old jeans

Today i finally pulled out an old pair of jeans from my closet and tossed them on the window seat in my bed-room. Before i flung them there i pulled them on. They didn't button. Yet i looked at them longingly yearning to justify pushing them back into my closet. I remembered how they looked and felt on that sunny day a decade ago. I sighed and placed next to them a threadbare, faded, green sweatshirt along with some soft, often washed t-shirts. Keep that one at least a tiny voice pleaded.  

There are things outside and inside that i hang onto. Attached to them are memories and parts of me that i do not fit into anymore but cannot yet bear letting go of. I know that to invite in the new i need to make room in my inner closet. But multiple fears lurk. 

What if i throw it all away, my inner closet stands bare, summoning in the new, but i find nothing that fits? The work to find the new feels impossible, exhausting, undoable. I don't know where to begin. Shouldn't i just hang on to the old then?

I am scared that i have reached the end. That i have nothing left within to find new 'things'. That i have given it all i possibly can and disappointed though i maybe with what i have it is the limit of what i am. 

And even if there is more i can be i am too tired to cast out the old and start anew. I have put one foot out but the other one feels like solid lead, dragging and afraid to follow.

Can i really do that workshop? It's been so long and i may be terrible at it now. What if everyone laughs or worse no-one does? Ya, what if they sit silently and say nothing at all?

The book sucks. Especially the beginning that i wrote two years ago. It feels so amateurish. I must have grown somewhat to recognise this now since at that time i thought it was wonderful. But oh no, an entire re-write. No... No... No...

And is it really what i want to spend my days writing? Wasn't that just the practice canvass and i need now to find my life's work? But how can i let two years of work just go? I loved it once and still i do. Is there anything more than this which felt so brilliant, joyful and even complete once?

And so it goes. 

But the jeans sit on the window seat. A strong afternoon sunlight filtered through sheer green curtains drops across them. A torn belt loop, frayed wide bottoms, comfortable faded blue denim worn with countless, coloured tops. Goodbye.

a celebratory pause

I find myself in another in-between. 

I finished my memoir. Even took a deep breath and sent off the extract. Feeling curiously detached from both the memories and the outcome now. Feeling a tide of healing flowing over me. Sending it out increases its chances of being read and that's good. Memoir is not my form. I don't love writing it and have a bungling sense of how to do it. But i am glad that i persisted and stayed with it on days that felt dark, still and low. On days i wanted to give up - i kept going and went back to it the next day too. My first finished writing project.

The critic sometimes says - but you could have done that better, written that with more feeling, deleted that. Shush now, i say. I am pleased with meeting the deadline the best way i could and want to enjoy the feeling

When i did the test for my nidan in March i threw myself into it and did the best i could. Then Sensei decided to announce the results the next day and i felt shattered, nervous, unsure. I stressed about it on my last dinner in Koh Samui with my friends and didn't sleep all night. But if i could do that evening over i would have partied and laughed as if i had accomplished what i wanted - because i had. I had pushed through almost thirty hours of training and done a test. Instead of feeling so attached to the outcome i would have celebrated that achievement.

So this time i have sent the writing out with the waves and hope it finds the shore it is meant to - or i receive further guidance on what to do with it - for it is a subject i  want to reveal to the world. Yesterday i laughed and said that if this effort goes nowhere i have a great idea for a fiction novel based on the memoir. My friend and i even sat around drinking wine and creating characters last evening. 

But having said that i also feel a little bit lost. Like i don't quite know how to fill the hours of my day again. I do have several paths i can follow and i probably will but today i am just blank. Questioning my future and myself. Struggling with the haze induced sinus and cough and feeling a fever come on. Hoping it does not interfere with my getting ready for my karate camp in Jaipur on the 5th. 

So far 2014 has been quite a year. 

is this project of visiting a personal past necessary?

Sitting here trying to finish the 3rd draft of my memoir of a time of joyous light followed by great shadow. Well probably this is really the first real draft. The first two were just excavating and finding the 'data' and then sharing it and conversations with a few people from that time so i could find more fragments. Now the pieces are laid out in a linear way and the task seems huge. Its emotional data and that makes it harder.

Sometimes - like today - i wonder why i am doing this. What is the purpose of re-visiting the past like this? Does it not make more sense to look forward to the future? What can the past possibly have for me?

Yet it has made sense to have spent this time on this project. At first i did not even know that this 'past' was lurking in my shadows. Bringing it out to the light has been its own liberation. Talking to others from that time has shown that the problem that i thought was mostly mine was much bigger and sharing with them has further freed me. Each time i've felt lighter and also more convinced that i need to finish this project.

But sitting down daily to things has been exhausting, depressing even. It's not a blank page i sit down to but a set of dense, chaotic memories. The blank page actually is less daunting but choosing images, feelings, stories from a 3-D page stuffed with them is harder for me. Mostly i keep at it because the dream called me to it and the tarot kept me there when i wanted to give up.

My daughter reminded me that writers have a social responsibility - well maybe not all writers or artists do - but i do identify with being one of those. Time and again people willing to share their stories, to visit and find the 'truth' from traumatic pasts have made it easier for others struggling with the same issues. Yet the issues continue, human behaviour seems not to change much and i wonder why bother. 

There is some literature and help out there for victims of therapeutic abuse but there is more yet that stays under. I think sometimes because people don't even realise what has happened to them or feel that yes, it happened but it can't possibly be affecting me so much. And yet research has shown that therapeutic abuse is as devastating as childhood abuse and leaves deep scars.

So is this project really necessary? I can only say maybe. But i am one of those people who do things without having a solid reason, just because they exist. I know i will finish this. But stay with me some of who read this and send me gentle strength to do so. 

what did i miss here?

Two days ago i was jolted by a strange interaction with someone - i hesitate to call him a friend.

He sent me a message, 'When you back? meet.' The last time i had heard from him was probably in feb or march this year.

I replied in what i thought was a similar tone, 'Just got back. Busy for a while. Will let you know.' 

This was followed by an unexpected outburst. He said that i clearly did not value relationships once they got close. He then attempted to analyse my personality, pointing out that i had a huge ego, that i wanted to change the world but had no sensitivity for friends and a few other like things. He said he was disconnecting and considering the content of that message my immediate reaction was, 'Yea, dude if you had such a low opinion of me i don't even know why you wanted to meet.'

I didn't really have a desire to find out where his outburst had come from but even if i did he had nipped that in the bud by having already blocked me. No big loss i shrugged. And that was true. Slowly this friendship had already dwindled. On my side i think as i got to know him better i realised how different our values were and as time passed and we did not meet i let it slip away. 

But besides this i felt a mild burst of anger and on and off that came back over the last few days. I felt i wanted to slap this man as if he was a rude child. I felt what he did was really cowardly - to say nasty things and then hide giving the other no chance to respond. I felt a desire to say nasty things back to him. So far i have resisted.

If the friendship did mean a lot to me i would want to get beyond this. But whatever good feelings existed were gone after this outburst. Just left wondering though what if anything this interaction has to teach me and what signals i missed that left me feeling so surprised by his words. 

the in-between

In a scattered in-between space. That narrow focused goal directed energy from few weeks ago has shifted to this diffuse state. It's a bit of a time of collection, of sorting and also a bit of post-partum blues.

I managed to get through the week in Samui. I tested and got my Nidan. Big, big achievement for me but after, along with the joy i also feel some emptiness which unnerves me. Like I've put down a huge load I had been carrying and though it makes me feel lighter it also leaves me less weighted into the earth.

The week has been filled with small things to firefight. A leak from the upstairs coming through our ceiling, the microwave dying, the A/C making strange noises and little Yoda peeing outside his litter box every morning. The construction outside pounds away and all the roads around here have been dug up leaving not not even one quiet little roadway to walk through when I go out. I hate it all. It numbs me. I want to escape my body and go into auto mode.

I am suddenly drifting. I was supposed to return here and rest a few days and then begin work on the fantasy novel again. The story is now sound, the characters have a life and what it needs now is some description, some details and cleaning up of language and dialogue. A task I hoped to finish by end May. But the boiling frog dream and memory pulls at me. Something is nudging me towards it while another voice says, 'No Not another unknown challenge.'

I long for the familiar. I have no clue how to structure a memory. Why do i need to write it? Why do i feel others should read it? How to do this? What to leave out? Why begin something new when I could just finish that book. It needs to be finished.

A part of me longs to work with what I have grown to know and not throw myself into another task where I have to read and learn and work and read and learn. But it calls. Some calls are hard to ignore.

But I am procrastinating. Putting it off. A bit afraid to start. And so much else also going on demanding attention. Yes, it is the in-between. I don't like these spaces much anymore. I know I used to. They used to make me feel alive. But today i am just tired.