reasonable, if entirely exhausted, groove, and wondered what there was to blog about in that condition.  Then I started yelling at people.  Perhaps I started yelling just so I’d have something to blog about.  Poor dears are the collateral damage of my blogging.

Why did I yell?  I yelled at Daniel because he told me that “had to stop doing this” when I was slower than he wished in getting ready to go out last night.  I yelled at my friend Anna when she called 15 minutes past the time I was supposed to drop Milo at her house for a playdate. (I started yelling at her before I knew she was actually calling to offer to pick Milo up.  I picked up the phone and said “Yes, Anna I know I’m late, I was up till 2, I am going as fast as I can, we will be there as soon as we can!)

Clearly, one should never question my punctuality.  It turns out to be rather a sensitive subject.

That’s meant to be funny, but it’s a way into a large and painful truth.   I can’t bear it when someone suggests that I could do better, or that I am causing some kind of problem or disarray or disappointment.  I put every ounce of my energy into doing better and being the one who never causes problems, disarray, or disappointment.  I am trying so very very very hard just to do anything, everything.  And I’m always falling just a little bit short.  My colleagues work harder than I do, more concentration, more hours, more self-direction of their projects.  My friends at synagogue are observant according to the dizzying number of Orthodox rules, and I’ve given up on all the effortful ones.  I am not nice enough to Daniel.  I am not on top of my finances, and I haven’t saved nearly enough for retirement.  I haven’t figured out my wardrobe — I keep buying the wrong things, sometimes expensively, even as my colleagues all look darling.  I am unable to mitigate the normal effects of time on a woman’s body (Saturday a rheumatologist friend diagnosed arthritis in my right big toe!  I always wear shoes with a generous toe-box.  No pointy-toed heels for me.  But so what?).   My house is a mess.  I don’t cook often enough, and I certainly don’t cook great meals often enough.  We never have guests (see Orthodoxy — we never ever have guests for Shabbat, which is unthinkable).  I don’t call my family.

I could go on.  (I can’t go on!  I’ll go on.)

And here’s the problem.  I need to let go.  I need to realize I’m stretched too thin and just absolve myself of the responsibility for more things.  But I have already let go of so very much. (That’s my plaintive cry, in blog typography.)  What’s there left to give up?   (No one should suggest anything unless it’s really revolutionary.  If you tell me to start packing my own lunch to save money, I will send torrents of ill will your way.  So don’t do that. )  Which of the things that matter to me a lot, that I currently do in a crappy, half-assed way, should I just eliminate all together?  How can I be worse?

I have chided Daniel in the past for refusing to believe a problem can be solved, for his torrential justifications of why things absolutely must be exactly the way they are and can never change to make him feel less oppressed.  Ah, but that’s him.  It’s very easy for me to see all the unnecessary things he does.  Me — nope.  There are no extras here.  Daniel believes cooking anything more elaborate than noodles is an extra.  Laundry, somehow, is an extra.  Any form of cleaning is an extra. All I want to do is what everyone else seems to pull off without so much effort and drama.

Last night when I yelled at Daniel, I knew I shouldn’t have yelled, but I fundamentally believed it was his fault.  I believed that I was under so much strain dealing with his unresolved depression and all the tricks and defenses he uses to manage it (the most wearying being his inability to tolerate any suggestion that our life is not perfect) that really, my outburst could be traced back to him.

And then when we had an awful conversation very late when I was trying to be honest  about why I had snapped, and he had no empathy or forgiveness, only impatience and dismissiveness, I just cemented all the blame for my bad behavior around him.  (Daniel can’t bear it when I am upset.  It threatens his own depression defenses.  And he especially can’t bear it when I am feeling something that he feels himself.  It threatens the hard work he does to feel okay despite his challenges.  It’s admirable work.  I just  wish he was doing it with a professional.)

But when I yelled at Anna, who was just trying to do me a favor, I knew it couldn’t be all about Daniel.   It’s about me.  I have work to do.  I think I can’t do it.  I don’t even know what the work is.  I thought I could tie what was happening to me to my unleashed ego, since that’s been the theme of the week.  All during yoga class today (proper yoga — the aggressive class at the Palace of Sport was filled up by the time I went to register), I thought that in fact my ego was dangerous.  I was lashing out at people who suggested I wasn’t perfect.  I thought about all the constraints I’ve placed on my aggression, and thought that was probably the right thing to do, given how ugly I’d been.

I don’t know what to do, and after only five hours of sleep last night, I have no imagination.  I don’t want to get small again.  This blog is helping me get to be my right size.  I’ve been taking up more space in a good way.  I’ve been weathering Daniel’s moods better.  But still, I have to learn how to tolerate criticism — or not to hear so much as criticism.  How can I laugh rather than snap, or just be silent  (while I sort out my finances, do my job, feed my family, stave off osteoporosis and middle-age weight gain, de-clutter, revitalize, and find comfortable black pumps with a 2-1/2 inch sturdy heel that aren’t shoot-me-now boring)?

There is no reason for my life to seem hard to me.  There is no reason for me to be defensive and beleaguered.  There is no reason for me to yell.

(Today I am thankful that I can work this out, even though I can’t see how at the moment.  I am thankful that I understand that shutting myself down and attempting to eradicate myself and my ego is among the worst options.  The required response is to get bigger, like a vast floating thing that is so big that choppy seas don’t submerge it.)