This whole thing started because I was stuck. Two years had come and gone since the Jenga blocks of our little family had fallen all around us. Apparently it was not the most solid construction to begin with, but that’s a different story.
I was waiting. Waiting for what is anyone’s guess. Something to change, maybe? For a surge of energy? A white knight? I kept waiting to feel ready for the next chapter. Was I ready to move forward with Giovanni or ready to let go? Maybe I was waiting for Tee to make a decision that would force me into decisiveness. I am sure I was waiting for a better-paying job to appear on the horizon (as if this is how such things happen), or to feel inspired enough to launch the project that haul me out of my financial pit. At the very least, I was waiting to feel something other than dread about the future.
I think I was waiting for a sign. Since I do not believe in signs, it will come as no surprise that none materialized.
All this waiting contained neither momentum nor acceptance. It was frantic. I kept swirling, spinning my wheels, slipping into the same old vortex of exhaustion and hopelessness. Pick your metaphor. Every one is a different version of a circle turning back on itself. Work was a grindstone. Conversations with both Giovanni and Tee were broken records. The needle never moved forward along the groove of the music to find its conclusion and lift away, making room for the next piece. No, it was all just revolve, skip, repeat.
Work was getting done. I was walking and dancing myself healthy, staying on top of Bug’s schedule, calming myself before the reactiveness and complications that seemed to weigh down every interaction with the people closest to me. Sure, I was looking well enough on the surface. “You really just have it all together,” one of my co-workers said to me. I gave her a “huh!” that made her jump. I was holding things together, but only barely. It just didn’t make sense to me that two years into this new life, and everything (and I mean everything) felt so hard.
I claimed I did not know how to do anything differently. Those familiar grooves, even the revolve and skip and repeat, were keeping me a kind of safe. Known safe. Nothing-has-to-change-and-I-can-manage safe.
But, boy howdy, was I miserable. Oh, and did I mention? Tired, tired, tired.
About three weeks ago, I found myself returning to the same refrain of despair after a brief detour. I had gone through a tailspin preparing for a series of interviews for a job opportunity that would have helped me approach self-sustaining. After the dizzying crash when it was offered to one of the other two candidates (the one with 14 years of experience in a field to which I have just returned, so who can blame them?), I brushed myself off, got back to the grind, and heard the mean little voice I had heard at least four thousand times before:
No one is coming for me.
For two years, this message has left me bereft.
But on this day, I woke up. Something sounded different. I looked that voice right in the eye. “Say that again. A little louder.”
No one is coming for me.
A key turned in a lock. The whole mechanism of my understanding slipped into alignment, and the door fell open.
No one is coming for me!
I am off the hook! I do not have to keep waiting for vague fantasies of rescue to come pulsing to life. No one is coming. It’s all me, and I get to do this in any way I see fit. No more clutching, grasping, longing, and struggling to endure this in order to get to that.
What a relief!
The reason I am stuck is not because I do not work hard enough. The reason I am stuck is because I am stuck. The only way to get un-stuck is to lift the needle, remove the worn-out composition, and replace it with music more to my liking.
I am ready to make my own happy.
I understand that “happy” is not a steady state nor is it a fixed target. I also know that whatever form it takes, it is an ingredient required for that elusive success I feel is so far out of my grasp. Without a little pleasure, I am just stuck in the same groove. Revolve, skip, repeat.
Depression, exhaustion, and a worst-case-scenario mindset have done far more damage than all of my professional and relational decisions combined. Or, another way to say it is this: feeling bad makes the universe of options constrict so completely that I make poor, short-sighted choices. And I generally choose inertia over bold steps.
So, “happy” may be an insufficient condition for getting un-stuck, but it is certainly necessary. Career success, inspiration, intimacy, and health all demand this one thing. Not harder work, no. I have been working myself hollow. Instead, it is throwing open the curtains and maybe humming a little good-morning tune.
Zippety-doo-dah.
That’s how this all started. I decided to right then and there to quit kvetching and start taking in the good, as Rick Hanson advises. It was a simple decision to begin the daily practice of seeking out a more positive, loving perspective. To calm my reactions and smile the tension down. I figured that doing this with any intention would require turning the good experiences over in my mind, rolling them around the tongue. First, seek moments of engagement, then collect them, and finally, describe them.
For these 100 days, I give over to the possibility of neuroplasticity, and let these practices do what they can to rebuild the tendencies of this long-suffering brain. This was the promise I made to myself when I wrote that contract with joy.
I will let in the light. I will find the new song. I will not shy away.
I will write it all down.
This final practice, I have discovered, kills two birds with one stone (or plants two trees with one seed, as the case may be), because writing makes me happy. Writing about happy things makes me doubly so.
Let the signs come. I may not believe, but I will keep my eyes and ears open. If they do not materialize, well, then, I will just have to go and cobble them together from whatever is on hand. Which is, after all, everything.
Tag: waking up
Catch and Release
Everything? Did you really do everything?
Finally, the question works its way through the labyrinth of my choices and avoidance, and returns to its true home.
Did I really do everything?
Giovanni is a good man. He brings home a small table to put in the corner of his room for me to write in quiet solitude. He concocts his own rub for the chicken and then works it into the perfect cubes. When I arrive, he is setting red bell peppers and summer squash in neat rows on a platter. “I’m about to light the coals. Go write.” I do. When I emerge, I fill the water glasses and pour the wine. We eat and laugh and argue and make our plans.
He is a good man for me.
Still. The timing is wrong, I am not ready, we are ill-suited for each other in a hundred ways, and we fight like we have money riding on the outcome. I tell him the marriage left too much smog and debris. I cannot see him through it. I only see reflections of Tee and of all the confused choices I made.
My fear of repeating the same mistakes drives me to insomnia. I leave. I come back. Again. Again.
Giovanni listens, and consoles. I round on him for making choices too much like Tee’s. He stands up to me. He challenges my assumptions and asks me not to have conversations in my head with ghosts. His good heart may be bottomless but his patience is not. Neither is mine.
I cannot face choosing, so I make the non-choice. I leave. I come back, and for the first time, he blocks my advance. “Not so fast.”
Not choosing, it turns out, is a choice after all. Now, the possibility that I have closed the door on what may be a sweet love wakes me up. It is the one sharp breeze that clears the air. I see Giovanni exactly as he is: strong and flawed and stunningly beautiful. And loving me and welcoming Bug. And hurt. And maybe done with me.
Did I really do everything?
A few weeks back, with his firm but loving touch, said, “You’ve got to let go.”
“Let go of what?” I asked.
“You know what,” he said. “And I can’t be the one to tell you.”
I cast about for what. Which fear? Which pattern? I know he is right. It is the edge I grip, the one I believe keeps me safe. If I hold on here, keep my arms and feet inside the bars, I will know exactly what needs to be done. Nothing can hurt.
The marriage clouds my vision. Tee blows in and blocks the light. Not Tee himself, exactly, not the real man with whom I am trying to work out kindergarten arrangements and holiday arrangements for 2013. Not my co-parent. The Tee I drag back into the frame is a phantom man with whom I am still grappling. The fights we had in the early weeks and months of dating haunt me, as I see now how the other choice was there, the other door, and I did not walk through it then. I had deep doubts, but I kept crossing the divide and choosing to believe. It only worked until it didn’t. The questions about what I missed, or where I missed a chance to choose differently, plague me.
Tee and I chose each other, and we did our best, and it did not work between us. It was not because of any one quality or one chain of events. Nothing about our unraveling is so easy to identify. Exploring those reasons is another story, though. It is for another day (or, rather, for all the days, quietly). The fact is that Tee and I are not well suited. We have moved without rancor into a new kind of relationship. We raise a son together, but we are not companions and partners.
I need to let go. Let go of Tee the history, Tee the boyfriend on the other end of those doubts, Tee the husband. Let go of the marriage. Release it to the story of before.
I have not done everything. I have not created a way to visualize or live that letting go. It is time to do so. It is time to do this, not to welcome Giovanni, but to welcome myself. Somehow, I have to take an action that will allow me to walk out into the fresh air and see the terrain around as it really is.
Today is the day. On this beautiful day in June, with a single cardinal on a branch outside my window, singing without restraint to the blue suburban sky, I begin.
I find the little toy Tee gave me on one of our early dates. It is a plastic figure of Grover in a cape and crash helmet. Somehow, this token became a symbol of our affection, and we passed it between us, letting Super Grover carry silly messages back and forth. It ended up with me all these years later, even though it had been a childhood toy of Tee’s. I wrap it in a letter thanking Tee for all he has done for me. Then I pack the words and the figure in a hand-carved box that Tee gave me. It was one of the many beautiful boxes he brought me from his travels. I love being surrounded by these small pieces of our shared story, but having them cluttered around me keeps Tee too close. Bug’s father is near enough, just by virtue of being Bug’s father. It is time to hand back these pieces. To release my grip, and let him do what he will with them.
And then to let the quiet, clear nothing fill my hands.
Perhaps Giovanni will fit into that space, perhaps he will not. Whatever happens next is uncertain. My hands are open. My eyes are beginning to be so.
Shannon E. Williams 