Tell Me I'm Beautiful

I have always wanted to be beautiful.  I don't mean cute or occasionally well cleaned-up or looking pretty nice by association of the other lovely people who are also in the Facebook picture at that fancy wedding.  I mean, externally, luminously, superficially beautiful.  I have never been that girl.

I've always been smart, "nice" (worst word ever), kind, the girl you'd want in your group for class because you'd definitely get an A.  The girl you can ask, "Hey, how do you spell that again?" or "I'm in a tough space in life and I don't know what to do."  These are not undesirable characteristics, and universe, please know that I am grateful.  However, from age zero until age now, I've always looked intelligent (this is the universal code for nerdy), friendly, unassuming, non-offensive, practically invisible.  Glasses (usually not even cool ones), braces, boring hair -- average, or maybe worse: not even noticeable enough to be average.  Occasionally cute.  "Cute" might be worse than being invisible (although, a toss-up for worse than "nice").  It's kind of this patronizing way to be told you're adorable-in-a-child-or-furry-animal sort of way, and that you're putting up a good fight, but that you're not the real deal.  You're not glamorous or striking or sensual or a real woman.

Nobody ever called me pretty.  Not then, not now.  Instead, I was all the words that women have battled for, for centuries, begged to be called.  Seen not for what they seem but for what they are.  I understand that there are women ALL OVER the world, beautiful, captivating women, who fight, scream, advocate for their legitimacy in existence to be for what they think and what they do rather than for how they appear, or for how their lives are (poorly) valued in accordance with only what they look like.  They would sell body parts -- and do -- demanding education, a strong, heard voice, cerebral equality.  Listen.  I know this.  Reminding myself of it only makes me feel worse about posting this, which it should, you say.  I know.  But I have always guiltily wished, secretly pleaded, that someone would skip past my good vocabulary and literary references and just find me lovely.  Shallowly, plainly radiant.  This has never happened.  I know, you say, this is dumb, you say . . . what is wrong with you.  I don't know.  I know I'm lucky for people to find me fascinating once they open me up.  But I want them for once to not have to do the digging and the work; I want them to be able to be lazy and just look at me and find me beautiful.  The kind of low-level mental processing that doesn't require any cognitive effort, any mental scripts telling you that she's beautiful because she's triumphed an emotional battlefield or helps special needs kids or could write your college essays for you blindfolded.  What I am about to say is completely inappropriate and I don't care: I want to get in on the unjust luxury that women have enjoyed for all of time, to be admired just for being something people like looking at.

I guess it's false to say it never happens.  You know who calls me pretty?  Older people.  Not older people as in creepy old guys, thank God.  But older women -- 40s, 50s, 60s.  Aunts, female neighbors, friends' mothers.  They tell me I'm pretty in a quaint, grandmotherly sort of way.  And I do appreciate it, I do.  I kind of feel like they think everybody's pretty though, you know?  I kind of want someone to feel that, about me, and maybe NOT about everybody else, without having to think it.  And I also sometimes feel like it's easy for them to say those kinds of things, because they're not sitting here in flannel pajamas at midnight alone crying into a keyboard putting their gross hair into a ponytail and feeling like maybe if they'd washed it today, maybe they wouldn't be in this position.  (Which, clearly, I would never do.)

Who are you, you say, and what have you done with my feminist friend?  Accurate.  This is something that really does not often come out of my mouth.  And yes, I'm a little bit ashamed to be saying it.  But I think it, I feel it.  You know?  I can't help it.  Maybe it's only socialization that's convinced me this is missing.  Maybe it's just stripped humanity.  Don't wait for someone to tell you you're beautiful, you say . . . tell yourself.  Yes, okay.  That's delightful.  I will do that.  While I'm reminding myself how shitty I am to say something like this while women remain second-class global citizens and I sit here in all my first-world snotty privilege.  I know.  I get it.  Not cool.  This will not go down as one of my prouder blog posts.  (Although, nothing will top the wrath I incurred after the "Settling" entry, so, do not despair, fair audience, I doubt I'll be that hated again!)  I suppose the best move for me right now would be to go procure a mirror, a nice self-help book to read a chapter aloud from, and a cup of hot tea.  Instead, I'll probably resume my book on microlending to women in Africa, finish my glass of wine, and avoid all mirrors on my way back to my bed, due to the unconfirmed but aforementioned rat's nest ponytail and "nice" pajamas and "cute" bunny slippers . . . a beautiful picture.

Hey -- I'm Done Being Sorry.

One of my good friends was in counseling in college.  And I remember her telling me that her therapist’s bottom line to her was: Stop apologizing.  Stop saying you’re sorry all the time, for everything.  And I remember thinking, shit, I do that ALL the time.  Apologizing when someone else bumps into me.  Apologizing when someone chooses to hold the door for me but I've rushed to catch it and ridiculously felt like I've inconvenienced them.  Apologizing when someone else was late, but I was early.    Apologizing when what I really should mean is, “You should be apologizing to me.”

Okay people.  I’m done saying I’m sorry.  And I’m done being sorry.  For shit I don’t have to be sorry for.

Let me explain.  And if you don’t like me, or don’t like my unapologies, or find it unacceptable that I’m putting this on the internet, here is your disclaimer: close this window now.  Because shit’s about to get real.

I’m not sorry for growing up with a family of whom I’m not proud.  My dad was extremely emotionally abusive, and this has only somewhat subsided since I counted the minutes until I turned 18 and moved to a different state.  I used to wish he’d just hit me (harder, with visible wounds) so that people would see and believe my invisible emotional pain.  I used to wish I could hide a tape recorder in the walls: him screaming, years upon years, “You bitch, I never want to see you again;” “I wish you were never born;” “How would you like to be put up for adoption?!  For me to make you go live with another family?!”  He’d make me sit in a chair for hours, while he stood over me, just silently glaring at me with fury for things I didn’t even know I’d done.  I used to wish I’d just get cancer or heart disease so somebody would validate the abyss in which I was floating, being dragged, at the hands but mostly words of a controlling, authoritarian, manipulative man.  My mom became an alcoholic, receding into her own fenced lair of marital denial and parental avoidance.  Never once did she raise her voice to him for my sister and me, other than her fleeing-to-another-room tears, to counter my father’s retribution on my sister and me of his own abusive childhood.  I will never be sorry for becoming a woman with assertion, a voice that will be heard, a refusal to kneel to a man’s word or world.  I used to scream at him growing up in defense of my mom or my little sister, and he’d hit me, and I’d keep screaming for them, even though no one screamed for me.  I’m not sorry that I laid in my bed day after afternoon after night, stoning my corporeal body not to convulsedly sob, but wondering if I swallowed every Tylenol on our bathroom shelf, if I could quietly die and rid myself of this pain.  I am not sorry for feeling all of this, and for re-feeling it now, or for telling you.

I’m not sorry for being an incredible student, for earning a full scholarship to a really fucking expensive prep school, for braining myself out of this hole.  I’m not sorry for being quiet in high school, studious, supremely likable if unpersonality-ed.  I’m not sorry for taking out a shit-ton of student loans to leave Pennsylvania and go as far away as I could manage, and even though Cleveland might not be paradise, I remember my family crying as they drove away from John Carroll’s campus, and not feeling anywhere close to tears.  I remember smiling, except for thinking of my younger sister, who was stuck back in that hell.  I’m not sorry about that feeling, but I’m sorry about leaving her.  It still haunts me every day.

I’m not sorry for screwing around in college, for embracing my new freedom and finding my wings (and pitfalls).  I’m not sorry for staying up late or for skipping class or for gallavanting with boys.  I’m not sorry for waiting until marriage until definitely not waiting until marriage.  I’m not sorry for becoming scary liberal Catholic, un-Catholic, and then sort-of, quantum physics, pick-and-choose Catholic.  I’m not sorry for being honors program, campus ministry, student service award kid.

Which then quickly transitioned into: can’t go to class, clinically depressed, cannot even begin to assess my life kind of kid.  I failed out of every single class my last two years.  I didn’t leave my dorm room for weeks, except to occasionally beeline to the campus counseling center, praying not to be seen or addressed in my running in my sweatpants there.  I hid from everything.  If I couldn’t champion it, I would avoid it.  The Ph.D. head of our counseling center told me that in his 15 years of therapy, my father was the most pathological person he’d ever seen.  In related news, my sister’s therapist at the University of Pittsburgh was concurrently telling her the exact same thing.  Funny how the universe aligns.  Six years later, I pulled myself through the last few classes I needed to graduate.  It was everything I thought I’d never be.  I’d never been more ashamed.  I remain never having been more ashamed.  And I’m not sorry about it.

I’m not sorry for struggling with my emotional pain, for scurrying to find a job, for ending up spending my days with kids with special needs, if only because at first I couldn’t find a job, but eventually because I have told myself (and continue to tell myself) that every child will do well when they can.  And perhaps I can’t undo some of the shit that happened to me.  But maybe I can tell a kid, without words, that what he’s going through is okay, and even if he doesn’t know what that means, maybe I can just sit next to him and help him fight it out.  And maybe sometimes I hate it, and maybe sometimes it’s really fucking hard.  And maybe sometimes it’s this cruel twist of fate, because I wish someone, anyone, in my childhood had sat next to me and said, “Hey…I don’t really get it, but I’m going to walk with you through it.”  And there are times when that is really hard for me to reconcile.  But you know what?  I’m not sorry.

I’m not sorry for pursuing boys.  For being decisive on who I like, and why, and doing something about it.  I’m not sorry for not waiting silently for a fucking awesome guy to approach me, because, guess what, I’m approaching him first.  And if a guy has a problem with that, we’re probably not going to work out.  I’m not sorry for holding out hope that someday, some guy will say to me, “Hey…I don’t really get it, but I’m going to walk with you through it.”  And I’ll need him to hold me, and breathe with me, and love me, but I won’t need him to save me, because I’m saving myself.  And I’m not sorry about it.  I’m not sorry for volunteering at the Rape Crisis Center, because keeping women strong and empowered and unashamed and unapologetic is essential to me.  I’m not sorry for tutoring a million hours a week, in order to have a place of my own, a life of which I’m proud, and an autonomy (read: lack of dependence) for which a monetary price is a silly absurdity.  I’m not sorry for not settling into a relationship or a marriage, because I will never, ever agree to be with a man who I find unworthy or who I don’t find strong enough to ask to sit with my pain.  I’m not sorry for thinking and reading and processing and synthesizing and asserting.  Someday I’ll get my life together and go to grad school, but I haven’t gotten there yet, probably because I keep apologizing to myself for my own uncertainties and insecurities and inabilities and inadequacies.  Note to self: work on that one.

I’m not sorry for making it my life’s mission to learn other people’s stories.  If I’ve met you, I want to know your entire life history.  I want you to tell me everything, and I want you to know that I’ll keep it in confidence, but the thing that lights me on fire and keeps me alive is the glowing, emblazoned heat of everyone’s story.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  Maybe because underneath, I yearn for someone to just ask me for mine, and then sit with it, and hold it, and tell me that my story is okay, and that they want to sit next to me anyway.  Aside: this hasn’t happened yet, at least intimately, at least lasting.  I want to write two books, of people’s stories, totally incompatible with each other, and one of which I’ll probably have to use a pseudonym for.  One’s about autism and one’s about sexuality.  Sorry, Mom and Dad.  Or not.

I’m not sorry for loving and losing the one person (man) who accepted me through all my pain.  I’m not sorry for continuing to mourn the loss of the only relationship who never abandoned me; until he did.  He found someone else who was less injured, or, at least took out less of her injury on him.  And there is the one thing I actually am sorry for: for ever placing my emotional pain onto anyone else.  And then finding myself even more alone than I was in the first place.

So I guess I lied.  I am sorry for one thing.  And that is for any moment where my own pain translated into my unkindness to another.  I feel it in my soul the second it leaves my body, and I shrivel a little bit inside.  If I could make one wish to the universe right this second, it would be that I would never harm anyone else because of being harmed.  I can’t guarantee that this won’t happen.  But I want it to go on the record that if it does, that is the one thing for which I will eternally be really, completely sorry.

But for everything else: I’m not sorry.  One of my best friends was listening to my whining about a boy the other day.  I told her, “You know what?  I realize I like the really intense boys.  The boys who are wild and passionate and stand for something and aren’t afraid.  The boys who have a history and a reflection and a spark.” And she said to me, “Alexandra, you like them because it is what you know.”  And she’s right.  Jack Kerouac may have said it best in On the Road: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

So here is the part where I tell you I’m going to continue to live, and burn like candles exploding.  And I’m going to keep searching for people who not only live like that, but also permit, support, encourage, me to live that, too, and to say it, feel it, remember it, create it, imagine it, reconcile it…and not for one minute, one second, be even a little bit sorry.  Unless I need to be, because I’ve been hurtful.  And then those kindred people I’ve found, they’ll help me fix it, and make it right to the universe, and then keep right on burning, with them at my side, while we hold each other’s pain, and transform that indestroyable energy into mutual radiance and grace, together and exponetially and unapologetically.

Not Nice Thoughts About People Who Settle.

So let’s talk about this idea of settling.  And let’s be honest.  Most of you have done it.  Yes, I said it.  Yes, I meant it.  Half of you will be divorced in ten years.  A sizeable portion of the remaining half will be lucky if you don’t despise each other’s every breath.  I say this not to be a total B [although…].  Think about it.  You can probably count on one hand the number of married couples who are still married past 10 years -- and let’s for the sake of argument say, who are on their first marriage -- who don’t bicker like preschoolers [or completely avoid each other] and absolutely hate each other most of the time.  I’m not saying it doesn’t happen.  I’m saying it’s really fucking rare.

People who’ve settled [read: lots of people] make me really, really angry.  Let’s talk about why.  For starters, I can’t handle the faux bliss they advertise.  Things aren’t as good as you say they are, Couples.  I know this because I’ve been in one.  A legit, 5-year one.  [Contrary to what you may believe, I haven’t been single forever.]  Things are good for a hot second, the sex is sanguine, the romance is saccharine, the comfort is sanctuary.  So eventually, if you’re not fighting, or at least disputing [even if it’s not my diva style of always-right all out warfare], you’re absolutely living this fake life.  There is no way things are always agreeable.  There is no way you don’t ever want to strangle that person.  There is no way you love everything about them.  So say it.  Scream it.  At least get it out and then have fabulous make-up sex.  Works every time.  Again.  I say this because I know.

Secondly, Settlers are getting all the benefits of married life without acknowledging the costs [i.e., that they should be fighting].  Great, someone will share your apartment rent or invest in a house with you or run half the goddamn errands or remember to water the plants [first, succeed at plants, then consider having children].  You’ll always have weekend plans and a theater date and something other than “and guest” on wedding invitations and someone to use the Restaurant.com gift certificates with when it specifies “Must Purchase Two Entrées.”  Neighbors and family members will have stopped trying to fix you up with totally unacceptable suitors.  They’ll also have stopped assuming something is clinically wrong with you that you are 30 and alone.  This makes holiday gatherings significantly less spotlighting and irritating.  I am offended at having to suffer YOUR pity when I'M the one who's done the work to become self-aware and find a deeply compatible life partner and wait patiently until I do which = making good choices!  Unlike you, Mostly Superficial and Miserable Relatives!  Settlers also have someone who knows their whole story.  Like, inside and out -- spectacular and shitty.  Granted, I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that most Settlers don’t have a colorful life history, or at least one they’re open and honest about, either with themselves, or with Settle Partner.  But really.  If you’re living an honest life, it’s got to be kind of nice knowing that someone knows all your shit and chooses you for their team anyway.

Next, Settlers piss me off because sometimes, they’ve taken perfectly viable relationship partners out of the dating pool for the rest of us who are discriminate.  Sometimes the other person totally sucks.  Actually, most of the time, the other person totally sucks.  But occasionally, you find yourself saying, “Damn, so-and-so could actually make the cut, and would be so much better with ME.”  But no!  They’ve settled!  I guess you could tell yourself to wait ten years, then so-and-so will be divorced and back on the market, but get it together.  Have some self-respect.  Continue to believe that if you’ve waited, maybe another person has waited, too, and you won’t have to change sexual orientations to find him.

People who’ve settled also like to make a point of providing their cozy, unsolicited advice and make you feel bad about yourself.  Sometimes this may be unintentional.  Common remarks include: “He’s out there;” “Everyone finds someone;” “Just be yourself;” and my personal favorite: “It’ll happen when you’re least expecting it.”  Shut the fuck up.  There is no moment when single, fabulous people are not expecting it.  And guess what, you don’t know that “He’s out there.”  What, have you personally consulted with him and are intentionally withholding him from me?  I think not.  Because otherwise, you don’t know, so don’t tell me things you don’t know.  Additionally, I am not in the market for just “finding someone.”  There are “someone’s” all over Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and America.  I am in the market for my other half, for someone fucking smart as hell, cultured, educated, literary, good-hearted, snarky, snobby, with a little bit of a messy history but has pulled it together, self-aware, and bougie.  [So, Settlers, if you know anyone of this nature, which you obviously don’t, tell THEM I’m out there, being myself and am least expecting it.]

This rant continues.  I particularly find it highly unacceptable when women settle.  Let’s talk about why.  Think about the single [defined as never having been married] women you know.  Now, think about the single women you know who are over, let’s say, 35.  Now think about the single, fabulous women who you know who are over 35.  You might be able to think of -5.  This is because women settle.  Just about ALL women settle.  This is inexcusable, ladies.  STOP IT RIGHT NOW.  Get your own damn life together and do whatever it is you need to do to either attract someone worthy of you not settling, or create yourself to be ultra fantastic enough to not feel the need to validate your life by relenting to a sham of marriage as a social institution and expected life choice.  Read, write, learn, go to museums, breathe fresh air, eat whole food, walk, travel, see the whole world [by yourself, and it's okay], dance, volunteer, spend hours with your godwilling other single fabulous ladyfriends, discuss politics, beauty, literature, philosophy.  Stare at the moon, take off your shoes and feel the grass, take yourself to your favorite restaurants, do cartwheels where you shouldn't when no one's watching.  And even when they are.  Kiss people -- well.  Permit yourself to feel.  Make yourself beautiful, and I don’t just mean hair and clothes [although do that, too, because to a certain extent, we all look how we feel].  Make yourself grace and light and heat and energy and passion and art and style.  This is imperative.  This is transformative.  Once this happens, settling will NOT be an option.

Trust me.  It’s taken me a long-ass time to get here.  I fought settling for a considerable time.  [“I’m waiting for the right person!  I’ll just know!  I’ll just feel it!  Blah blah blah!”]  The minute I doubted this and agreed to settle with someone who truly just didn’t get me, rationalizing that since it had been five years, might as well make it fifty, it was cracked over my head, and he was uninvested [read: cheating], and I stumbled into the cheating, and I should have trusted my intuition.  [It’s cool.  He’s since downgraded.  Obviously.]  [I really like parenthetical references.]  And even though it sucks spending nights alone, it’s incredible spending them with not the wrong person, and crawling to the very edge of the bed while you sleep so you don’t have to touch them, or pretending to just be asleep, or standing in the living room yelling to him for the millionth time that you just can’t explain it but he doesn’t illuminate your heart with moonbeams and make your soul say Yes and you wish he did but he doesn’t and you don’t know why.  So I say this because I get it.  If you need references on the verity of this, I can provide some.  I guarantee you that in addition to our mutual friends, both his neighbors and mine were audible witness to much of this chronicle of unraveling.  Contrary to my initial despair, the absence of this from my life has been the most liberating thing I could ever describe to you.

So.  Friends.  Please don’t settle.  Please don’t enable Settlers.  Ladies, especially you.  Come on.  If you’re tempted, call me.  I’ll go out and do shit with you.  We’ll be fancy and fabulous.  You can borrow some of my books, and we'll walk around Shaker Heights, and sit next to random fascinating people at bars, and tell each other our life stories [and maybe I'll interview you for my book, get your game face on].  And we’ll be out there, being ourselves, and least expecting it, and it will be singularly perfect.

[For further reading, consult “Marriage: A History; From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage" by Stephanie Coontz.]

The Stories We Tell

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a woman, I gave up my childish ways.” – 1 Corinthians 13:11

There may be no harder quest than for one human heart to understand another.  It is this magnetic binding, this unsurrenderable pull we have towards each other that beckons our unfolding of each other’s stories.  Even the most guarded and tightly kept of us are impervious to this pull.  Perhaps more so than those whose pulls are uncovered; it takes more energy to disguise it, rendering it all the more discoverable.

My mother was never particularly emotionally open.  Always composed, proper, and contained, she had learned, much as all poor, Catholic, city girls growing up in the 1940s had, that to be a lady was to be mutely minimal.  I’m not sure this ever even seemed unappealing to her, but it did to me as little girl.  I remember wanting, wishing her to be more, say more, live more.  As a child, this yearning washed over me, and resounds with me still in rippling, sharp pangs every time I unsurface a memory of she and my dad fighting, or me pleading with her for stories and information.  She never unlocked much and rarely let anyone in.  This would make me furious and indignant as a girl.  I would never be like that, I said.  I would be audible and unashamed and unboxed.  I would tell without being asked.  I would be different.

Sauntering into adolescence, this attitude brought me absurd amounts of conflict with my authoritarian father, who counteringly understood the importance of raising daughters different than their mother but who was entirely unwilling or unable to know how to readjust to them.  The tension in our house was always palpable.  More often than not, worlds and directions collided, and words and tears found themselves racing up staircases to hot bedrooms, shoving furniture, slamming screen doors.  Through this chaos, my father would yell and my mother would cry.  Finding neither of those two options suitable, I would lay in my bed, silent and overflowing, after refusing to permit myself to yell and steeling my resolve second by second not to cry.

Once, after a particularly unpleasant spectacle, my mother sat on the side of my bed and stroked my hair.  “I was engaged once, before your father,” she told me softly, reaching for a tissue to continue drying her face.  “His name was Tom.  He was a kind, gentle, caring man.  I loved him more than anything.  Sometimes I wish it would have been different.”  I lay there mesmerized, my turn to be mute.  “He was killed in Vietnam.  I’m still close to his family.  I think about him all the time.”  As my mother sat and stared into the resonant post-whirlwind darkness, she gave me no more and no less.  I made it about me.  I didn’t know as a child how to receive it as being about her.  Why hadn’t she married a man less like my father?  How would my life have been different, with less time spent heaving between the sheets and between the draws of yelling or crying.  Why did adults not get this.  I would be different.

A few weeks ago, a decade or two down the road, I was preparing for Memorial Day to kick off a summer of, again, me.  I’d been pondering my epic search for a man, readying my friends for a few warm months of enjoyment, shenanigans, blogging, and maybe ultimately finding my brilliant, kind, literary, cultured, compassionate, educated, elusive man – not too much like my father, since I was not too much like my mother, I resolved.  Always in the back of my mind guiltily believing that I was somehow superior to my parents – waiting to marry, making better choices, being more selective, more educated, not settling.  The fact that I did not arrive at this lifeview of my own preteen accord did not specifically occur to me.  I was scrolling through Facebook on my phone, at a picnic near the warm, breezy lake, skimming status updates and sunny scenes, when my breath was swept from within me.  A friend of my mother’s had posted a picture and a Memorial Day caption: “In memory of PFC Thomas Schaller, my mom’s little (and only) brother, my uncle and godfather, who was killed in Vietnam in 1965 at the tender young age of 23.  I was only 4 but I remember well the huge hole it tore in our family.  Eternal thanks to you, Uncle Tom, and to all those who fought and gave the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom."

Here in front of me, while I frolicked and reveled in my own triumphs and defeats in finding a man (and in how much better of a selector I was being than my parents had been), was a man I would never know, yet had always somewhere pondered.  The worn, crooked black and white scan of his army photograph, uniform pressed, face structured but kind, set my mind racing to possibilities, doubts, longings, parallels.  This was the man my mother had loved.  This was the person she’d chosen.  And then he was gone.  It was gone.  It was everything and then nothing.  I felt myself weakening and sat in the grass still staring at my phone.  The quest for love is universal, no matter how cleverly contained or unspoken or unshared.  How strange it is to see one’s parents as adults, as oneself, as a life.  Suddenly we didn’t seem so different, my mother and me.  And at once, painted clarity washed over me.  And I wanted to yell and cry at the same time.

Growing up, I never understood why my mother’s friend Karin and her family were always invited to our big family birthday parties.  My mother always had contact books full of friends, but now their closeness made sense to me.  Karin was Tom’s niece, and my mother had remained friends with their family after Tom’s death.  I messaged Karin right away after seeing her post, and she told me how hard it had been for my mom and for all of them.  She also added how hard it must have been for my father as we grew up, to know he was my mother’s second choice, her replacement after losing her real love.  This had never occurred to me, and it quieted me in ways few things can.  Thinking of my father and his wild manner, and the fiery spirit that I seem to have inherited from him, it made me see his journey in an entirely new gaze.  It gave my Pearl Prynne self-identification – Scarlet Letter child as a fusion of repellant energies – this game-changing jolt.  The decisions we make here in our twenties and the things that happen to us are revolutionary.  The people we choose, the events that unfold, the narrative we weave, it will all mean something when someone somewhere, sometime, realizes the weight of its meaning.  “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” reflected Annie Dillard.  This unfolding was jostling my own reflections of finding life and love with another.  It was surreal.

When I told my mother I had seen Tom's picture, she was quiet and blank.  "Yes," she said.  That was all.  No more, no less.  We carry the lives we've been given and the lives we've chosen.  It was unspoken between us how she understood more than I'd realized my grief over my semi-recent loss of a great love.  We are not that different. 

A few weeks following, on Father’s Day, I was having a quiet morning coffee with my dad at a café near our house.  I was recounting the story of the painful ending of this five-year relationship with a man I knew my father had never particularly liked.  “I never got a good vibe from him,” my father explained.  “He wouldn’t look me in the eye.  Man to man, that’s something he should do.  I didn’t feel what I felt he should feel for you.”  I listened, more attentively than I generally had.  “And I saw a lot of myself at that age in him,” my father gingerly continued.  “I didn’t like that.  Not for you.”  Rarely speechless, I didn’t know what to say.  Just as the breath had been knocked out of me at the park on Memorial Day, here again I found myself forcing a swallow and not knowing whether to yell or cry.  But having advanced beyond running under my covers, I softly told my dad, “Thank you.”  Softly, but loud enough to hear.

This quest we make is a shared one: for knowing why the other says, does, is.  For finding someone to walk beside who transcends our days of crying under the sheets, or being too minimal, or yelling too much, or holding out until someone worthy of all her parents gave her (and they wanted to give her but couldn’t) comes along and shakes their hand.  For seeing the pain and struggle in the stories the others tell, and for aligning our stride with theirs, if only to show them they do not walk alone.  For not making it about us, like children do.  For affirming that we are no better, or no worse, than those who’ve gone before us, or go with us, or who will come after us.  And that the most worthy quest of all is to integrate your own story into a version other people can access, so that the person who most closely, intimately energizes your own spirit will choose you, and you will choose them.  And if you’re lucky, they won’t be taken from you.  And if you’re lucky, your children will hope for you to sit on the edge of their beds and tell them about the things you’re doing now.  And they’ll know that it’s not so much about whether you yell or cry; it’s about letting something leave your mouth.

There Are No Men In Cleveland. Except For Chris Evans.

So friends, the blog is back. Another summer, another search (party). Since there are no impending weddings, or at least any that anyone dared invite me to with THIS kind of thing going on, this will be an open-ended expedition, and mainly just a chronicling of mis-adventures. Which always seem to find me. Or maybe vice versa. I mean, let’s be real – probably both.

It turns out, there are no men in Cleveland. Don’t let the census fool you. Presumably, there are 190,471.2 males residing in the greater metropolitan area, but all except 0.2 appear to be married, gay, both, a priest, or homeless. And while I have great respect for Cleveland’s transient population, they don’t make very good partners for my trying-to-get-it-together-and-be-fabulous lifestyle.

Friday night, the relatively unattached ladies and I attended the First Fridays mixer thing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. According to one girlfriend: “I’ve been. It’s man-stacked.” WIN. Game on. I unearthed the sexiest mint green stilettos I had, slid into my ruffliest, girliest short skirt, and even landed a sweet University Circle parking spot (making the survival in the heels much easier). The heavens were smiling upon me. This was going to be good.

I met my first friend, Tina, inside and we headed straight to the bar, obviously. Yes, there is a bar in the museum. As there should be. While waiting to order, the man sitting next to us offers us his seat and explains that he was just leaving. After multiple compliments, slurred words, several inappropriate hand touches and a stumble or two, he does vacate the area, and thank God, because he wasn’t a day under 80. “Didn’t you just say you preferred older guys?” Tina joked to me. Yes. Geriatric. Definitely.

Our third lovely lady, Lindsey, arrived, and we no sooner wandered into the event area when two very definingly Italian men saunter over to us and awkwardly (cornily) begin a conversation. They were apparently brothers, and I can’t remember either of their names, which should be a good indicator of where this was going. The chatty one had to be at least 45. Tight black button-down, gold chain around his neck, bad greasy (or gelled . . . tough to tell) hair, super smarmy, said he did real estate and lived in Pepper Pike. They asked what we did. Tina told him she’s a speech pathologist. “Oh, so you teach those people how to talk?” What is wrong with you. "These people" is a totally unacceptable way to refer to people with autism, and not only unacceptable, but digging you further into the ground. I asked the brother what line of work he was in. “I don’t tell people what I do for a living.” Okay . . . ? Are you in the mafia? Are you in the witness protection program? Are you a felon? “What do you do?” the older, greasy, smarmy one then says to me. I tell him I’m a behavior therapist. (Sounds legit, right.) “Oh, so the two of you could tag team,” Smarmy says with a creepy laugh. “That’d be like if I were a gynecologist and my brother here was a proctologist.” I literally spit my cabernet back into my cup. Is this real life. Thank GOD Lindsey had just spotted a fancy and fabulous mutual ladyfriend (who would never support us tolerating such bullshit from idiots), at which point I yelled, “Sorry, gotta go!” and bolted to visit with the delightful Cheryl.

Poor Tina was stuck with these two while Lindsey and I chatted with Cheryl and her friend Flora, and after a series of exchanges from Smarmy and Tina including, Smarmy: “So Tina, do you want kids?” Tina: “Yes, definitely” Smarmy: “Well, let’s go! Right now! [insert beckoning arm motion towards the balcony],” we set a rescue mission into operation and prepared to vacate the premises. Tina’s manfriend had arrived at this point, and the onset of a handsome, well-dressed, articulate, manners-possessing male on the party made it perfectly clear that we all needed to find more like him. Onto the next adventure. The night was still younger than the average age of all of that evening's suitors.

We all headed downtown to Society Lounge on East 4^th, one of the classiest libations establishments in the Cleve. Perhaps not as “man-stacked”as the Museum of Art, but we’re not going to meet the garden variety man of our dreams at a Denny’s, n’est-ce pas? We are kind of snobby and we don’t apologize for it. There's no time for entertaining classless morons when you're pushing 30. I park like ten miles away and walk through downtown, and while I’m en route, two valet guys sitting outside the Chocolate Bar whistle at me. I actually turned around to see who they were whistling at, because I do not believe I have ever been whistled at before. “Hey baby,” one says. (Not your best opening line, sir, considering YOU are the baby who is still in high school.) “Are you talking to me?” I actually asked out loud. “Yeah. Where you going?” “Not here,” I say. “But I’ll catch you on the way back.” (No I won’t, but what does one say to these sorts of things. I didn't have the heart to put him in his place.) “Can I have your number?” the seventeen-year-old one asks. “Uh, no,” I laugh. “But thanks for . . . trying.” I hope he didn’t think I was being insulting. Sometimes a girl needs a little validation boost, even if it’s from someone with a learner’s permit.

I head to East 4^th, which really is one of the best parts of Cleveland, and we run into another fantastic ladyfriend, Caitlin, and some of her grad school friends at Society, out celebrating her birthday. We order delightful and ridiculously easy to drink cocktails called French 75 (naturallement), and cozy into a corner booth with a prime view of the bar. Dark, swanky, with swallowing velvet seats, very F. Scott Fitzgerald. After a few of these, the room starts to spin, which is the tradeoff for the drinks being very expensive – one only needs a few. “Oh my God,” someone says. I can’t remember who because, as I may have just noted, the room was kind of spinning. “Chris Evans just walked in and is sitting at the table next to us.” I would like to please take this opportunity to note that that man is incredibly f-ing hot. Like, makes the girls in the booth next to him melt kind of hot. He was with two other people, and I didn’t want to bother him, although it WOULD have made for excellent blog material. I (un)fortunately was not in my soberest state, after having laid on the bathroom floor for like ten minutes while Lindsey photo-documented my amusing stint of trying to regain my balance in my heels (thank you Lindsey), so this did not seem the most opportune time to introduce myself to a movie star. Sometimes I’m smart like this, even while heavily intoxicated.

Chris Evans’ table of three has now increased in size, but I can’t really see him that well, because (a) it’s dark in there; (b) my rarely worn contacts are getting blurry, as they do after a few hours; and (c) those French 75’s mean business. I’ve never even seen a movie he’s been in anyway, and I’m not one who’s ever been particularly interested in asking celebrities for a photograph. Even in my prouder moments. So, we took our fabulous selves home, and with a smile, we expanded the narrowing man classifications to married, gay, both, a priest, homeless, or a deliciously beautiful, temporarily gazable movie star, just out of reach, one table over. 

A Typical Wednesday Night

Someone asked me today what I would do if I could do anything.  "Write," I said.  She didn't tell me to find a way to do it, or to abandon everything else to make it work, or to squeeze it in between crackless commitments that intentionally distract me from despair.  I filled in those things.  Silently.  At the exact time as the words left my mouth and before her non-response counter-intuitively validated how I don't need anyone to validate this.

So here I am.  Writing.  About who knows what, or for who knows who, and until who knows when.  I am 2/3 of a bottle of wine in, on a weeknight, at my apartment, alone, again, as per usual, and it's almost bedtime, and the loneliness is yet again palpable and consuming.  

These are sentiments that are not acceptable from a 28-year-old progressive woman.  Be strong, be enough, be impermeable, give single feminists a good name.  I am crying because I miss him.  My soul misses him and his love for my holes.  And for what he loved of was left in the spaces where there weren't holes.  And, now that there are black holes between us warping time and space, and he is filling another woman's holes which are glaringly similar to my own, I am left with the agony of pouring sand into a riverbed.  My holes were created by a man -- although not him -- and they will be filled by one.  And in the meantime, I can pour sand into my soul, but I ache for someone to devote their presence to shovel alongside me.

Time heals, I suppose, but it also renders one more undesirable and eroded.  Life's toll is not without scarring, and as we progress, we develop more disclusionary criteria for whose weathering most closely mimics our own -- or perhaps compliments in a jigsaw sort of way.  It is defeating to saunter alone.  It's not even particularly comforting to know that others also walk a solitary path; the only comfort lies in the elusive hope that another isolate soul may sync beside you in your walk, and snug their bucket into your sandpit, and eventually enable your pouring to find a limit.  And then the pouring will transform into a pointy, pouring climbing pile, above the surface, and towards the heavens.  And it will no longer be a charge into the void, but a collaborative upward push.  Maybe all that binds us moment to moment is this fated hope.  But I want to be okay with the hole itself.  Because a hole by definition is what holds it up, and what and who holds me up is . . . everything.

It's always weirdly therapeutic to find just the right song to listen to on repeat when you're going through some kind of shit.  Like, you comb through iTunes and YouTube like a crazy person, feeling like if only someone in the history of popular music has sung about it in just the same way that you feel about it, it'll totally validate the crap out of your situation.  Plus then you can act all badass, dancing around your living room naked with a hairbrush, empowered by screaming out in all likelihood piss-poor lyrics.  But it's cool -- somebody prominent (and the American population, by default) gets you.

Pretty sure they make no songs that say: I dated a good (but "wrong") guy for 5 years, treated him like hell, broke up with him 19 times, wanted him but didn't, wanted to be alone but couldn't.  Mustered the courage again and again to walk away only to slink back when loneliness and grief consumed me.  Then turned the tables on him, when he finally manned up and started dating someone else, begging at his feet to not be turned away, as he closed the door (I mean, the text?) in my tear streaked, guilty face, and went back to fucking his model, runner, freelance writer (FML), moving-on girlfriend.  And the best part: he isn't a jerk.  Not even a little bit.  Not even at all.  We didn't fight, we didn't explode apart.  We faded away.  If only he'd been an asshole.

How do you reconcile the pain you caused someone, and the pain that their pain caused you?  What do you do with the emotional fallout and the not-metaphorical ball of hurt that you're left juggling, knowing that this is what you "wanted" so you can't even pass the blame?   What happens to our pain?  So we mask it, or we cope with it -- which, what does that even mean.  We release it?  Does running pound it into the pavement?  Does journaling scribble it away?  Does yoga zen it back into the universe?  Does releasing our pain mean injecting indelible sadness into the atmosphere?  Is it a zero-sum equation?  If the pain isn't within us anymore, is it somewhere else?  Energy can't be destroyed, but can it be transformed?

I've looked to everyone else for answers: friends (who want to gouge their eyes out with a spoon), family (who just want their daughter to find a nice boy and get married already), co-workers, books, therapists, religion, occasionally in fits of paranoid frenzy checking my horoscope on 7 different websites until I find one I like.  I've tried to just sit quietly with my pain.  I've talked about it until people have literally fallen asleep.  I've laid awake for entire nights; I've slept through many days.  I've gone a week without eating, and days compulsively stuffing my face in an effort to physically fill the gulf of sorrow.  I don't know why I've allowed this to tear me apart.  (Pretty sure it's not tearing him apart.)  I don't want to find some random guy to fill this void.  I want to get to the bottom of my own void and stand there, feeling the lower limit under my bare feet, and breathing in, in that place, that this is my very own, very personal experience of the charged reaches of who I am.  Who I've been.  How far I stretch in directions in which I want to be fully aware, and not just stumble into realizing when something else forces me there.  They may be dark corners; they may be horrifying.  They may be what hell is like -- when you're face-to-face with the worst about yourself.  And not that there's nowhere to run, but that you don't let yourself run.

Since the canon of American pop music is failing me, I feel like the most (least.) appropriate way to wrap up this mess is with my daily horoscope, which I swear, was the first one I pulled up:

"Today, Capricorn, you'll undoubtedly ask yourself a lot of questions. You tend to be rather introverted, and you typically need a great deal of freedom. You're usually an energetic person, but with the current astral energy [no idea wtf that is.] at play, you may feel lonely and doubtful of your abilities. Take time today to analyze your commitments to others."