The Alice Extraordinary

Recently - a term defined variably as I get older, because it might mean yesterday or last year or a decade ago - someone I love dearly said of me, "I've never met anyone else for whom each day matters. Should matter."

To say I've thought a lot about that comment is an understatement. 

The odd thing is that when I heard that, I was living my life as if each day barely mattered at all. I had lost myself in the mundane, defined myself in such a limited way. I narrowed my identity down to doing the dishes and being an introvert and being harmed by my past. I was made of memory and fear, crinolines and heels, habits and hibernation. I was a writer who barely wrote and a housewife who barely kept up with housework. I was small.

So when I heard that it stuck in my head and nagged at me. Was I still that person - was the meaning of every day still important to me? Did I still want to live as if every day should be extraordinary, and was I even trying to live up to that ideal at all? 

And what did it mean for time to matter? How was extraordinary measured? What behavior or thought could possibly bring back a sense of the desperate importance of each day? When I was described in this way, I looked inside myself and I couldn't see that person. I lived in the past. I neglected my present. 

But there was something of the passionate Alice still visible, it seemed. And in being seen I started to see myself.

In the past year I have made more changes in my life than I have in - God, I have no idea how long. Some of those changes have been heartbreaking. Some have been so unbearably difficult. I transitioned from early rising and early bedtimes and hours of isolation into working nine to ten hours a day and scrambling for sleep. I went from a fairly sedentary lifestyle to running around a restaurant and frantically searching for the most comfortable shoes. I don't write enough, though I already didn't, despite all that free time. I don't sleep enough, though I do sleep so much better. I don't see friends enough, though now it's out of a packed schedule rather than self-imposed shyness. I'm tired all the time. 

But I think I've started to understand the Alice, extraordinary. 

I have so little time, now, but in that time I pack in moments which matter. At the end of a long shift, 12:30 in the morning when I'm not entirely sure I can muster the energy to drive home, I play Saint-Saens' Organ Symphony at maximum volume, and Dido and Aeneas, and Palestrina and Thomas Tallis, and I feel it in my bones, my childhood and my hurts and my hard labor. And it is extraordinary.

I go out to dinner - I eat duck confit, and Iberico, and seared foie gras, and the flavors are so strong and subtle that they nearly make me cry in the middle of the restaurant. And that, too, is extraordinary.  

My feet ache and I stay up too late, and I come home and can barely hold my head up long enough to feed myself. I think about the challenges of a career, where I want to go with my life, the restaurant I might want to build as my own one day. I work so hard and dream so big. I matter. 

The city is noisy, fireworks and traffic, shouting in the street, and the lights shine just the way they did when I was a little girl in the back seat of my grandmother's van coming home from a rare meal out, and soft rain slides down the window just the same, picking up gold and silver and red and coloring my hopes for who I want to be. And that woman matters. 

I get angry, and I hate being angry because I swallowed my anger for so long. I get angry and I'm learning how to live with it by saying it out loud. I'm passionate about things and getting mad is a part of that. I create boundaries, proper ones with real consequences. I'm willing to reshape my life based on my own values rather than reshaping myself to fit in with anyone else's. It's so damn hard. But my anger - yes, it matters.

Every day has extraordinary moments. The confused smells of roasted garlic and uncooked prawns and fire. The Spanish I'm struggling to relearn. Dancing in my own kitchen. Laughing so much of the time. Crying because I'm happy and when I'm horrifically sad. Putting on my suit before work and peeling it off before bed. The scandalous dresses I wear out to dinner and the shine of rose gold around my neck, and the children I may or may not be able to have, and this body, this gift, this person I must take care of. Me. 

I have made so many difficult choices and I've abandoned so many ideas of who I was supposed to be. And there are moments when I am terrified, when I think I've absolutely lost my mind, when my whole life seems so precarious and unsteady, when I think all I've done is hurt myself and the people I love. And there are still fragments of memory which threaten me, make me pull away from love, make me want to hide again; there are good memories, too, and those can be much harder to bear. To part with. 

But I am, I am the woman who wants each day to be extraordinary. I want every day to matter. Music and food and the clothes I wear and the work I do and the way I love. All of it. It was always in me - that person was right. Even when I couldn't see it for myself. 

Our days are so important. 

And even when it hurts - or maybe especially when it hurts - I won't ever forget that again.