BF is playing Gears of War 3, and gawd, the sound effects from that game. Rat-a-tat-SPLATTY-roar-SQUISH. Noise-cancelers and “Sail” on repeat is what I’m doing now.

I don’t know how to help him with the adjustment he’s had to make, nor do I know what to suggest to him about what he should do with himself in the upcoming days? weeks? however long?. Should I not suggest anything and just let him be? Is that the right thing so I’m not nagging? Is that the wrong thing to do with his personality? What would I suggest if I decided it was the right thing to do, to go on and suggest? I don’t know what he wants to do with himself. Maybe I could teach him to knit.

I’m frustrated about the end of therapy. Yeah, that’s, like, September’s news, but I’m still frustrated about it. Did I fuck it up somehow? Did I miss an opportunity to get fixed, or was it really as meaningless as it seemed when I decided to give it up?

I’m depressed because I can’t write. That’s inaccurate. I’m depressed because I have not been writing. I’ve had the Word document open for about two weeks on my desktop, sitting there in 110% zoom the way I wrote the lion’s share of the Greenland book, ready to have words added to the end of the last paragraph. The word count wants to grow; this book wants to come out, I can feel it, like a cramp. But I have serious performance anxiety and it is driving me CRAZY not to know whether I wrote the last book well or badly. I feel paralyzed, no idea how to get at the next thing when I don’t know how I did on the last thing. I know it’s not as important to the readers as it is to me, I get it, but it’s pretty hard being on this end, wanting to go out on another limb when I have no idea whether I did “yeah, okay” or “really awesome” or “back to the drawing board with you” with the last climb of the tree.

No, like, NO idea. Really paralyzed. It’s fricking awful, one of the worst feelings I’ve had throughout the writing process during the last five years, as if I’m naked and chained to a wall and I know there’s a way to slip out of these handcuffs and enchant my captors with a no-touch hoochie-coochie, risk-free, so they’ll let me go, but instead I’m just leaning here against cold bricks with my fingers going numb, my brain going dead, losing time and energy by the moment, because I CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT TO DO NEXT.

Bird by bird, right? Bird by bird. God, I’m afraid of it.

“Sorrow” now. Too intense for repeat, but it’s like visiting one of those crazy friends from college. What a good time.

How am I going to ditch the habit of saying “two thousand twelve”? I sound like I’m from three generations ago. I need to remember to say “twenty twelve”. It just seems wrong.

I’m pretty sure my mom lied to me during our conversation yesterday. Like, relentlessly, without any consideration for whether I would know or it would hurt me. Because of the nature of the lie, I kind of can’t get over it; it’s been tugging at me every twenty minutes since it occurred to me that she was probably lying (which was about 10 minutes after we got off the phone). I don’t know what to do with this information. I’m seriously thinking about confronting her, because it’s going to hurt me for days, and every time I think about confronting her with one of her lies I always think it’s going to go a different way than it goes (I’m continually too optimistic) and I need to just get over it and move on because no way will anything good come out of me calling her up and saying “You just gave me the equivalent of an oral book report from a seventh-grader who hasn’t read the book. Why did you do that? It was stupidly obvious. Why didn’t you just tell me the truth, no matter how much it inconvenienced you to admit you did the wrong thing?”

Would it kill you to admit you did the wrong thing?

This video proves to me that I was right all along about Sucker Punch. Even if each progressive video makes me think Beyonce’s kind of gone off the deep end (still, she sure is purty).

Some days I feel like I’ve got things figured out, like I’m living the right way and have learned enough in my twenties to call myself a smart woman. Some days I feel like a big bumbling idiot who can’t even keep herself healthy. Raccoons can keep themselves healthy.

And what is vitamin D supposed to do for you anyway?

Well, that happened again. Not that exact thing, but the thing where I have some awful crisis occur that leaves me naked and wailing and clutching handfuls of dirt, not at all knowing how to go on, and then the clouds open up and the sun shines in this spectacular beam and something happens that is not quite a perfect solution, not quite, but close enough that no one would believe it except in a Coen brothers movie.

Last night I was driving to a yoga class that I was subbing, although I really was not up to it, and I was listening to the radio, and this song came on:

Visuals not recommended; just listen to the song. (Oh, Morphine. If those notes could talk about something other than themselves…Morphine and me go back a long way.) Anyway, that two-string bass groove floated on the surface of my mind for a few seconds, and then it dug under my skin. I blinked, and the world cleared; I was awake again, not just staring but seeing, actually here and present for the first time in a long time. The music got through, and felt good. It was working for me, making me walk a few steps away from my panic.

And I heard something. You have to be be bigger than your life, it said. I was listening to Mark Sandman sing Buena, Buena, Buena, Buena, good good GOOD!, and I heard you have to be bigger than your life. This stuff is small, I heard, and will pass, and in five years this will be a week of sorrow and heartache among many, a month when nothing went right surrounded by other months when some things did. I am letting the bastards grind me down. That is not right. The world is big, life is wide, there is something inside me that is too strong and brave and good to be ground out like a cigarette butt, I am bigger than my life!

And I smiled.

And when I got to the studio, I got a surprise $25 check for that sunrise class where no one showed up, which seemed to me to be a little hat-tip from the universe saying see? Sometimes, in this game of Monopoly, the bank will make an error in your favor. I taught a decent class, came home, ate dinner, and checked my email. In my email was a note from an oDesk employer, the employer that brought me to oDesk in the first place a month ago, offering me a full-time copy editing job starting two days after my current job ends.

It pays a little over half what I’m getting paid now. And I’m not sure all of that money is guaranteed. And it’s a contracting job, which means the taxes will be kind of shitty. But I’ve had this job on my mind, hoping for it as hard as I can, for the entire month that all this crap has been swirling around, because it solves about half a dozen problems in one swoop: I won’t have to worry about finding another job if we end up moving across the country; it’s a flexible-hours work-from-home job, which means I can work the job around a more significant teaching schedule, and means I have the numerous benefits of the work-at-home job that I’ve wanted for as long as I’ve been in the working world; I can even add other part-time jobs on top of it, like Starbucks or other oDesk work; and I will have the time to write and write and write if I want to. The job is theoretically still 40 hours a week – theoretically – and I’m not completely sure what the parameters of it are yet, so there are a lot of things about it that could still mean it won’t work out or I won’t be able to teach and write as much as I think I will. But still. I have a job. I am not going to be insolvent. Things are going to work out. They are! They are.

So. My gratitude is boundless. I think I just needed to see the black bottom of this crisis before I found the opportunity. And I’m grateful even for that; it reminds me of this Sugar column, the concept that the crucifixion is no less a part of the miracle than the rising. This is no deus ex machina, no utter phoenix action, but it’s…better. That’s all I wanted, was better.

I am, to put it plainly, not functioning, except as necessary at work and interviews.

It’s not a secret here that I believe in God, and I don’t think it’s a secret that I talk to God when I’m troubled. I think it’s praying, but I don’t think of it in the same context as the “Our prayers are with you” kind of on-your-knees before-bed Christian-type praying. On rare occasions, I have had answers. Maybe they’re my own mind answering me. I’m fine with that. I’m also fine with an external force that nudges from time to time. Neither makes me crazy, in my opinion.

This morning as I was driving in, I was feeling so thoroughly beaten, so lost and furious at whatever force had decided to give me a nasty virus while I’m coping with all of what I’m coping with, that I was sobbing and asking God what I did to deserve this. In my mind I was backing up this request with the knowledge that this-all is not so bad compared to being homeless or abused or cold or hungry, but I still wanted to know, why did I get kicked this week when I was down? Why have I had over two months straight of no normal bowel movements due to stress? Why couldn’t I have found a therapist who could help me instead of one who was so impotent, who is on maternity leave now and can’t help me at all? What did I do to fuck up my karma so badly that I can’t get a good breath until it’s time to sleep?

What did I do to deserve this?

Nothing, darling. This is just the way it has to be. 

But…why?? Is something good coming? Will it all work out, like it did the last time I had a crisis like this? Will it keep getting worse until it works out?

Remember the anatomy class? Remember how hard it was, how you stuck it out to the very end, and how proud BF was of you?

Yes.

I want you to be proud of your own perseverance. You deserve that. 

Thank you, but I was hoping for more help, more answers.

…

Thank you.

Nothing that I do right now is helping; no amount of breathing or counting my blessings or thinking about the sheer number of job applications I’ve submitted and how one of them is surely going to be lucky or being optimistic or remembering that things have always worked out in the past or any of that shit is helping me. I do not know what I’m going to do on November 7th. I am completely helpless before the enormity of this not-knowing, and my helplessness is making me angry.

Being waylaid by this virus is kind of a double-decker of helplessness. (That’s part of why I’m soldiering through and going to work instead of just To Hell With It and calling in sick the rest of the week. Combating the helplessness.) I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what action to take to make this better.

Maybe the crisitunity here is about humility? About laying down my wish for action in the sight of the universe and allowing something to happen without me trying to direct it? I’ve been trying to read the universe’s clues for the past two months, and trying to act accordingly, but apparently I am no mystic because I feel like I’ve gotten it all wrong. I just feel hopeless. Like no action I can take will do any good, not even lowering my dukes. Not even resting in the utter rubble of my bad housekeeping and trusting my immune system.

The past few weeks have made me decide to attend church voluntarily for the first time in my life. There’s a Unitarian Universalist church in my town, a tiny one, and a much larger one in a nearby town. Neither of the projected sermons for this week seemed terribly salient, so I decided to go to the tiny one this week and see what happens. Maybe nothing will. I am just feeling so rudderless that I’m reaching out somewhere kind of obvious. It’s worked for many millions of others.

I have no idea what’s going to happen. This creek, the one I’m up, without a paddle, is unmapped.

The people I work for are interviewing candidates for my job right now, as I type these words. They advertised without telling me. They still have not told me. I don’t know if they’re setting up to fire me or not, or if they are, when, but no matter how you slice this situation up – there are a lot of particulars about what has happened up until now that complicate it – there is deception, and it hurts and troubles me.

Earlier this week I got a trial job on oDesk to write a couple of articles, one of them about HCG and one of them about a skincare line. They were about two steps up from spam. If the employer likes my work, they will ask for more of the same. It took me two hours to write these, and they were agonizing, atrocious hours. I did not enjoy this work. Maybe I could pretend to enjoy it if it was the only thing in the pipe for me to call Work, but I don’t know if doing it all day would be better or worse than doing it for two hours.

This morning I got up at 4:30 to substitute for a sunrise class, and no one came. I am so punchy and exhausted that I don’t know how I’m going to finish out the day.

Lately I have been so cold during the days at my desk that I’ve taken to wearing knitted mitts over my fingers, because I can hardly type with such cold hands.

My mother doesn’t know any of this. She keeps calling me and we keep having these light conversations, and when she asks me what’s wrong or if there’s anything she can do, I put her off. I feel that all the things she would have to tell me would be discouraging or inadvertently painful. That’s what always happens when I’m in a painful place, or when I’m trying to reach for new opportunities; she says discouraging things and I wind up feeling lower than before.

I know I’m perpetuating a lack of intimacy between me and my mom, but I honestly don’t know what other solution there is. Either I tell her all the things that are happening and she makes me feel rotten about my life, or I tell her nothing and I feel false and distant. Is there a middle way?

This has helped keep my mind occupied, but I have some other work I could be doing. So I think I’ll do it.

But I want to make a go of it non-anonymously. I think I’m ready to have a lot to say over there.

If you want the blog address, let me know (crisitunityblog [at] gmail [dot] com). Cody, lurkers, this means you. In the meantime, I’ll tell you some other things.

—

Yesterday I got some very difficult news, kind of clawing-at-the-mud-on-the-side-of-the-hole news. Instead of crawling into a vodka bottle at home, I stuck with my plans to go to a yoga class I’m subbing for in a couple of weeks. Before I went in, though, as I sat in my car for the half-hour I had between arriving and the start time, this one thing loomed large in my mind: the five-year-old half-pack of clove cigarettes that’s been in my glove compartment since I gave up smoking for good when I was 25. (FTR, these have actually been banned for sale in the US in the time between when I put them in my glove compartment and now. One of the areas in which Mr. Obama and I flat-out disagree.)

I miss it horribly. Lately I’ve been missing it every day. The cravings for it – although largely emotional in nature – are as bad as they ever were when I had a dose of nicotine in my circulatory system.

I went to yoga instead, and had a very nice time, and actually did a not-terrible partial scorpion pose (!), for which I am paying with sore back muscles today. I plan to go again next week. When I got back in my car I still wanted a cigarette more than I wanted to eat or sleep or go on living.

So I smoked one.

And I’d hoped that it would be so rotten and stale and toxic that I’d be free of my cravings, that smoking again after this many years would be foreign and yucky. This did not happen. It was awesome. Perfect. Totally do not regret it. Wish with all my heart that I could take it up again.

When I got home, I ate dinner and watched the defeat of Sauron’s army and then stayed up far too late writing an essay about the smoking experience. I pulled out every stop I had, told some of my most painful stories, and I am really, really proud of the result. I’m going to send it to The Sun.

I slept very poorly when I finally got to bed. Today I feel hot-cold from so little sleep and those awful chemicals my body has to compensate for, and my head feels stuffed and wide; I’m worried this is the beginning of a migraine. Last night I laid awake, praying, asking for clearer signposts about what I should do. I wonder if maybe the lack of signposts is actually clarity, telling me that I have to make my own way without guidance. I really don’t know how. I feel bereft and angry and inexpert.

I am trying to think of Sugar: You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. But it’s just forming a lump in my throat instead of motivating me.

—

Today is my ex’s 35th birthday. Tomorrow is my 30th.

—

That’s some steep shit, right there. I got it at CNN. I looked at a related website this morning that depressed the hell out of me. Those sad stories just go on and on and on and on, for 60 pages.

—

It’s Friday, which is typically a slow day for blogs, so I’m trying to do my part for everybody out there who’s bored too. But I have very little to say. I am still dithering about what to do re: blogging, I wrote a little last night and watched part of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape before giving up because…no, I am actually enjoying Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, a book I tried and failed about three times to read when I was a kid, I did something good at work today, I am waiting to hear back about something that happened on Monday, I am heightened and worried about something else that happened yesterday and could happen next month, and something I thought was happening tomorrow is not, which is kind of a relief.

I’m starting to wonder if I should have tried to write vampire books instead.

My mother told me a story once about a friend of hers named Leah who was driving along one day, thinking about her insanely busy and stressful life, thinking about how pleased she was with her relative calm in the storm, and how yeah, everything’s okay. She tasted something weird and chalky all of a sudden, and discovered that she had been grinding her teeth so hard during this conversation with herself that she had ground off some little pieces of tooth. But everything was okay.

I did not write last night. I wrote yesterday during work, a point of view exercise for my workshop that I had significant fun with, that I’m tempted to post so you’ll see what I’m actually like when I write fiction. No one has commented on it yet.

I dragged myself to the grocery store, saved $7 on pork chops, and discovered when I was pushing the cart around that my legs were killing me – from the waist down it just got worse and worse. I was having the normal left-leg pain from my spinal issue, but my knees also ached like rain, and it felt like my ankles and feet were steeping in scalding water. I elevated my legs on and off all night and treated with Aleve, and those things helped, but it was singularly painful and strange. I can’t place it all on the slightly high-heeled loafers I wore to work yesterday. Or the weird weather. Or the fact that I really need to exercise. Or all the sitting on the couch with the laptop I’ve been doing in the past week. It felt like there was poison in my legs.

This morning, Green Day again (all is forgiven). When I loosened my hands on the wheel to make the right turn on Taylor, my fingers felt strange and raw. I’d been gripping the wheel that tightly, at ten and two. Even in thinking about my hands on the wheel prior to that turn – and I had – I hadn’t noticed they’d become fists.

So. I think I’m under stress.

I’m reading Art and Madness, Anne Roiphe’s memoir of her life in her twenties. It’s bold, fascinating, a book that could change your life. Read it, if you haven’t. I find myself thinking in its short, surreal, devastatingly candid sentences. (Kind of nothing like that last one.)

There are strange snippets of things floating through my mind: the refrain of “Ophelia” (the song I put up yesterday), quotes from books I haven’t read in years, the bit from Quills that haunts me whenever I think about whether I’m writing too much or reading too much, scenes and songs from movies. John Goodman running down the burning hall bellowing “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” My head feels like a landfill, strewn with parts of numberless lives, some treasure but mostly trash.

I got tired of my laptop burning my thighs, so I went to Target for a laptop cooler thingy. To my enormous joy, I found one that had a little pull-out tray for a mouse. Editing fiction (or any kind of document, really) with a trackpad is goddamn annoying, and whenever I’ve had to do any editing I always take my thumb drive down to our PC. But if BF is gaming/working/whatever on the PC, I have to just do the editing another day. Finally, a mouse, a solution. I took home the $60 of laptop accessories – two lap desks with different purposes, wireless mouse – meant to turn our couch into the best damn writing environment I can have short of renting an actual garret with a sloped ceiling and a tiny window facing a brick wall (sounds of the city piped in for $5 extra per month). At first the mouse was backwards when I plugged it in: up was up and down was down, but right was left and left was right. This was really hard to deal with, I found. I think if I’d had to I would have adapted to it, but instead I restarted my laptop and then it worked fine. It was an interesting experience, though, one I remember from learning to drive, and learning that the way the wheel moves the car when you’re in reverse isn’t actually that intuitive. Trying to make my brain rewire its controls, its HUD.

Anyway, the mouse is great, the lap desks are great, everything is great, and writing is like grinding gears on a machine that doesn’t have enough coolant pumping over the saw. Fits and starts, fever-heat, guesstimating whether I’ll get any more out of this hour, afternoon, sentence, metaphor before my brain explodes and takes out the couch and all my accessories with it.

My mom is giving me really, really good advice and support about the writing workshop I’m struggling against doing. She’s telling me things that indicate she thinks I’m a good writer, when I have never thought that she liked what I wrote at all. She showed zero interest in reading my trashy book after I was finished writing it (one of the more painful memories of that shitty year). I read to her over the phone Vonnegut’s eight rules for writing, and she thought they were wonderful, as I do. Vonnegut also advised (I’m paraphrasing) that you can break all these rules but the first one if you’re good enough, which I find a useful and necessary postscript.

This week’s stories are half good and half terrible so far. The good one is pretty darn good. I don’t know what I’m going to say about the terrible one, because after reading this story, the second this author has shared with the group, I think the writer either needs to write for several more years before the writer can hope to produce anything good or the writer should just give up. That’s the level of terrible. The ideas have promise, but the writer just can’t put together a story. Specific feedback on this story is somewhat pointless.

This has already been an interesting day, and there’s a great deal ahead of me.

Last night I whined a lot (kind of a yucky spectacle now that I think about it) about not knowing what to do with some characters I’ve invented, and BF listened patiently and made suggestions. He gave me ideas that I’m probably going to use. This often happens when I talk through my writing with him, and I feel so guilty every time, because I feel like his help means I’m not writing the book myself from top to bottom (which is what my name on the cover implies I did). Sometimes it takes a village to write a book, I suppose, but the guilt remains. BF himself thinks the guilt is silly. He’s happy that I can use things that he says. He’s not going to use them, he points out, and besides, I’m the one who has to put all the words into sentences and so forth.

He advised me to read the first book of R.A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf trilogy, Homeland, because he said it might give me some insight on how to fill the vast middle of the book with, you know, plot. So I’m reading it. It’s an interesting experience; I pretty much never read pure fantasy and this is my first outing with Salvatore, and I find it addictive, thin, and not ultimately that enjoyable – like Baked Lay’s potato chips. But I can’t stop reading it. It’s also a world that I find really useful, what with the underground cavern, the high-intensity world-building (that aspect, at least, is done very skillfully), and the political intrigue. These are all elements I need to bring to my book.

***

I read a little about Jim Henson the other day, because it occurred to me after watching The Great Muppet Caper for the 80th time (and bursting out in song without intending to for the 77th time) that his vision would have been a difficult one to sell to anyone with the capacity to buy it. “I want to do a prime-time variety show with these goofy puppets. We’ll spin off feature films. They’re not for children, exactly, but they’re really funny and…” Yeah. Get outta my office. But still, he did succeed, spectacularly. And from reading about him it seems like it just took a lot of work, a lot of years of effort, one after another after another, until he did succeed. He was forty before The Muppet Show went on the air.

So even though I feel like 30 is awfully old to have not yet figured this thing out, a routine of life that I can manage and keep at and enjoy for long periods (longer than 4-6 months, anyway), I know that ultimately I’m wrong. It’s all living, even this haphazard thing I’ve done for almost a decade out here in the world; it’s all building something, even if it’s something that shelters only me.

I’m reminded of a scene in Magnolia when Robards’ character is talking about life and regret. He says, in agony, “Life is long. Life isn’t short, life is long!”. I think of that a lot. It seems short, with the bigger sweep of time and history that we know about, but it’s not. It’s long.

From the example of Jim Henson I take with me: always keep plugging, don’t give up, and maybe you’ll realize your dream after all, no matter how insane it seems. (And for God’s sake, if you have an infection that hangs on and gets worse for a couple of weeks, go to the damn hospital. Everyone will miss you terribly if the worst happens.)