Do you live with apathy as your baseline only to switch tracks so quickly when someone finally captures your interest that you’re now examining every conversation and action like a post-game analyst?
Do you spend most of your life letting situations float by, and using phrases like “that’s interesting”, but your face is impassive? Are you more emotive in text than in person? When asked about your passions do you freeze, because you can’t remember the last thing that really moved you? And then do you find yourself crying at the end of a movie or show or in the middle of reading a book? Does a drawing make you weep? Can the person in front of you read your face because all of a sudden your face doesn’t know how to play poker?
Is 75% of your time spent procrastinating, until the deadline looms large, then do you bang out the best work you’ve ever done in your entire life because even though you don’t like working under pressure you really only get your best work done under pressure — or so you tell yourself so you don’t feel bad about living your life that way? Has your mother ever told you that you could probably do great work if you stopped procrastinating?
When someone tells you they like something, do you then decide that you need to do that something for that person and you do it at 110% because surely you must show them you do actually listen to the words coming out of their mouths and you appreciate them? Have you hyper-fixated on making crochet stuffed animals even though you have no children and now you’re known as the person who crochets stuffed animals in your group of crocheting friends?
Do you wonder why you spend so much time overthinking if you really are as apathetic as you claim to be? Are you me? Or do you have your life in order?
~*~
I was thinking, over thinking… Cause there’s just too many scenarios to analyze; look in my eyes cause you’re my dream please come true.
May, the month of lofty highs and gut-wrenching lows.
1. I returned from vacation at the beginning of the month, so May kicked off with a feeling of rest, my heart full from the time I spent with friends I haven’t seen in a while. There’s something about being in the presence of good friends, being able to share anything and everything, and generally enjoying each other’s company. May started off spectacularly.
2. Soon afterward the plumber came by to fix the basement pump which meant that the basement is now fully functional! It’s hard to describe the feeling of satisfaction I get when something is fixed and fully functioning. It’s like a dopamine boost and typically I spend the rest of the week looking at the fixed thing and smiling to myself.
3. The upward trajectory continued with me attending my first opera. Attending an opera has been on my bucket list ever since my aunt raved about a performance of Madama Butterfly at the Met Opera, and was recently sparked again after a mezzo-soprano showed up on my TikTok FYP talking about her experience auditioning for opera.
4. Then, death, death, and fire. My friends were facing tragedies of their own and when I offered to send a friend photos of the pages of notes and checklists I made when dealing with the funeral arrangements for mom, the walls of distraction that held the grief at bay came crashing down. Mother’s Day was looming and I had to face the fact that Mom is no longer here. That my friend’s mom was gone. That mom’s good friend had also passed away. Noticeably, I stopped sleeping. That week leading up to Mother’s Day I felt like I couldn’t keep the walls up anymore, the grief was oozing in through the cracks. I tried to distract myself on the day of by completely taking apart my sectional and installing a rug pad under the rug, but I ended the day weeping into my pillow overwhelmed by sadness. Mom’s not here, Dad is sick and there’s no one to call to help me with this new chapter of my life. I’m sure there are people I could call, but I never felt like I was bothering my parents when I asked them questions, not like I feel with anyone else. I know it makes no sense, but my parents were always there whenever I was ready to stop being independent, and I miss having that parental safety to fall back on.
5. The month ended on a higher note with me hanging with friends, hours of “chick time”, attending another opera, and eating good food in a backyard with friends. I hope June is better, but I also know that I need to stop distracting myself from this grief and finally take the time to face it, embrace it, and really start healing.
~*~
The world will fail me left and right, and I will try to run and hide, so come and find me every time.
One of the words everyone used when describing my Mom was generous. Generous with her time and with her resources, sometimes going without for herself to help someone else.
Two things Mom taught me, first to let things go that you can’t control and to be a safe place for people.
Three things Mom did that showed me she cared. Standing up for me even when she didn’t agree with me. Allowing me to forge my own path and be independent (though I think I might have given her no choice at times). Cooking specifically for my health when I had major surgery.
Four reasons why I miss Mom. She was the social calendar of the family and had all the events memorized. Her cooking. That she’s not around to ask questions when it comes to owning a house. That she’s not here to help me bully Dad into getting better.
Five things I’d say to Mom if she could hear me now. When I signed the papers for the house I cried because you were not here to witness it with me and celebrate. I’m trying my best to take care of Dad and make sure he’s provided for, but can you please tell him to make it a little easier on me and Shav? I’m still trying to understand why you took off the mask, I hope I made all the right decisions for you when you were incapable of making them for yourself. I know the last word you heard from me was “breathe”, and sometimes when I tell myself to breathe I think of that night and I hope you realized that I would have done anything to make sure you were OK. I didn’t realize the depth of my love for you until I was willing to give up my dreams to take care of you regardless of how you left that hospital, as long as you left it.
Hug your mom if you have her near. Happy Mother’s Day.
Have you ever visited a place and thought, I can see myself living here! There are very few places outside of New York that I feel that way about, and all of them are on the East Coast. I’ve visited Cali twice before and did not experience that feeling of home, but there’s something about Long Beach that resonates with me.
I’m not a beach person – I think sand is nature’s glitter. The houses are too close together, I love the space I have right now, and nothing is within my price range anyway, but for some reason, Long Beach felt like home. Maybe it was the trees or the way everything seemed within reach. Maybe it was the fact that I was spending time with friends I haven’t seen in a while…
The idea in my head of home has evolved throughout the decades. Home was always my parents when I was younger. In my 20s it became my ideal of what I thought family was – a husband and children. In my 30s I finally accepted the fact that I didn’t really want to bare children which wrecked me a tiny bit. Now I find that home is my dad and sister, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my friends… home is the place I feel loved.
~*~
You were so tiny, with those big green eyes! Enjoy perfecting your craft, honeybee, but mind that you don’t forget about your regular life. Enjoy time with your friends, maybe find someone special. There’s magic in the little things, too.
These five things are a little introspective in no particular order.
We are living in an extrovert’s world and I am just an introvert-girl1
It’s a bit exhausting, living inside of my head sometimes.
In the middle of living and working within the constraints of a global pandemic, I experienced a lot of loss. The more I lost the more I retreated into myself until there was a long stretch of time where I didn’t want to hang out or make plans with anyone. Now, coming out of that stretch of time, I feel like I don’t know how to be with company anymore. It’s a struggle to answer simple conversational questions because my knee-jerk reaction is to retreat. Who wants to bring down the crowd with their sad story? And maybe that person is just asking the “how are yous” and “what’s news” to be polite and conversational, maybe they don’t want to hear more than an “I’m fine” or “nothing much”.
Someone asked me the “what’s new” question lately and I genuinely blanked, my brain could not compute quickly enough the level of our acquaintance to deliver the appropriate response. Imagine telling an almost stranger that you don’t sleep well some nights because you think your dad will die and then you’re going to have to take care of the rest of your family, but recently you’ve been working on meditation to lower your stress levels because the stress is causing your body to breakdown since you internalize everything? Yeah, that would be a fun party answer.
What do you say to someone who is grieving?
(photo from LA Times)
After losing my mom I had to deal with a lot of other people’s grief, and it made me wonder, how did I react to someone when they were grieving. I found this article soon after that talked about what to say to someone depending on how far removed from the situation you are and I highly recommend the read to anyone who (like me) wonders just what to say and how to show comfort.
A little emo, a little angst
A few months ago I found my old Live Journal – that I completely forgot about! I reactivated my account and started reading all the posts (most of which were private).
When I look back at college-me, I would never use the word emo to describe her, but after reading my LJ posts I think maybe I was a bit angsty as a teen. Part of me wonders if I feel this way now because I’m reading it through the lens of someone twenty years removed. However, there’s another part of me that recognizes that at that time I was holding a few things in tension and had yet to decide which side of the fence I wanted to land on. I had a worldview that was evolving and as a person who internalizes their thoughts and feelings (and then apparently writes them in a private journal online) a lot of my entries revolved around working those tensions out. Interestingly enough, even though my entries were private, I didn’t have the courage to actually name a lot of my feelings – hoping that future me (well, now present me) would read between the lines. I wonder if I didn’t feel the safety to express myself, or if it was more of the fact that I didn’t want to write something down that I would later change my mind about.
Deconstructing faith
There’s a lot of conversation around the idea of deconstructing faith. A lot of people are leaving their churches and walking away from the faith, deciding to pursue spirituality in other forms, and honestly, I don’t blame them. As a person who was a teen/young adult in the time of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and at the height of purity culture, then witnessed the toxicity found in churches like Mars Hill Chruch it’s so easy to understand why people are walking away.
Personally, I still find something in organized religion – and I found a good community – but I still struggle to untangle myself from the things that I grew up believing in that were not scriptural. The entire idea that women should dress and act a certain way because men can’t seem to be decent humans is insane to me, or the focus on a list of nos and oftentimes very wrong and unfounded rules that are not grounded in actual scripture. One of my favorite podcasts, The Bible Binge2, had an episode on this same topic and it really resonated with me and anchored a lot of the feelings I had on the topic. It’s been slow, but I feel in a better place when it comes to this topic. I have clarity in what I believe, and I am slowly rebuilding around my core values and beliefs3.
There’s hope for the future
In everything, through the highs and lows, I have to admit that I am hopeful. There’s a hope that one day this will all be worth it. That the friendships will grow stronger, that the familial bonds will strengthen, and that, no matter what, we will make it through this. Well, I didn’t really mean to make this entire post feel somber, but I think I achieved that nonetheless. Here’s to the future, here’s to overcoming.
~*~
1 Sing to the tune of Material Girl. 2 The Bible Binge is one of my top 10 podcasts; highly recommend them. 3 I also strongly believe that the God in the bible would not be pleased with conservatism in the US.
I’m crashing like a tidal wave and I don’t want to be… stranded
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