On Transitions

The last time I touched this post was April 30th, but I never posted it. And I didn’t finish it. I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve sat down a number of times and thrown away so many beginnings of posts that I’ve hated in the past couple of months. And I can’t seem to find my way back to this space, so I’m going to let myself be vulnerable, at least for now, and place this unfinished thing here as a way of beginning again. It’s not an explanation, but a start.

I haven’t been writing at all. Not just in this space, but in general. And each time I go through periods without putting my words anywhere, it gets easier and easier to do so, an ease which is completely terrifying. So today I welcomed the discomfort, the not feeling quite like myself because I was missing something that (I think) I know with certainty is an essential part of who I am at my very best, which is a writer who writes because she can’t not write. And I’ll take that crappy sentence, double-negatives included, because I think those of you who write or create or make or do anything because not doing so is so far from who you are that it’s not even an option will understand. Today feels that way, far from myself. And tonight, I want to write, with acceptance of the disjointedness. I began parts of this weeks ago, and they fell away into a folder of drafts that rarely see the light of internet day. But I’m dusting them off, and piecing them together with the present in hopes of finding someone familiar in old drafts.

***

“I’m a little sad about it,” I said, honestly, the way a kid responds to an easy question with the sharing of emotions in a completely unexpected way, which of course was not the reaction my professor expected when he asked me during class if I was excited about graduating and heading off to graduate school.

“Sad? Tell me why it’s sad,” he said, opening the moment for me to be a little more vulnerable than I would like.

“I don’t know.” I paused, thinking about what I wanted to say about it all.
“I’m sad and excited. Equal parts sad and excited. Transitions are kind of sad,” I repeated the same useless words, not wanting to elaborate.

And through my hesitant smile I imagine he understood what I meant. That transitions are terrifying, and that I am equal parts excited and sad, but that I can’t pretend to be excited about the endings and goodbyes. I cried on my bike ride to work this morning, and I cried in my last lit class tonight, and I feel like I’ve spent the entire month crying, because I hate endings, and I avoid goodbyes at all costs, even small, seemingly insignificant ones because they all point to more significant ends and impossible goodbyes.

And sometimes I selfishly wish that crying was as socially acceptable as laughing, and that people did so freely without any issues so I wouldn’t feel as embarrassed on days like today. And I wish we didn’t label emotions “bad” or “undesirable” because then the physical expression of those emotions wouldn’t be bad or undesirable or something to hide at all, but something for others to understand, to want to understand, like an inside joke or an old family tradition. Because comforting someone, to me, is less about putting your arm around him or offering advice, as it is about attempting to understand, to take emotions seriously, to never minimize or dismiss or turn the focus to oneself.

We’ll Be OK

The only recurring dream I remember having as a kid was of my house burning down in the middle of the night. And in the dream I would wake to flames all around my bedroom window, and firefighters would carry me out of the house while I was still on my mattress, despite the fact that it is completely improbable that a mattress would fit through the doorway level with me balancing in the middle. I can interpret that dream without the help of Google, as I was, quite simply, afraid of large fires, and also of sleeping. I think the idea of sleep causes most children a bit of anxiety, which is why our parents and babysitters read bedtime stories and tuck us in and check for monsters and kiss us goodnight as we clutch our stuffed animals and blankets and do anything to make the ritual easier. Sleep has the potential to bring dreams and sometimes nightmares, neither of which are within our control. As a kid, I remember the idea of falling asleep making me extremely anxious. And if there were thunderstorms, forget about it. The whole process was a nightmare.

Luckily, I had an older sister just down the hallway from me, who rarely resisted a Sister Sleepover, which almost always included a few rounds of Guess Which Song I’m Humming, a game I remember losing more often than winning. But on nights when I was on my own, I would watch the alarm clock on my bedside table for hours, the neon numbers that glowed onto the lenses of my purple frames. The time passing made me nervous, but I remember taking comfort in the fact that the time seemed to pass slowly late at night as I watched the geometric shapes shift from sixes to sevens and eights and so on until the patterns reset and repeated. And when I think about being a kid, I feel like I was afraid of everything. Sometimes I still feel I am.

I remember my mother recommending various tactics that occasionally helped (I did some serious counting, folks). But at some point, I took matters in my own hands and developed a way of pausing my neurosis just long enough to fall asleep; I would take my pillows, place them where my feet were supposed to be, untuck all of the sheets and covers, and I would sleep backwards on my bed. Maybe someone taught me this and i’m claiming as my own childhood brilliance now. Maybe everyone did this, but I saved if for the most dire of situations, when midnight would turn to 1 AM and my necessary-eight-hours-of-sleep opportunity had long passed. For whatever reason, this usually worked. And when I think about this strange habit now, I imagine it had a lot to do with control; it was something I could alter, something I could change.

The most overwhelming heightened moments of real-deal, irrational anxiety I’ve experienced in the last couple of years as a young adult align well with the experiences I had as a kid trying to get to sleep at night. And what all of those recent instances had in common was they occurred precisely at a moment in which I completely surrendered control of some seemingly major aspect of my life, and the outcome of that moment I irrationally perceived as necessarily dreadful or threatening, when that wasn’t the case at all in the end, the same way I would always wake up the next day with no justification for my obsessive anxiety from the night before.

As an adult, the fix may not be a simple one, and it may not be a complete fix at all. But I guess all I can do is try to make sense of the mess.

I’ll start small. I’ll place my pillows at the foot of my bed. I’ll rest easily. I’ll be OK. We’ll be OK.

It’s Easier To Pine

I’ve been obsessed with A Fine Frenzy’s newest album PINES since it released in October. Accompanying the album is an interactive digital book singer/songwriter Alison Sudol wrote, titled The Story of Pines. The entire project is absolutely stunning. I’m a sucker for music that meets narrative; what can I say? I remember my friend Lily recommending a few songs from One Cell in the Sea to me, but I wasn’t a huge fan of A Fine Frenzy until this album. I emotionally connected to PINES immediately after the first listen, and I’ve come back to it a number of times over the past few months. For me, it’s a definitively winter album. It’s a little softer, a little sadder, a little more painful.

I bought the album the week it dropped, but just stumbled upon a track-by-track commentary on Spotify with Alison Sudol, in which she takes listeners through the sensory progression she imagined and where she was emotionally in writing PINES. It’s all very lovely and worth your time. If things like Spotify playlists interest you, I made one with the commentary and album so you don’t even have to go searching for it, which you can access here. I transcribed a short clip from the commentary for you all because I thought it was all around lovely, even on its own, apart from the song.

“Dance of The Gray Whales–I started writing this piece–it’s the first instrumental piece I’ve ever written, and I started writing it years ago when I was on tour during One Cell in the Sea, actually. And I used to play it for myself and for friends who were upset or who needed soothing, or I’ve played it for friends and they’ve just fallen asleep to it. And it’s just–there’s a moment that happens after a stormy or turbulent event in your life where there’s a quiet, and–a really deep quiet. And there’s a bit of pain left over, but not really pain, but the memory of the pain. And yet there’s this kind of peaceful sort of gray cloud that comes over you, which is healing and–not gray, not dark gray, not a charcoal, not a storm, but a softness.

And I love whales, I think there’s something so wise and ancient about them and I just imagined being in the sea and having been in a shipwreck and gotten in a fight with ghost ships and then being rescued by whales. I mean, how much lovelier could that get, even though that may not carry the same weight because you’d be a bit tired. But it’d still be pretty nice.”

From PINES (Spotify Track by Track) by A Fine Frenzy 

The Evolution of an Ever-Evolving Young Writer

What I’m about to tell you comes as a shock to me, even as I have been watching the numbers tick closer and closer the past few months. It has stared me down as my posts became farther in between saying, “Is this all you’ve got?” like a friend who’s trying to motivate me to do something, reach something, but unfortunately is disguised as a mean twelve-year-old waiting to point and laugh at me when I trip over my feet playing kickball. I’m being dramatic, but this post is cause for drama because it is, in fact, my 900th post! I admit, that’s an unreasonably large number. But it’s true, folks: post number 900.

Post numero uno went a little something like this: “I begin this blog, today, September 7, 2009 with many goals and aspirations in mind, most which will not most likely be achieved; however, one must dream. Today marks the tenth day of my senior year in highschool. I’m beginning this blog hoping to document the fabulous year ahead of me; the growth, the ideas, the thoughts, the experiences…” And here I am, a few years and, apparently, 900 posts later about to graduate from college and begin a master’s program in journalism.  I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told eighteen-year-old me that this writing space would become what it is now, that I would spend an entire year posting every single day, that I would create a place to relate to strangers and friends and strangers who became friends, and maybe most importantly, create a reference to document and reflect on the ways I would grow as a writer and a human being.

So to mark this ridiculous milestone, I’d like to write a little about what has happened over the past three and a half years that has kept me here and kept me writing.

Bloggers constantly balance the work of not taking themselves too seriously and convincing others to take them seriously. Lets face it, there are a lot of people writing blogs that aren’t saying much of anything. Maybe I was one of those as a naive teenager who’s grown into a slightly less naive young adult, constantly trying to figure out what she’s doing here. And that’s okay, I think, because that was precisely the point from the beginning. But the way I came to blogging was strange. I wasn’t looking to inform exactly, but merely to contribute my own voice to this digital space that was inviting me. In the short-lived flourishing days of Xanga and Myspace, I taught myself little bits of HTML and wrote diary-style entries about my life. And from there, a dialogue opened with friends, and each of these platforms was another way to communicate, to reach out; the same way I wrote notes I passed in class, then left AOL away messages, then emailed and messaged and texted and tweeted and blogged and instagrammed and did everything I could, and do now more than ever. I would do whatever I could to capture a instance, a moment, a feeling, anything and everything.

I don’t have an objective understanding of what this means for my generation, as I’m a product of it, still completely wrapped in this unavoidable mess of social media that often has me aching to cut myself off and to simplify. But the web of social media is neither completely bad or completely good, so I keep spinning, happy for the conveniences it offers me.

While my writing was certainly diary-like, it’s important to recognize that I wasn’t writing in a diary at all; I was writing somewhere in the digital space where anyone could read it. And as I’ve learned in every English class since 5th grade, writing has to be constantly aware of its audience. So I wrote and still write to an undefined You, a group of human beings (presumably) who materialize only insomuch as View Counts, Likes, and Comments. And unlike writing in a diary, my writing took on the potential to say something to someone, which was meaningful even if no one was reading it. It was the potential that mattered.

But what has come of all of this is a love for writing, a love that developed over the years not only in countless writing workshops and late nights writing and revising papers and stories and poems, but also 3 AM post-concert write-ups and thunderstorm-induced posts which were not-so-cryptically about love when I had no idea what it meant, and loneliness and fear and all of the things that keep me awake at night and teach me that being a writer has nothing to do with A+ papers.

All this to say, thanks for sticking with me. Thanks for being patient and caring enough to give this young writer a chance to be young and frivolous and mess up over and over again and figure out what it means to be a not only a writer, but a human being.

“And while you wait for your luck to change all you can think of is where you started”

I’ve always held the notion that inconsistency is a feature unique to this time in my life, unique to the all-too-lost and self-absorbed twenty-something, that eventually I’ll get to a point where things change a little less frequently, or in smaller ways, if nothing else. I’ve anticipated this moment, this age of consistency where I don’t feel drastically different each day when I wake up, each time I flip the pages of the calendar that hangs in my kitchen, each birthday that comes and goes and comesandgoes again, as though it would be easier that way, with the steady and the certain, as though we ever stop changing. Maybe I’ll get to a point where things will remain the same from year to year. Maybe I’ll buy a house and paint the walls a soft green and learn to save money and hang my clothes in my closet after I wash them and maybe I’ll have a better idea of who I am because she won’t seem to change nearly as drastically as she does now. But I don’t actually think consistency is compatible with humanness, and I don’t know that I want it to.

I think living can be really difficult sometimes. We don’t talk about it this way though because the alternative, the not-living, is horrifying both figuratively and literally. But I think it’s okay to admit that living is hard, and it’s okay to want it to be easier sometimes because it means we’re alive. It means we’re not numb to the world and all its horrible, terrifying, silly, heartbreaking, inspiring, overwhelming, beautiful, and complicated facets.

There’s something valuable that comes from discomfort and uncertainty. You taught me this a long time ago, before time convinced me we were no good for each other and I wanted to impress you so much more than I wanted to be great at anything, so I consumed all of your words, carefully, so that maybe they would press and form to my insides and become part of me and me a part of them and maybe I would believe them for the right reasons and I want to thank you because I do.

Living is hard sometimes, and I’m learning to love it more and more ardently, sincerely, and intensely every day. To love that the only thing consistent is inconsistency, and it’s all the better for that. And tonight, with a little bit of music perfection, I was reminded what it feels like to be a little more alive.

As you think the bad,  feeling so bad makes the good so good.

But he stays all the same, waits for you, then sees you through

I’ve been doing lots of things besides writing lately. Some of which you can find here. Maybe one of these days I’ll write a post explaining why I’ve begun another blogging space from scratch, but until then I leave you to explore as I figure out what exactly I’m doing over there. And since it’s been a whole five months since I’ve made a ukulele video, here’s a new one. I have a pretty strict policy that no one should ever sing Adele covers. Adele is a queen in my book. I don’t care if her music is overplayed. I don’t care if she always wins every award. She can’t be touched, nor should she. But I broke my own rule today because I came across the chords for “Daydreamer,” from her first album 19, and fell in love with it all over again but with my uke this time. You can throw rocks if you’d like, or you could listen to me honor Adele in the only (tiny, mediocre) way I know how.

 

“You’re already home where you feel loved.”

To celebrate Valentine’s Day this year…

I played hooky with a stellar seventeen year old, had a lovely dinner with the best rents any girl could have, saw a movie with my favorite gal Toria, played my ukulele for the first time in weeks,

I wrote a love note to a stranger,

I made paper Valentines with my favorite five-year-old,
and I designed and mailed postcards to my sweet friends and family.

In the larger scheme of things, Valentine’s Day doesn’t actually matter and is pretty trivial. But I can’t help but love any day that gives me an excuse to remind the wonderful human beings in my life how lucky I am to have them. So, thank you, friends, old and new. And happy Valentine’s Day to you!