annie's microblog

Books I read through the divorce process. The progression is 🤣

How small that is, with which we wrestle,
what wrestles with us, how immense;
were we to let ourselves, the way things do,
be conquered thus by the great storm,—
we would become far-reaching and nameless.

What we triumph over is the Small,
and the success itself makes us petty.
The Eternal and Unexampled
will not be bent by us.

…growth is: to be the deeply defeated
by ever greater things.

Rilke, The Man Watching

Finished reading: A Life of Meaning by James Hollis, Ph.D. 📚

We swim in the mystery, and we have to track the movement of Divinity through the tangible world, to try to track the role of the unconscious powers—which by definition is something we don’t know—to see them as they manifest in our dreams, our bodies, our patterns; and to realize we are carriers, humble carriers of the life force that has little interest in our comfort or certainties.

Mandy Brown, Gather your gossips:

Capitalism needed to disparage women’s talk in order to bring itself about because women’s talk—that is, talk that is liberatory, reciprocal, and mutual—is a powerful antidote to the violence, oppression, and theft that capitalism ushered in. That same disparaging force is at work today, in the forces toiling feverishly to restrict reproductive rights and to reinforce the gender binary—because the gender binary is a load-bearing pillar of capitalism. But as the edict to prohibit “babble” attests, only by isolating women, by preventing them from talking, from sharing their experiences with one another, from acting in concert, can that pillar be defended.
This represents an opportunity: if capitalism needs women to be quiet, then women talking is one key to ending capitalism.

Observed while driving L to school:

1. A young woman walking her dog. She keeps glancing at her dog with this sweet, satisfied half-smile like she's just so pleased and happy to have this particular little dog.
2. School crossing guard dancing a little jig while waiting for more students who need to cross.
3. BMW with a personalized license plate that says MEOW. Beside it, a bumper sticker that just says CATS with a heart above it.

Finished reading: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson 📚

I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected–an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

Knowing is a great strength and also a form of pleasure.

Currently reading: Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux 📚

Finished reading: As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto 📚

This one will stay with me. True story. Heartbreaking. An infant boy’s botched circumcision leads to him being raised as a girl, alongside his twin brother. The medical gaslighting is infuriating. Turns out forcing a gender on someone is bad.

I started freelance writing because of the flexibility.

For all the years my kids were babies, and on through several years of homeschooling, I got to be home with them. The bulk of my time was spent taking care of the kids. My work got tucked in at the edges. It was pretty exhausting, honestly. (Having little kids is exhausting by itself. But I digress.)

We needed the extra income and this was something I could do on my own terms, at home. When I started there were plenty of oddball offers and pennies-per-page gigs and scams but there was also a lot of legitimate basic work. I could earn enough money to make a difference.

Over time I developed more skills and gained more experience. I specialized and raised my rates. I got referrals and set up long-standing agreements with clients and editors. Things got steadier and easier but I still had lots of projects, lots of clients, lots of flexibility. Also, lots of logistics, lots of deadlines, lots of emails, lots of juggling, lots of urgency.

Late last year, I started a full-time role for one of my clients and I’m quite happy with it. Everything is simplified and I like that. I used to love the experience of diving into a new project, getting to know new clients, understanding a new vertical or specific subject area. Now it just makes me tired, honestly. I’m less interested in broad and much more interested in deep.

I still work remotely, asynchronous. On my own terms, in charge of my own schedule. I’m not required to track hours or log keystrokes (thank god). But without the urgency of juggling multiple deadlines for multiple clients all the time, sometimes I really struggle to stay focused, to say no to distractions, to keep myself on task, to not jump up for every interruption. To have boundaries, in other words. To be a little more rigid, so I can protect my time and my attention.

I didn’t realize how much I relied on urgency as a substitute for structure. It wasn’t good. I don’t recommend it. So now I’m learning, or trying to learn, how to give myself structure, how to set limits. Flexibility has served me well. I needed it. Now I need to shift into something different.

If my body is currency I will spend it on myself.
If my body is property I will own it myself.
If my body is a place I will live in it myself.
If my body is a fantasy it is for my own dreams.
If my body is for birthing, I choose what it brings forth.
If my body is a tool, I will use it to shape my life the way I want.
If my body is for service, I am the master.

From yesterday’s hiking church. I could listen to this for hours.

A few weeks ago, one of Z’s teammates lost his dad. I didn’t know the man, and I don’t know the details. But I used to see him at every one of the wrestling meets. Walking around, usually alone. Engaged in what was happening. Paying attention to all the matches. Watching and encouraging his son, especially.

And now this man is gone. He existed on the earth so briefly. His life was happening, an ongoing event, concurrent with mine and yours and billions of others. Now it isn’t. Our little threads keep going, twisting and turning, overlapping and knotting, twining and wrapping all around each other. But we are less, collectively. One thread, this man’s life, cut off by a combination of factors I don’t know. But I do know one of them, perhaps the main one, was despair.

Death is in the room with us. Death is sitting next to us. Death is walking in and out of the door. Death is on the corner. Death is in the car. Death is in the silence and in the laughter and in the meeting of eyes and in the looking away.

I don’t know what the lesson is, or if there is one. I’ve watched death happen, seen the moment when the lungs empty and don’t fill again. It’s not really a moment, though. It’s moments, strung together, breaths becoming shallower, blood pressure dropping, heart slowing. It took longer than I expected. The body letting go even as the consciousness holds on.

Death seems insurmountable and abrupt. A swift end, a slammed door. Maybe that’s how it is, sometimes.

But sometimes it is looming and silent, padding in soft, a slowly expanding shadow.

And sometimes it’s the mind that betrays us, hands us over. The body fights. The body clings to life. The body may be full of the possibility of days and years, but the mind has already laid down under that shadow.

We are strong, as a species. Adaptable and clever. Quick with our hands, quick with learning, with tools, with patterns, with communication. Quick to puzzle out answers, quick to imagine possibilities.

But despair, a disease, creeps in below the level of our quickness.

I don’t know what the lesson is. I don’t think there is one. Perhaps just a reminder to myself, written here. Death is in the room. Try not to look away.

When we visited Puerto Rico in March, the first few days I kept thinking I’d forgotten something important. It felt like I was missing something, and I kept running thru the mental list, racking my brain, trying to remember, to identify what wasn’t there.

Then I realized: it’s not a what, it’s a who.

Him. The one I married, the one I made these children with, the one I moved to Puerto Rico beside. He’s not here. And now I’m here, with our children (so much older, so quickly!) and we’re going back, we’re retracing our steps, revisiting our past, and he’s not with us.

My day-to-day life doesn’t feel void of a person or empty in anyway. It feels full (sometimes too full) and it feels rewarding and also stressful and overwhelming but good, and whole. I feel complete, as a person. I have moments of loneliness. I carry grief but it’s a marble in my pocket. Sometimes it gets heavy and I sit down, take it out, cry. Then back in my pocket it goes and I move forward.

When we left Puerto Rico in 2020, it wasn’t to move away. The plan, such as it was, was to go on an extended road trip over the summer. We’d planned to make lots of stops, visiting friends and family. With COVID we shifted, decided we’d do more camping, visit national parks, explore the country, stay mostly outside and away from people. It was very early still, in the pandemic experience, in what we understood of it.

We rented a big van and took off. 6 people, 26 states, 8 weeks. It was chaotic and unhinged and desperate but I couldn’t see that at the time. Most of our marriage had unraveled in 2019. Early in 2020 I thought we were knitting ourselves together again, but we weren’t. I was just holding on to those last few connected threads. During that road trip they snapped apart, too.

The first week of September I called it. It was a cool gray morning. We were in Wisconsin. My skull felt like it would explode. I thought my brain was melting. I put my hands on each side of my head to try to hold it in place. I think I was really close to a mental breakdown or something similar, but I didn’t know what to call it, didn’t have the language or context to understand what was happening. I was the strong one, I was the caretaker, I was the one who held things together. It couldn’t be me falling apart. But it was. I was lost. I was drowning. Blankness and noise at the same time.

I stood in the parking lot beside the van and looked at him and said, I can’t do this anymore.

There was a mythology he’d created and I’d bought into. I was trying so hard to believe it. It seemed like believing it, really, was the key to everything. The key to holding our family together. The key to saving my husband from whatever was happening to him. The key to getting through the chaotic shitstorm our life had become. The key to stability, the key to peace, the key to making it work. You had to believe it, for it to be real. You had to really believe it, and then it would be real and it would work and we would be okay. And if it wasn’t working, and things weren’t okay, it was because you didn’t make it real by believing enough.

And I knew it was my fault. My fault that it wasn’t real, that it wasn’t working.

Because he believed it. He was earnest, he was zealous, he would talk for hours as I stared out the window and we drove through New Mexico, California, North Dakota, Kansas. The sound of his voice wrapped around me and the space grew tighter and I tried so hard. But to believe it, to believe him, I had to turn off so many parts of me. I had to disconnect from my intuition, doubt my intelligence, ignore my analysis, dismiss my feelings. I did it carefully, little by little, because I’ve never wanted to lose myself in someone else. But I was so afraid to lose him. It seemed like the price I had to pay. I thought if I went slow, razor-thin, skimming a bit here, a piece there, then I could hold onto enough of myself.

That morning in the parking lot I couldn’t connect the beginning of a thought to the end of it. I couldn’t find a pattern in my own world, not a single one. I couldn’t touch that place of existence and identity. There was only noise, blankness, noise, blankness, noise, blankness and me grabbing at everything and touching nothing. The only thing I knew was there were two ways forward: to plunge into the noise and release the final bits of myself, let myself melt away. Or scream and scream and scream and scream until I screamed out the noise and heard my own voice again.

So I screamed, as loud as I could. And it came out so soft, almost a whisper: I can’t do this anymore. I could hardly hear myself. But it was enough. It was just enough.

On Sundays, almost every Sunday morning, I go hiking with my friend Jenn.

We have a steady little cycle now, 5 or so local trails we rotate through. We hike for 3-4 hours, usually. That’s the time we have, and then we have to move on to the other parts of our Sunday. The grocery shopping or family time or naps or chores or social events or whatever it is.

We call it hiking church.

We both grew up in evangelical Christianity and subsequently left it as adults. So hiking is our church, and let me tell you: We preach to each other out there. It is therapeutic, it is uplifting, it is relieving, it is connecting, it is healing. We take turns sharing what’s on our minds. Work stuff, relationship stuff, parenting stuff, family, life, anxiety, friendship, whatever. Three or four hours gives you a lot of time to talk things through. Usually about halfway through the hike we move from sharing about our personal lives to a bigger discussion. About the world, culture, the future, psychology, politics, the environment, religion, hilarious ideas for skits we could do if we had the time and energy. The important stuff.

Hiking church is special. It’s an important weekly tradition now. It gives me space to process the week with someone trustworthy, and that in turn helps me feel ready to roll into the week ahead. I’m a big fan of routines because they help us protect what nurtures and supports us. The world is full of urgency. These hikes, in the woods, are full of peace.

The reality that my child is graduating high school in a week and moving out in a few months is hitting hard this morning. Cannot stop crying. I’m so proud of her. How do I rewind the years.

Read this quote in James Clear’s latest newsletter:

“Selfish people should listen to advice to be more selfless, selfless people should listen to advice to be more selfish. This applies to many things. Whenever you receive advice, consider its opposite as well. You might be filtering out the advice you need most.”
Source: Conor Barnes in 100 Tips for a Better Life

Made me think of something that keeps coming to mind: Men, in general, need to get the hell away from stoicism as a philosophy/approach to life. And women need to get closer to it.

Finished reading: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin 📚

After reading Tomorrow x3, I wanted to read more by Zevin. This one was recommended by @pratik. I loved this poignant, sweet, book-filled story.