January 2018: feast on your life
On new year’s day in 2006, I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine. There was a woman who was older than me and I’d gone home with her. I woke up with one of my red high heels missing, the only thing in my dress pockets my lip gloss, crumbled dollar bills from when I tipped the bar tender. I’d misplaced the tote bag where I’d carried a change of clothes the night before, so that I spent new year’s day hungover on this person’s couch, wearing her clothes, jeans that were too big for my hips, Converse sneakers that my feet barely squeezed into, and a threadbare t-shirt. I knew I didn’t belong with this person, who seemed to be so much more worldly than I was. I was playing pretend. I was the disaster she’d brought home the night before. She made chocolate chip pancakes and we watched football. Cold sunlight poured into her Greenpoint apartment. Later we would go back to the bar so I could get my missing tote bag from the bartender, then we’d get dinner at the thai restaurant on the corner of Manhattan Ave that’s now a Dunkin Donuts. The restaurant had moon in its name, and I can’t remember how it looked, the soft lighting, the warmth, and how anxious I felt, pretending to be enjoying new year’s day.
Back then, I was good at pretending. I could sit on a couch and watch football and feign interest. I could pretend that my shame wasn’t a constant companion, this nagging ulcer that something was amiss. There were many mornings in my early twenties where I’d get a line from Madeline in my head: Miss Clavel woke up with a fright. Something, she said, something is not right. The actual line is different in the book, which I found when I worked at a nursery school and came upon the storybook. I’d use this rhyme to needle at my growing anxiety that I was squeezing myself into a life more and more unsatisfactory. I now know the anxiety was pushing me towards the change that was about to come, the drinking that was about to stop. The dread that ballooned inside of me when I was alone in my apartment, pulling open the door to the bar, sitting on the A train, standing in front of a white board with the children I taught watching me - that dread would come to signal great change.
Every new year’s eve I tend to catalog the past places I’ve been and the things I’ve done. Midnight has struck when I was on a dance floor, when I was on the G train, when I was face down in the apartment of someone I worked with at Waldenbooks in high school, on a couch at a dimly lit house party, in the quiet of my own home, in the cold, walking from one bar to the next, trying to rush, trying to enjoy it, trying to keep away the dread.
Last night Emily and I went to a New Year’s Eve meditation at a zen center a few neighborhoods away from where we live. It was three rounds of twenty minute meditation, with two rounds of walking meditation in between. For the last 90 minutes of 2017, I was with my body and my thoughts. I did all the things I had tried to learn about meditation over the years: I counted my breath, I tried mantras, I tried not to fidget, I tried to focus on the back of my own eyelids, the image of my thoughts as passing clouds. It was not perfect, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t need it to be perfect. I was happy to just know where I was that night, who I was that night. This morning I heard the clack of a woman’s heels on the sidewalk outside of our apartment. The pattern of sound was the kind of walk where one does not walk with confidence, and the heels double clicked as if she was wobbling, dragging her feet. There was a pause before I could hear the creak of a brownstone door open on our quiet block before it slammed shut. I remembered then the new year’s day I’d woken up with one of my heels missing. Sometimes I resent being older and sometimes I make space for all of my younger selves who still reside inside of me. I was in a warm bed in a sunny apartment with my Emily. The cats were curled on the floor in patches of sunlight. The radiators hissed and clanked, an active heat. The only way to know it was midnight last night was that we could hear the world around us. The quiet of the room was draped by the shouting from the people outside, taxis that honked, fireworks that exploded. It was just enough commotion to feel part of the world. I had been silently mouthing my intentions for the new year to myself. I did not carry a sense of dread like an albatross around my neck.
The woman from 2006 and I bumped into each other last summer, waiting for the same train. She recognized me and I laughed as we embraced. I was more than ten years older than I was when I’d first met her. I’ve done so much interior work to scrub that shame from myself, the dread I took for granted, the resentment and envy and judgement I hoarded. When people this year shared their accomplishments, I knew my best work had been an inside job. It had been a faith cultivated over phone calls and coffee tables, lists written like prayers, taking directions and acting as if. At the meditation I kept picturing myself dumping buckets of the envy and pain I carried onto the space in front of my cushion. Take it, I thought desperately, as if the lesser spiritual condition could be exercised in a burst of pleading. Take it, take it all. Make me whole. Make me abundant. Make me of service. Make me the person I am meant to be. This past year was one where I was humbled enough to take my own counsel, to turn the loving and patient friend I am able to be for others back to myself. I took grace like a bit in my teeth to move forward. The inside work that is done in therapy, in self care practices, in meetings, in retreats, in asking for help - it is the most valuable work I know.
I used to send this Derek Walcott poem to friends when they were heartbroken. Of course now, it’s a simple affirmation that stands with or without the prerequisite of a broken heart. The final line I think of often, in moments like this morning, when I was able to shake the memory of the past new year’s days in favor of this one: Sit. Feast on your life.
Happy New Year. With love and many blessings,
xo,
c