Help and Liberation

This is the family story about me, as a two-year-old:

Parent: “D, do you need some help?”

Me: “No! No help!”

Parent: “Do you want assistance?”

Me: “Yes.”

There is also the story of the epic battle between me and my mother one night, when was about the same age. I wanted to leave my room, and she insisted that I stay, and I would open the door and she would close it, and this continued while I screamed (cried it out) until there was a sudden silence. My father joked (later) that he wondered if I’d screamed myself to death.

So, that’s my experience with help (also, why words matter so much). I don’t want it, and then when I am screaming and wrenching open doors pleading for help and release, the door slams. (And yes, I sleep trained Milo because at that point it was him or me, and I decided it had to be me). That is a cul-de-sac that is hard to write or think my way out of. Also, I’m an urbanist. I hate cul-de-sacs. I could have written “blind alley,” which is an alternative definition with an urban flair. But perhaps it’s because I hate cul-de-sacs that I chose that word.

Anyway, help. I want help except I don’t want help. I want assistance. I definitely want resources. Oh, yes, resources. I want gifts, grants, ladders, opportunities. I also want a list. A lovely, definitive list of what I have to do, and only I can do, for myself, and what I can (“can”/”ought”/”should”/”am allowed to”) ask others to supply. And fuck off, I don’t want to make that list myself. The list needs to be a fact of the universe, like gravity, something that I can point to and say, “It’s just a fact. I didn’t make it up. It’s a natural law.”

Of course, that list is my divorce complaint. It’s just facts. I didn’t make it up. It’s not natural law, but it’s history. And within that list is a statement of resources that I can/ought/should/am allowed to have, and that someone else is holding and must be compelled to release. And the court is the vehicle for help. Or assistance.

I love (is this true, what I’m about to write?) to give help. Even though it’s one of the tepid-sounding verbs of my profession that drive me crazy. But maybe that’s some kind of ambient misogyny that makes me say that. Helping is very feminine. Needing help is super-duper feminine. Anyway, I want to give help in a more robust way, to more people. I want to receive help in a more robust way — from ANYONE professionally.

I have outgrown my suspicion of interdependence. (Right? Hah!). I want more, in fact, in my professional life. If no one is going to help me, it just means I’m in the wrong place.

It is so much work to get free of all the ambient bullshit — whether it’s merely in my head (which is where I live) or in the world.

Grief, ghosts, and liberation

The always incomplete “we.” The severed limb of shared memory. The divorce renders me a plate that is broken and glued back together. More solid than before, strong at the broken places (is that really true? I think not), with a rare, even unique beauty, all my own. But there are pretty things I will never have, and Milo will never have.

The severed limb of shared memory: My great-aunt died. Will never knew her. I can explain (re-present) what she represented, the role she played, what it meant to say her beautiful name. But Will doesn’t and can’t really know. Daniel knew. Daniel was there. And I will not tell him she died.

The always incomplete “we”: Will and I have spent time together with each of our kids — the awkward grammar says it all. Someone is always a listener, not a remember-er. Someone always wasn’t there. It will be years and years before there is a remembered we that includes everyone in the room. And it will be fragile or thin, I fear, because Milo and Will’s daughter (Will needs to name her for this blog) are launched and will spend less time with us, even less than the half time rendered by divorce.

Where does this get to liberation? Wouldn’t I like to know! I don’t expect to be liberated from grief, or ghosts — more like phantoms. Ghosts imply a thing that was there that is dead. There was never in my marriage a truly present, uncomplicated we, the three of us happy, safe, and honest. There is no ghost because there was no living thing. It’s a phantom, a stillborn dream.

Grace and liberation. There’s something there. I don’t know what it is, yet. And isn’t that part of grace? You don’t know what it is until it’s happened. Like finding love, which is also an experience of grace.

Frustration, fear and liberation

I’ve been on edge all night and all day. Yesterday I did a good, solid, small thing for work, which made me extremely proud. And I couldn’t explain why it mattered to Will, who is a patient and sensitive and gracious listener. (It didn’t help that we were in a ferocious rainstorm on a highway and Google maps interrupted every few minutes.). That small — and getting smaller every minute in retrospect — thing is the most public thing I’ve done in months, the thing I’m funded to do. And I believe it mattered, but I can’t say. Will asked, “how many people will do _____ because [of the thing I did]?” A legitimate question, which I cannot answer.

And I did the thing I do, which is pile on words in the hope of fooling a listener, even a patient, sensitive, and gracious listener, into believing that I know what I do and that it’s valuable. (There’s got to be a pony in there somewhere.) No one is fooled. Not even me.

And yet I know this. I know I have stopped believing in my job. Will never believed in my job (although always in me). So why do I continue to want things from it?

The agony of not having an audience. The agony of need. The agony of invisibility. The agony of cliche: I need someone else to see the good job I did because I don’t believe strongly enough in my own report to myself. And the excruciating frustration of this recurrence.

(I see you, Will. I see you reading and the aghast look on your face. I see you coming to me and saying, “But you matter to me! I see you! I need you and love you just as you are. I believe you. You are spectacular as you.” I see you, my dear Will. But perhaps I can’t hear or believe you. Working on it. Also, the need might be too big to be met by one person, even someone as wonderful as you.

That’s the fear: that the need will never be met. There will never be enough people or audience. And (agony of cliche) that will be the case as long as I am not in the audience. Fucking cliche. I hate cliche and I am cliche. The reason that it’s a cliche is because it’s true. And, Will, if you can quote Lloyd Cole back to me, well… I’m even more helpless than before.

Where I live, it’s a rookie mistake to say “Nice to meet you” at parties (this will be relevant, just wait). Because there are so many parties and so many people and so little attention and sincerity, that you might be meeting the person for the 3rd or 5th or 10th time, and you don’t want to embarrass them by forgetting or, really, embarrass yourself by revealing bad memories or insincerity or whatever you’re trying to hide. So, “Nice to see you,” is the in-the-know go-to phrase. Maybe that’s the story of me and the need. Nice (actually, horrible, shitty, unbearable) to see you. The need gets met and then unmet and then reintroduced and I pretend that I met it before — as if that matters, that I met it, in passing, years ago, and smiled sweetly and possibly sincerely but it’s been a long time and I’m distracted and tired and older and I didn’t fix my makeup right and I’m here at this terrible party with a glass in my hand and trying to keep it all together and here it is again and I have no idea if it was met before. Here it is again. And again, and again.

I write for right now. I write to say, it’s happening again and it will happen again. I run into the same needs in the strangest places and have to meet or unmeet them all over again. And that’s not terrible.

And that metaphor totally doesn’t work. It was clever wordplay and it made me feel better, but it totally doesn’t work. Except there’s something in there, about the agony of being invisible and needy and unrecognized and how when it happens again, I experience it as the only thing that has ever happened.

And… the liberation point? That liberation is enacted again and again, on the same terrain, a recurring dream, a pop song chorus, an echo, a refrain, recurrence, return. See also, all of contemporary Judaism, a constant reminder that we were slaves, that it took 40 years of wandering to liberate ourselves. Maybe we don’t need to remember we were slaves — we need to remember that we got free.

Epistemology as Liberation

Of course. Epistemology is always power. the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion

Rushed today. The writing equivalent of a HIIT workout.

I believed ardently in truth, living as I did with an untruthful person, and even before that, silently critiquing and non-conforming but not believing I was allowed a different perspective, allowed to call bullshit after about age nine. I was scared of the way people around me with power — starting with the popular girls in first grade — determined reality. I didn’t feel capable of asserting a different reality. I didn’t want to use or take for myself they power they wielded so destructively. I wanted a grown up to make an authoritative statement of what really happened. You can imagine how well this went over on the playground. Also, in first grade, I was a radical liar. I claimed I was Amy Carter, the president’s daughter, among other things. I knew I couldn’t be trusted with the truth.

There are a tiny number of things that really happened. Our atmosphere is instead thick with justified beliefs. Every adjective is an expression of justified or unjustified belief. I denied myself justified beliefs, fearing that I would be wrong, or unfair, or incomplete or self-serving. Others were less restrained, whether in good faith or not.

Most events (see how careful I am? Even now? I will not say “all.”) have around them a penumbra of description. I am choosing the description, the justified belief, the adjectives, that support me.

(Do I hear a record-scratch somewhere? Am I allowed? A loud, male voice from my past says this is intolerable. That I am not allowed. That there is truth. And that truth is exactly what he says it is.)

Definition as liberation

Defining, redefining, undefined. (while the giant, motorized metal gnat that rides on the back of a man spews noxious noise and toxic fumes outside the window and outside of swatting range).

I am tired of the verbs of my job: define, redefine, imagine, challenge, question, probe, explore, understand, reimagine (dear Heaven above, save me from another reimagining of the city. I’ve been doing it for more than two decades). Sometimes, on ambitious days, test or determine.

I am tired of the pronouns of my profession. Actually, there’s only ever one. “We.” A clown-car word — anything can be put in or pulled out, a many-wheeled contraption. There are so many “we”s. Or are they all imagined? We, my wee program, out on the limb and falling off the log of a larger and well-rooted non-profit. We, the people I invite to my events. We the massing of urbanists. We, Americans. We, humanity who clearly thinks like Me. We… do all those verbs, those blunted, fuzzed, secondary-meaning verbs.

I am tired of strategic plans, theories of change and logic models, and I have actually never engaged any of them. I am tired of seeing that my skills are available more cheaply and an unimportantly lesser quality elsewhere. I’m selling a Cadillac when a scooter is what’s really needed.

I am tired of the fibs, too. I’m tired of hearing “We [!] need places to come together, to talk, to share, to listen, to learn.” Sure, but no one wants to pay my rates to make those places– maybe they’re all tearing around on scooters, while I’m an old fashioned livery service. I’m tired of hearing “We [!] need change,” while seeing money flow to the same places and people.

Why “definition”? When I am defined, my work is narrowly defined, I balk, resist, get bored (of all the verb-making, all the manacling with “ize” of perfectly good nouns, why have we not made a one word verb for getting bored, the self-inflicted version). I want to defy definition. But when undefined, I am lonely, adrift — mostly so lonely– dislocated, untethered. I want both boundaries and bridges, open but extant borders. I insist on not just permission but support. When the Israelites left Egypt, they were weighted down with their former captors’ gold and supplies. For twenty five years I thought permission — the false promise of “you can do anything you want” “you can do anything you wan t” — was enough.

So wrong. I don’t need permission at all, never needed it in the first place. What I need and should have asked for was resources. But didn’t I ask? And wasn’t the answer no? A twenty-five year door to door campaign. Could I have asked differently? That’s unanswerable now. How will I ask differently? I am saving myself from unserious people.

Per previous sentence, my draft divorce petition just arrived in my inbox.

Conformity, non-, as liberation

I am likely at (perhaps past) the halfway point of my life. Now seems like a good time to understand and act on a truth: I’m not good at conforming. It is not for lack of trying. But if it was going to work, it probably would have worked by now.

I believed, until last Friday when I scrawled “Conformity: I’m not like everyone else –maybe no one is” on a note pad, that I wanted very much to be like everyone else. No part of that assumed wish stands up to scrutiny. Working backwards: “Everyone else:” I did not want to be like everyone else as they actually were. I wanted to be like the idealized version of everyone else, the imagined version of everyone else, the version of everyone else that has abundant room and understanding in their hearts and workplaces for the real, scraggledly, jumpy, out-of-synch version of me. I wanted to be like a bunch of imaginary people. That’s kind of interesting, actually. To be an imaginary. The Velveteen Bunny who says, “no, actually, I would prefer not” (wait, that was Bartleby). “Real… nope, not for me.” I wanted to be imaginary. I’m not sure what that means… I’ll sit with it.

“to be like:” Did I want to be a simile? Maybe. Or a simulacrum, which is not the same as an imaginary. What I wanted was not to be like but to be liked. One overlooked consonant doing so much work! I thought, as a elementary school anthropologist, that being like would in fact lead to being liked. This belief persisted. I remember in grad school in the UK, trying to adopt at least a British intonation so that the shopkeepers might think I belonged there as a student not a tourist, might believe I was one of them and not snarl, as they were wont to do, at outsiders. All throughout organized school, I tried to crack the code, to do the things. But I couldn’t suppress the part of me that wanted to be unlike, that wanted to be superior: faster, smarter, brighter, better-informed. I ruined my own surprise birthday that way. It was complicated: I planned my own surprise birthday as a ruse for my roommate’s actual surprise birthday party. A double surprise with a half twist, because our birthdays were on consecutive days. But I ruined my part of the birthday party and confused and disappointed a lot of people because I had to let them know I was in on the joke. I was too smart to be surprised. And, no surprise!, people don’t like to be fooled. They don’t like to be double-crossed. They don’t like double-agents and spies and people who seek to mimic but then to out-do. I might have been more successful if I’d just stated outright: “I’m different, but friendly.”

“Wanted very much,” well, see above. Also, I always liked having a trap door into non-conformity. When I was Catholic, living mostly among Protestants, I liked that Catholicism made me different. I like being the humanist amongst the policy people, or the skeptic amongst the dreamers. Except when I don’t. I told Will this early on, right after our first date or in a text (that’s my novel, my book of essays, my collected works: the thousands of words to Will in an ephemeral medium, backed up to the cloud. When they named the cloud, did they understand that clouds shift, move disperse, disappear? They should have called it the atmosphere, or the oxygen): The outsider, but not too outsider, narrator — the outsider who passes an insider, until she writes in her diary and says what she really thinks — was a staple of the fiction I read as a girl. Except now I can’t think of a single example. Jane Eyre, maybe. Anne of Green Gables and Emily of the Emily series (the much edgier version of Anne of Green Gables by the same author). Elizabeth rather than Jessica in Sweet Valley High and no I didn’t read many of them and anyway, didn’t everyone want to be Elizabeth? Wasn’t the series rigged to valorize Elizabeths? The Jessicas weren’t even reading.

There’s the loop: this is where Will catches me: I want to be different, but at the same time, I think, “But isn’t everyone like that? Didn’t everyone identify with Jane Eyre and that’s why the book persists?” Except, dear God in Heaven I have no use whatsoever for Emma Bovary, or Catherine Earnshaw, and those books have also persisted. Those are my imaginary friends, many of whom are my real friends. We are the ones who loved Jane Eyre most. (I just texted my four closest friends asking them to weigh in on Jane vs Catherine. What if they aren’t Janes? Who was the narrator of Wuthering Heights anyway? Wasn’t he a useless framing device, like the narrator in Frankenstein? )

Surely this is not original: the desire to be safely ensconced, held, by one’s own precious subculture to be different and amongst others who are different in exactly the same way. Upon this desire, Brooklyn (“Brooklyn” –perhaps a simulacrum) is built. And Austin. And Portland, and indie bookstore patrons, craft beer lovers, coffee afficianados. So what’s different? What am I trying to say? It seemed profound then I wrote it into banality. Until I figure out how to make it go the other way, I’m writing for myself.

Belief, and Liberation 2

Liberation: I will be the beneficiary of my surplus labor.

I have a deeply ingrained fear of exhaustion, which has co-existed quite easily with deep physical and emotional exhaustion. If you don’t see things and name them, you can live with all kinds of contradictions “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in an essay called The Crack Up, which tells you what you need to know about the sustainability of that kind of intelligence. He couldn’t keep it up past age 39. I’m made of sterner stuff, and have kept it up for an extra decade.

I remember– and have probably written about — my mother’s fear of my exhaustion. She didn’t want me to take algebra in 8th grade, because she’d seen students “staying up with their homework till 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning.” I went to just one high school basketball game as a spectator because my mother worried, “You’ll stay up too late and be tired tomorrow.” Being tired, staying up late… those were violations of the well-regulated life I was supposed to have. To be clear: my mother is lovely, supportive, and kind to me. I have always known that she loves me. She was passing on the skills that helped her survive and navigate the world as a smart girl in a tiny town that couldn’t countenance smart girls, and as the eldest daughter absorbing the shrapnel of my grandparents’ volatile marriage. And just at this minute, I realize she was telling me these things when she was in her early and mid 40s, which is when female exhaustion becomes crushing and un-ignorable. Maybe she was talking to herself.

I used my intelligence and my ability to work fast and efficiently to avoid exhaustion from paid labor. I haven’t and don’t work at my job late into the night or on weekends. My fear of exhaustion is such that I shied away from bigger jobs, because I worried I would be too tired if I took them on, and I had such a deep and subterranean exhaustion from the circumstances of my marriage. This is another white woman record-scratch: I work basically 9-5, and I always have, and some of that is attributable to fear and self-suppression, and some of that is attributable to my emerging belief that most of the ideas and vocabulary that people of my age, race, education, and class have about work are complete bullshit.

Now, today, when I am trying to get out of the wheel recreation business and into the real task of building axles, drivetrains, and roads (my ear and my logical mind are at war there. “Roads, axles, and drivetrains” sounds so much better, but it’s not the logical sequence of building. But maybe “axles, roads and drivetrains” is, and that’s not bad.)… anyway I’m getting out of the wheel business. So why would I spend all of my workday on wheels? Why would I spend more time than I need to competently deliver the wheel that I’ve promised my funders? Actually, I do better stuff than make wheels. I’m making nets, clasps, tents, and ladders, but I’m really good at it and it doesn’t take me a lot of time. Or rather, it’s taken me 25 years I’m not seeking more grants to make more wheels. I’m trying to get hired on to a really good road crew, but it’s taking a while.

Irony: not building wheels and feeling bad about it, not building wheels and looking at Instagram or the New York Times or anything but the truth in front of me, which is that I am so done with wheels, even as truly lovely people around continue to work on theirs, all of that has made me… exhausted!

So liberation is saying, I claim my surplus labor and I translate it back into time to build. While I’m waiting to build roads, I will build worlds with words. Or I will build lamps and spotlights and giant flaming stars to illuminate worlds with words. While no one is watching (or reading — can’t forget that) I can do my real work. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive — even after he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (thanks, Wikipedia). I can test my bold statement that the way we think about work is bullshit by working differently.

shedding, shedding, shedding.

Action, maybe liberation

Last night Will asked if creative activity would pull me out of my 9-5 sadness, my restless spin, my crushing boredom. I said, “No. I don’t feel it. I don’t feel any call or desire to create right now. I want to rest. I’m not feeling it.”

And then, mid-morning today, after shopping and Instagram scrolling through yet another conference call, I wrote a note to myself: “create rather than consume.” Then I leafed through Keep Going by Austin Kleon, eyeing pages about the importance of a creative practice, rather than relying on inspiration. And I remembered: several weeks ago I had made an impassioned argument to Will about the importance of religious practice, of going to shul, of observing the holidays, regardless of whether I was feeling it. I said, “You can’t rely on feelings to do the work. You have to put yourself in a place where the feelings can find you. There are so many times we don’t feel it, in parenting, in love, in work. You have to show up anyway so you can have a chance to feel.”

Well, then.

I’ll create into the urge to create. I can organize the day around discovering what I want to write about and doing the writing, and do my paid work (less paid now — I’m on partial salary) in the interstices.

Here are the skins to shed: 1) It’s not worth writing if no one is reading it. Austin Kleon, in Keep Going, says that’s not true. He says write and delete, write and tear it up (well, like me, he quotes other people saying that. Writing is collage anyway). The writing is the work. The reading… whatever, it’s not my concern. This one I’ll shed one cell at a time, sloooooowly.

2a) Someone — no, a ferocious chorus — will say, at some time, “You didn’t do [_________] in this time? You didn’t USE YOUR TIME WISELY? How did you not know? You should have known.” Will last night joked (gently, gently) about the time police coming to get me. Well, yeah! And they are mean bastards, the time police. Productivity is a false god, but such a beautiful one. I resisted in the early days of sheltering-in-place the shiny, tinny songs of self-improvement (we’ll bake bread! we’ll learn French! we’ll get ripped!). They were so clearly false. They still are — so false that no one is saying them any more. But we are saying, “Well, this is work now. Get busy. Stay busy.” I associate value with activity. Less is less. To say, as a well-educated, well-paid, smart-aspiring white woman: “Nah, I’m actually not very busy. I have all kinds of empty time. I’m not busy.” I can’t even finish the sentence. I don’t know what would happen. My imagination falters.

2b) Someone — no, a ferocious chorus — will say, at some time, “You didn’t do [_________] in this time? You didn’t USE YOUR TIME WISELY? How did you not know? You should have known.” I have been waiting my whole life to be convicted (humiliated, brought low, possibly even executed) on the charge “You should have known.” It hasn’t happened yet. Even when I probably should have known what was right in front of my eyes, the infidelity, the disrespect, the de-personing, the lies. Funny thing about that: I’m rather compassionate with myself about my not-knowing. And no one in my life has come to convict me or demean me or abuse me for the not knowing. A couple of therapists have suggested that I knew… and stood down gently when I said no. And offered compassion when I said, “oh… yeah. It was all there. All right there. Damn…” So I have indeed lived through the worst outcome of should-have-known-ing, and, y’know, it wasn’t so awful. But still. It is one of my deepest fears: I should have known. I am self-educated about so many important things, and I have the deep insecurity of the autodidact. (Do autodidacts have deep insecurity? I just made that up. Should I know? Will is a spectacular autodidact. I don’t sense deep insecurity in him about his knowledge. He owns it. He knows it.) But come to think of it, many people get away with all kinds of crazy shit that they “should have known” was crazy shit. See 2008 financial crisis. Perhaps I have some credits built up. Or maybe I do what I have in fact done and say, “Yep. Probably so. But here we are now, so what do we do next?”

3) I don’t get to say what the right thing is. Are these even different, or are they all the same toxic rubber band ball of late-20th century white female socialization? I’m helping a small, worthy organization complete a big, worthy project. And this project has been done before, by a giant, rich, worth organization… and not much happened. Welcome to the favorite project of the non-profit sector: re-inventing the wheel. It’s what we do instead of, you know, building roads upon which the existing wheels can roll. Or building carts or chassis or wheelbarrows. If the old wheels aren’t rolling, inventing new ones looks like a good idea. But damn y’all, we have just about every kind of damn wheel there is. I digress — for my whole career. I digress. Anyway, I was thinking, “Is this a good use of my time, to help this group do what a previous group did to little effect? Is this important?” And I realized the answer is, “if it makes me feel good, it’s the right thing.” Here it is again, another well-educated, well-paid, smart-aspiring white woman record scratch: “I’m going to spend my workday time doing things that make me feel good.” The time police are reaching for their tasers. Would the world still spin if women like me said, without apology or anxiety, “I’m doing to use my time, my money, my food in ways that make me feel good.” I’ve been told my whole life that I must use time, money, food, movement, sexuality, brain, energy, love in ways that are Constructive, Healthy, Long-Term-Oriented, and Approved. But perhaps constraint and that long chain of no is someone else’s medicine. My medicine might be yes. Yes to eating dairy at every meal. Yes to buying that lipstick, which I don’t strictly need (who strictly needs lipstick?). Yes to writing DURING THE WORKDAY EVEN THOUGH IT’S NOT MY PAID JOB.

Shedding, shedding, shedding, one cell at a time.