It could indeed be worse

The virus could have hit the US between July 5, 2018, when I said I didn’t want to be his wife any more, and January 3, 2019, when I moved out.  I would have been living — as so many women are right now — with someone who verbally abused and physically threatened me.

I wanted to leave in October 2018 — I started paying rent on my apartment then.  He convinced me to stay until Milo had taken his college entrance exams.  The idolatry of college entrance exams and achievement!  It was stupid and costly — also to Milo, because we were fighting pretty much openly by then.

So I’ll have the holiday alone.  Milo isn’t careful of my feelings, and he will spend most of the quarantine at the family home, which is 3x the size of my apartment and has outdoor space.

And yet, I have so much.  My beloved friends will FaceTime me tonight for a pre-Pesach open house, where I will show them my debut Seder plate, on my grandmother’s china, which I have never used despite having possessed it for 20 years.  I will show them the dishes I am making just for myself, but I am my own honored guest.  And then my true love Will will be with me, also via FaceTime, sending his love because he doesn’t want me to be alone.

It could be worse.  It has been worse.  It’s better now.

Back for another disaster

Well, this is different.  I wonder what the world is preparing me for.  Every crisis is more frightening than the one before it, every test to my resilience more strenuous.  What is next?  Never mind.  I’ll wait.

I’m writing now because I was looking for a poem that I needed and went back through “Poems for Wednesday” posts to find it.  I needed the poem because my spirit couldn’t breathe, and a poem is like an inhaler.  I can’t say ventilator now.  That word is not for joking or metaphor.   I re-read my old posts, and thought, “That’s good and I should do more.”  I hate saying it: I’m a writer and I want to be a writer.

I’m writing because on Wednesday evening I was doing one of the things I do best and have done best my whole life, which is charming the daylights out of men over 70 (it used to be over 60, but now 60 is too close to my own age).  The gentleman in question was interviewing me for a job at an organization that I believe to be nearly a cult, and that others have described to me as a cult — “a tawdry cult” in one case.  During the interview, he himself said, “My wife asks me if [organization] is a cult because there is so much jargon and it changes all the time.”  So even in this time of great duress, I’m not going to work there.  Anyway, this senior acolyte asked a typical job interview question, “what is your career like in 10 years,” and my ungoverned mind said “writing” and my governed mouth said something more respectable.   And if I want to be writing in 10 years I need to write now.

My beloved, my Will (Daniel’s gone, but not gone enough.  He lurks malevolently), says I should write a novel of the coronavirus.  Not an original idea.  But I can capture the texture of a crisis, of me in yet another crisis.

Just when I have learned, or am starting to be open to the possibility of learning, to slow down, to believe there is enough for everyone, I am faced with grocery ordering: there is not enough for everyone.  I have to act RIGHT NOW.  I am TOO LATE.  Dear God not again!  Not that fear again of too late.  Too late for a brilliant career.  Too late to save Milo from his father’s influences (WordPress wanted me to say “influenzas,” suggesting some machine learning happening in the background.  My beloved knows about machine learning.  I try to be a learning machine.). I thought I was too late for great love, and I was wrong.   I thought I had a great love early in my life, and I was wrong.   So late, not too late, has possibilities, has pleasures.  Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t publish her first book till she was 50.  I am also behind schedule on that, having neither a publisher nor a manuscript, with 50 less than 6 months away.

It’s never too late for a crisis?  Never too late for a poem.

Fun

7:52

When I started studying for the LSAT for the second time, in 2000, the first question I encountered on the logical reasoning section was about a bumble bee.  I bumbled (pun intended a little bit — it’s the bourbon typing) the question because I overthought it.  I imagined contingencies that the question refused to countenance.  I saw multiplicities, unintended consequences, and none of the answers was on my side.  Eventually I learned to simplify, to stay within the boundaries of the question, and I got a perfect score on the LSAT.  That was the last time I was perfect.

I’m also a disaster at personality assessments and magazine quizzes.  Do they mean always?  More often than not?  On Tuesdays when I’m not busy?  With beloved friends or strangers?  When I was young or now? But now I’m particularly anxious, so maybe they mean when I’m not anxious.  Except, aren’t I always anxious?  But how anxious?

This is my oblique approach to the question that I can’t answer: What do you do for fun? Variation: What is “play” for you?  Please ask me something else.  But, no, the authors of Designing Your Life won’t budge.  They want me to evaluate myself on play:

“activity that is done just for the pure sake of doing it.  It can include organized activity or productive endeavors, but only if they are done for fun and not merit…. Play is all about joy… Play is any activity that brings you joy when you do it.  When an activity is done to win, to advance, to achieve — even if it’s ‘fun’ to do so–it’s not play… The question here is what brings you job purely in the doing.”

Can I have another question, please?  The authors also ask me to evaluate myself on health, work, and love.  You’d think I’d stumble on love but in fact I’m rock solid.  I have lots more love in my life, or I recognize lots more love in my life, than I did a year ago. I’m also much clearer on what is and isn’t love.  I don’t have all the varieties of love I want, but I understand the question.  Work has a complicated answer, but again I understand the question.  Health, I’m also solid, even on mental and spiritual dimensions.  I’m lagging spiritually, as always, but I know what it means.

Fun.  Play.  What are those things?  I find fun and play in the other things I do.  I find joy in the instrumental things, like cooking to feed myself and walking to work and walking to synagogue with Milo.  And thank God, because I am not sure I do anything at all that is not instrumental.  I read.  I read Louise Penny and other mysteries, not just excellent improving books (although I AM very literary.  I just choose otherwise sometimes.  Often.  When I’m stressed I read mysteries.  I have read mysteries almost exclusively for the last three years. Or five. )  I deeply enjoy yoga, but there is an edge of advancement and improvement.  I try to go for slow, aimless walks, but I find myself speeding up, my heart pounding, taking the hills.  And that’s fun, but would I do it if it weren’t good for me?  Cooking, but I get sad when it turns out badly, so that’s clearly instrumental.  Blogging?  It’s not joy as much as it is unpicking tightly, wrongly woven stitches.  Sighing and starting again at the beginning.  I aim to knit.  It seems soothing.  Is soothing instrumental?  It doesn’t sound like joy.

And yet, I want to believe, ALL evidence to the contrary, that I am a fun person.  Cruel men have told me otherwise, when I decline to do what they want me to do: “You’re no fun.”  I have a lot of joy in my life, even more in the last year when what I thought was my life was falling apart all around me like a building imploding in a summer blockbuster.  Milo and I make each other laugh till we can’t speak, and we go on and on and on.

Is this a gendered question?  Can women in families ever detach from instrumentalism? I’m about to find out, aren’t I, as Milo chooses to spend most of his time in the only home he’s ever known, which is not where I will live.  Creating my new apartment is fun, and instrumental because a person needs tables and chairs and rugs.

I can see coming to understand this question.  The previous question that used to stump me, stop me cold, cause tears of frustration was, “What do you *want* to do?”  What I wanted to do was a good job.  What I wanted to do was please, appease, get an A, exceed the standard, be praised and therefore loved.  Wasn’t that enough?  What do you want me to do, oh questioner?  Tell me and turn me loose and we’ll both be happy.  I am better now at this question.  I know the answer more often than not, and I know when to ask it. It tugs at me when I pick up the improving book (Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach.  I don’t think I trust her after Visit From the Goon Squad.  She didn’t answer the essential question, “how did they get from A to B?” I could have forgiven her in the name of experimental fiction, but then she put it in the mouth of one of her characters, which seemed like a cruel wink.  She knew what she was doing and she knew it was mean.  I don’t like mean girls.  But Manhattan Beach is supposed to be straight up traditional narrative.  Still…. I also have Homegoing, which I really wanted to read when it first came out.  But it still seems improving-ish.  So I read the second Joe Ide IQ novel, which was less wonderful than the first.  And not very literary.  But that former professor of mine can go jump in a lake.  I read Hopscotch for his class, which was not fun at all.)  It reminds me, per Mara Glatzel (she’s quite good, and quite woo-woo), that I should eat before I unload the dishwasher, go to the bathroom before I finish the email, get some water even when I’m late to the meeting.

What will that even be like, not to pay the debt to my family in the form of laundry and dishes and housework before I leave the house to go to yoga on Sunday?

I texted this question to three beloved friends.  Two have responded and they don’t really know either.  So I’m leaning towards it being a gendered thing.

8:31

Strained

8:32

I wanted, four hours ago, to call this post “Silly” because I had, ridiculously, spent $200 today visiting a friend.  It wasn’t exactly like that — it never is.  Daniel took the car this afternoon to take Milo to an activity.  So I rented a Zip Car, to spare myself the cost of an Uber.  I wanted to drive, and that’s something I rarely feel, so I gave into it.  I believe, now, that I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts for the 30 minute ride to the suburbs, and I certainly didn’t want to be with a driver.  Driving gave me something else to think about.  And the cost wasn’t much more, if any more, than an Uber.   So that’s $45.

My friend Annabeth has cancer.  Bad cancer.  So $25 on flowers, that being the very least I could do.  And she is a gem.  We have seen each other maybe three times in the last dozen years since we graduated law school.  Folly!  She is a gem, and I need more of her in my life.  And she has cancer.  She’s remarried, and I mentioned that I’d last seen her right after she got married again.  She said, “Yes, the modern era.  So much better than before.  You know the first marriage was bad when now, even with cancer, is much better.”  We visited for an hour (“visited” is a verb from my childhood, usually used in past tense without the final consonant, as in, “It sure was nice visiting’ with you.”  Occasionally in the quasi imperative, “C’mon over here and let’s visit.”), and she got tired because she’s had a treatment recently.  She was delightful, then tired.  We laughed.  I didn’t ask her about her illness.  I did tell her the truth about my situation — she knew Daniel from our law school days, and he leaves an impression.

Then I went to the food co-op in her neighborhood.  I used to shop at a different branch, since closed, and I was so happy to be back.  I spent $150 on kombucha, beer, soap, chocolate, and environmentally righteous menstrual products.  Why?  Because Annabeth has cancer– bad cancer.  Because she has a truly, deeply loving husband, and a little girl who asked me if I did all the housework in my house (er… um… kind of, not really… yes it feels like it).  Because I don’t want her to die.  Because I don’t want to be married to Daniel.  Because I realized today that the feelings I wasn’t feeling weren’t feelings of relief or happiness, but of deep sadness.  And maybe I can drink and eat and bleed and wash all that stuff away.  Maybe I can surround myself, intimately even, with all this eco-luxury and that will make me feel entirely better.  At the very least, it was a reminder of a time when I had less clarity, and believed I was happy, and worried less about money.  I am worrying about money — the money it will take to buy my freedom — all the time, except when I’m filling my cart with luxury objects.

Then we did a family logistics thing — no need for details — which is always a recipe for extreme tension.  Milo and I are both on the ceiling right now, and he won’t talk to me about it, which is entirely age-appropriate but it makes me sad.

Annabeth makes me sad, too.  I am so sad.  Sad I haven’t seen her more.  Sad she has cancer.  Sad she is missing out on even a minute of happiness with her husband.  Sad about all my missed minutes, too.

What will I do?  Her cancer is not about me.  But this blog post is.  What will I do?  I know what I have to do.  Daniel came home from the grocery store and was actively nice for a bit.  I liked it.  I fell for it.  He believes it’s all fine.  It’s not fine.  It hasn’t been fine for a long time, and it will be so costly in every sense to make it so.  He’s already threatened me with an awful divorce.

I realized last night that when I first mentioned divorce, he said I couldn’t because of Milo, not because he loved me.  Maybe he gets a pass because he was angry and surprised.

I could decide to spring myself.  I could decide not to take the next round of grants and leave my job in June.  I could decide to leave Daniel now.  The money is there, from my parents.  If I said, “Daddy, I need the money, loan it to me, and you’ll have it back in two years,” I could do that.  I could do all those things.  I’m just so sad at having to right now.  I’m too sad right now.  And then I’ll be sad throughout.  And I still trust myself to do the right thing at the right time.  This is being brave for myself, and I have to be brave for myself so that the next good thing will come.

There was a point with Annabeth when I thought, as I have thought sometimes, “and yet, I’ve never been happier.”  I”m getting back to myself.  I am restoring my soul to me in mercy, and it feels pretty good.  I’m renting a car and driving to a granola suburb and spending silly money without justifying it to anyone, and it feels good.  It felt good.  Clarity is better than what I had before.

I should stop.  I should just read now.  I’m going to do health insurance reimbursements and iron instead.

8:56

 

 

Multitudes

8:54

As in, “I Contain Multitudes.” I’ve never read the poem, actually, and when I googled “I Contain Multitudes” the top hits were for a book about microbes in the human body, which is an excellent title for the subject.

What I do not contain is job security. The grant that I thought would turn everything around will, like the two other turn-everything-around grants before it, will come in small, or late, or not at all. It will not come in now, so I am much closer to the end of my run in the best job I have ever had, which is the best fit and brings out the best in me. I have an important call tomorrow — that call is really the last turn-everything-around possibility. And I’m probably going to stay up ridiculously late to watch the Oscars.

Last night, when I found out after Shabbat that the grant was not going to come through, I was angry. I was angry this morning at Daniel (various reasons, some justified: I thought he woke me up at 2am to move the dog from my bed to his. He denies this. He says he was just moved to kiss me when he came home. Sadly, he lacks this enthusiasm during, say, daylight hours.) But during yoga this morning, I stopped being angry because there’s no benefit, there’s no joy in it, and I need joy and joy and joy and joy. Something just happened, and something else will happen. I believe that I will have a job at the end of 2018. I believe that, if I have a period of unemployment, it will be manageable, even if it drains all my savings. It’s only money.

Today I got a pedicure with a friend, and she told me how much she earned at her old job, and what she earns now. I feel like we are sisters after this. It was a beautiful experience. She made me laugh till I almost cried (not when we talked about money, when we talked about Passover). I have her, and many other friends, so it’s going to be okay. It’s just information, just experience, just another step on the way to the next kind of thing.

So, I am weirdly happy. I was angry, then shut down, then happy. I’ll go through this cycle many more times. But now I’ll just be happy & watch the Oscars.

9:11

Later

(Ls are easy)

8:22

It got better. It always does, just not on demand. This time, it was yoga class that saved me, that took my mind enough away to escape the destructive loop it was in. Then I threw myself into cooking for Milo, who has a cold that he’s taking a little too seriously. He needs a break.

And I found a friend, who is herself divorcing, and talked to her. And I had an honest, excruciating conversation with Daniel, and he didn’t yell. He got snippy at the end, and he wasn’t kind, but he was honest and didn’t yell. I told him that this was a conversation between two people who were very hurt but had some kind of relationship going and wanted to go forward. He thought we already were those people.

I told my friend that Daniel and I are on different planets, and on our own planet, we are perfectly justified, and there is no bridge between our worlds. I’m reading Left Hand of Darkness now, hence the science fiction metaphor. She, bless her, suggested that it was a mistake to give Daniel his own planet. Ceding to Daniel’s narrative is always disastrous for me. The terrible feeling of all day yesterday, the crying, the worthlessness, that is a familiar feeling, although I’d escaped it for a while. That’s the feeling of trying to live in Daniel’s narrative. We might never agree. My narrative is the least-harm narrative.

As I suspected, Daniel believes that since our last big fight, the one where he told me I was inadequate and asked who could be married to me (but of course those statements don’t count because “obviously” he said them in anger, and that doesn’t count), since our last big fight I have been much better. After that fight, the careful reader will recall, I gave up on expecting anything at all from Daniel, and set myself to serving him. So that is “better.” In fairness (to him, not me) I did realize only then how soul-sick he is. I realize just now, writing this (which is why I write) that the flare up on Friday came when I told him that I did, in fact, expect things from him. That’s when it all went to hell and I thought of self harm.

This is all information. Daniel will be furious if he ever learns I am keeping a record. But it’s for myself, for the next time. A hedge against self harm. I think Daniel is trying, but he insists that the scrim of hatred was created by both of us because “It’s a marriage, and marriage is two people.” I can’t hear that, and he can’t hear otherwise. It’s a problem. He agreed in principle to go to counseling later. We’ll see. I need to remember that, to record that, too. He agreed in principle to go to counseling later. He doesn’t want divorce, that is clear. He might not want the same marriage I want.

8:33

Joy

4:38

I’m breaking one of my cardinal rules, and blogging during the workday.  I will leave my desk in 22 minutes anyway to go to yoga, and there’s nothing work related that I can accomplish in 22 minutes. Well there almost certainly is, but nothing is coming to mind and I’m not looking hard.

So some things that are bringing me joy right now, regardless of all other things, and in no particular order

1. Frugality. When I am thoughtful about spending money, buying new things only to replace old things,and using up all the old things and clearing out and letting go, I magically have money for the things that matter (therapy!). I’m loosening my grip a little, but so far, it’s not been too hard and the psychic rewards are much greater than the rewards of careless spending.

2. My new CSA subscription. To be fair, I won’t see the produce for a couple more weeks, but I am very happy about the idea of the fresh produce and adventures in cooking. This subscription touts itself as being extremely easy to manage. A few weeks ago, I would have said I couldn’t afford it (groceries come from Daniel’s portion of the budget), but I think it will make me happy to spend this money in this way.

3. Bringing my lunch to work. Before our financial pinch, I never brought my lunch, and thought it would be impossible to do so. Who wanted to cook on Sundays for the week? Me, it turns out. Some three months in, it’s not oppressive. I have a very high tolerance for eating the same foods over and over (I’m on week 2 of lentils every day). I go into the common areas of our offices, and have my nice lunch away from my desk. I think eating away from my desk is essential to this enterprise, and the food is incidental.

4. My new offices. I thought I would hate this location, but the space is delightful. It feels fresh and new. I also like working in a slightly different neighborhood. I enjoy being an urban explorer.

5. Bicycling. The new offices are most easily reached by bike, and I delight in unlocking a bike every day and flying along the streets. My bike commute is very short, downhill (I usually take the bus or walk home) and energizing. I feel like a college student, or little kid, and I enjoy that.

6. Writing. At work, I write for 10 minutes a day on whatever project is at hand — mostly playing around, brainstorming, sometimes revising. It is magic. I have ideas I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. I move projects along that would have seemed too daunting to take on. Even when I don’t feel like it, it’s just 10 minutes. I didn’t read about this practice on a blog or in a productivity book.  I just made it up, and I love the results.

7. Milo. He’s spectacular. He shows me what mutual love looks like, and there is so much freedom and happiness in it. (Shadow to this: my relationship with Milo, and the goodness in it, revealed to me so many of the limitations of my relationship with Daniel, and the wrongness of what Daniel said about me and how he treated me. It’s an awkward truth: Milo’s love showed me that I have to leave his dad. Hmm. Milo will need a good therapist of his own.)

8. My friends. I thought for years I was a bad friend, needy, self-centered, only showing up when I needed something. My friends show me something different. If these amazing women want to spend time with me, then there is something really right with me, and it gets more right the more time I spend with them. I didn’t have models of female friendship growing up. These women are saving me, every day.

9. The gym in the office building. Finally, finally, I’m running. Just the treadmill, just for 15 minute HIIT workouts, but I’m running and it’s hard and I like it. I’m also doing some weights and resistance work. I looked forward to it all day yesterday. It feels better (and is so much cheaper) than spinning.

4:59. Not my best prose, repetitive and pedestrian. I care enough to note it, but not enough to change it.

Dessert

It is typical of me to leave the story at the hard work and the struggle, the square-shouldered resolution, and leave out the hope and fun.

All that stuff I just wrote has a payoff. Even now, I’m putting more distance, faster, between myself and feeling like I’m a bad wife.  I am confident now that I put Daniel’s happiness above my own, and it doesn’t feel like choking.  Let me revise that.  Putting your beloved’s happiness above your own is the “out in the world” definition of true love and a good marriage.  I didn’t feel like I met it, so… failure.  I’m not sure I would choose that definition of true love ab initio.  It sound like the message sent to women for, oh, millennia.  On the receiving end, I’d be unnerved by someone putting my happiness above his own all the time.  Anyway, I am confident that I am closer to loving Daniel entirely as he is than I have ever been, because I’ve seen more of him.  I know what’s there, and I am okay with it.  Merely okay with some of it, but that’s better than denying, correcting, and raging at.  That makes me feel good.  I was so disappointed in what I thought was my flawed love for Daniel, I thought I was bad at love, and rejected that because it was too painful.  I am not flawed at love.  I was really, really wounded and scared. But I stayed with it — and that is a beautiful tribute to what I’m capable of.  I stayed with it and I got to this place as fast and as best as I could.

And the biggest payoff, and perhaps the hardest to explain but it makes perfect sense in marital alchemy is… I feel like I can be more entirely myself.  I don’t have to be good, I don’t have to supply the perfection that my marriage is missing.  I can, dear readers, finally be a bitch.  That’s not a goal, but it is a reprieve.  I have desperately wanted to feel and only rarely, rarely felt loved just as me. (It’s not my parents’ fault. They did the best they could.  They just didn’t know what was going on in my head, which was more complicated than they imagined.)  My beloved friends have provided it, but I wasn’t tuned in to it as a possibility, so, again, always felt like I was somehow disappointing them.

Now, I’ve created that possibility.  I don’t even need Daniel to go first, and demonstrate deep love in my moments of bitchiness (Does this make any sense at all?).  I can just lay claim to it.  I have so often felt powerless in my marriage, because Daniel won’t do things that are important to me.  But I’ve seen that I do have power, in a more subtle way, to show Daniel how to treat me, and to live with it if he doesn’t deliver immediately.  And that’s not about imperfection and failing.  It’s humanity.

Now is the time (again)

I’ve felt the need, or the urge, or the itch to write for a few weeks now, but have pushed it aside.  It’s easy to do that during the run-up to the Jewish holidays, or the four week endurance test of the Jewish holidays (maximum observance version).  But three weeks in, I’m going to write now.  Writing here is associated with so many things: comfort, discomfort, risk, clarity, observation.  And I’m in the middle of all of those states.

What first made me feel like writing was the dawning understanding that intentions can take a very long time — years and years — to manifest themselves, but eventually many of them do.  How many years did I say I intended to meditate in the coming year?  And after not doing it, and not doing it, and not doing it, I started last year, and now I sit and meditate (poorly) for 30 minutes each morning and arrange my schedule around it.  Similarly, for months if not years, I’ve intended to get control over my spending, and after a particularly binge-y summer, this month I’ve managed to observe the impulses that drive my spending and think harder about what I’m trying to buy (efficacy, ease, confidence, pleasure, excitement, comfort) rather than actually buying things that are just things rather than achievements or states of being.  I find this time lag so comforting.  We’ll get where we need to go, where we intend to go, but in a wending, winding, sort of way, when the world inside and the world outside are congenial and supportive.  We are not failures, we are just not successes yet.  I never before appreciated how things can unfold in time.  I thought I had to bring about changes or states of being instantly (which is why shopping was so seductive, especially online; I wasn’t seeking instant gratification, but rather instant efficacy.  I wanted to make something happen, and I did — I clicked and a whole machinery came to life just to satisfy me).  But many things happen when we aren’t trying, when we aren’t looking.  I used to find this invisibility, this occurrence without extraordinary effort discomforting because I believed I could control what happened to me, that I was able to control things through extraordinary effort, and that I could control all the people who were part of the happening.  Well, no.  I held on to that illusion with all my might (a lot!) for a very, very long time, and this blog is, among other things, a record of why and how I began to let go.  I expect there is much more letting go that will happen in the future.

Yes, time.  Before Rosh Hashanah this year, I was thinking about self forgiveness. I was thinking that I was probably ready to forgive myself for never having had that second child.  It felt like time.  Among the other things this blog is, it’s a record of a giant tangle of sadness and blame — and the connection between thinking I could control everything that happened, and should control everything that happened, and the subsequent step into blame, first of Daniel but more fundamentally and durably of myself, for what didn’t happen.  So this year, I went back and read what happened on Rosh Hashanah four years ago.  I felt drawn to that accounting because, I guess, I needed to measure the distance between now and then.  Four years is a long time, but not really so long.  It’s how long it’s taken.  And I was so grateful to have the record of the starting point, even though it’s very painful to read even now.  And so grateful to have people like Nicole, Tracey, Sister, Mali, and everyone else who were there for me in a way that no one who was physically near me was or ever could have been.  How ever many words I ever write in my life, here or elsewhere, I’ll never be able to capture what that meant in that time, and how precious and necessary it was.

And, still, time.  I’m about to accept a new job.  An imperfect job, but the perfect job for me at this time.  I think being on the verge of this new job, a job in which I will really create something, called me back to the blog because it, even more than my book, was a powerful, sustained, creative effort.  I was creating… words are failing me here… I was creating a self that could withstand being disappointed by God, myself, my husband, medicine, the universe.  I was creating a story that enabled me to make sense of the place I was in.  I was creating a loving and supportive community.  I was creating myself as a particular kind of writer.  I did that, with help, word after word, one post at a time.  So now I can do this new thing, and then the thing after that, and then the thing after that.  It is time, again, to create.  This time publicly, with my own livelihood at stake.  I think it will work out.

Daniel is a brilliant writer, but he hates to write.  He makes himself miserable over most of his speeches and his larger articles.  I think it’s because he worries they will never be good enough.  They will never accomplish his true aims.  This morning I told him, “You don’t have to try to be Daniel D_____.  You already are.  You woke up that way.”  And a few hours later, during a deep twist in a yoga class, I realized, me, too. I don’t have to be anybody more spectacular than I am to do this next thing.  I woke up with enough, at least with enough to get started.

At every holiday, we say a prayer called the Shehecheyanu, in which we thank God for having enabled us to reach this occasion, with the sense that we are grateful to be back at this occasion, this place in time, once again.  I am feeling that intensely now.  I am back at this occasion, the occasion of building a path forward for myself.  It has taken a long time and a lot of intending, a lot of trying and lot of wandering and not trying, to get back here, which is also somewhere very far forward from where I started.

To bolster myself later….

Okay, it’s a bad time all round.  Or maybe not so bad.  We are healthy.  We can pay every bill on the horizon.  Milo is flourishing.  But I’m not happy at work, and I’m not happy at home.  And Daniel isn’t happy at at home.  And that’s deeply exhausting and hard to overcome.

But a good thing happened.  I had breakfast with a dear, dear friend on Thursday.  I told her that I was applying for a new job on Friday, and that I was just going to hit send on the application however imperfect.  I did apply to the new job — a job I don’t want, and an application I didn’t spend a lot of time on– and there was a glorious rush once I did.  I felt like I was finally doing something different, meaningful, and that would create something better eventually.   But by Shabbat morning I was doubting myself again, questioning my skills, feeling low and enervated.  But at services, my beloved friend told me that I had inspired her, and she made two phone calls she’d been putting off for months to get a potential project started for herself.  And if nothing more comes of my job application, that’s okay — because helping my beloved friend is enough.

There is so much out there about work and advancement that borders on, or charges headlong into, magical thinking.  It is very like infertility talk —  put that good energy out there,  set that intention,  make that vision board, believe, believe, believe.  But maybe it’s just different enough that I can believe that having 100 breakfasts, and letting all my friends know about my struggles and aspirations, and putting myself out there, and connecting and “give before you get”-ing will get a good result.  (I was much happier before I drew that parallel with infertility.  But I survived that.  I’ll survive this.  Oddly enough, the stakes seem higher now, but that’s only because I know that I survived that — or have survived so far.)

Usually I write my way out of pain.  At the moment, I’m writing my way into pain, as it all looks so daunting and unfair and impossible.  Really, wasn’t infertility enough?  Why this, too?  But, see paragraph 2 above.  Helping my beloved friend is enough.  Making her feel happy and smart and engaged is enough.  And I can write my way into something else, eventually.  Eventually.