A Burd in Flight

“Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct.”

It’s a cold and breezy morning here, wind is blustering in grey clouds and there’s a chill in the air that belongs on green Irish moors, not Texas in (almost) April.

This morning I’m introspective and for the first time in weeks I didn’t wake with an overwhelming dread, anxiety closing off the world around me.

I’ve been thinking this morning of a statement from the Natalie Portman movie Annihilation that I’ll never forget:

“I think you’re confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job… and a happy marriage.”

I was self-destructing and calling my alcoholism for seventeen years (from 21 to 38, still sober though, in September it will have been three years) “coping”. I recognize it now. Perhaps that’s part of why I’m trying so hard to treat my mind and body so much better these days.

I finally don’t want to self-destruct. I finally feel some worth in myself. Even as much as I love everything I am, part of me has never believed that I deserve to exist or be happy. I’m trying to be more understanding of that side of me now. Treating it gently instead of abusing my body and covering up pain with booze.

I’ve self-destructed since I was a kid of seven or eight. I didn’t start drinking alcohol at that age, but was self-destructing in habits and thoughts. I think back and wonder why but all I know of happening at that age was my horribly abusive second grade teacher, and I don’t even remember that year of my life. Which is in itself unsettling. Anything I know of that time was told to me by others. There are small snippets I have in my mind, but I don’t even know if I’m actually remembering or just imagining what I was told by others.

Perhaps this past month of uncontrollable anxiety that pinches my senses down until my ears ring and my vision goes haywire has more to do with it than I realize. When the attacks come I feel encased and trapped and completely isolated from everything. And as it’s in my own mind there is no escape.

The bars of this cage grow from within.

But I refuse to live in fear. Even if it envelops me until I’m walking in a dark corridor with no end in sight. I will not allow myself to be caged. Even if it’s by my own hand, as it has been since I was a child.

I will not allow my dreams and hopes to fade beneath such a harsh mistress. I owe her no fealty, and never did.

Too much introspection so early. I’m gonna cuddle Yuki and read and sip decaf Earl Grey.

“Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Merton writes of solitaries that we are ‘a mute witness, a secret and even invisible expression of love which takes the form of their own option for solitude in preference to the acceptance of social fictions.’

And what love are we solitaries mute witnesses to? The omnipresence of the great Alone, the infinite possibilities of no duality, no separation between you and me, between the speaker and the spoken to, the dancer and his dance, the writer and her reader, people and our earth.”

At the Center of All Beauty – Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson

As a tree

The dregs of anxiety have begun to recede and aren’t hanging their angry fingers over my head every day. At last. Although my palms sweat again just writing about it. It’s manageable, as if my body just had to take a few weeks to recognize it for what it was and relax again. CBD oils are helping quite a lot, and my nights are full of vivid dreams of moments when I look down at my hands to see they’re covered in blooming vines and blood and vibrant living things.

Every morning now I get up earlier than I had before to fit in almost an hour of walking outside, no matter the weather. I find that on the days I don’t do this by the evenings I’m overwhelmed again and shivering shaking sweating beads of sourness that I can’t escape from. The walking helps lubricate my joints and my mind at the same time, and I won’t be stopping the new habit anytime soon. It’s helped my appetite return as well, and I find myself with a gurgling in my stomach that isn’t fear or dread but a powerful hunger, something I haven’t felt in what feels like quite a long time.

I’m more sensitive to the things I put into my body now…or perhaps I always was and just masked it with alcohol or green. I’m sober from alcohol two years and six months almost to the day, and I don’t miss it one bit. Seeing people drink on shows and films makes my body revolt and I wonder how I did that so long. Perhaps it was a seventeen-year-long-phase I simply had to go through. The genetic tendency is strong within my bloodline, I didn’t realize what a problem I had until it was too late, and I tried to kill my mind and body with alcohol until they simply rebelled and had enough. I’m thankful for this and hope that it stays that way for the rest of my life. If I drank again it would kill me, I know it as sure as gravity, inescapable and with a will of its own.

It’s spring break here in Texas, although the damp cold of the last freeze seems to linger in the ground the sun is making up for lost time. On walks there are heaps of cacti and agave that didn’t make it, piled against the curb for the rubbish, breaking my heart with their wilted faded yellows and pale greens. Their tissue is spongy as if the ice that formed in their cell walls turned them to mush barely contained by their skins. The barbs and needles are still as spiky as ever, though, as they don’t have living tissue inside them, and I’ve pricked my fingers more than once as I pass by and say hello.

There’s a live oak on my street I want to draw. She’s ancient, hundreds of years old, we don’t have many trees like that in this area. Her center is hollow, dead wood rotted away, but she still lives and throws acorns that make saplings. I’m convinced the oak in my front yard, the one I wrapped myself around to anchor my mind during the ice storms, is a descendant of this ancient one, and I want to remember her.

If I come back after this life let it be as a tree.

Kiddo and I have spent our extra spring break days together with the windows open as I’ve worked, soaking in the sunshine and fresh air (and oak pollen, it’s that time of year again). Yesterday he sat in here with me as I worked, gaming on his laptop building Serenity (from Firefly) from scratch in Roblox. We chatted and laughed and it was glorious. After the shift was over I made chicken and broccoli and we stuffed ourselves as we watched Zack Snyder’s Justice League then cuddled afterwards until I started to fall asleep. He has this curiously sweet way of curling my arm against the top of his chest, across his clavicles, to where my hand rests on his shoulder, and he tucks his chin into my arm, trapping it against him. I don’t mind this in the least and would sit there letting him hold my arm for years if he wanted to. His heart is so purely sweet and he’s an ache inside him I can’t define or reach yet, but I know I was the one to put it there when I left his father. And when I moved to Idaho with my Stardust, even though it broke me in ways nothing ever has to leave her, I had to come back to him. Nothing will make me leave him again.

This vividly delicious rush of elation…I hope it stays. My tears today are from joy and relief instead of fear and anger, and I welcome them when he’s not there to watch me. I can’t cry in front of him, he’s too much an empath and he worries over me so. He has since he was small, seeing his father with my best friend, and me alone. I am grateful he can now see me whole without someone to pair up with. I hope he takes that lesson into adulthood. I didn’t know that it was acceptable to be single when I was a child. The only examples growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness was one miserably unhappy divorced woman in the congregation, and another who never found a partner, though she wanted one and looked incessantly all the years I grew up. I thought it was necessary to be paired. Not to have kids, as that was highly discouraged and still is in the JW way of thinking, but to be paired was necessary. It was how a person stayed faithful to their god, by way of controlling their natural impulses to pair and mate. With a married partner you could indulge your physical desires and still be faithful. Even if you were unhappily paired.

For years I felt that I needed it too, until I left the marriage. Then paired and broke up then paired again over the next decade, with breaks in-between each. I suppose it was necessary to me, too, then. To have an outlet. I don’t feel it anymore. That died within me when I left my Stardust and I’m happier now than I have ever been, alone as I should have always done.

It’s long enough that he’s worried for me. My mission now is to show him there’s no reason to.

Life. Is. Glorious. And I intend to sup on the marrow and suck the bones and wear them around my throat, smiling a toothy grin of satisfaction the rest of my days.

Absence of silence

“Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” – Henry David Thoreau

“The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.” – W. H. Auden

Three days after the ice storm ended I experienced extremes of emotion, it struck deep and hard and left me breathless. I’m a sensitive soul and am used to such things, but they usually ease and melt away with distraction or a change of scenery. This time it didn’t. I’m not sure what led to it, I only know the repercussions.

This panic/anxiety attack, I’m not sure which it would officially be named and don’t care, left me barely able to function, work, parent, and stole away my independence and freedom. I’ve not written about it yet because I don’t want to feel it again, and accessing those memories brings the feelings very close to the surface. Even as I write now my hands sweat profusely, and my keyboard is damp. So I’ll just touch on it, for now.

My freedom is the most precious thing to me. This attack showed me even more strongly so. It took away my freedom, and I found myself only able to breathe fully and calmly when wrapped around the oak in my front yard, face pressed so hard against the bark that I’d wear the marks for hours after. I’d close my eyes, press close, and finally be able to fill my lungs. Time melted away, and I stood holding the tree close, my arms not even going all the way around the trunk, and whisper “I’m right here. I’m right here. I’m right here,” over and over again as tears streamed down my cheeks. I felt them burn and welcomed them, because so much else of my world had been stolen by the anxiety.

Heart rate sustained at 130 for hours at a time, and I couldn’t lessen the pressure in my skull or belly. I couldn’t see straight, breathe fully, or think clearly. During the worst of it the pressure was so intense my ears rang and I thought I could hear voices talking around the corner of each wall around me. Just murmurs, nothing fixed or legible.

I was terrified. This attack stole my freedom, made it impossible to even think of driving, walks were unsettling because I feared I’d fall and crack my head open on the pavement. I was trapped in my home, separated from the natural world, and I’ve never been so scared in my life. Even getting sober cold turkey after years of bingeing paled in comparison. The fear of the feeling returning immobilized me.

And worst thing was, I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t find the words because my brain wasn’t able to work properly. Without good ol’ American Death Care, I mean Health Care, I was unable to get help unless I went to the Emergency Room. Which of course in the midst of a pandemic isn’t the wisest decision. And without health insurance the visit could potentially cost me thousands of dollars I don’t have. I was stuck and didn’t know how it would get better.

So I made changes, and they’ve seemed to help. It’s three weeks later and even so I still live every day anxious that it’ll return and hijack my mind and body again. I used to have an early morning routine to start my day of getting up two hours before work, making a pot of coffee, and sitting and reading news and FaceBook. I stopped both and silenced all my notifications on all apps. Now I indulge in books and herbal/green teas and my mind is finally more rested and able to focus on the pages before me. I’m still wary of checking FB and rarely use messenger because the anxiety begins to creep up again and engulf me. I have spent days in nature soaking up the sun and touching bare skin to bare earth even more than my usual daily habits. I’ve started walking in the mornings as well before work, going for strolls sometimes in silence, sometimes with a good audiobook.

The combination of these changes has made it all manageable. Finally. It’s been a purgatory I don’t ever want to experience again and still when my ears ring my heart rate escalates because I’m terrified it’ll entrap me again.

I’ve gone through one or two books a day now since, finally reading ones I’ve accumulated for future quiet days. They are my refuge and I’m once again the eleven-year old kid excited with my arms full of books from the library, taking a blanket to sit under the skies and get lost in my treasures.

Finally some silence. Finally the comfort of getting lost in pages that smelled like my youth. Finally I was sniffing at the papers and covers of the one sanctuary I found as a child. A teen. An adult.

I was 16 when the internet became available in the little cow town I grew up in. I became enamored with it and loved it mostly for book lists and, of course, news and porn. The glut of information grew as I aged and got older, and I started using MySpace in my 20s to keep up with family across the country and let them know about my son’s development. It was wonderful to have an active part in the lives of those I care about. I loved it. When FaceBook became available I moved all my information and journal there. It made me happy and has for over a decade since, through my leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses and my marriage at 30 it offered me connections I wouldn’t have otherwise. Shunning is vicious and sudden and brutal when you leave the cult, but my parents and sister still talked to me at that point quite regularly. As time passed that ended as well.

So social media was an everyday need for me at that point. I spent the day talking to friends, posting adventures and thoughts and photos, welcoming the ease that technology afforded me.

The panic/anxiety attack (I’m not sure which it was yet as I haven’t been able to see a Doctor) changed things for me. Constant contact made my heart rate skyrocket again and again and I found myself shying from it. Finally, several days ago (I won’t log in to check how long ago), I just stopped using it. Stopped the habit of huge cups of hot coffee and catching up on the news and doings of friends every day. Just. Stopped.

And I feel much better. Even with the sweaty anxious palms that type now, I feel so much better. Finally my mind isn’t filled with the troubles and worries and gossip and constant contact that it was before. I have FREE TIME for thought while I gaze at the birds outside and pick weeds in my garden. No longer do I scramble to clean my hands from the dirt so that I can respond to an inconsequential inquiry. No longer are voices of others filling my every waking moment of peace.

I don’t want to go back. And I know that there are many close friends who miss my voice every day online but I honestly have to choose what is best for ME now. That’s what this entire past year has been about since leaving my Stardust in Idaho. Focusing inward, instead of outward. Addressing my failings and true nature rather than getting lost in a world of triviality. It’s deliciously decadent focusing on just me for once and not catering to the needs of people around me. Fuck the social contract, I revoke my signature, I don’t want it anymore.

Someday I may return, but for now this is needed. For now there is very little that will distract me from changing my life into what I absolutely NEED instead of what others think I should be like, should do, should say, should should should SHOULD. That was my mother’s favorite word for me my entire life and I’m sick of it. What I SHOULD do is be a good person and mother and save up and work and build my future. Give me back my “shoulds”, because the only ones that matter are the ones that originate with me.

It sounds selfish and self-centered writing that. I don’t like it. I also love it. And I’m grasping at my sanity with two sweaty palms, afraid to ease my hold. This quieter world of self-reflection is more important to me right now than anything. I won’t allow that anxiety/panic to steal my freedom away again.

Among the books that I’ve been burying my nose in lately I’ve found one that echoes my newfound sentiments entirely. I’m only a few pages in at this point, but will likely finish it at the end of the day. I’m writing below here a few of the passages that made my brain light up and take notice. My hope is that typing them out will make them more impactful in my thoughts and more permanent, as they seem to be sanity in a world of internet-crazed madness these days. I highly recommend the book, if anyone reading is inclined to give it a read.

The End of Absence – Reclaiming What We’ve Lost In a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

“For those of us who have lived both with and without the vast, crowded connectivity the Internet provides, these are the few days when we can still notice the difference between Before and After.

This is the moment. Our awareness of this singular position pops up every now and again. We catch ourselves idly reaching for our phones at the bus stop. Or we notice how, mid-conversation, a fumbling friend dives into the perfect recall of Google. We can still catch ourselves. We say, Wait…

I think that within the mess of changes we’re experiencing, there’s a single difference that we feel most keenly; and it’s also the difference that future generations will find hardest to grasp. That is the end of absence – the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished.

Before all memory of those absences is shuttered, though, there is this brief time when we might record what came before. We might do something with those small, barely noticeable instances when we’re reminded of our love for absence. They flash at us amid the rush of our experience and seem to signal: Wait, wasn’t there something…? “

“What I’d left behind was absence. As a storm of digital dispatches hammered at the wall of my computer screen, I found myself desperate for sanctuary. There was a revulsion against these patterns imposed on me. I wanted a long and empty wooden desk where I could get some real work done. I wanted a walk in the woods with nobody to meet. I wanted release from the migraine-scale pressure of constant communication, the ping-ping-ping of perma-messaging, the dominance of communication over experience.”

Cacophony of chainsaws

Right now as I write there are echoes of chainsaws from multiple households on the street. The Texas Snowpocalypse killed so many trees, shattering them with the weight of ice. The unprecedented weather here weighed on the wildlife and growing things just as much as it did on any of us humans.

I’d sit at the window during the worst of the weather hearing them shatter with the weight of ice and snow, ripping branches from the trunks. I would close my eyes and hear the trees whispering to one another, “Wait, wait…patience. This will pass. We simply have to outlast it.” And we did. The birds, the squirrels, the feral cats, the trees, we all waited in the cold and dreamed of sunshine.

We were lucky in my house. The electricity flickered but never stayed off, the water became iffy and we have to boil it still, but it stayed running. The only thing that really suffered was the internet, it went out and our router blew but that can be fixed as well. Thanks to my upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness I’m a bit of a prepper, so we had a few cases of water in the garage, empty bottles to fill for boiled water, and plenty of dried beans and rice. Canned goods were stored away for such an event, so I brought them out and it was actually amusing to imagine what I could come up with to eat that wasn’t overcooked and boring. We never went hungry, and my stores are still healthy and don’t need a lot of replenishing.

The pandemic coming on made me start a habit each time I went to the grocery store. I didn’t go overboard and buy cases upon cases of toilet paper and canned goods. Didn’t need to, as it’s just my roomie and I and then my kiddo joins me on weekends. Instead, I would just make a habit of doing 4-1-1 shopping when I’d visit the store. Costs less than seven bucks each time and gives quite a lot of reassurance. Each time I visit the store to get groceries I also get 4 cans of food, be it meat or veggie or pasta; 1 bag of rice (brown or white, doesn’t matter, but brown is more nutrient dense); and 1 bag of dried beans. All together this costs no more than about $5-$10 depending on what I purchase. Easily affordable and each time I went doing this it bought me another 4-5 days worth of food to put away. I can easily live on 4 cans of veggies/meat, 1 bag of rice, and 1 bag of dried beans for that long, even longer if rationing.

Ice coated everything outside, living or not, in 1/4-1/2 inch amounts, smothering everything.

By the time this natural disaster froze our neighbors’ water and killed their electricity I’d stored up enough food for 3-4 weeks and enough water for around 5-7 days, even more with rationing. We had water stored in the bathtub and in big plastic tubs in my shower for flushing. We had heat and food and water for drinking. Things were tolerable in our home the entire time thank goodness. We turned the thermostat down close to 60 degrees to reserve energy, put on extra layers of clothes and blankets, made hot tea and coffee, and settled in to wait. Internet was out, so we had sporadic service to make sure our loved ones knew we were okay.

We couldn’t get online or stream anything, so we sat and read and read away. Roomie pulled his chair in front of the fireplace for himself and his pup Sancho, and he sat there happily for days. I drank hot tea and grabbed some of the books on my to-read pile and got lost in the stories. My chair was by the frigid front windows and I had to bundle up to be comfortable, but I was warm and fed with my kitty on my lap, and happy. Contact to the outside world was limited. Cable and internet were out and cellphone signals were unreliable, so we couldn’t check websites to even see what the weather forecast was, how long we’d be stuck like this, no boil water notices, nothing. It was as if the city had abandoned us. There was no direction, nothing. We had to do what we thought might be best for our families, pets, and homes without knowing what the weather was bringing next or where to go for help. Eventually I found resources on Reddit and FaceBook, but without cell service or internet most of us were blind.

It felt like a purgatory of sorts. We went through each day the same way, making coffee and meals, going back to our huddled warm spots, then to bed, and up again the next day.

Bundled up, reading, enjoying rare sun through the window during the weather event.

The sun has broken through finally. Trees are being trimmed and a week after our biggest recorded snow/ice storm in my life the windows are open and it’s seventy degrees outside. As if it never happened. Except for the frozen garden, the buckets of water in my shower, the boil water notice still in effect.

And so I sit and listen to the trees come down again, this time accompanied by the cacophony of chainsaws instead of the silent snowfall. I smell their sawdust on the breeze as I step outside barefoot, starved for energy from the earth after so long being frozen away from her. I go and talk to my frozen tomato seedlings and peppers, hoping their root systems survived, and hug the oak outside my window as Yuki watches and yells at me. We all want outside. We are living creatures whose ancestors knew nothing but outdoors at some point. Our very cells scream for the connection, and people mistake it for anxiety and pop a Xanax when bare skin to bare earth can calm them.

We are stuck in an uncertain time of recovery immediately following a major weather event and our normal won’t be back for a while. Before that we have been isolating for a year from the pandemic, insulating ourselves from our loved ones. Things won’t be back to comfortable or “normal” like they were before this time last year. We are exhausted and spent, and so many of us feel as if we have no direction. Acting like we are okay, when we aren’t sure if we truly are. Or ever will be again. I’ve masked “normality” my entire life, so I’m used to the uncertain feelings that come with it. Going through each day feeling stuck in a never-ending circle of “Not Knowing” is excruciating.

Stepping outside to ground myself, touch a tree, breathe fresh air, and listen to birdsong tells me all I need to know. This is just a season. One of gathering strength below the surface before exploding in growth. It’s just invisible to us right now as our roots spool below our skin, getting ready to peek through the soil. The most delicate tendrils, the softest little things, they grow into trees that dwarf everything around them.

Just hold on a little longer.

Fingernails black with soil

Last weekend I spent half a day clearing out old growth and weeds and grass overtaking my little garden beds. It felt right that when the sun was shining and warm, after quite a bit of rain, that I pull and dig and carry countless armfuls of bracken from the beds. That I pull off old dead growth from the butterfly bushes and cut them back. I cut off and pulled invasive wolf grapevines that choke the trees they grow on. I refilled the bird feeders and replaced the suet. I made sure the bird bath was clean and full.

I then cleared the dead tomato plants from the other bed, ripping out more grapevines, giving the surviving tomatoes a lift into the air off the ground so they could continue growing, tying them gently with cotton string to give them room to grow.

Nothing told me it was time. I’d forgotten when spring comes, when green things shoot forth here. It just felt right to be in the sun, fingernails black with soil and broken, heart full of soul even broken too.

A year ago today I got back from Idaho. I’d traveled six thousand miles in four months, 3/4 of them alone with my cat in a little hatchback car. A year ago today I became a monster because I left my Stardust my life behind. For good.

And she fills my days still. I hear her voice and see the shape of her as she moves, just outside of my vision, disappearing when turn to see her.

She fills them less now. Every day a little less. In a few years I may have left her behind but she still sits with me.

I left her, yes. But it wasn’t because I didn’t love her. I will always love her, even when I’ve forgotten the smell of her and she is a sweetened sad memory. Some day she will no longer be the sandstorm of pain she is now.

Today wasn’t about her though. Today in the warm sunshine I went outside to gather wild grape vines to weave a cross for Brigid. The wolf moon is waning above and the winds are chilly but the sun shone so brightly the air was almost in the 80s and it was brilliant and crisp and smelled like spring growth.

As I sat barefoot on the cold ground and twisted the vines I focused on stories I remembered about sweet grass and the reciprocity of nature. How our Mother is always giving back when all us humans remember how to do is take. I wound the vines together and thought of the deep nests of eagles and how lichen and fungi work hand-in-hand, how if we take care of a plant it stays with us.

How balance must rule us all, and we must give before we can take. But people have forgotten this. They buy their groceries and have them delivered, not thinking twice of who brought it, who harvested the fruit, who planted the seed first to grow it, and all the hands that have touched it to get it to them.

Click a button on your phone and you don’t have to think of that. Go back into your McMansion, close your door, and continue to separate yourself from the circle of life all of us are a part of whether we like it or not. Even in death humans separate themselves with caskets and chemicals, so the earth can’t recognize them when they go back to Her.

Brigid’s cross is hanging at my door to welcome her back again, bringer of the light.

Brigid’s cross woven from wild grapevines culled from the yard

Today as I wove the cross I soaked in the warm sun and cut myself on the edges of the vines, until my fingers were sore and sticky with the sap. Out of a chaotic bundle tied in the right way and interwoven came a cross and I clipped the ends to make it uniform. The bits I tossed back into the high grass and said thank you to them for helping me create something so pretty. They will come back with the spring, they’re incorrigible.

I wasn’t done in the sun yet and thought of the garden beds I’d cleared the week before. I needed to plant and I wouldn’t be able to rest tonight if I didn’t listen.

I wandered the nursery at the hardware store and asked the plants which would like to come home with me. A few caught my eye and made it into the basket. When I got home I talked to them as I filled planters with rocks for drainage then a mixture of soil that was damp and smelled deeply of spring.

My fingernails broke, I ended up bleeding more than once, but I planted scads of lettuce, chard, peppers, and tomatoes. I cut lengths of bamboo I’d harvested earlier last year from a nice person who had them growing wild by the road. They were pared down to four and six foot lengths and driven into the ground to create tomato cages. I talked to each seedling as I told them how happy I was they were here now and how I’d take excellent care of them and look forward to getting to know them better.

I planted potted herbs into the ground that I’d harvested and propagated from my mom’s garden last year when I saw them last. They deserve a place here too. Rosemary, mint, oregano, catnip, chives, all went into the earth and were freed from the pots that had protected them as they grew roots.

Catnip, rosemary, chives, oregano, mint, chard, red leaf lettuce, butter leaf lettuce, sweet green peppers, chili pepper

As I removed each seedling and each herb from the pots that protected them I was removing myself from the protection I’ve wound around my energy for the past year. This pandemic has isolated me so that I could grow stronger, having been cut from the life I was building with my Stardust. I cut myself from her tree and the roots I was beginning to grow with her family. I was a cut branch with no roots, placed into soil alone to try to grow.

But it starts in stages of course. You don’t take a cutting from a plant and stick it into the soil and expect it to grow.

You isolate it and give it water, sunshine, and some nutrients, when it needs them. It wilts at first in shock. And you think all hope is lost.

But look. A new growth where the leaves fell off and are forgotten, a bud small and green and delicate. And smallest fibers of root hair have begun to emerge from the cut, the most traumatic part of her removal. See, that can reform too.

Red chili peppers, sweet green peppers, and jalapeño

And there she needs to remain, for a while. A pandemic. Isolated, with everything that she needs to grow, and time. A lot of time. You forget about her and go about your days, trusting that she has the strength to keep growing. You go back to look one day a few weeks later and she is an explosion of life and silky roots and fresh green leaves and new small tentative branches of her own, that weren’t there before.

She can grow more, she’s stronger now, you can see it. You place her gently into soil, around her ball of roots growing from a place once attached to a tree and she’s a small tree of her own now, growing in ways the original never dreamed possible. And she stays there even longer than the first time and her growth is only half visible because now some is under the ground and not in water, she’s her own sapling at last.

She’s getting taller and stronger but still needs to be isolated and alone because the pandemic still rages and if I let her sit with the other plants she won’t get as much sun and water and air and she’s not strong enough yet.

And a year passes. She’s grown.

So today when I took those little cuttings I’d taken from my mother’s garden and remembered how small and delicate they were and how they almost didn’t survive but I let them grow at their own pace and slowly gave them more space to grow and more soil and roots of their own growing from the wounds I put in them I cried.

They had grown so many roots in the soil below them they’d become a little root-bound and they were so very ready to be planted into the ground. I tipped them out of their planters and into my palm and could see how much they’d grown. I loosened their roots with my fingertips and placed them gently into their holes in the ground and told them it’s time to grow even more now. That they have all the room in the world now, and I realized I do too.

Rooted where I choose, my tendrils reach into the entire planet and I have all the room I need to keep growing. It was a delicate process and a long one to get here, and a lot was lost along the way. But the growth I didn’t expect…it flabbergasts me.

And now I have all the room in the world to keep going.

In so many ways. Yes. I love being alone.

Loss of a family

I miss my parents tonight.

Growing up a Jehovah’s Witness they were my entire world. Our little congregation was all I knew. My father, a pilot, a machinist, a pirate, a fascinating big-hearted man. My mother a hippie, nature-loving, passionate, creative artist. All of course within the confines of the expectations of the religion.

My entire world. My sister and I shared a bedroom our entire lives until I was 18. Two girls couldn’t be more different yet as we grew older we grew closer and more alike. We never saw eye to eye on much but I loved her. Love her.

Tonight I miss them. Almost a decade now since I left the religion, and my eleven year marriage. I fumbled through the years and they helped me more than most JW parents would help a child who was now “worldly” and who had disassociated. I don’t know if I was formally disfellowshipped at this point and to be honest I don’t care. I’m never going back. Life as a gay woman in that organization led by a bunch of fat old men in New York is hell on earth. No fucking way.

We grew apart over this decade because I was a lost child making big mistakes. It happens to all who leave the religion to some extent, but especially for the kids raised knowing nothing else. I fucked up constantly and they saw me fumble.

I got sober. I’m not stumbling as much now. But I don’t need that crutch that kept me in the loveless marriage and oppressive religion. My nightmares are gone.

Two years later I published my first small book of poetry. June 2020. I texted my parents and sister all excited. They didn’t even acknowledge it.

I saw mom a few months later and she didn’t mention it. My sister flew down to visit without warning a month ago. She asked if I’d like to see her and I said no, because I had plans I couldn’t change. She didn’t mention the book.

It’s not that it’s a book that I care about.

It’s that it’s my writing. My heart and soul are on those pages. I’ve wanted to be an author since I was a child. A life long dream. And they knew I accomplished my dream. Finally after a lifetime of scrambling up from the wreck I was because of that cult I could stand proud.

And they cold shouldered me. They still haven’t asked about my book. Books now. And I don’t expect they ever will. They don’t want to read them and get to know what I’ve bled upon those pages.

So I stopped trying. I had sent them pics of my son and I every week or so since I got back from Idaho in February. After leaving my Stardust and losing the forever family we were building I tried to grow closer to my parents and sister. I asked if I could see them for lunch. I asked if I could bring my son around to share family time. I really was trying to have a relationship with them. I’ve tried for ten years. I’m tired of trying to make them love me. I give up.

I just won’t see my son around my family or have those life experiences with him. With them. They won’t get to know how wonderful a person I am. We won’t get to talk about growing older and memories. I don’t get any of that. They don’t either.

As I piece my life together alone, sober, and completely happy, they won’t be a part of it and it destroys me. As I progress into building the adult I should have been twenty years ago all they will remember is that broken child. The one who was mentally disturbed by the cult they raised her in to the point that she cut herself, cheated on her husband, and became an alcoholic. I made those choices. I own that person and those decisions and what came of them.

And she’s all they’ll ever know.

I hate that cult.

Snow in Texas …And thoughts on needing to NOT be needed

We haven’t had so much snow in this area in forty years I think. It’s charming and reminds me of being in Idaho this time last year. I think it’s beautiful even as it reminds me of what I left behind.

I need to be not needed. More than I need water, or air.

I know it’s hard. I do. I am a difficult person to love. I don’t ask any to take me on. People just have to want it is all. And I love deeply and purely. It just doesn’t translate with normal people.

I’m tired of apologizing for being me and being hard to love. It hurts so much. Either I live with it and accept me, or I die. Those are the only choices I have. And there is no grey area, no muddy middle.

Each day I am in a constant battle to fight the tendencies to care too much about what others think. It’s the trauma of being raised without a safe way to dissent. As much as I crave solitude I love my people fiercely. Completely. I have a few forever people who I will carry to the day I die, whether they know it or not.

My parents, my sister, my Stardust, first loves, kindred spirits, they are always with me. And what’s awful about that is most don’t know it. How much I think of them every goddamned day and how they’ve shaped my life. They are some of my forever people.

I have others, far fewer, who know it. Even if I don’t tell them often enough.

Because I really, truly, deeply need to not be needed.

And why?

I’m only starting to understand it. Tendrils of ideas are finally taking hold in my brain as I try to figure it out. Thing is, trauma shapes our brains as we grow. And either we figure out how to cope with it or it kills us. If we survive it we find ways to heal it. My brain is shaped to be receptive to others in magnanimous ways. I wasn’t allowed my own will in most outward things that are visible to others. So I became very adept at sensing what others need. To the extent that it was ALL I could sense.

This happens every day even with just strangers. If I begin to care about someone it is ever-amplified a thousand times over.

I’m drowned out. I can’t sense me any longer. All I am is a receptor to THEIR needs because my entire upbringing I was shaped to be exactly that. I’m a puzzle piece perfectly shaped measured and cut and FUCKING HELL I’m so GODSDAMNED TIRED of it!!!

I’m tired of being attentive at every moment to every need my person has. Of worrying about even how they’re breathing and if they’re comfortable and what do they think of this color I’m wearing and am I hungry they must be too what can I do to show I love them and make them smile but I needed to go run an errand but it doesn’t matter because their needs trump my own at ALL times no matter what because that’s. How. I. Was. Raised.

I did this for three decades in an organization ruled by fat white men in New York. I gave everything they asked me to and gave up my dreams because I was forever working for a future that was decided for me before I was born. I left the cult and the marriage and kept serving others trying to make the world a better place and giving myself to people who needed me, against my better judgement in many cases. I kept giving and giving, my love, my help, my ear, my time, my body, my freedom, my everything I possibly could. I kept serving long after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And I didn’t realize it.

After a lifetime of being so attentive to other’s needs that I disappeared…I decided I was tired. Tired of being needed so much that my own will vaporizes. So now I choose to not be needed, as much as I can. It’s not because I am denying someone’s needs. It’s because I can’t even hear my own. To hear mine I have to pay attention. And if a need of someone I love is near, then I can’t hear me anymore. I try to listen to my needs first, THEN hear theirs, otherwise I get them confused.

I need to not be needed. I can’t live my life as I choose without that freedom. And I am not going to fight for my right to insist on it anymore. It just is.

Just as everyone has the right to walk away from such an odd human who needs to not be needed. The ones who understand stay for the right reasons.