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.