Floodgates

I guess it stands to reason that I opened the floodgates last week, and stuff is pouring out.

The topic that is calling most urgently is one that I suspect most of my friends and readers may find surprising, although I don't think it is uncommon: All my life, I have felt that deep down, I must be "evil."

A stranger might immediately jump to the conclusion that religion was involved, and certainly, Christianity's concept of "original sin" has a lot to answer for. As an Episcopalian, I was exposed this notion, but not over-exposed, if you know what I mean. Yes, I joined in the Book of Common Prayer's "Prayer of Humble Access," where I said that I was "not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table." I literally believed the words of the hymn Herzliebster Jesu ("I crucified Thee") and I've written about how I confessed in fourth grade to sins I not only did not commit, but couldn't possibly have understood. But my church upbringing didn't seem to me to focus on sin, but more on beauty, the beauty of the service words and music (presumably as a window to the beauty of heaven?!) There were no "fire and brimstone" sermons, or extra weekday services. At home, except for a simple daily grace at the dinner table, my parents never mentioned religion or good vs. evil. The Bible was not read except for the Christmas story, on Christmas Eve. Adult parties (at which our church rector was a frequent guest) featured alcohol and cigarettes.

No, I think my sense of being evil came earlier, almost as a birthright. And the following is the only sense I can make of it.

What if people like my dad, with limited-to-no capacity to love others or to see outside themselves, literally consider "good" people "evil"? What if this duality is turned so totally on its head in them that they cannot tolerate the qualities that most people would agree are good -- kindness, generosity, truth, wisdom, beauty, respect for others, etc. I guess it might make sense for a "good" child born into this situation to get the impression that they were evil. Speaking only for myself, I think what happened was that, to counteract how bad I had the impression that I was, I worked hard to be abnormally "good." This wasn't to impress people, but out of a simple desire to overcome my badness and earn the possibility of being loved. Of course, the irony is that, the more good I tried to be, the more I felt myself being held at arm's length (nothing, of course, was ever said), intensifying and providing more momentum to the whole circular process. If I slipped even in the slightest, I felt not only mild embarrassment, regret or mortification, but genuine, pit-of-the-stomach "I don't belong here on this planet" kind of self-hatred, which has continued until very recently. A small accident, like breaking someone's drinking glass in their kitchen sink, brought on a level of terror and self-loathing utterly out of proportion to the actual event. This daughter of someone who was incapable of apologizing has been the queen of apologizing. And I've had a tendency to think I am responsible when anything anywhere near me goes wrong, just because I was in the vicinity. Really?

There may be no way for me to ever know for sure if this theory holds water, in my life or in general. No one close to me ever said anything, and it was the utter silence around everything that left room for so many self-negating assumptions, left me blaming myself for not being loved. Yes, there is a lot of "unpacking" of this that I need to do. But I am glad to say that, over the last few months, I have noticed that I am less terrified of myself. The sense that I might be inherently evil seems to be completely dissolving from my core. This rebirth is bringing with it a measure of self-acceptance. I may be many things, but evil? Of course not. It was a preposterous misconception, wherever it came from. 

The follow-up

Lightning hasn't struck me dead since last week. I still seem to be in one piece. The unspoken lifetime threat, "speak, and disaster will strike," has so far proved to be a lie, like so many others. Of course, it helps when by some measures your whole life has already been a disaster, or at least an unusual, unconventional, nontraditional jumble. The old, "when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose" thing again.

So I'm shaky, but I have survived. It took three years of blog practice, but I told an important truth last week and I hope speaking out will only get easier and easier.

There are so many major tasks facing me, not the least of which is finding more permanent housing. But first things had to come first this fall, and right this minute I am focusing on the little accomplishments.

In recent years, on solstices and equinoxes, I've pulled a Tarot card to represent the energy of the upcoming three months. What did I pick Saturday but Queen of Wands? For me, she is the queen of passion and possibility, of being able (literally) to point to a goal and make things happen. To say, "I declare this" and it happens easily and quickly. May all women on this planet find that inner power this fall.

And in the last few days, I have just tried to notice when I am happy, and what makes me happy. The other night, I watched "Educating Rita," which I used to show as part of the Allegory of the Cave unit of one of my courses at the community college. (See my October 3, 2016 blog, "Liz's New Allegory.") I know this film "dead well," and love it. Afterwards, I found myself singing its faux-Thomas Arne fanfare music, and was told I sounded happy. Well yes, I was happy. I love seeing my beloved England in any form. I love English (-y) music. I love this story of a plucky "lower-class" woman who loses almost everything in order to gain an education and find herself. I allowed myself to trust, even for a few minutes, that it is valid to love what I love. It may seem like a simple equation, but it hasn't always been for me, as you may know from previous blogs. The music flowed exuberantly from my heart.

I also stepped out of my comfort zone to attend an event I wasn't sure I would like, and in a sense I didn't, but I might have made an important connection or two, and I learned more about navigating the city on weekends, by bus and on foot. The whole experience expanded me.

And finally, the "gales of November" came really early and we had a cold rain-wind-branches whipping off the trees-whitecaps visible on the lake from a mile away-kind of storm. I felt a distinct shiver. ("This is Duluth. We ain't seen nothing yet.") But my thankfulness for a warm, dry perch, friendships, and space to grow knows no bounds. Yes, I have survived. And I think maybe, even more than before, I am on the cusp of beginning to learn how to thrive. It continues to be one day at a time.

Event horizon

After writing the post on Monday, probably the hardest one I have ever published, I did the following three things: listened to Choral Evensong on BBC Radio 3, made an unsuccessful batch of cookies (subsequently tossed out, rare for me), and then spent an hour curled up in bed with a stuffed animal. I regrouped somewhat later in the day, but the waves continue to hit, waves I had hoped were over when I returned to "the water" a few months ago!

Of course, there is a little part of me wishing my memories would all have gone away, making writing or thinking about them unnecessary. And there is that voice continuing to say to me, as it has my whole life, you're making a big deal about nothing. All the brave women coming forward right now were actively attacked. You were not, so what is your problem? (Comparisons, begone!)

Well, that's the whole thing. Breathtaking lack of humanity doesn't always come in the form of rape, violent beatings, shootings, knifings, torture, kidnappings, gas attacks, etc. It does not always come in the form of violence foisted upon you or into you.

It can be silent, a black hole that pulls in everything around it. It is the opposite energy, a pulling in rather than a lashing out. If you are at the receiving end of it, you spend your life in an abyss so deep that when you attempt the Sisyphean task of clawing yourself out, just as you reach the event horizon you fall back in and start the process all over again. All those qualities that human beings so dearly want to experience -- love, support, respect, visibility, a sense of home, a sense of hope, a sense of connectedness, validation of your uniqueness, abundance, fulfilling work -- are always just beyond the horizon. You know somehow deep in your bones that you deserve them as much as every other person on the planet, but they are always out of reach. The black hole is, indeed, "nothing," but a person with that energy needs to pull in everything around them to survive, to seem like "something." The resulting chaos to those of us around them is very real.

As of now, anyway, I am not angry about my experience because I know my soul chose it for a variety of reasons (more on that another day). Yes, I wish I could have continued to sidestep talking about it so that I wouldn't risk having it define me. Those beautiful things beyond the event horizon still feel far away, but one thing feels better today -- I know that out in the world, there must be many women and men who have had similar experiences, and perhaps my imperfect attempt to articulate what it is like will help them, too.

The lesson in the bag of candy

Well, OK, here I go, before I lose my nerve.

As regular readers and friends know, my dad passed away a few months ago. It was a bittersweet milestone, really. I envy the people who can genuinely grieve for a parent, and who can truly celebrate a long life well-lived.

In my case, my dad was a lifelong mystery. On the surface, he was handsome, sweet, smiling, WASPY, with a uniform of button-down shirts, rep ties, and (depending on the situation), grey flannel trousers or tan chinos. But the core reality that I experienced from childhood was his alcoholism. From the moment he got home from work at 5 pm, he poured himself a new cocktail every twenty to thirty minutes until, somewhere around 8 pm, he would "fall asleep in front of television." So many nights, I would try to wake Daddy up, shaking his shoulders, but he remained entirely unresponsive and slack-faced in his easy chair. It felt, to me, like he died every night. I knew that he didn't from the evidence of my eyes (there he was, leaving for work the next morning) but it was a daily heartbreak that I was not allowed to acknowledge or understand.

During my 20s and 30s, I explored this situation (and subsequent family perplexities) in therapy and 12-step programs, and yet I never felt that I had gotten to its core. No one else in the family wished to join me in solving the mystery, and so for a good decade or more I just tried to forget about it all and get along with everyone.

Somewhere around 2000, an old friend of the family expressed dismay that I had changed my life entirely in order to help take care of my mom while she was dying. This woman said, "Your father is an incubus. He's just using you." I was so clueless, I had to ask her what an incubus was. Vampire. Bloodsucker. I said, "Oh no, you're wrong."

Fast forward to 2014. Two years earlier, I had moved to his town out west, both because the choir at St. John the Divine had been disbanded and I wasn't sure what to do next, and because I thought once again that I could be in relationship with family by "helping." (Dad was due to make a major move into a different housing situation, something that never actually happened.) It had been a wrenchingly difficult few years, but I had survived. One night, I ate dinner with dad at his swank retirement community's dining room, and he said to me, "Liz, come back to my apartment for a minute before leaving. I have a present for you." Silly me. Dad had almost never spontaneously offered me anything and my heart almost burst with anticipation as we walked down the hall.

He handed me a 99-cent plastic bag of discount candy, you know, those sugar-coated fruit slice-shaped soft gum drops. Before I even registered the shock and disappointment of receiving something so totally worthless after such fanfare, I sensed that there was something even more amiss. The bag felt oddly heavy. I pinched one of the candies between the plastic and my fingers and it was as hard as a rock. I peered at the expiration date (I am the Queen of expiration dates). Lo and behold, that date was a good seven or eight years earlier.

"Dad, this candy is extremely stale." Silence.

I plucked up all my courage, and with as much control as I could muster, I said, "What on earth would possess you to give your beloved only daughter a stale bag of candy years past its expiration date?" He looked at me with this utterly blank look that often came over his eyes, but he regrouped and said, "I thought that you could share them with your friends at the Y." (The fact that he was living in luxury and I was living at the YWCA was another one of those clues that was finally adding up, although all of a sudden I was proud to be there.) I said, "Dad, what kind of person would I be to do such a thing? Most of these women are living in abject poverty, missing many of their teeth, and breaking a tooth would lead to dental work they cannot afford." He stared back at me, and then walked away. I dropped the bag into his wastebasket, and walked out the door. This was a watershed moment. This wasn't about his age, or dementia (which he did not have) or alcohol. This wasn't just "a man of his generation." This wasn't some unique situation, the result of a bad day. This was the latest in a string of inexplicably subtle but cruel interactions that I had never understood, and it had to signal something far worse.

The next morning, I went to the public library, and wandered around the psychology section hoping that some insight would leap out at me. And of course, information that might be applicable was easy, but horrifying, to find. Dad would never in a million years have consulted with any mental health professionals, so an accurate diagnosis may never be possible. And I'll never know whether his condition, whatever it was, was genetic, or the result of his experiences in World War II. I'm just going to be conservative and refer to it as extreme narcissism. But surrounded by stacks of books and the light slanting in from high library windows, I finally came to understand my experience of my father.

Other than the New York Giants, the New York Yankees, and alcohol, I never experienced my dad taking a loving interest in me or any other person, activity, or situation. He never really had a career, hobby or creative pursuit.

I never experienced my dad apologizing or expressing regret for anything, even though there were many events and situations where that might have been appropriate.

I never experienced my dad expressing genuine appreciation for anyone or anything, unless it reflected on him. (On Easter, he would tell me and my mom, "My ladies look nice today," kind of thing.) He did stand up and say some nice words about me at my 50th birthday, words he had never said directly to me; there were some of his old friends there, and I'll never know who he was really speaking to.

I never experienced my dad helping people or offering to help. He never said, "Here, let me do that for you" or "I'm going down the street to help Joe paint his shed." He didn't belong to civic, church, or volunteer groups. Most of my interactions involved my feeling that I had to help him. However, late in life he led the residents' group at his retirement community, which I never really saw firsthand. Perhaps a new side of him came out at that time.

In my experience, my dad was highly manipulative about money. That is all I will say for now on that subject.

Fortunately, my dad had no global ambitions, and his energy vis a vis the world was quite passive. The people most affected by his emptiness were family. I think the fact that I was female and utterly his opposite meant that I was exiled, at birth, to a point off his radar screen, except for some key occasions when he could use my free help. The candy incident gave me an intellectual context for finally solving the family mystery, but the waves of emotion didn't start to hit me until last year. I apologize to readers for taking so long to more fully explain some of my metaphors, but I literally didn't dare speak until well after he was gone.

I left Montana soon after I learned the lesson in the bag of candy, but I did go back one more time two years ago, when he almost died. We had what we both knew to be our last encounter. I thanked him quite genuinely and in a heartfelt way for the emphasis he had placed on getting a good education, for his and mom's choice of churches (where I was introduced to the English church music tradition), and for our summers on Lake Champlain. I told him how these three things had enriched my life. And then there was silence. This was when another father might have jumped in to say, "I love you so much, honey. I am proud of you. I hope you will have a wonderful, happy future." Instead, a long, dead, silence. I finally blurted out, "Dad, do you even love me?" He said, "Of course." "What is it that you love? I mean, I am not sure I even know." He looked at me blankly, clearly not having a clue what love is, who I am, or how a quote-unquote "normal" father would feel on parting for the last time from his daughter. Finally, after a few more empty moments, I stood up, went over and kissed him on the top of his head, said, "Good-bye, Dad," and walked out. 

There are a million more stories to tell, but that's all I can bear for today. I guess you can see why, when I say I'm just now learning about love from scratch, I am not joking. I think I have always known how to love, but not how to believe that love, respect, or caring will ever be returned in my direction. 

Afar

I am sure I am not the only one in America to watch these extreme weather events from afar, with a sense of unreality, even surreality. The hurricane is so far away, but news cameras successfully communicate the breathtaking devastation. It is hard not to feel the water lapping up around your knees, or the fires burning perilously close to your own body and possessions. Each new storm brings new levels of human suffering and alteration of the landscape. Something in all of us is washing away or burning up right now.

Every corner of the country has its own potential weather disasters, and I guess in some way (consciously or not) we choose the manifestations of extreme nature that we can at least tolerate. Having opted to come back to Duluth, I'm fully aware that I've returned to a winter experience that, frankly, I don't particularly like but I guess I prefer to some of the alternatives. My first full winter here in the early nineties, Duluth had a forty inch snowfall, the famous Halloween blizzard. The city shut down for days, and over six months later, huge orange and black bags of leaves began to appear from under the melting snow (I wrote more about that storm on March 16, 2017). My favorite two winters of my life were spent in England, where 30 degrees F was "frigid" and only light coatings of snow fell, so I'm not looking forward to what's coming. This September's lingering heat and stillness must be savored, not only horizontally but vertically, if you know what I mean. Thank you that I'm not down south. Thank you that it isn't winter here, yet, anyway.

The last few days, a blog that I'll post next week has been percolating. This may seem like "much ado about nothing," but at my end it is not. I'm calling on all the wisdom I have ever had to be with me when my fingers click away on the keys next Monday or Tuesday. When I first started writing this blog three years ago, I would handwrite my drafts, or word process them in advance. Now, though, the pre-writing seems to happen in my head. That makes for a very busy brain right now, but I also feel a certain calm and inner power. All will be well. 

Holding pattern

This phrase came to me a week or so ago: "What I am holding inside is holding me back." I'm sure this is not a new concept, but sometimes you need to find your own way to these milestones.

Despite having written over four hundred posts in the history of this blog, I've come "this close" to articulating a certain truth in my life, but I have continue to hold back. I am sure it has made some of my writing seem baffling; I was not ready yet. It has reached the point where the effort and energy it has taken to circle around the edges of the truth (to be metaphorical and not dive in) just isn't there any more. It has sapped me for a lifetime, and will continue to until I pluck up all my courage and speak. 

I found my way to this cluster of human structures at the end of the biggest lake in the world, not to experience the new restaurants or brewpubs or outdoors opportunities or even to be surrounded by old friends and a familiar landscape. I found my way here because it is a place expansive enough for me to grow completely into me. And there is only one way to do that.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I'll break the holding pattern and take this next leap. Please "hold me in the light," as the Quakers say, as I inwardly prepare.

Genius

I had one of those poignant, memorable little moments yesterday.

It was in a retail setting, and I had just tried to use my card in the card reader. There was some minor snafu (I had slid the card when I should have inserted it, or inserted it when I should have slid it, or something) so I made a little self-deprecatory comment about having a genius IQ and still not being able to do the simplest things. 

Well, the clerk responded by saying, "same here," and saying a number near 150. For a moment, I didn't get it, and then I responded with my number near 150. The two of us smiled at each other, and had a brief back-and-forth along the lines of, "It's a challenge, isn't it?" 

I mean, we didn't even need to go any further, did we? It's a challenge being so ridiculously bright that you are always the smartest person in your family, school, or work setting. Being told you intimidate people, or your resume intimidates people. "Getting" things minutes, hours, days, or years before other people do. Being told that people don't understand you. Using "big words" and not being able to help it. That's my variation on the theme, anyway.

Although women of genius have clearly had a particularly hard path in this regard, I think this is an issue that transcends all superficial identities. Yes, some geniuses find an appropriate university teaching, research, or other career, but how many more do not? We, with Niagara Falls-size intelligence coursing through our veins (by whatever measure, IQ or otherwise) are waiting tables at restaurants, paving the roads, manning the cash registers, entering data, you name it. The world is comfortable with a norm, and too many of us have been squashed down to fit into it rather than encouraged to soar with our intellect. It's such an absurd waste of human potential, isn't it?

I didn't know, walking away, whether to be sad or happy, but the happiness won out. I am constantly trying to find members of my various tribes, and by accident, I found one of them. Yay!

Grounded

On this grey day in early September, I'm thinking about the concept of being "grounded." Actually, looking it up, I found that the meaning I was mulling over was one of many, which helped a bit in re-framing it.

It's a word that has been a bit loaded for me, since it often seems to be said in such a positive, complimentary way about someone who has their feet on the ground, a solid, permanent home, work or career they love, and, of course, practicality about money/saving/budgets. Even the merest mention of the word triggers a well of shame, because of course, my life has had none of those factors and I have frequently been criticized and ridiculed for it. At this very moment, I know there may be dozens of people silently praying that Liz finally gets "grounded," and practical, and "realistic." Which, of course, is unlikely to happen, per se, in the current paradigm. Yet even I have spoken about wanting my feet to become rooted in beloved physical ground, and wanting, finally, to thrive.

Some other meanings helped round the word out: knowing the basics or fundamentals of a field of endeavor. Becoming stuck (like a boat in the sand). Or even, a teenager being "grounded" for an infraction, which implies a kind of imprisonment.

It helped me this weekend to consider whether there is any way at all in which I am grounded, and of course the only one that sprang to mind is this: I believe I am grounded (to the extent to which I can intuit them) in the priorities of the divine feminine: love, freedom, creative expression, doing no harm to others or the earth, and fearlessness. I am grounded in values and trends I believe will become more and more widespread as we become post-money, post-duality, and post-hierarchy. I am not yet completely grounded in a place, although I think that's not far off, but I had to get inwardly grounded first. If it is to a set of values that many others cannot fully conceive of, I think I am finally beginning to be strong enough to withstand the pushback. I saw a funky (possibly homemade) two-masted sailboat with three triangular red sails crisscrossing the harbor this weekend, and it reminded me of me. Different. Not quite seaworthy, grounded in itself and yet not aground (important distinction). Still sailing. Even, occasionally, displaying what appeared to be a colorful, joyful, homemade spinnaker!