Amo, Amas, Amat

 I'm a romance writer, and I've never read a romance novel.

Well, maybe I have, if you count all of the fantasy and horror novels which have both adventure and thrills and smooches and doomed love. And, heck, I've read my fair share of Shakespeare, and goodness knows he showed us quite a bit of passion. And maybe I've read the poetry of Pablo Neruda, and Lorca's plays, and Sharon Olds's "Sex Without Love." Maybe I've watched Moulin Rouge a million times, and Henry and June, and I know I adore Hadestown and Camelot. 

And, well, I spent nearly all of last year reading Harry Potter fanfiction, with its magic and tropes and will-they-or-won't-they. The slow burn fics, hundreds of thousands of words which had me on the edge of my seat, waiting for the big reveal and sudden declarations; the short pieces which were more about, uh, "intimacy," than romance. 

But no, I've thought. Romantic literature is not for me. 

I've written about love, here, and yet love has always been tricky for me. Without a doubt, I've loved my husband for fifteen years, and I love my family more than I can say. I was desperately hungry for love as a child and a teenager, and I looked for it in the typical stupid places, in my peers and my role models and (ugh) a teacher or two. I wanted the kind of love I read about in fanfiction, and I wanted, though I didn't know it, a best friend sort of love. I wanted the platonic just as much as the romantic. And I wanted parental love which was not particularly forthcoming. 

I was hungry, so hungry. 

I'm not sure that ever stops. 

We live in such a strange world, right now, and I think it's easy to feel a lack of love even as we need it more than ever. This country is just hateful, all the time, and the hunger for real affection and intimacy increases. We are isolated, cut off from our usual sources of closeness - friends and coffee shops and grandparents - so of course it all feels worse. Harder. It's very human to feel this way. We are pack animals, even those of us who are quite content with our own company. 

So I've felt that hunger, though there's still a part of me which doesn't fully understand it. I've written a whole darn romance novel, yet a few months into the pandemic I still found myself (oh, I'm embarrassed) googling, "What does it feel like to fall in love?" I should know the answer, right? I've got 80 thousand words on the topic - and, well, I am quite happily married! I guess I still have my own challenges with emotions, but I think that another challenge is the numbness of the pandemic. How is our internal narrative affected by the external - how are our identities, our reliance on others, informed by separation? 

I've realized, through my writing, that so much of love is about the little things. And little things are what we both do and do not have right now. We have this time where we can see little things in a new light - a partner with whom you can sing in the kitchen, or with whom you talk incessantly over a loved TV show. A new puppy and endless walks, or (thinking of my Grandmere's companion, here) an endlessly adorable and constantly terrifying cat. Trips through the Starbucks drive through with family members who just need to get out of the house, gosh darn it. Dinners by the light of a bonfire, togetherness which demands distancing but is still so precious.

A hot bubble bath, skin on skin, or board games, or crying with your closest friends, or giggling with your sibling, anything, anything to keep the connections going, anything to maintain love. To keep the little details which mean - with partners or family or friends or even pets - we are not alone.

There are little things we can't have, of course. I can't sit with my Grandmere, down in her apartment in South Carolina, and talk about anything and everything. I can't invite a weird assortment of friends to Christmas dinner (a family tradition I've been happy to keep). I can't give my best friend a hug. It stings, this loss. I miss those little things.  

I'm lucky, I know. For a girl who needed so much love to a woman who isn't always sure what love means, I am fortunate to have a lot of it. And I still need it, I'm still hungry, because I think it's the only way I'm going to get through the bitterness of the world. I need to learn these ways to love, to love without jealously, without regret, without resentment, without pride. I need to move forward from a foundation of lack to a future of abundance. 

Things are about to get a hell of a lot harder, I think, because the election is coming and who the hell knows what is going to happen. All I want to do is gather my loved ones to me. I want, next Tuesday, to have my people, my closest and most essential people, near, within reach. I want to hold and be held. I want to cook ridiculous food and wear a ridiculous outfit. I want the little things - from kisses which linger to scritches behind the ears of my friends' pups - while we are forced to go through big things. I want to say, yes, I know what love is, and I have it, here, now, always, no matter what.

I guess - it seems like I have sort of figured out the love thing. At least a tiny bit. Enough to get me through - well, I hope it will. I'm trying to squeeze whatever lessons I can get out of the pandemic, and maybe this is the most important and essential of lessons. Because I have to meet the hatred in this country with a deep well of love. Love for my people, for myself, for acquaintances and strangers, for any positive future. I need this. We need this. 

So, heck. Yeah, I read romance, and watch it, and write it, too. I've got love in me, and right now, as our world is falling apart - 

What else do we have? 

     

Grief

 I've been crying every day for a month.

This is neither to be alarming or an alarmist. I am, for the most part, doing quite well. In many ways I've actually been incredibly happy, which has made this daily crying thing all the more vexing. I've been trying to figure it out - I've thought of so many reasons, all of them valid, but it's been very hard to pin down. It is, to put it bluntly, annoying as hell.

I've been doing so many good things. I've begun working out nearly every day, treadmill and strength training. I'm writing, some of it passable, and I'm eating, some of it healthy. I've been spending precious time with my husband, talking and holding and supporting. I've been able to see some friends, albeit at a distance, and have phone calls with others. I've been reveling in love, familiar and new. 

But I've also been feeling a profound and unrelenting grief, and it is so hard to bear. 

I don't know how much grief I have actually experienced in my life. I don't have a lot of practice, and sometimes I'm not sure if I am fully capable. I mourned and continue to mourn the passing of my grandpa last year, and I miss him a lot. I have felt grief for him, I think, and for our family, for the time we won't get. 

I've experienced other deaths and felt many strong feelings but I'm not sure - I don't know if those deaths inspired grief. Sometimes death is just the next step. Sometimes illness is so substantial that death is the best path forward.  

I think there's a page missing in the book of Alice, maybe, which gives the instructions on how to grieve. There are things like that, normal human responses, which don't always make sense to me. I need the step-by-step; I need directions. There's a disconnect between my intellect and my body - I feel pain but I'm practiced at putting it away. And, though I am intimately familiar with my emotions, there are times when I don't really have the words to process what they are or where they've come from. 

So I've been crying for a month and I don't really know why, but it was my husband - not an overly emotional fella himself - who reminded me, Alice, there's still a pandemic on.

Oh. Right.

And it's not just COVID, is it? Our country is a mess. It's horrible. It feels impossible to keep moving through the avalanche of cruelty, impossible to look towards the future with hope when our present threatens to end that future entirely. As I have written before, it's just too big. It's all the time. It's relentless.

I've been doing so many wonderful things in this messed up, in-between time, and as such, I have so much more to lose. And I think I am truly experiencing grief, preemptive, because I'm looking at my life and seeing all the things with which I am unwilling to part. Disaster seems too close, maybe the end of the whole darn world, and I'm thinking about my loved ones and my writing and my treadmill, for goodness sake, and I'm thinking that being so happy hurts.    

Maybe grief can only exist when you know how good life can be. When you are happy - all the way happy. 

I think that grief is probably not an uncommon emotion right now. We're all missing things, silly things like coffee at our favorite cafes, big things like birthdays and anniversaries, routine and delicious things like the Renaissance festival (that would be me) or a family vacation. And in that missing, in that lack, we might be realizing how beautiful life really is. Really should be. It's hard to notice the good stuff when we are living it, and we are - or at least I am - discovering how hard it is to live without it.   

I just don't know how to do this, and I'm not sure if any of us do. It's so prolonged, and it's the world we have to live in every day. It doesn't stop and we cannot stop it. And I - I need directions. I need to know how to make do. Crying every day is just rotten and useless and I hate it and -

Is this what it means to grieve? Does it really feel like this - a pain so deep you can feel it down to your fingertips? Like a bad breakup, like a diagnosis, like a death?

I'm so happy in so many ways, given gifts I never would have imagined pre-pandemic. God, I am so darn lucky. But it seems that one of those gifts is a bitter one, and undesired. Because the pandemic is teaching me, maybe teaching all of us, about loss. About waking up with loss every day, about trying to fall asleep as we long for so many things which are out of reach or gone entirely.

I'm so happy. I'm so impossibly sad. 

And I don't know how to live with that. 

Milestones

Four years.

It's coming up in about a month and a half, so I'm jumping the gun a little, but I'm so excited - I'm hitting four years sober in September. 

It seems like hardly any time at all, and it seems like a lifetime. It's an entire high school or college career, and it's time that goes so fast and days which, sometimes, feel very long. In those four years I have dealt with massive challenges, and there was a time in my life when I thought I could not handle anything on that scale without a drink. I hit six months just as my biological father started home hospice, attended his memorial service a week after eight months, and in the ensuing years I have lost and found myself again and again. 

I didn't know what it was to endure without alcohol. Alcoholism is progressive, and it took two years - ages fifteen to seventeen - to go from a glass of wine with dinner to splitting bottles of vodka on Saturday afternoons. Curing the same-day hangovers with more wine, cheap stuff, jazz on the radio, food on the grill, the muddy purple Baltimore sky, boundaries perpetually crossed. Alcohol was a problem and it was my solution to everything, especially to the deep pain of knowing it was a parent, a guardian, who was passing this problem on to me. Alcohol was love. Alcohol was forgetting.

I've heard, and said, that I'm powerless over alcohol, and it's true - but there's a snarky part of me which thinks, hell no, I was kicking alcohol's butt. I was chewing it up and neglecting to spit it out. I couldn't stop and for a long time I didn't want to, and gosh it was powerful, I felt untouchable, the first drink always tasting like the promise of the next, and the next. I could handle it, another thing I frequently said. I was better than the drink - how else could I drink so much and feel just fine?

But I knew. Of course I did. Because from so early on, drinking was the only thing which made me feel human. I could drown out the bad things, and the anger, and the utter loneliness, because there was the person I loved the most in the whole world, and he mixed a fantastic martini. It was easy to slip into it, a slow slide that felt so elegant, and I just did not have to think. It was a relief. And I knew.  

I'm responsible for all the drinks I took after that, without a doubt. I'm the one who bought vodka and scotch and rye, and I'm the one who drank all that beer, and I created my own world of brewery tours and trips to vineyards and cocktail mixing and anything, anything to make it look better. To make it look fun. That was all me. I was the girl at the party with her own bottle of Bushmills which was nearly empty at the end of the night, the girl who always took her shirt off or kissed other girls or said terrible things. I'm the woman who cried when there wasn't alcohol in the house, when there was no numbness on offer. All of that is my responsibility. I bought the drink, I poured the drink, I drank the drink. 

Again. Again. Again. 

And I had no idea how damned wonderful life could be.

Sobriety is fun. It's hard work, and there are moments when those pains come back, the loneliness, the fear of being unloved, the power dynamics of me against the looming purple sky and looking up to the people I adore, and I think that I know what would make it easier. And then I remember that all things spring from my sobriety. The health of my marriage, and my relationships with my family, and my enjoyment with friends, the words on the page, the tears I finally let fall, the trauma I sit with and allow to heal. All things come from that. From being awake - being fully alive.

My sobriety is a commitment to my body and its functioning, and to my mind and its continuation, and to my raw and wounded heart. My sobriety is the way I laugh with my husband and remember, the next day, what he said, and can smile in that remembrance. My sobriety is taking my sister to see shows on Broadway, no longer counting the breaths between each drink, no longer itching with a need I feel I can't control. My sobriety is evenings spent with my best friend when I tell her every stupid feeling I have, when she shares her life with me, and it's healthy, and it makes me whole. My sobriety is vacation with my in-laws, and weekends in Baltimore or Philadelphia or New Orleans, and quiet days on the back deck when my husband and I share the best bits of our favorite books.  

It is sobriety, now, which is love.

And I have so much love. I'm boiling over with it. It hurts, sometimes, to face love, especially when it used to come from the bottom of a pitcher of martinis. Especially when it was permissiveness; especially when it was abuse. It hurts to trust that I'm worthy of love when it doesn't come with such a terrible price, with hangovers, with a desperate acceptance that it will never, ever, be enough. With the knowledge that it is sickness. Sickness was what I knew, and it was easier, and I wasn't at risk in the way I am now - a self exposed, a self unbound, a clarity of focus, an admittance that yes, I love, and I love, and I love.  

What I grew up with wasn't love. 

What I deserve, is. 

And I couldn't understand that until I got sober. 

So yes, everything springs from that. I'm hitting four years, and there are some days which are so dreadfully long. I have a catalog of moments when I'm so scared and angry and broken, and I think I can't keep going, but I know, of course, that I have to. There are times when I look at my loved ones and I think that there's no way they could possibly love me the way I love them, and I taste absinthe in my mouth - and there are horrible hours when I feel like I'm such a monster, because how else could this have happened to me, and I remember the burn of citron vodka. 

But most days are such incredible joys. Because I have my husband, my darling partner - and my sister, and my friends, and such beautiful family. Because I'm here. I am alive. And some of that impossible, all-powerful, agonizing and indescribable love - 

I keep that for myself. 

The Joyful Nihilist

It's all too big.

It's easy to feel right now that the world is ending, but that feeling is in some ways incredibly naive. The world has been ending for quite some time - by which I mean that systems of oppression and injustice have always existed, and the deep selfishness and anti-intellectualism of conservatism has always been there, and the religious right has always been dreadfully wrong, and the rich want to get richer, and whiteness yearns to preserve itself, and on, and on, and on. It's been like this. 

Right now we've got this... pandemic situation... which has highlighted the entire unholy mess. Communities plagued by inequality are hit hardest. People who cling to Evangelical nonsense trust their fictional white Jesus more than they do living, breathing scientists. Conservatives foment the hatred they've bred into the populace with shoddy education and dishonesty and racism and every other damn thing, every method of subjugating the people who seem to vote for them, anyway. 

Oh, hell. If you haven't caught on, I am just really, really done.

It's too big, and I'm done with trying to say this stuff in nice ways. It's beyond our capacities to comprehend, and I'm not bothering with the layers of politesse which have covered up my true opinions. My anger. It's so damned much, and I seem to have decided to live my life with integrity. Heck. 

I feel like we are really on the edge, folks. I know I am, and yet I'm deadly calm - I can't tell if that's a bipolar thing or a PTSD thing or simply a decision I've made to put things away. My husband goes to work, mask on, and I have the opportunity to worry about COVID, and I tuck that into a little box and type my overwrought romance. I spend some time with family, and I'm so happy to see them, and I'm worried, worried, worried, and I bury that somewhere under a giant rock, a label scratched on, here lies anxiety. It went straight to hell. I see my best friends at an appropriate distance and God, how I've missed them, and it's sad, and I put that sadness at the end of my pen and I scribble it away in my dreadful handwriting. 

I have my little bubble of people, some of whom I can call, some see, some touch, and under it all is this swift current, this voice, this whisper, here we are at the end of the world, and wouldn't it be nice to just... 

Be. 

I wonder what that's like?

I'm done, I've been done. I just don't have it in me to care about stupid things anymore. I don't have the energy. I've spent so long trying to detach from toxic people and I thought it was so hard and here I am and I just do not, cannot care. I've struggled with elements of my identity, some public, some private, and I've been mad at myself for things I can't change, and dear God, yes, this is who I am, so I'd better live it. 

I don't know how long I have. I do not know how long our country has. Our world. Does that sound extreme? How could it? Between COVID and climate change, white supremacy, fascism, voter suppression, honest to God secret police grabbing people off the street... Yeah. It's not that crazy to think that whatever we've known about our lives is about to change. 

In some ways, it had better. 

I didn't know who I'd be on the other side of the pandemic, and I still don't know. I can tell you that I am already a fundamentally different person while also being the most "Alice" I have ever been. I love more; I know I have so much more love in me than I realized. I'm a bigger person on the inside but with better boundaries. I've written ridiculously romantic dreck and called some of it good. I've had so many more deep conversations with my husband - which is just flat out amazing, I think - and I've forged other bonds which nourish me. I'm lucky. I'm extraordinarily privileged.

The world is ending. 

The world is ending and I'm here, I'm living it, I'm so damned fortunate, and I'm always taking my meds, and I put my worries in a box, and I love and make love and I write, write, write. 

What is the word for having so much hope when there is none?   

I'm going to do what I can do. Donate, vote, have tough conversations, educate myself. I'm not saying goodbye to the idea of a better world - I am invested in this one - but I've realized how many things I've needed to give up, how many layers to unwrap, in order to really live my own life. The image I had of myself was incomplete. Disaster has forged a newness I'd been craving for such a long time. 

It's just all so big. All the scary things, and the bad things, and the worries down under heavy rocks. I'm so small in comparison.

But I won't make myself small. Not for anyone. Not for myself.

Not anymore. 

Who We Are in the Quarantine

I like to talk to cashiers at the grocery store.

Ask anyone who knows me, and the first word that might come to mind when describing my social habits would probably be, "introvert." And it's true - I am quiet, and shy, and I get pretty drained by spending time with others. I thought introversion was an unchangeable part of my personality; I grew up alone, a lot of the time, and loneliness is sometimes more comforting than togetherness. I tend to protect my soft heart with a hard shell of long-accustomed isolation. It's easier that way.  

And people - even the people I love - are exhausting. This isn't a complaint, really, but an acknowledgment of the rich complications of everyone's existence. Everyone has their own body language, their own speech patterns, scents, subtext, subconscious insecurities. And I'm a sensitive person. I pick up on all of those little nuances and my brain tries to interpret them - I want to get it right, say the right things, offer the appropriate emotional response. I want to be able to give up what people need. 

Social exchange is difficult for me, especially when there's not some pre-approved script. I think that's why I like chatting to cashiers. I can make conversation within the allotted time, maybe throw in a few compliments, genuine interest in their day, and the exchange is successful. I am not responsible for the remainder of their shift, but maybe I can give them a little smile, a little warmth. My tender insides are untouched, and I've remained safe in the shallowness of small talk. 

Now, of course, the world has been ripped apart, and my social habits are totally thrown off. I don't go to the grocery store, or the mall, or the dry cleaners, and I've realized how much I have come to depend on that feeling of, yeah, I've talked to someone, and it went well. And I've been surprised to learn how much I need people in my day, in my ongoing existence. 

I've found myself chatting with three to four people a day - friends, family, my husband who is lucky enough to be able to stay home. Sometimes we talk about nothing in particular, and sometimes we share our fears, our hopes of how and when this will end. My mom and I trade funny pictures and comments about our eating habits; my college best friend coaches me through my anxieties and I listen to hers; I hear from other friends about what it's like to do this quarantine business with their kids. I've grown closer to people who entered into my life right before this all began; there's an intimacy to this enforced separation, as if we can and must share the deepest parts of ourselves. There's still this abstraction of distance, but in some ways I am open and raw. 

It turns out that maybe I'm not such an introvert, after all.     

Identity is a tricky thing. I thought that my concept of who I am was based on this structure of introversion - I thought that being alone was my natural state. But the quarantine has revealed another part of me. And it makes me wonder how many of us have uncovered new facets of our identities. We might be confident in who we are when the world looks as it should, as it always has; but maybe when everything is so vastly different we find within us very different selves. 

Who are we when our lives are normal? Who do we become when they're not?

This sense of captivity has made me rebel against myself. In isolation, I desire connection. A friend commented that I might really be ready to go out and have fun when this is all over; I think she's probably right. At least I hope so - I hope I've learned this lesson. I want to be with all of those complicated people with their own secret lives, secret selves, and maybe I won't worry so much about "appropriate social exchange." Maybe I'll let myself think that my friends and family want me in all of my weirdness just as much as I want them. 

And there are parts of me which have remained very much the same - Star Trek and long philosophical conversations with my husband, and complex makeup looks to start my day, dressing up and taking ridiculous selfies, strong coffee, loud music, holing up in my playroom (the guest bedroom that houses my vanity and gowns and garb) and writing overwrought nonsense. Those bits of me are unchangeable, it turns out. 

But I've made an incredible discovery - this need for other people. And as scary as the world is, I'm grateful. I've got so much love to give, far more than I knew. I'm not Alice-the-introvert anymore. I'm a friend and a daughter, a sister and a granddaughter, a wife and a partner. What a gift, this lesson. Such a wonderful thing to learn - that I don't always need to be alone.  

I'm looking towards the future, and I'm anticipating living up to this change in who I am. I think that when the doors open and the world is healed and we are set free, I'll set myself free, too. I won't worry about doing it properly or perfectly with a script pre-approved.

Because finally my hard shell has cracked, my soft heart is exposed, and I've found a new self to honor.      

And I am ready to yield up my love.  

Hope and Hospitality

I keep thinking about a party.

I'm a bit peculiar, I guess. I have this strong urge towards hospitality - some latent Irish genetic code making itself known - and I crave the sweetness of using the beautiful dishes and silver passed down through my family, from my Grandmere to me. I like doing things well; I love hostessing, my outfit just as ridiculously over the top as the mounds of food I want to serve my guests. My cheese boards alone could make a grown woman weep. Anyway, maybe I'm some housewife stereotype, but without a doubt, I'm an odd duck.

Five weeks - that's the number I've got stuck in my head for how long I'm supposed to be sequestered in my house. Maryland is shut down through the end of April, and while I'd like to believe the world will have righted itself by then, I know I have to mentally prepare myself for the possibility - probability - that there are more weeks of isolation to follow. The virus won't magically go away, and as long as there are foolish, selfish people determined to flout safety measures, all of us are at risk. But I'm clinging to those five weeks. For now, five weeks are the difference between me feeling trapped and me delighting in anticipation.

Because I do anticipate - I keep making plans, places to go and people to see. I think that's the only reasonable course of action, the only thing that'll keep us sane. We should look towards the future. We should hold onto the things we love. I miss my family so badly, even though they're a five minute drive away; I need a big hug from my closest friends. But I'll see them, I will, in the future which simply has to come.

So I'm thinking about a party. I'm thinking about grilling steaks and broiling mini crab cakes, and making my killer ghost pepper dip, and serving brightly colored mocktails, and playing my favorite albums. Doors and windows open, the whole house flowing with fresh air. I'm thinking about a mismatched conglomeration of friends and family and the hunger that we'll have, maybe, to socialize when we haven't for so long. My husband's board game group, my college companions, old friends and new friends and my nineteen year old sister and my extremely introverted parents. People I fall in love with more and more as they seem, now, so much further away.

And right now - now I feel grief, though I'm adjusting. I already had plans, you know? Just a few weeks ago I was meeting new people and doing new things, and I had enough focus to dig into my fiction. I'm not trying to shove myself into the very real grief of those who have lost loved ones to this vicious virus. I just... I think there is mourning for all of us. For the future we thought we'd have. The months spent caged by circumstance and anxiety. Powerlessness.

And idleness. There's a sort of consensus among the people I've talked to that we are experiencing a constant state of arousal cocooned in an unrelenting nothingness. The world is scary, and we are on alert - at the same time we are locked in our homes with not a whole hell of a lot to do. It's strange. We're not meant to be like this, as if we drank far too much coffee and then downed a couple Valiums, experiencing both to their full extents. And there's so much love, so much passion, so much desperate care, and we remain divided. Separate. All the feelings and none.

A very real threat of illness and death. Netflix, junk food, time spent on the couch.

Life continues. We pray that it does.

So in four weeks I'm going to polish all the silver. As soon as the weather turns, the screens are going in the windows, and I'll keep the house open as long as I like. I'll clean off the decks and wipe down the outdoor furniture. I'll plan some menus. Hell, maybe I'll iron the napkins (okay, Alice, let's not go too crazy). I need these things. Beautiful things, living things, nonsense that is a part of me.

Because I want to have a party - a big, no-holds-barred, high heels until they hurt, so much food I could burst, John Coltrane and David Bowie mess of a party. Laughing and maybe crying and choosing not to hide in the kitchen, for once. And it may seem shallow, but these things, this mad planning, this simple and sweet hope - that's what's going to get us through.

I hope you'll make plans, too. And pencil me in, whether it's in five weeks or a few months -

Because you'd better believe you're invited.         

Bad Darn Day

Man, this stuff is rough.

I got up at 6:30 this morning, did my usual stumble to the kitchen followed by the caffeine-addict clutching of my moka pot, checked the internet while it bubbled away. I went through the typical motions, wrapped up in my Harry Potter bathrobe (Slytherin green, of course) and tucked under the beautifully crocheted blanket given me by my mother in law. I did everything in order - Facebook first, then twitter, then tumblr. It's been like any other morning, nothing remarkable about it.

But, you know, the world is on fire.

I'm feeling "hung over" this morning. I got triggered by something I watched last night and had an hour long meltdown, of which I am not particularly proud. Crying used to be a lot more common when I drank - now I can go weeks without getting to that level of upset. So perhaps I've formed some sort of association: if I cry at night, my body and mind think I've been drinking.

Thank God I'm not. Everything would be so much worse.

Anyway, I feel horrible. I know I'm not the only one. I've seen a lot online from other people dealing with PTSD - this social distancing, plus the feeling of impending doom, feels a lot like trauma. It is trauma, really; the world is falling apart. We're forced into a posture of grief.

I keep thinking about the role of our leaders - cough, Trump, cough - and how I feel particularly powerless. The people who are supposed to care for us simply aren't, they don't, and that's pretty damned familiar. So every day ends up feeling like - like we're back there. In the unsafe place. Our political "father figure" is... a person too well-known.

I spend a lot of time feeling as if there is poison inside of me, a toxicity planted there against my will but staining my insides all the same. I'm a carrier of this thing, the sick thing - gosh, that sounds a little like what's going on now, doesn't it? And most days I carry it with a sort of pride, a strength, or at least I try to; I make different choices, choices to love and care and preserve, and I recognize the beauty in those acts of compassion and grace. Humanity.

But right now I feel the poison in me. I wonder if I'm already carrying the virus, and I wonder if, in moments when my mental health suffers, I'll spread a different kind of sickness. I wonder if I'll hurt other people, my greatest fear. I wonder if I'm capable of love, even though the proof is there - marriage, family, friendship. I don't feel like a person. I feel like a pandemic.

This stuff is hard for everyone. No matter how well we're handling it, this is a huge change in our lives. We probably all have morning routines - coffee or showers or hitting the snooze button - and we're probably doing our best to stick to those routines. We've got Zoom meetings and happy hours, and phone calls, and texting. We exercise if we can. We adjust; we are adaptable. And heck, maybe we're doing more creative cooking, or journaling a bit more, making little bits of progress we didn't have time for before.

But I think I can safely say that there are some parts of us, even if they're little parts, which are suffering. I watched an episode of one of my favorite shows - something I've seen, what, maybe six times before? - and had an emotional flashback from hell. The day before I woke up from a nap and smelled the place where I grew up, and I was terrified. Every day I worry that all of that will arise from within me and harm the people I love. Typhoid Alice.

I meant to write about something else today - still on this topic but with a more optimistic spin. I wanted to write about the idea that trauma is an explanation for behavior but not an excuse, about the anger I have to accept and then release, about the hard work that I'm happy to do to be so easily kind and sweet and responsible. And of course I am those things, I'm just...

I'm really struggling today. I've got a hangover from a virus I can't control and a childhood I wish I could forget. I see the president's face and it looks like someone else's. And other days will be better, no doubt; other days may be worse, but I sure as hell hope not.

I do have friends and family at the other end of the telephone, and I've got pretty much the best husband in the entire universe; I've got Star Trek and Miss Fisher and Kushiel's Dart and so much glittery eye shadow, I swear to God. Music played at maximum volume. Chocolate and Cheetos. Pajamas and lingerie. Perfume. Bodices. Corsets. Hot baths with coconut oil.

I'm just, right this minute, a bit of a mess. I need to accept that, give myself the compassion and understanding that I'm always giving to others. I need to write even if it's an act of processing rather than creation, and I need to keep eating even if it's junk, sometimes. I need to convince myself that the sickness I feel inside was not my fault and that I am not in any way giving it to others.

But man, this stuff is rough. It is probably going to be rough for months. Me and my coffee and the routines which keep me grounded. Keep me safe.

I'm doing my best.       

Constitutionally Capable

I haven't seen 3:00 AM in years.

There's a particular type of quiet which exists in the early hours of the morning. Some might call that time peaceful - a calming solitude - but I've always known different. 3:00 in the morning is not when you're alone but when you're alone with yourself, and that self might be a scary person.

I've filled those hours with prayers and I've filled them with erotic fiction - with music, with wildness. I've seen so many of those mornings and I've seen the hours pass; in my first year of college I'd wait, shaking and wiped clean, until the grocery store down the street opened at 6:00. I'd gather ingredients for a gourmet dinner to be cooked and served for my then-boyfriend, acting out a particular fantasy of bohemia and housewifery.

I was so young and already so exhausted. I wanted to be myself; I wanted to be someone else.

Later, 3:00 was around the time I'd be watching some tragic or artsy film - usually, "Brokeback Mountain," or, "Henry and June" - and I was alone with deep and enduring heartbreak. Secrets and lovemaking and doomed affairs and me, happily partnered, crying, feeling the after-effects of people and events I could barely remember.

And then came a different sort of 3:00 - the hangover which arrived too soon.

I knew true exhaustion, then. I knew an unquenchable thirst, standing in front of the fridge and sucking down whatever cold liquid existed therein, praying, yet again, to a God which might not be listening or might not be there at all. I promise, I'd mumble, desperate - I promise I won't do this again. 

Just let me live through the night. Tomorrow, I will do better.

I never did.

It's kind of funny, telling people that I'm a recovering alcoholic at my relatively young age. I've actually gotten some incredulous responses - how could you know, I've been asked, young as you are? I'll tell you, 3:00 in the morning let me know for sure. I've been drunk in the early hours since I was sixteen or so, and I was probably seventeen when I knew I had a problem. Then I really was young, staring in the mirror at my wine-blue lips, and I'd think, ah, the hell with it. I flirted with my mortality, bating it like a bear on a chain.

When I first got sober, I was pretty scared to admit publicly that I was an alcoholic. I lived with that secret for such a long time - nobody knew. Fifteen years of steady drinking - my tolerance ridiculously high since splitting pitchers of martinis when I was a teenager - meant that I didn't black out. I rarely got sick. No one was with me at 3:00; that time was my own. It was between me and God.

I never drank before or during work, and I never got in the car if I had been drinking. The idea of being around children while intoxicated was so repulsive to me, for some pretty obvious reasons, so I was sober and effective and safe. I don't say this to brag, or to say I was some sort of "good" alcoholic. Actually, I think it's another layer of this disorder - the rules we make as alcoholics which keep us from the truth.

But 4:30 in the afternoon always came - or whenever I returned home after work - and despite my 3:00 promises I found myself mixing one of my killer cocktails. I hated myself and hated myself and when I looked in the mirror I didn't see wine-blue lips anymore - I saw the person who introduced me to this life, and I hated myself all the more.

The only person who is responsible for taking a drink is me. I know that to be true. I also know that 3:00 in the morning is a shared time of shame, passed down, communicable. It's erotica, and sad movies, and things you can't remember - it's re-enactment.

I haven't seen that time in years, and I am beyond grateful. Sobriety is the best gift I've ever given myself and the people around me. I'm alive. Ha, I am so alive! I don't blur my edges anymore; I've had to learn to live with them. Life can be such a pain in the tush, but it is so, so much easier to heal that pain when I allow it to exist. I don't swallow it, pressing it down in layers of anger and despair and rye whiskey. I don't hide from it, and I don't hide it from others.

It's taken me a while to be okay with saying these words. I do feel a sort of responsibility, now, because I have some sense of what it feels like to be an active alcoholic, secretive and ashamed - I think my honesty might be important for someone else. Even if it's helpful for one person, just one, I've done something good. My honesty is a form of amends, I guess. I hid in the shadows. I've got to let the light in.

I could talk a little bit about the stigma against addicts, but I bet you know all about that already. I'll bet that, even if you're compassionate and open-minded, you have some notions of "weak will" and "self control." I'm not saying that to be mean, but non-addicts will never truly know what this feels like. It's not about taking a drink. It's not about the drink feeling good, because eventually it really doesn't. It's not about parties or happy hours or champagne toasts at weddings. If you are capable of putting a glass down then you just don't have this perspective. Count yourself lucky. I hope you'll be kind to those of us who have to put every glass down forever for the rest of our lives.

Some of us can't be open about this because of the stigma. Some don't want to. And that's okay, it's a personal choice, but maybe, reader, you should think about what you say and how you say it. We hear you.

I don't regret being an alcoholic - I think that's part of how I can speak so openly here - but I do regret the years I spent hiding. I regret feeling like I needed to have a drink in order to live. I regret the dishonesty. I regret the damage I did to my body. But I am so thrilled that I get to experience sobriety and that I get to know what it means. I'm not sad. I rejoice.

At 3:00 in the morning, I am asleep. I'm snuggled up next to my husband - and the next day, dinner will still get made, and I'll be that bohemian housewife. I'll read and write racy stories. I'll watch sad movies at appropriate times. I will be me, and I won't be anyone else. Now, I look at my reflection and marvel at this person in focus - this person un-blurred. I'll be in recovery every single day, and every day will hold this promise, this strength not of will but of love. Self-love. Love for everyone around me.     

I am an alcoholic. I'm in recovery, and that work will never end.

But now, I sleep just fine.

Deep Breaths

Christ on a cracker.

(Well, if you went to the same kind of churches as I did growing up, Christ was a cracker.)

I'm definitely unsettled at the moment, to put it mildly. I don't know what your process is as we consume news about covid-19, but I've found myself refreshing twitter and double-checking Facebook far more than I ever have before. I think that that's what a therapist might call unhealthy mental hygiene - they would be right.  

I am prone to anxiety. That's just a fact of life. Before I was diagnosed with C-PTSD, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder - both names for a constant state of hyper-arousal (fight, flight, freeze) which can lead to some pretty epic meltdowns. I've been that way my whole life; my anxiety seemed to arrive in bouts of intense, terrifying nausea when I was a child, and after my grandfather's illness when I was nearing 20 years old, I developed some truly un-fun medical anxiety. I can't stand to be around a man yelling - my husband, frustrated while putting in the storm windows, learned that the hard way - and going to the doctor is an exercise in trying not to run away.

Which I kind of still do, whenever there's a needle involved.

Both of those have subsided in the past year or so since I began separating myself from toxic situations and committing to the hard work of therapy. But anxiety is a part of the way my brain works - the function of my dysfunction. My brain is literally, physically different than other people's brains. Does that make me lesser, or broken? Not a bit. But it means I have to learn to cope with things which other people might shrug off.

Enter the coronavirus.

Christ, I repeat, on a cracker.

I think we all have some anxieties in life. Maybe you get nervous talking to large groups, or get a bit of jitters on a first date; maybe you feel a spike in your blood pressure when you go to the doctor's office, or perhaps you worry when someone doesn't answer your call. These are all pretty typical things, acceptable things - oh yeah, a friend might say, I feel that way too. And those anxieties might ebb and flow over the course of your life. If you've endured a stressful event, you might feel them more; if life is going well, you might feel them less.

But what do we, as a society, do when there is a tangible public health emergency? And how do we approach those of us who might experience a serious surge of their anxieties?

I'm not sure if it's possible to convey what this feels like. I've seen some writers joke that they're more prepared for mass anxiety because they deal with their own personal anxiety every day. I've also seen commentary on how covid-19 - and the reminders for frequent hand-washing - is making OCD symptoms and behaviors a hell of a lot worse. PTSD and hyper-arousal - ready to run, ready to fight, ready to hide - feels rather more urgent given the threat of lock down or sickness or death. And, an added bonus as an alcoholic, I've got my face rubbed in all of the people not-really-joking, time to hit the liquor store!

And we're told to practice social distancing - creating isolation for ourselves - and some of us have gotten pretty good at that already. But, at the same time, isolation can make anxiety echo, because we are living not in the world but in our own minds. All I want to do is reach out and get big hugs from my friends, right now, but I've gotta keep a six foot distance.

I know I'm not alone in worrying, and I don't want to downplay the worries of neurotypical people who might be facing intense anxiety for the first time. We're all dealing with this in our own ways. It is, I should mention, much more difficult to cope with when we know we can't trust our own government - and the coronavirus is just the cherry on top of that particular sundae. Many of us have been anxious since 2016, I can tell you that.

So it sucks all around.

My brain works differently. My brain never really learned what it meant to feel secure. My brain has patterns, grooves of trauma and maladaptive reactions, and my brain got used to using alcohol to numb those reactions. I am just better at worrying than I am at not. Again, does that mean there's something wrong with me as a person? Hell no. I think I've got a bit of an edge, actually, because when I feel anxiety I know what it is. I forgive myself - I care for myself.

I hope you will, too. I hope that if you're worried right now, you will give yourself the space to be worried. Some people might laugh or tease or make fun - but it is totally rational to be scared of scary things. We are totally reasonable when we practice social distancing and we are totally understandable if we need that hot bath with epsom salts. Hell, I did hit the liquor store for my non-alcoholic Cabernet and I will be having a glass this evening (disclaimer: please don't do this if it would be too difficult in your recovery).

We need to take care of our mental health just as we preserve our physical health. We need to eat healthy food and we need to be kind to ourselves as we nibble on chocolate. We need water, we need a bit of sunlight, we need to laugh, we need to have a good cry if it would help.  

We need to give understanding and compassion to ourselves - and always to each other.

Worry is a part of life. I'm basically a pro, but we've all been there, I think. As we cope with this rapidly evolving situation, I hope that we can take any chance possible to share ourselves - calls, texts, messages, whatever - and say, hey, I'm here. I'm feeling this too.

Being anxious is normal - so let's get through this anxiety together.

Soundtrack of the Self

Our lives are told and written and bound in art.

I wake up every morning with music in my head. While I was teaching, it was, "I'm a Little Teapot," and, "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider," just as often as it was, "Five Years," by David Bowie. Now that I'm out of the preschool world, my musical repertoire has expanded again, and I spend those first few moments - waiting for the coffee to brew - haunted by melody, chord progression, the odd lyric or two. Music never leaves my head. Sometimes I need to turn on the radio just to get some peace.

It can be loud and irritating, or it can be soft and seductive, my heartbeat counting out the measures of notes half-recalled. Music is in me every day, and it would be easy to say that that quality comes from my family - musicians all - but I think it comes from somewhere else.

We all interact with music.

Recently, on Facebook, I posed a question regarding how my friends might listen to music. Did they listen to a whole album as one piece of art, or as individual songs, or some combination of both? I was wondering how the state of music today - digital, downloadable, streamed according to curated playlists - might affect the way we perceive music. Growing up, I listened to albums and memorized them all, the order of the songs, the way a story was told. Now, totally addicted to Spotify, I've created playlists for every mood, David Bowie lined up next to Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel and Fiona Apple and Frank Sinatra.

My playlists are a part of my identity. They tell the story of me.

Most of the respondents to my question said that they listened to both albums and individual songs. I'd wager that if my friend group skewed younger, most of the responses would be option B - we don't even buy CDs anymore, let alone LPs, so I think we've grown accustomed to grabbing songs one by one. Liner notes are gone; those hours I spent scanning tiny printed lyrics are obsolete.

So the way we interact with music may be changing - or it may reflect the way we've always been. We might have always chosen to experience whole albums as long stories as well as buzzing with the thrill of that one song which really seemed to get who we are inside. What is undoubtedly unchanged is that music is a constant.

I'm a big fan of the idea that music is accessible to all of us. It's available to all of us. We experience music in mundane moments - commercials, the grocery store, the doctor's office - and we experience it in profound ways, even if we don't notice it. Movies and television shows couldn't exist without music, even if we only perceive that subconsciously. The story-telling world of visual media is endlessly enriched by scores and soundtracks. Hans Zimmer is just as much an artist as Beethoven. Peter Gabriel's cover of David Bowie's, "Heroes," defines the urgent and chilling mood of Netflix's, "Stranger Things."

But so often - too, too often - music is seen as the purview of only a few. Of only the "talented." The same goes for theatre, for visual art, for dance. We've made a society which limits us because not every child can perform, innately. And it's patently ridiculous.

Music is emotion, music is a lodestone. It doesn't matter if you can name chords or identify instruments in a symphony - it doesn't matter if you had piano lessons or played in your elementary school band - music is where our souls rest. Where we rejoice - where we are truly alive. Maybe the only way you hear music is in jingles or pop songs played low on the radio - it doesn't matter. Music is a part of us.

I'm lucky because I grew up with so much music around me. Choral music at church, and pop with my mom in the car; jazz on long golden afternoons, rock and roll with my dad. I had Ravel coming out of my fingers and I had Johnny Cash cocooning me in the wet heat of Baltimore summers. It was never something I questioned; it was a given. So yeah, I have that innate thing, the genetic predisposition, but mostly I was raised in music. I was nurtured. But so many kids aren't. So many kids aren't allowed to participate in music because they can't quite carry a tune.

It drives me absolutely bonkers. It's the same with Shakespeare, for me - an art form that is so easily accessed when it is taught early. Art is how we are human beings, and we are all human beings; we share in emotion, and art gives us the language to express that. It's plain old snotty to say that some people deserve that and some people don't.

I don't expect that everyone in the whole world will choose to be a musician as their profession. But I do think that we are all musicians in our own ways. I got a lot of responses to my Facebook question - and none of them were, I hate music. None of those responses indicated that music wasn't something which had value. Whether we listen to a whole album or a handful of songs - whether we see our identities reflected in our playlists or just enjoy dancing around the kitchen - we are all a part of music, and music is a part of us. It belongs to all of us.

Snobbery has no place, there. Exclusion is useless and cruel. Shoddy education is injustice. We don't have to like everything, or be good at everything, or be comfortable singing anywhere other than the shower. But no child, no adult, should feel like they can't make music their own form of speech. Of self-knowledge. A soundtrack of our selves, living. 

We should argue passionately with each other with the percussion of symphonic metal, and we should flirt with the wailing of Janis Joplin; we should mourn with requiems, we should confess our deepest truths with Jacques Brel. Whatever our music of choice - whatever's got us buzzing - we should remember that we all speak this language. We should silence no one. We should welcome all.

I wake up with music in my head, and it annoys me to no end. Music won't leave me alone. But I turn on a playlist, or an album, or the radio, and I cram new music in there, and I breathe into it. I make the coffee, I write the words, I take a bath, I put on makeup, and the music keeps going. Here, I think - here is how we are commonly human.

Here is the story of our lives.         

Ink and Ownership

I like scars.

When I was in fourth grade, I got some sort of injury on my right calf. I made a decision - spurred on by the toughness of my hero, Xena: Warrior Princess - to pick at the injury repeatedly, giving myself a shiny new scar. Here I am, I thought - damaged, but living. I have a faint scar on my left thigh from where I rolled over onto a broken Christmas ornament; I have one little mark below my eyebrow from the time I ran face first into a teacher at lunch, smacked over my eye by a bowl of mashed potatoes (go ahead and laugh). In high school, I cut my right hipbone, and there remains a white line, pillowed and soft seventeen years later.

I have outside scars and I have inside scars, and the inside scars are harder to live with. I think often about that nine year old girl and her quest to leave a mark on pale, fresh skin. What was I saying with that desire to permanently injure myself? I felt like I had been through so many battles; I wanted proof. 

I have new scars, now - scars which I put there. Scars which, like the mark on my calf, ground me in my body and give evidence of my strength.  

On the inside of my right forearm I have a tattoo - four words in script, "Turn on with me," a quotation from a David Bowie song. On the inside of my left bicep I have another - a red carnation, the twin of the same on my sister's arm, denoting our connection and love for each other. And along the surface of my back I have a gigantic tattoo, almost from my hips to my neck, stretching across my shoulders, and I've been planning that art since I was fifteen years old. 

That tattoo took about ten hours of work over two sessions. The first session was just the black outlines, the structure, and the second was color and shading. Yes, it hurt. It cost money. It required weeks of healing and inconvenience, my husband washing and applying lotion to the areas I couldn't reach. 

All of these have been completed since May of last year - if you're counting, that's three tattoos in about nine months. Lest there be any doubt, I love getting tattoos, and I intend to get more. I'm not sure, exactly, what other designs I want. But yes, I anticipate many more hours in the tattoo artist's chair.    

These new scars have set me free.

I've wanted tattoos my whole life and I've been downright terrified to get them. I'm not sure if I was worried about the pain - whatever happened to that little girl who made her own wounds? - but I was for sure scared of going against the values of my family. I always have been, even as I have vehemently, though internally, disagreed. Sometimes it felt like my family's ethos was the word of God, unimpeachable and irrefutable. I didn't want their judgment, ever - I didn't want them to stop loving me. But in May of last year, I woke up, got in my car, drove into Baltimore, walked into the Tattoo Museum in Fells Point, and started a new phase of my life. 

It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

Tattoos are productive scars. They don't just show pain but a creative determination. I have sat in the chair for nearly twelve hours, now; no one else did it for me. Artists did the work, but I made the choice. I yielded so that I might survive in a new way - survive visibly, undeniably. That process can never be taken away from me. 

There's a sense of camouflage which comes with assenting to things you don't agree with. It's dishonest to make yourself so invisible - it's a covering of who you are to try to only please others. That, I think, leaves a deeper mark than needle and ink ever can. For so many years I lied to myself, pretending that everything was okay, pretending I should or even could be what other people wanted me to be. It was a silent cutting, a hidden bloodletting. As I refrained from pursuing this interest - tattooing - I also refrained from being myself on a broader scale. This little thing was a part of a much bigger thing.

From the moment that first needle pierced my skin, I knew I was making a personal choice that was both visible and irreversible. And it was deeply personal - it wasn't really an act of rebellion but an act of the self, declared. It was a huge relief, a burden lifted. And once I got that tattoo, I found it easier to build boundaries, to believe in my self-worth. I shook myself free of the familial word of God.

And there's a bigger picture, much bigger than the dialogue between family members and myself. I mentioned internal scars - a lot of those scars derive from bad things which have happened to my body. And as a woman, my body has been harmed by our society, too; I am an object, sometimes, more than I am a person. My body is gazed upon and legislated and measured and weighed. The worth of my body is lessened with age - it was seen as more valuable when it was immature. My body was coveted, regarded hungrily by strangers since I was twelve; my body, grown larger, was derided. My body has been political. On some days, my body belonged to everyone but myself.

But now it bears my marks. 

I'm so much happier now. 

I can't honestly say that's all down to my tattoos, of course. I've been doing a tremendous amount of work - going to therapy, writing thousands of words, making new friends. I've been teaching myself how to say no. But I do have these new scars to be worn with pride. Scars that will never be hidden. Here I am - willfully and beautifully damaged, but living.

Do I love my family less? Of course not! Do I prioritize my own happiness? You bet your butt! Am I still a part of a society which strives to own me? Unfortunately, yes, sometimes even more so now that I'm thin again. It's complicated. And, I'll tell you, people have just as many opinions about tattoos as they do the ratio of my hips to waist. But somehow, in getting these colorful markings, I care a heck of a lot less. My pain is my choice; my endurance is my apotheosis.           

I was nine years old when I made a scar on purpose. I still have that scar; I don't like it as much as I thought I would. I thought I knew, then, how strong I could be - how strong I had to be. I've had to be much stronger. I've been small and large, externally and internally; I've been possessed, I've been captive. But I think about the Alice who felt like a hardened warrior princess, and I think about what she might think of me, now. If she'd look at these new scars and see them as I do - proof. Evidence. 

Freedom. 

So get ready, world, because I'm not finished. Not finished talking, or writing, or inking my skin. If I've got to carry these internal scars, then you've got to witness the external ones. I will never cover up. Look away if you want to -

But the scars remain.

And these, I put there.

A Rose is a Rose

Grandpere shared a lot with me in the year before his passing - stories of family, of friends, of his fatherhood. He taught me how to balance a checkbook and helped me sort through photographs. Up on the third floor of that Victorian row home, Grandpere cracked open his life for me. 

I remember so many of those stories - mostly brief and fragmented, now, but he was my grandpere, and I listened. One of the little bits - hardly a story - that he conveyed was the way that some people whispered, never spoke aloud, the word, cancer. As if it were a secret, a hidden shame, uncouth and unacceptable. As if the thing growing in him were more frightening in the naming than in the living.  

I was angered by that. It seemed disgusting and foolish, an antiquated superstition surrounding a common biological experience. To whisper a thing - it revealed more about the whisperer than about the word. Cancer isn't unknown, isn't too terribly rare. Sometimes it's due to processes beyond our control; sometimes it arrives as a consequence of our actions. Either way, an illness is an illness. To be ill, to be mortal, is to be human. How could that be shameful?

How could we look away?

When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I remember trying to talk to Grandpere about it, trying to come up with some metaphor, some explanation as to how I felt. The closest I got was this: being diagnosed and medicated was like waking up and realizing that my life had been so damned hard because I'd been missing a limb and didn't know it. And the medication, the therapy, they were like being fitted with a mobility device so that I could function unimpeded for the first time. I had an illness, a disability, but I was finally getting help.  

Bipolar disorder didn't have to be whispered, any more than cancer did. 

We would never blame a cancer patient for naming their illness and asking for help. Who among us would understand it if a person sick with cancer hid their illness and resigned themselves, out of shame, to a painful decline and death? Cancer requires openness, fast reactions, treatment, resolve - community, support, expertise. We cannot treat that mutation of our cells in silence and isolation.

Nor can we treat mental illness that way.

I've got a whole bucket of words that people don't want to say. I've written about them, most recently in my previous blog post about disordered eating. Mental illnesses tend to go together, too - the comorbidity of bipolar disorder, anxiety, C-PTSD, ED, addiction is statistically significant, to say the least. I deal with a checklist of things which lead to other things; sometimes it's difficult to know what is an illness versus a symptom. 

Anyway, I deal with them all, and I do pretty well, and I actually like who I am, and most days I'm incredibly grateful. My illnesses are a suit of armor, a mantle of strength. But it - it rankles me, on an emotional and intellectual level, that there remains a sense that who I am is something which cannot be said out loud. It's insulting and it's counterproductive. 

Because, just like a physical illness, we have to talk about these things if we wish to heal. We have to get help. We have to be open and honest. We have to advocate for ourselves. Therapy is our radiation, medication is our chemo - our families and friends are necessary, and they simply cannot be ashamed. If our community is ashamed of us - how do they think that makes us feel? As I said, I like the heck out of who I am, but it can be hard to hold on to that when I feel like, due to my challenges, I shouldn't. 

We see stories online of moms, dads, colleagues, friends, shaving their heads in support of their loved ones going through cancer treatment. Reading those stories makes us feel good - we are witness to that very human thing, compassion, companionship, a refusal to let someone struggle alone. We see that as brave. I wish we had some sort of similar advocacy for those of us with mental illnesses. An act of visibility, of being understood in some small way.

But I know that, for so many people, my illnesses mark me as other and as wrong. When I talk about it here, it might be seen as - I don't know. I can't really understand it. I don't judge myself for my biology, or for what happened to me. I don't think I have a right to shut up about it, either. If I don't want others to be ashamed of me, I absolutely cannot be ashamed of myself. And that means saying words out loud. 

It would be an act of self-harm to hide. It could kill me.

I think it is difficult, since mental illnesses are so judged, to convey how happy I am while also being chronically ill. We look down on mental illness, whisper the words - how, then, could I be healthy and happy in so many ways? But I am. I am happy precisely because I talk about my illnesses and receive assistance.

I'm challenged by the legacy of disordered eating - but I don't hate myself for that challenge, and so I get better every day. I cope with addiction - but I'm honest about it, no longer giving in to the alcoholic tendency to hide my problems, and that's how I stay sober. 

I have highs and lows and I medicate them and use them to fuel my work. I worry and worry, and I talked to my therapist, and she's gotten me to start meditating. I have emotional flashbacks but now I know what they are, thank God, and so I ride them out, expressing myself, forgiving myself, figuring out where those emotions came from. I identify through therapeutic dialogue people and situations which hurt me, which trigger flashbacks or anxiety or mood disturbance or what-the-heck-ever, and I avoid them, and I care for myself. 

All of these things make me healthier, not sicker. I have a wonderful opportunity to look at the ways that my illnesses make me tough as hell. And I name them. I own them. They are a badge of honor. Sometimes I have bad darn days. Some days are so much better than "normal" people could ever understand. 

A cancer patient is never cured, but victorious in remission. That survivor needn't ever be ashamed; that survivor kicks serious butt.  

And that's where I stand. Kicking butt and claiming names - never whispered but right out loud. 

So how could I be anything other than proud?            

 

All Is(n't) Vanity

Content warning: this post is about disordered eating/body image and weight issues. If this is triggering for you, please proceed carefully or refrain from reading at all.




I weigh myself pretty much every morning.

Scratch that - I weigh myself in the morning and in the afternoon. And sometimes right before lunch. And sometimes right before bed, to see if I can face the number when I wake up.

I have two scales - one which usually shows my weight as two pounds heavier, and another which syncs to my phone, which I only step on if I like the weight on the first scale. I know the second scale is more accurate based on various trips to the doctor where they, for some reason, weigh me every darn time.

I didn't know sinus infections demanded a weight check. What the heck.

If this sounds disordered, well, it is. When I was in middle school, I used to weigh myself on the old scale in my grandparents' bathroom. It was one of those slide scales, and I'd balance it carefully, heart in my throat, hoping to get down to a particular number. I won't post my various numbers here - listing weights is pretty triggering for those who have lived with eating disorders - but as I have mentioned before, I never dipped below what was considered "healthy" on the BMI chart. Somehow, despite the restrictions, the rules I made, the foods I refused to eat, I never qualified for the diagnosis - I was never anorexic.

Ha.

And I'm definitely not anorexic now - gosh, how I love food. I eat, for the most part, whatever I want; smaller portions, now, but I do go to town on Cheetos and Reese's Cups and enjoy the heck out of them. I need a good steak every couple of weeks, and last night I made a French toast casserole topped with bacon (great choices, Alice). So I am considerably less disordered than I was twenty years ago, without a doubt.

But disordered eating - disordered thinking - sticks with you. It doesn't matter how much you weigh, what you eat, your dress size, your waist measurement. It doesn't matter if you love going out and getting creme brulee at any and all opportunities, or if you grab a box full of pastries on vacation, or if you dive into a bag of Cheetos with unreserved glee. Once you hear the seductive call of disordered eating, it will never be silenced.

Three years ago, I was quite a bit heavier than I am now, and I was still disordered. Having a history of anorexia and bulimia (yeah, I'm going to claim those words, and the heck with the DSM) plus alcohol abuse meant that when my inhibitions were lowered I ate a lot of (and drank so many) calories.

And then, over the course of my biological father's illness and death, I leaned into my disorder, resurrecting a teenage Alice, controlling my stress and pain through the oldest and most familiar method I knew. I watched the number drop on the scale - yeah, I bought a scale to bring with me down to South Carolina, again measuring myself in my grandmother's home. It felt so good. It felt better than facing down cancer and losing. It felt so much better than longing to receive amends and knowing I would never get them. And as that number got lower and lower, I was spurred on, invigorated even as I was so profoundly fatigued.

Disordered eating is a drug. A drug I embraced in my recovery from alcoholism. A new - and old - addiction to lose myself in. 

I'm three and a half years sober, just about, and I've basically maintained my weight for a year and a half. I fit into my high school clothes. And this morning, I weighed myself, and I was .2 pounds under my "goal weight," and the first thing I thought was, hmm, I bet I could get down to the next multiple of ten. What I weighed as a high school freshman, rather than as a senior. 'Cause goodness knows, I want to relive those years (uh, not).

It's not about vanity. I wish it were. If it were about my looks, I'd have kept on five to ten pounds, retaining a plumpness to my face which filled out my emerging fine lines. A little more heft to my tush, my bust. Eating disorders don't make you pretty. They don't make you feel pretty. I have to look at pictures of myself to know what I look like at all. If I gave in to my inclination to lose a few more pounds, I would start to disappear.

And that is, after all, the goal. To be unseen. To hide. To escape the pains and chaos of life by becoming insubstantial.

You can't hurt me if I'm not here.

Oh, that sentence, in and of itself, hurts a lot.

So, no more weight loss. Another addiction to kick. Keep on maintaining, keep on eating, keep the weight off and keep the weight on. Get compliments and try not to think about them, where they come from, why people prioritize thinness. Go to the doctor and get weighed and choose not to care. Don't give in, but do, maybe - eat a lot sometimes, and a little other times. Accept the waist measurement which is slightly larger than it was when I was eighteen; consider doing crunches again, because building muscle is good, right? Be happy about a larger bust; be thrilled at the disappearing tush.

Hate yourself, love yourself, worship at the altar of addiction and recovery. Prioritize family and friendships. Make the food, eat the food. Get enough red meat. Take a vitamin. Maintain. Maintain. Maintain.       

It never goes away.

Yeah.

I'm happy with my body, truly. That's the funny thing about where I am right now - I don't think I need to be thinner, not for health reasons, certainly, and not for my appearance. I feel pretty great. But man, thirteen year old Alice is kicking me around the block. Because it's not about how I look; it's about how it feels to lose weight. My body is secondary. Disordered eating is about the mind. But I'm in recovery, always - from alcoholism and from (what doesn't qualify as, how stupid) anorexia. And recovery does feel so much better than being trapped in addiction. I'm motivated to be well. I don't want to live in my illnesses anymore.

But if you have an opportunity, dear reader, to give a hug to someone who has struggled with disordered eating - even and especially if that person is you - give that hug unreservedly. Because we are fighting a lifelong battle. And for once, we need to be seen.

Getting Warmer

Huh.

So I've finished the novel - about 80,000 words - and I've given it to my biggest fan of all time (also known as my awesome mother) and a few close friends to take a peek and give feedback if they are so inclined. I've got novel number two bubbling away, plans for seven books total, and I am beginning to think I've been doing life wrong for a long time.

I was having one of those little moments of anxiety which pop up every so often - all of the worries and doubts and flashbacks and mental noise had been simmering under the surface, as they always do, and so yesterday I reached the point where it all had to spill out of me. My fabulous husband sat with me as I poured it all out, and I had calmed down a little, and then we were talking about what the future might look like, if I publish, what I want out of life - and he said, "We moved here because of my work. If you need to move because of work, we can do that."

And I started crying, hands over my face, mumbling, "Why had that never occurred to me?"

It never had.

I never thought that what I wanted or needed might be that important.

I've automatically thought that I've had to bend myself around the people in my life, accommodating their needs so that they might love me.

It's kind of a scary thing, thinking about that. Thinking about the things I might want which might be different - might throw a spanner into the works. But so many bits of me have been needling under my skin; I've been pushing them down, hiding them, not wanting to make a fuss, because at my root I think that, if I am myself, I am unlovable. I've talked a heck of a lot about being true to myself and done very little to prove it.

And it's complicated. Having a mental illness (or three) has given me a sense of inferiority, like I should just be grateful to be noticed at all. Accepted. Like I have to work harder than "normal" people - like I have to hide. And in hiding I have downplayed my enormous successes - here I am, bipolar disorder, anxiety, C-PTSD, and I'm living, and I'm writing; I am married, I'm a big sister; I am in treatment, I am sober, I have friends. None of those achievements are things I should ignore.

But biology aside, there's another element - the nurture counterpart to the nature - which has kept me low for so long. And it's not particularly nice, but I'll lay out a little bit.

As a child, my needs were not met by all of the adults responsible for my care. I'm not talking about toys, or designer clothes, or lots of money; I'm not talking about buckets of extra-curricular activities, the nicest backpack. I am talking about food insecurity, inadequate housing, lack of physical and emotional support, lack of a clean and safe environment. Some of that was due to my guardians' low wages - most of it was not. I started drinking with a parent when I was fourteen, but my first glass of beer was in elementary school. My childhood bedroom was so cold - and it was only my bedroom - that I slept in my coat. Winter after winter, the chills so bad that I couldn't stop shaking. I went into my guardians' bedroom, terrified that I was having a seizure; years later they had both forgotten.

Other children have had it far worse.

But I didn't know that I deserved any better. 

Now, I am 33 years old, and I'm having these conversations with my husband, and I'm thinking, my God, I never figured it out, it's never made any sense to me that everyone, even me, deserves better. And I've pushed off my dreams - I've been stuck in limbo, I've put up with abusive behavior, I've had no faith in my value - and here I am.

I'm writing now, and it's fantastic. I love what I'm doing. I'm thinking, hey, I might be good at this, and, this is what I've wanted to do this whole time. And I'm also thinking that I've never wanted to live in this country; I'm thinking that I was too scared to explore my sexuality and gender (turns out I'm a little bit of everything) and maybe I'm not too old, now; I'm thinking that I don't like it when we watch too much television, for goodness' sake. It's all - it's all coming up, and over the past two months of writing I've been so angry, so cranky, so resentful.

It's been hard. Really hard. I've been doing my best to keep that all in, to keep it from spilling out - but that's the problem. I did keep it all in and have done since before I can remember. And I am so unbelievably lucky because I've got the partner of my dreams who will listen to me, who wants to know who I am. Who would move for me. Who makes sure the house is warm.

I mean, I'm pretty sure I'd need a solid career which allowed us to move to Ireland, but maybe I can let myself - let myself believe I can do that. Whether or not we move, it would be good to think that my actions, my desires... mattered.

I've had this sense - as outlined in a previous post about this age, my early 30s - that something has been missing.

It turns out that what's been missing has been me. 

So now - I'm removing myself from damaging situations. I'm learning how not to damage myself. I'm trying to talk, to write, to share, to dream; I'm not taking any more nastiness from anyone. Ever. I'm really, really working on being honest.

Cards on the table - my score on the Adverse Childhood Experiences quiz is a seven out of ten, which means that without treatment I am statistically more likely to die twenty years too soon (what a great number, ugh). But I am in treatment, and I do have a good life, and I'm going to write and write and keep living and the heck with this idea that if I am authentic, I am unlovable.

I'm going to dream big. I'm going to laugh loudly and dress oddly and be queer and artistic and silly and me. Me. And at the end of the day, people can choose to love me, or not.

I won't bend anymore.

I won't hide.

And my bedroom is toasty warm.