“Your past is just a story now,” she said, her voice booming with confidence. She saw the look of disbelief on my face and nodded. “Are you saying you’re incapable of turning the page and choosing different behavior? If that’s so, go ahead and surrender to your patterns. It’s over for you.”
I was a little stunned that she was advocating that I give up.
“Get a piece of your crazy chalk, X, go outside, and make a chalk outline of your body, as if you’ve fallen forever. Look at it. That’s what you’re going to leave behind if you don’t make different choices. You know that the number of obstacles that hit you is never going to be zero, so figure out how circumstances are not your actual problem. You are. You wanted clarity and hit-you-in-the-face commentary. There you have it.”
I nodded with an intent look on my face. She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before. The words, though, were incisive and harsh this time.
She continued. “I read your ‘reset’ promise. You said you’d give it a year. Do that. Every day, make a chalk outline and remind yourself visually that we all are going to end up with unfinished business. Get yours done already. You love to write? Do that. You want a connection that gives you presence and affection without qualification? Get that. If you can’t be successful, I doubt anyone who sees me can be.”
I laughed. “I wish you’d tell me how you REALLY feel.”
I pulled the piece of orange chalk out of my gray jacket pocket, holding it up. “I’ll get started when I leave, right in your parking lot. I hope no one gets the wrong idea.”
“There is no wrong idea. It will either be funny, surprising, or hurtful. You know that you can’t control other people’s filters. Stop trying. What was it you gave me? Like a mouthful of fire, who you are should be impossible to conceal. Your sense of humor is your secret weapon. Focus on that, X.”
After I left the office, I did what usually gives me a secret laugh. I knelt on the pavement and drew a rudimentary chalk outline of a body. I wrote “Yesterday” on the torso.
Somehow, I knew she would nod in approval at the small addition to my drawing.
Almost all of our lives are written in chalk. Entropy and time erase so much – but never the connections and moments we share as memories. Things are transitory, just as we are.
On the way home, I stopped and got nine balloons. I wrote a card that said, “Thank you for being you. -Anonymous.” And I tied them to someone’s car, someone I didn’t know. I laughed, knowing that whoever the car belonged to would find them and be filled with curiosity. And maybe a little glee. I gave them a story, maybe one that would linger forever in their heads.
I love sharing on social media. I do. It’s personal, revelatory, and I try to be honest without stepping on people. I tend to step on myself the hardest.
I learned to play the game of Chicken with my crazy dad. Do you know what his secret was? NEVER veer, even if you’re going to get killed. He told people beforehand, “I’m not going to veer. I’m not kidding.” And he never did, even when it could have killed him. People learned not to play Chicken with Bobby Dean. Not in cars, not on tractors, not ever. Never veering is a stupid way to play chicken – unless your goal is to stop people from challenging you. There is no truth I will not confide if it is in my heart to do so.
I wrote very personal posts on the 23rd and yesterday. Both were honest and revelatory. The one from the 23rd was an admission that I’m as guilty as anyone about being a revisionist. I’ve not hurtfully crossed the line needlessly about anyone – including my ex-wife. That’s not to say I couldn’t. Two of the components of my post were to mention that I appreciated the good years, as well as to mention that I could have engaged in a flame war during the divorce, even though I bore the responsibility for the mess. It’s okay to need to gain perspective and distance. Even if it makes me the villain. It’s not okay to wipe away the good times, the good things, or the concessions I made to mitigate my self-made disaster.
With my level of humor and stark, combined with my willingness and ability to literally say anything, it would be manifestly easy for me to shatter a lot of illusions and break eggs. Even while still admitting I’ve behaved like a lunatic at times. I’ve been considerate after-the-fact. I can’t erase the past. It’s unwise to argue with someone who buys ink by the gallon, or with someone who will respond to accusations by admitting even worse truths himself. No one can win a “let’s share secrets” war with me. I will go there – not out of spite, no matter how someone pushes me to inflame or respond to fire with fire. It’s a fool’s game, especially after the final whistle has blown. The players should exit the field, hopefully with the goal of learning from what happened. Even if they fouled forty times during the game. An examined life always yields lessons.
People trust me not to reveal secrets they share. Believe me, one of the most satisfying aspects of social media is that many people have shared some of the most intimate things possible using it.
As you’d guess, I caught hell privately for the things I shared. Even the post about my wife who died brought out a level of accusation that surprised me. None of those accusations touch the truth, though. Everyone was kind, loving, and supportive to me for both posts. Well, almost everyone. And I love that. Worrying about the critics is another fool’s errand. Because I’m a fool, I’ve been guilty of that at times.
“You’re the villain in someone’s story” has always been true.
Equally true is that telling me I can’t tell my story isn’t going to end well. I’ll be respectful – but not silent. Trust me to be both honest and responsible.
If you play Chicken with me, I will not veer, now or ever.
When people move away from a relationship or marriage, they become revisionists. It’s a natural human reaction. Because I don’t want hypocrisy lightning to strike me, I will be the first to admit I’ve done it too. When things go sour, we overwrite the good moments, and the sense of wrong and failure fill our heads. Most of us don’t go into relationships will ill intentions. There are exceptions; some people don’t see behind the masks of those they are with until later. It’s not their fault. Love drives us. We all pretty much want the same things. How we traverse the minefields of our own vanities and life determines how successful our relationships might be. When it ends, we’re left with a raw fringe that often transposes into a filter that overwrites all the positive things we experienced.
I haven’t written a tremendous amount about my marriage. In part, it is because I saw no need to inflame emotions or trespass across the boundary of where my right of expression would infringe upon her life.
As time passes, she’s told me more than once that she thought I was there for so long because it was an easy life. Such a comment is an indictment of what we actually shared. There was a lot of love there for most of the marriage. The end was a bitter pie, that’s true. Since I’m the one who added a lot of the bitter, it is my pie to eat.
When we first got together, I was trying to recover from the sudden and unexpected death of my wife. She was ten years younger than me. Her death was a stop sign in my life. The brutal truth is that had she not died, my life would have continued along that trajectory, probably forever. That’s not how life works though. It’s a series of blows, each of which we either confront or bury.
I made the decision to live life. The risk of me not doing so might have been my demise. “Get busy living or get busy dying” was certainly in my head. It wasn’t going to be easy no matter what choices I made.
One of the reasons the accusation of staying in the marriage because it was “easy” bothers me is that anyone who knows me knows that I am not money-driven. That’s both a defect and an advantage. I feel rich in a lot of ways no matter what roof is over my head or what car I drive. Growing up, I lost a lot. Houses burned, tornadoes came, and violent parents made physical comfort an impossibility. Security is never in the things that envelop me. There is no doubt that my conscious decision to ignore ambition has cost me in some ways. That same lack of ambition also provided insurance, flexibility, and more free time to fill in life’s spaces with ordinary moments. We live most of our lives in those spaces rather than in the grand ones that most people prominently use to illustrate their lives.
Before the divorce, I signed over the house to my ex-wife. I did it for a lot of reasons. I could have insisted that we divest everything and sell it. Had I done so, I would have had 40-50K in my pocket when I left. As it was, I left with $5000. Someone motivated by money would have never walked away from that money. She would have needed to move and start over exactly as I did. It didn’t matter who was at fault; that’s just the way it works. I don’t know many people who’ve willingly given up such a big chunk in order to let their ex have peace and security.
It bothers me that the love I had and the gift I gave her by letting her keep the house are now being characterized as untrue. But I understand.
I sit as the villain in her head. If that helps her have a good life again, I can accept it. During the last few months, I stayed as a roommate. Luckily, I was going to counseling. I learned to sleep and I learned that I didn’t need nearly as much sleep as I had been getting before something in my head snapped. Over time, the anxiety I wasn’t addressing built to a point where I had to either succumb or deal with it. I waited too long to get a handle on it. That was arrogance on my part. There’s no other word for it.
I learned some lessons, some of them unflattering about myself. But one of the lessons I learned is that no matter what your intentions, if you don’t express the hard things in your mind when they come up, they fester and burn you from the inside out. It is so easy to walk through each day, letting the details and routine gloss over the things that need to be said. And done. It’s obvious that I didn’t really learn some of the lessons deeply because I repeated the same pattern by swallowing my truths a few times, ignored the little voice inside my head saying “No,” or stopped striving for the demand of a normal kind of affection.
When I had my emergency surgery, it was my ex-wife who came to the emergency room and stayed with me until my surgery started. She got to witness me violently throwing up and yelling in surprise pain each time a spasm of internal tearing got the better of me. She got her karma that night! But despite that, she was there. And that’s not nothing.
I don’t want to ever come across as someone who doesn’t appreciate that or the good years we had.
I also don’t want to be the kind of person who feels like I’m ‘too much.’ I’ve learned that my ‘too much’ is exactly what some people want. And that is true for all of you, too. I was surprised to find that the things that give me connection are these: writing, a buttload of laughter, and the ability to sit in a chair, intertwined, with nothing but the comfort of someone who sees me as me. I’ll get there, in part because of the long past that lies behind me, including all the stupid things I’ve done and the times I let my arrogance or inattention to what matters lead me astray. I don’t want to be right. I want to be happy.
If you have a happy marriage or relationship, please whisper its truth in gratitude or prayer. Don’t let the valleys overshadow the inevitable peaks. And if your relationship ends, try to avoid the pitfall of painting everything as sinister or dark. We’re all complicated people and so often we find ourselves at the end of a road without a clear idea of how we got so far astray. We started in love.
As the noted philosophers of VanHalen said: “If love’s got you down, love can lift you right back up. Get up and make it work.”
Love, X .
P.S. Wherever I end up, there is going to be a swing. Without playfulness, the seriousness of what we experience would drown us.
I made a painted 6″ X 24″ porcelain floor tile. I love the word “redacted!” When I use it, I get to circumspectly communicate the unsaid. Whether it is snarky, serious, or a feeling.
You can fill the blank with whatever you think life is and what makes it worthwhile. Some of the answers y’all might provide are ones that might surprise the people around you.
I wish you’d be comfortable enough to share the unshared, say the unsaid, and live the unlived. The path we’re on tends to narrow as we get older until we find ourselves inching along, if at all.
Note: this is a different kind of post. It’s not for everyone. Literally. Wink.
We rely on human nature to protect us. We prefer to think that people are like us. Kind, compassionate and reasonable, behaving as we would. When that fails, we turn to the law to mitigate the behavior of those who are not like us. The law has many shortcomings. Its bureaucracy is flawed with delay and a disregard for the victims asking for remedy and comfort. We created a complex system to protect victims and those wrongfully accused.
Its existence does not preclude a return to the chaos of personal justice that preceded it.
The same clever code words used to avoid the consequences of actions? Those exact words can be turned and used in the same sinister way.
If someone asks for peace of mind and safety, it’s their right. Because I’m familiar with toxic and twisted psychology, I know that there’s something wrong with some people’s brain chemistry. That defect doesn’t disconnect them from the commensurate responsibility of behaving in such a way that they don’t inflict further emotional trauma on someone who’s insisted that they have the fundamental right of peace and the pursuit of happiness.
Those it’s rare, some people don’t honor other people’s right to be free and happy in their lives. Some are simply irredeemable.
We all have an instinctive urge toward fairness.
In The Green Mile, Tom Hanks as Paul Edgecomb leans in to the villain Percy Whitmore: “…you mind me now. We’ll also see you beaten within an inch of your life. We know people too. Are you so foolish, you don’t realize that?” Percy had been so confident of his connections and deviousness to protect him, not realizing his cohort of fellow guards subscribed to a higher level of fairness and justice. On their plane of justice, people like Percy are given leeway until they have to face the consequences of their actions. If the Percys of the world don’t listen, they face the same fate as the dog that bit the little boy earlier in the book and movie.
It’s not personal. If the equation requires that the side abusing others be minimized, so be it.
Thinking that the legal system is the only remedy to protect others? That’s foolish.
I’m liberal and kind-hearted. But I have an iron rod of my dad inside me. That rod is premised on the old school belief that if you’ve given someone leeway to stop and they don’t heed the warning, then the precepts of Southern Justice come into play. It is no sin to defend yourself or someone else.
Unlike so many other people, I’ve seen behavior turn from trivial to violent. Many people underestimate its probability. I don’t. That’s why I hypocritically subscribe to the belief that it’s better to act precipitously at times without regard to the potential consequences that might befall me simply because I subscribe to a different sort of justice.
I honor the laws to the best of my ability.
My greatest allegiance is to fairness and justice. That allegiance plays by a different set of rules, especially when the intent of laws is being perverted or subjugated by someone who has demonstrated that he or she feels empowered to victimize others.
If you’ve already violated someone and still persist in harassing, intimidating, or making that person feel unsafe, the long arm of the law will get you. There’s a longer arm at play here, one with compunction to compel you to see the light.
There’s time to reconsider the error of your ways.
Please take the route that ensures that everyone is safe.
Otherwise, you are as unnecessary and unpleasant as a fruitcake without liquor.
The truth is that even if you’re double-vaccinated and have the booster, it’s likely that you will get a version of Covid.
Having all your shots will almost certainly keep you out of the hospital or worse. Of course, I’ve had every available shot.
My other truth is that my biggest risk and exposure has been where I work – and that’s been true during the course of the pandemic. It doesn’t scare me, precisely because I’ve seen people do everything right and still get Covid. I did everything right physically for a year and yet my body still slapped me confusingly and I found myself in surgery.
I tested again yesterday. As far as I know, I’ve tested more than anyone else in my personal circle. It’s important to me to know that if I have it, that I hide in a closet for a few days. I’m around unvaccinated people and the burden of giving them something that is essentially a mortality lottery ticket is a higher price than I’m willing to pay. I wish everyone would get all the shots, but that is no longer a reasonable expectation.
Be safe and be loved. Squeeze in some laughter in there, too, if you can.
I’m going to go out in a bit and reconnect with old friends.
While I’m doing it, the awesome t-shirt a fascinating new neighbor gave to me this week says everything that needs to be said: play.
A few minutes ago I was walking the trail by the hospital for a few minutes. As the spur I walked merged into the main trail, a man walked up with his cell phone held close to his left ear. I said, “Good morning!” and smiled.
To my surprise, he venomously replied, “It’s past noon!”
I flicked my wrist and looked at my Fitbit. It was 12:01.
Without missing a beat I retorted, “Have you been eating lemons?”
He stopped and said, “What do you mean by that?”
Because I am me, I answered, “You seem awful bitter. Are you okay? Do you need to talk? I have a couple of minutes.”
“No,” he said, and he kept walking.
A little further ahead, alongside the perimeter of the apartments that abut the trail, he stopped at one of the long black benches. I walked up towards him.
He turned towards me and said, “The lemon question was pretty good.”
I sat down on the end of the bench. He soon followed.
And he did talk and told me what was bothering him. After 3 or 4 minutes, I told him to wait there and I had something for him. I walked back to my car and got an old pair of headphones and walked back towards him. I half-expected him to be gone. But he was still there. I handed them the headphones and told him that if he needed a ride I would be glad to give him one.
He thanked me twice. I reached out and shook his hand. He actually smiled.
I used the simple human superpower of humor and listening to turn the lemons in his head into something else.
I’ll let him walk away for a minute before I snapped the picture.
The bright sun above me somehow seemed to shine brighter.
If you behave as if you believe you’re confident, even when you’re not, most other people believe it too. And if you wear clown shoes and talk like you’re crazy, people question you a whole lot less.
Most of the great people I know also hate something about themselves. It’s perplexing. Why is it we can see the exceptional in others but so seldom in ourselves?
As for flaws, it is impossible for you to be certain that someone else won’t find them to be endearing or fascinating. Unless your flaw is personality-driven, as when you practice hatchet-throwing in my direction.
So, stop looking at yourself that way.
If you’re not going to change it, revel in it. You’re living life for yourself, so that other people can see you for who are.
PS It is really hard to get to know a facade. Breathe fire if you can, flaws and all.
My favorite belt is older than a forgotten box of toenails. I’ve added 16″ of extra holes to it and cut it off twice. I have had a new one hanging in my closet for the day when I would be ready. Much to my shock, I had to drill eight extra inches of holes in it for it to fit properly. For any of you who are waiting for the new year to start your New Year’s resolutions, I hope you will take this tired old failure’s words of advice: you can do it without the gym, without upending your life, or feeling like a failure on your bad days. All it takes is a clear vision of what you want in life. You can pay the price and you can do it incrementally. With the right mindset, you’ll get little victories that add up. You will also have days where you feel like nothing is going right. If you start the journey and feel yourself waning, reach out to me. One of my superpowers is that I am a motivator. Love yourself and find a way to give yourself the opportunities to be who you want to be. If you’re already happy with who you are: be weird and let the fire breathe from your mouth so that people will know who you are.
“Life is like looking for your phone. Most of the time, it’s in your hand.”
Today’s brooch was made from a very old badge my manager discovered last week. I wrote “252” on it. That’s how much I weighed in the picture. I’m 105 lbs. lighter now. The part that continues to remind me is the new people who come into my life. They didn’t know me as fat. A couple of them had to be convinced. That’s a strange, wonderful thought. None of them have inaccurate misconceptions of me, either, so they look at me as if I’m just X. That’s wonderful, too. It reminds me of decades ago when I changed my name; it allowed me to easily identify those who loved me for who I was without regard to my name. Not a day passes that my name doesn’t bring a question, a laugh, or a story. Having a ridiculous name saves me the trouble of needing to tell people I’m probably eccentric. (Whether I look like a professional bowler or curler is up to you to decide.) * ^
“I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I’m not enough Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up Am I more than just the sum of every high and every low Remind me once again just who I am because I need to know” “You Say,” Lauren Daigle
All of you who can feel God’s love are fortunate. I mean that without snark. All love is housed in one’s heart. Believing that you’re loved in any form is something to strive for.
* ^
Because of my blog, people find me and read the ridiculously long and circuitous path of my life I’ve left there. It’s told higgledy-piggledy, with huge omissions and P.S.-sidepaths; it’s just the way I like it. It is both consoling and astonishing when someone discovers it and finds something worthwhile in it or me. When you commit things to writing and especially publicly, there is no return to privacy or withdrawal. It’s both faith and lunacy. As direct as I’ve been, there are hundreds of stories that I haven’t shared, mostly because of the overlap in other people’s lives. A lot of my joy and anguish are difficult to share for that reason. It’s not that I don’t want to. I’d prefer to spill it out. I can’t imagine that I’ve experienced much that a lot of other people haven’t – that’s the joy of peeking behind curtains in life. * ^
“State your truth” is such a vulnerable thing to do. Or say. I’ve become so open about it that I’ve forgotten that people need camouflage. We are all so similar in our vexations and pleasures. Knowing this at 54 is almost a superpower. But I do revel when I am able to witness someone letting the wall down and just sharing, even if it astonishes them as they do so. Sunlight and revelation bring peace. So many people are carrying secrets or thoughts of a different way to live. They don’t see the options until they see no way to continue.
“Buried emotions are always buried alive,” someone smart told me once. * ^
“Some people are empaths. I’m a telepath; people want me as far from them as possible.” – X * ^
“Hey X, do you smoke marijuana?”
“No, I prefer the natural flavor.”
That one took him a minute to understand. * ^
I think I’ll forego a regular walk or run today and see if I can run 100 floors of stairs. That seems fair, doesn’t it? My heartbeat objects. Maybe it knows the inventory of my allotted steps in life? Either way, my heart owes me a debt for liberating it from the sheath of excess that I put on it for two decades. And I owe it an apology. I’m lucky I didn’t give up, even as I constantly failed. Until I didn’t. It’s not the path that matters so much; it’s where you end up. * ^ To a specific friend, if you read this post, a phlebotomist I met at my doctor’s appointment LOVED your catchphrase: “Nothing tastes as good as this feels.” His eyes went wide and then he laughed. “Exactly!” he said. “I’m going to steal that without question. It’s perfect.” He’s a bodyweight fitness nut and looks like a flattened barrel in his upper torso. He wanted to know my story and secrets – and I shared both your phrase and The Blue Dress Project’s catchphrase, “Choose Your Hard.” He couldn’t believe my transformation and I told him that between the bell going off in my head and seeing people like you do it with a lot more obstacles than me, that I knew I was supposed to succeed. He understood, having done it himself. Don’t be surprised if it ends up on social media. * ^ The man who taught me one-on-one how to end an altercation quickly (and violently, if necessary) recommended a browser-based productivity timer. It works crazily well. I can set it for 5-minute increments. When the alarm of my choosing sounds, it’s time to do another interval of weights and/or stairs. Because I do most of my writing sitting at the computer, it’s a great way to create thoughtless and repetitive chunks of exercise. Because of the law of increments, I can artificially get a lot of movement each hour instead of relying on my motivation. The cat hates it though, especially if he’s perched on my lap as I type. * ^ The Lexapro is working very well. So is therapy. And time passing. As the curtains of other people’s lives continue to open to me, I realize that my problems are real – but inconsequential compared to the complexities that other people are living. It’s great that some parts of my life are a motivation to people. It’s also okay that some parts should serve as a warning. None of us are pristine or untouched by trauma, loss, indecision, doubt, or wanting. * ^ My “Ask” project is working well for me. It’s failed consistently, but that failure is changing me. I can feel it and observe it as it works its way into my nature. Some of the ongoing “No” has hurt me in a way that surprised and upset me. But I’ve kept asking, feeling the wave of “No” click a meter in my head. I don’t know where the true fulcrum of some of it lies; I’ll trust my instincts when it does. Once the meter has run to zero, we have to accept the truth of whatever we’ve been asking.
Ask Ask for what you want or desire. If you don’t, it is a certainty you’ll never get it. Ask of life and ask of people. The answer, though bitter or not what you sought… It’s at least the truth. Everything starts from there Ask * ^ I walk past the place where the deceased are kept until they are retrieved for their funerals and remembrance. I walk past a lot. I’m surrounded during the day. By love, concern, fear, hundreds of individual stories unfold. How odd it is that such finality and drama barely pierces people’s consciousness. I know we have to protect ourselves or otherwise be flooded. Sometimes, though, we need to remember the hourglass sifting sand invisibly behind us. It’s a valuable motivator to know that your day is not a promise. It’s a gift, one which many of us waste on triviality. * ^ Somewhere In Time
I had another life, a Lowenstein of my own. She walks the planet, fulfilled, and not alone. The lesson is that everyone has a tightly drawn curtain. When they fling it open, there is beauty and assertion. To see someone from within their own head is a joy. It’s agony when the curtain closes again, a closure that can destroy. Every nuance and experience in life will change us, if not derange us. There is no return to the before. There is only the after and absence, paired with infinite reenactments. Time does not cure us; it erodes us. To know that somewhere in time, that your life did not branch away from you, is a breathtaking comfort and inner chime.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 