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I find myself cancelling plans lately and thinking, I should want to be around people and connect with people. I find myself going to hang out with people thinking, I should be able to just sit alone in my house right now and not need anyone.
There are two wolves inside me : One that thinks I should do everything alone and one that thinks I need other people to do anything. There is a third wolf that thinks both are stupid and I am doomed to an uncertain anxiety for the rest of my life where nothing pleases, satiates, or satisfies me.
Without the distraction of longing I find myself left with the thing I have been tending to the least : my relationship to myself. My oldest relationship, the longest one I will have, the one I simply cannot escape no matter how hard I try. An exhausting effort but one I manage to keep picking up.
The shadow of my old self and desires seems to haunt me in every corner of this quiet house, at the same time holding me in this time of deep wintering and aloneness. There is no better place to have a broken heart than at the water’s edge.
There is something daunting about this time for me right now. When you finally catch your reflection and think, oh fuck - there I am. All of the unturned stones of healing that have been building up beneath me where now the only option is to turn them over one by one. My earning capacity, debting, underearning, taxes, anxious attachment, distraction, addiction, resistance to rest, resistance to my own pace, the ways I want to be loved. Each stone feels heavier than the one before but I suppose this is why we rip every scrap apart to make a blanket, the scrap as is doesn’t make sense and needs the new scraps next to it to find a new form.
Speaking of scraps I started working with my personal trainer Stella again (who you should really watch in the new Sharon Van Etten music video) and I find that when I work with Stella my inner strength, the collected scraps of my being, my mirror of self : is strong and clear. It isn’t cloudy or filled with other people’s expectations or projections of me. I see myself in a right sized way.
Lifting 3lb weights over and over again I think - why yes, I can open this stack of mail. Why yes, I can look in the mirror and not be an asshole to myself. Why yes, I can call the vet and make an appointment for June. Why yes, I can face this absolutely terrible fear that I am unloveable at my core and incapable of staying in relationship to myself and another person at the same time. Ok the last one is mean, but the thing about mirror of self is it still gets cloudy from time to time. The process of coming back to ourselves is absolutely never ending. This is both my least favorite thing about being alive and my favorite promise the world has to offer.
When we are so rooted in togetherness and used to being a body close to another body and it is no longer there, where do we go? We go to the mirror of self. The mystical, mundane, ordinary mirror of self. The only you there will ever be - floating tirelessly in a sea of other people but washed up to shore there you are yet again, alone and fragile and tired.
This is my hope for this time - to delight in everything ordinary. The way the water boils in the pot, the way June’s paw prints look in the snow, the way the bay rushes when the ice melts and then freezes up again, only to rush again a few hours later.
In this space is everything god could possibly offer for expansive transformation. And it always feels much worse before it feels better. Every coping mechanism is stripped away, the hand on the lower back, a compliment, hearing another person walk in the door thinking “Yes I am not alone today”. Hearing only the sound of my own boots kick the snow before I walk back inside I think, good job boots. Good job keeping us warm today.
Today I sit alone, and today I am not afraid of that. I might be in a few hours like I was last night, and I know exactly what to do and exactly what tools to pick up. The to do piles are high, the shoulds are a mile long, yet I sit alone and give myself permission to watch The OC and color with my colored pencils and stare at the pile of fabric that isn’t becoming a quilt as fast as I want it to become a quilt.
The mirror of self shows a person moving slowly and my internal compass wants to speed up. Accepting this winter heartbroken pace is its own lesson in leaving.
I made this guide for you : it has a short audio note and some assignments for what to do when the mirror of self is too much to do alone. What tools and activities to use when the tending is overwhelming. It is free, take what you like and leave the rest.
FLEXIBLE OFFICE : A DIGITAL CO-WORKING SPACE
NINE WEEKS OF ALONE TIME TOGETHER : FEBRUARY 15 - APRIL 14
Flexible Office starts tomorrow! I am going to open a lot of mail from the IRS, develop a syllabus for my next class, work on a new quilt, read a book, carve out time for research, make a batch of chicken salad, and finish my book proposal
I will also stay curious and fascinated if I do none of the above
Flexible Office is offered at a sliding scale, has closed captions, a resource library, template for tracking projects, and more - read all about it see you there
If you're starting to think OK THIS SOUNDS FUN but I don't want to :
Get behind and be embarrassed, Fail, Look stupid in front of other people
OR : UGH I don't even know what to write about or make art about or DO WITH MY LIFE
SOUNDS LIKE YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE
AND YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE
You can come to one session or all sessions, no one is taking attendance. These sessions are recorded so that we can keep THE CHAT however the videos themselves are not shared or stored anywhere - this isn’t a class or something to watch back, it’s an accountability hour!
In Sharon Van Etten’s New Music Video, Exercise Is Emotional
Thank you to my friend Liz for telling me about FOLKSTREAMS and all of these little quilt documentaries
The Gee's Bend Experience book of Poems, Tidbits, and Short Stories
Sadness is not an alarm
Samantha Irby calls Getting to Center a “banger”
Samantha Irby’s substack :
“It's more like actually living that parable where no matter what happens, the correct response is always ‘oh, that’s interesting.’ As in, I don’t know if the worst news is the worst news anymore; or if the best news is actually the best news, and my body is really, really tired of sussing all that out and reacting to things on face value.” - Holly Whitaker - sign up here for her newsletter
I love Jess Ackerman’s paintings
Pre Order Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire, Collected Writings 2007-2022 by Jen Delos Reyes
xo
mar
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