Easy for You, Hard for Me

How easy it is to place this line in the sand, the air; in our lives. Easy for you, but don’t you know it’s so hard for me. A bit like a child trying to keep up with grown-up stride, but always unable. Unable to walk side by side, unable to keep pace. For a long time I’d felt like this, but unable to tell anyone, just thinking that I somehow felt like a teenager, to everyone else’s grown-up. Stuck, I didn’t want to grow up to be like anyone I’d known, and yet, still looking for someone to look up to. 

This can sometimes be the plight of us who grow up in this culture where intellectual pursuits are rewarded and if you are bright, even the most difficult task, is actually, easy. So, when we as children are told, this is difficult, and we find it’s not, it creates a sense that the person who told us this would be hard, is well, either lying or perhaps, not so bright themselves, and so we are in a way, left to our own devices. 

This also creates the weird paradox that being smart is the be all and end all and that if you just apply yourself, you will be successful. And what we ask, is this success? To be like you? Step one on the quest for self. So now, I know, that much of what was missing for me was not just a role-model, but a sense of being whole, a sense of integrating my emotions into my intellectual self. A sense of having an open heart chakra, a sense of not competing with others, but of just being. I had to deconstruct all the roles that people play to make themselves the adult, understanding now, that I was not the only one feeling like a child inside, but I was one of the few willing to admit, to naming this. 

I had to understand how people hide behind titles like rev, like president, and vp, and professor, and dr and how these labels only represent a passing through of levels of learning or assessment and do not in any way measure a person’s wholeness, a person’s ability to care or to respond appropriately, or even in their own, or others’ best interests. I don’t feel like a teenager anymore, I feel like a person. I have ages within me, but alongside I have compassion and a much bigger scope of understanding how we come to choose how much of ourselves to share and how much to hide. 

Once I so often thought, easy for you, hard for me, now I know, life is hard, life is easy, life is a beautiful mess, in a random ordered world. I don’t have to hold onto being the outsider, I don’t have to be afraid to step into the often stupidness of our systems, of our ineptness, of our humanness, there is no Santa, no one in the sky with a big book, we have each other, we are enough. 

blue screen

living in computer generated space

becomes an exercise in disappointment

of being alone

of missing out

of waiting for that next email

or text

that will connect us 

to that which makes us feel

so much smaller

than we really are

i want to escape from behind the desk

with the computer

with the glowing screen

with the constant ping

of letters from the rev mrs isaiah watson

whose husband just died

but in the lord

who wants my social security number

to deposit millions from an overseas account

and the ads from the merchant where 

i just shopped over the weekend

reducing me to an object 

to be used

manipulated

and I smile

too smart for that

deleting the email

but not turning off the 

screen

not leaving the office

afraid of what real life might 

have to offer  

Let Rise

I am, in some ways, a month behind in my life. I’ve been struggling with a horrible cold, and then the mind numbing effects of cold medication, and once again, I’ve missed paying bills on time, something that at one time I would be mortified to even say aloud, let alone write for the world to see. And so, yet, even in my writing, I feel like there’s so much I want to write about, so many projects and again, it seems like not enough time. My mother often accused me of cleaning with “a lick and a promise.” I don’t want to live my whole life this way, but sometimes, it seems the only way to get through, is to just get on with it. Right? I mean, who really wants to dust? 

So, to make some sense, to not fall too far behind, and then so, to stave off giving up; I’m trying to recap. I don’t think I ever quite took the time to write about the process of becoming a writer, at least not in the same way I’ve been trying to mark the process of becoming a therapist. Part of this I think, is this awful fear I carry with me, that if you talk about something you jinx it, and especially being a writer comes with all this baggage of how hard it is, how you never get paid for it, and how confusing, even, the whole process is now. I can’t tell you how many times people have asked why don’t I just self-publish. The process isn’t like becoming a therapist. As much as I struggle with the details of the whole getting licensed part of my therapist career, it is a clear path, as opposed to writing.  

As much as I’m juggling writing and therapy, when I try to put my writing on the ‘back burner’ it just won’t stay there. My writing is such an integral part of my life, it won’t take a back burner or a back seat, it wants to drive. So, unexpectedly this past year, a short piece that I wrote was published in an anthology, The People’s Apocalypse, and finally, my writing was in an actual book. One of the editors, Ariel Gore, coached me with the re-writes of my memoir. It still makes me smile. And just last month, I connected with the writer Melissa J. Haynes, her book, Learning to Play With a Lion’s Testicles: Unexpected Gifts From the Animals of Africa had caught my attention (after being one of Jimmy Fallon’s top ten do not read books). 

The book is a beautiful adventure memoir, as Melissa travels externally to Africa, and also journeys inward, on a quest for reconciliation. I was impressed with her risk-taking on more than one level, and as we connected, she was impressed with my writing, and she offered me a guest blog on her site (melissajhaynes.com). Her generous sharing of her blog space and of her support for my writing has ushered in a more fearlessness in myself in making connections with others. Trust, yes, trust has been a big theme for me this year. Trusting myself, trusting others, trusting in the universe; this seems to be the antidote for risk, and it’s companion fear. I need to move into the next year letting go of fear, entering into the warmth of trust, and all that it might foment. I want to come in out of the drafty back porch and exist in the warm kitchen of life. Mix, knead, let rise, punch down, let rise, bake.