What AM I Running From? Part 2: The Next Revelation

A couple days ago I went to see some local herbalists. I have been feeling worse and worse, and when I saw them at the Tuesday market, Elizabeth looked worriedly at me and said, “You look exhausted.”

“I feel awful,” I said, and almost collapsed crying in her arms.

I’m not very good at admitting that I need help. In fact, it’s not all that strange that I made it to this point before I reached out: in the last week I’ve been to three doctors, had 2 rounds of blood tests done and have now spent two hours with two wonderful women who offer natural remedies, all in the week that I canceled every plan I had because I can barely stand up without getting dizzy.
Anyway. I am tired, and I went to Elizabeth and Diane because the first set of antibiotics the doctors gave me for an eye infection didn’t work; next I thought they had misdiagnosed a bladder infection (I’ve had enough to know that I don’t have the symptoms) and the second round of antibiotic eye drops didn’t seem to be working either.

We got through my 10 page medical questionnaire, looked back at my history of antibiotic use, candida issues, general overall health problems and lab results and it seemed clear to them that 1) my immune system is shot from too many antibiotics, hence the ear infections, sore throat, cough and pink eye in both eyes in the last two months that will not heal 2) I am dragging ass because of a thyroid issue and adrenal system exhaustion and 3) I’m physically suffering from emotionally working through a lifetime’s worth of bad habits, defense mechanisms and fear.

We talked for a long time. They applauded what I was already doing for myself – I’ve been religious about the candida diet for a month now, plus in general I know enough to be eating and drinking a lot of the right sort of things to help myself – and it somehow came up that I have a copper IUD.

“You should take it out,” said Diane.

“I can’t believe they still are putting those into people. The toxicity is definitely not helping your system,” said Elizabeth.

I’ve had the IUD for three years. Before I had the IUD, I really and truly had nightmares of being a single mother living in a one-room shack, trying to comfort a baby, thinking to myself “Oh my God, this is real, this is not a dream and I cannot wake up,” and having no idea who the father was, let alone how to get support from him.

Since I’ve had the IUD, I haven’t had a single dream like that. I also recently heard a horrible story about an illegal abortion in a third world country that did not allow them, and after all the research about being on hormonal birth control for too long and how it can increase your chance of cancer, the IUD seemed to be a good option when I got it: no more nightmares, no worries about needing Plan B, the effects of long term hormonal birth control, broken condoms or even thinking about abortions or the emotional repercussions of having one.

Let’s be honest here, shall we? I am not sexually active enough that these are even THAT big of a deal, but when you travel as much as I do, finding yourself in rural areas in Catholic countries, the last thing you want to worry about is whether the resources available to you if you make a bad decision in the States are too far away to help you now.

At any rate, we discussed my peace of mind, other options, and the general state of my health and how it could be helped by my poor body not having to deal with yet another foreign object.
And then I went home, exhausted, loaded myself up with the tinctures they gave me and went to bed.

At 6 a.m. the house alarm went off. I’m house sitting and had been warned this would happen for often no good reason, which is what this was. Nevertheless, nothing scares the bejesus out of you like being woken out of a dead sleep…or a good dream, like the one I had been having, but didn’t remember until later.

At 3 p.m. that same day I laid down on the couch and suddenly it came back to me: the dream I had been having when the alarm went off for no good reason. I was looking at a little girl with chubby cheeks, and she was looking up at me over the edge of a countertop. She was my daughter.
In the dream, I was totally and completely content, and she was beautiful. I remember thinking in the dream that I was surprised I didn’t have a boy (a psychic coworker in a previous job I had predicted I would have a boy) but otherwise I just watched myself be totally content and interact with this wonderful little girl that was mine.

At 3 p.m., this memory of the dream set off huge alarm bells, internal this time but just as piercing as the house alarm had been at 6 a.m. Despite my exhaustion, I suddenly wanted to leap up off the couch and find the nearest sugar (which, due to the candida cluster in my gut, I cannot eat if I want any chance of getting better anytime soon); I thought about if there was any alcohol in the house (ditto for alcohol); I got a huge knot in the middle of my chest and found myself close to crying.

I stopped and looked at all this. What was this feeling, and where had it come from? It was not the dream itself that had caused the panic, but the thought that came with it: this could be my life. I could be looking at my future: I could be happy.

Something screamed NO! and tried to shut a door. The panic grew worse. Then it came to me: if I had it, it could be taken away.

This is so cliché it’s almost embarrassing. It is such a heard-of realization to have that I have thought about it many times before and always dismissed it. Nah, that’s not me; I'm not afraid of any of that shit. I am introspective enough I would know, I thought: if I was afraid of letting others get close because if they got close that meant I would be torn apart if I lost them, I would know it by now.

But I didn’t. Not in the way that hit me then. It was like realizing I had only lived in half a house, completely ignoring and unaware of the wall that blocked me off from all the best parts, and then suddenly one day I walked straight into it and panicked at the thought that once I started incorporating all the things that were on the other side, I would never be the same again.

And that’s true. And suddenly, I also know it’s true that I have purposely lived in a way that kept me cut off because it was easiest, best, because it hurt the least. This is separate from my need for alone time and quiet; there are plenty of people who have that AND have other people in their lives. This is separate from the many friends I have, but it does have to do with how much I am willing to open up to them. This has been something that was kept separate from me, because the realization that I was holding myself hostage was too much to bear.

Another realization on top of this one toppled onto me, and it rolled me right off the couch to cry on the floor in a ball. It was my grandmother. Somehow it became clear that I had gotten this idea from her death. I was 14, and Nana went in for a fairly low-risk surgery to remove a small cancerous spot on her lung – she had already survived having 70 percent of her liver removed due to cancer, for crying out loud – got an infection in the hospital and died.

And I still miss her. I was her first grandchild, and I was special to her. She’s the first one I ever remember baking with; some of my most treasured possessions are her recipes, several of which I have memorized, two of which I put in both of my cookbooks; in fact, one of those cookbooks is dedicated to her.

I don’t remember being especially devastated when she died, but it seems this idea may have stemmed from there: the idea that all you love dearly will eventually be lost to you, and therefore it’s best not to love dearly at all. That, and a lesson learned through her that cemented that idea: two weeks after my uncle, my grandmother’s first born, graduated college, he was racing a car on a track, lost control, regained it and was on his way back into the race when he turned his head to look behind him and was decapitated by a guy-wire.

I don’t mean to be dramatic, but that is truly what happened. I have heard the story countless times from my dad, who tells it without much emotion – he was 16 at the time – but each and every time, unbidden, I have thought of my grandmother, and the pain of losing the first child you ever poured your heart into, before his time and at the prime of his life, in a nightmarish and unexpected way.

So you see, invisible audience? Somehow it was hardwired into me: somehow and some way I began to associate the best kind of connection, intimacy and love with the inevitable pain of loss, before the intimacy was even there.

When I look back on the people I have let myself be close to, specifically the men I have dated, I have always been thankful that they chose to leave me, because ultimately and in hindsight it was clear that they weren’t right for me. At the same time, I never saw any other options besides them: it’s not like men have been beating down the doors to date me my whole life. What I never really considered, however, was that perhaps I didn’t even see them: that they weren’t even on my radar, that I wasn’t on theirs, either, because something in them picked up on “deeply and unconsciously emotionally unavailable” and just moved on without a thought, and I intuited “is someone I deserve and will be happy with; could eventually crush me to lose” and unconsciously turned away.

Jesus this is exhausting. I cried loudly and hard for over an hour, mostly on the floor, when I had this revelation. And then I got into a bathtub with a cup of naturally sweetened hot chocolate and laid there until the water went cold.

To be honest, invisible audience, I have to wonder if this is powerful or interesting to anyone but me; if you've gotten to the point that I have, where you wonder why you're still reading, because it seems the layers will never end and the cascading tears will never stop. I wonder at my need to write out loud, and whether it will always feel this way.

I wonder all that, and yet I know that writing out loud is the answer for me; even if all the traffic on my blog is spam traffic, even if it seems redundant and ridiculous to write this out into the internet when it's part of an important internal process, it feels important nonetheless. And therefore, if you've made it this far, I will simply thank you for reading, and I will keep writing all the same...for my own peace of mind, my own needs, and my own capability to process what I keep dredging up from the depths. Maybe what I write is helpful to you, but most importantly, know that the fact that you're reading this, whether you ever reveal yourself or not, is important to me.



Love and revelatory kisses,
Morgan

Writer’s Tourette’s, Also Known as Word Vomit

“You write like I talk,” he said.

He is a now long-gone ex-boyfriend, who had to get used to getting emails from me instead of having face-to-face conversations about whatever was bothering me about our relationship, or important things that I needed to tell him in general. The subject of each of those emails to him was “Verbal Diarrhea Part [X.]”

The last email I wrote to him – that I wrote but did not send – was called “Last of Verbal Diarrhea,” and never made it farther than my writing folder.

When he said that I wrote like he talked, he meant that I could say things in writing that I could not say out loud – and that many times, there were things written there that I wish I could take back, but some part of me refused to edit and rewrite, because writing that email was the most authentic thing I could do. If he couldn’t take back hurtful things he said to me in the heat of the moment, I sure as hell wasn’t going to censor myself in my emails to him…even if I often went back and corrected the grammar.

I am a writer. I write every day, for my own good, for my own sanity, and my own peace of mind, but even if I didn’t, I would still be a writer, because regardless of what is happening to me I find myself trying to find the words for it in my head; to best describe it; to best apply prose to my feelings, thoughts, emotions and adventures.

This sometimes gets me in trouble. Aside from my need to write, I have a need to write OUT LOUD: to an audience, so someone can hear me, read me, know that there is a part of me that fits best into the words that I have just strung together in a sentence, that may be prosaic and painful, but goddamit, so is the feeling I just had.

It has to come out or it rots. Yes, there is some part of me that wants to share my story so that it can possibly help others to know that they are not alone, but that part seems to be shrinking by the day, leading me to become more and more hesitant about wanting to publish the book I came to Panama to write. It is so personal, so vulnerable, and cuts so deeply through the muscle, the bones, the very marrow of who I am, that I am afraid to show it. I am afraid that people will think that I have not only lost my mind, but that I will never get it back – that if I have felt as low, stuck and depressed as I was during the time I was writing about, it means I will always feel that way. The first writing that lasted in society was written in stone, and it seems that that is the impression: that I took a feeling, painted it with words and stuck it up on the wall, and the people who came to look are looking at a single, raw moment in time, and mistaking it for a long term state of being.

I write because it is the easiest way to clear an emotion. If I am angry and I write about it as if I were tearing the flesh off of someone, the act of creating those flesh-tearing sentences eases my anger. If I feel alone and adrift in a sea of nothing and I can describe that in terms of an ocean of tears below me, I suddenly find that there’s a life raft; that I am no longer drowning but buoyed. If I write about my happiness in terms of the sparkling starlight and standing naked in the full moon, I may or may not have actually been naked, but I was happy nonetheless.

It is not transient, this writing. Even as my emotions flee in front of me as my pen meets paper or my fingers clatter over the keyboard, the words stay, and they are bigger there; they do not dissipate into thin air like my ex-boyfriend’s sometimes hurtful speech, with only the ability to paraphrase later, depending on what I did or didn't want to hear and what he did or didn't want to say.

Do I feel more deeply because I’m a writer, or do I write because I feel deeply? I don’t know. All I know is that the best way for me to let go is to hold on: to grip the pen, put it to the page, and let the ink tell my story. Once it’s out, I have to push send. Not because I am seeking redemption, approval, or even to help someone. It’s because – much like an artist friend says about her work – my writing just happened. It often doesn’t feel like something I could have consciously produced, more like something I stood aside to let my unconscious unleash. When that’s the case, I don’t really feel like I own it anymore: the writings are not mine, and neither are the feelings that sparked them. If it’s not mine, I don’t own it, and I have to let it go. Like a songwriter, a painter, a sculptor or a child throwing a tantrum, sometimes the best, most healing, cathartic and authentic thing you can do is share what it is, because even if it started out as yours, the only way to prevent the rot is to let it out into the light, wishing it well as it floats away.

Love and writer-freed emotions,
Morgan

Baby Steps Still Propel You Forward

I can be an impatient person. I see an end goal, a final project, and all I want is to have it DONE. Although I have the ability to also foresee the many, many steps involved in getting to the end of something, it is often hard for me to calmly take each step, knowing that eventually what I want will materialize before me, not with a *POOF* as if out of nowhere, but instead out of the many small steps I have taken in the right direction.

This has been especially hard for me lately. I am planning a move, and the move requires many small steps that will eventually leave me in the new place where I desire to be. In turn, moving will give me some time and space to focus, which will then lead to more time to write, something I want so badly it leaves a lump in my throat.

I have been craving time to write for years. This craving is what led me to quit my job in Bellevue – it led me to make a decision to divert part of each paycheck into a savings account that I never touched; to stay at the job in Bellevue for a year, wanting to tear my hair out, as my baby steps eventually led to the day that I turned in my resignation and walked out with the money to start again.

I learned about publishing in baby steps: how the industry worked, the advantages of self-publishing, the slowly changing behemoth of traditional publishing, and the joy of learning of other like-minded individuals who want to breathe life into their words and share that life with others.

I wrote my cookbooks in baby steps. Talk to wineries and restaurants; create recipe templates, call, email and cajole contributors, make appointments to take pictures, test recipes one at a time, lay out pages, edit, edit, EDIT, print, sell, one Facebook post, one local retailer, one Amazon sale, one new friend at a time.

I have grown confident of my writing in baby steps. Regardless of how long I have called myself a writer, it has only been recently that I have started sending out essays to publications, no longer afraid of their rejection. Suddenly I realize that I have something important to say and all I need is to find the right place to say it. This is not to say that I will not continue to improve, but only through writing for the past four years have I finally gotten to the point where I can realize that I am actually a writer in a way that feels real and visceral.

I have found my way here through baby steps. I feel a book trying to emerge, and I want it to come out in one fell swoop, leaping out of my brow much like Athena leaped, fully formed and ready to fight, out of Zeus’ forehead. The task seems overwhelming. It seems like I will never finish, because it is so hard to start; because the baby steps seem so infinitely small.

More than a year ago, two writing friends and I decided to do the Artist’s Way. It is a 12-week program to help people rediscover their creativity, in whatever way, shape and form it may take. One of the essential parts of the course is the morning pages: first thing in the morning, you take a pen and a notebook and write. At first, I got up an hour early to do this. At first, I wrote the three pages suggested, but then I realized that I was taking on more than I could handle. I cut it down to a page, got up a half hour early, and found it was the most joyful part of my day. Fifteen months later, I look forward to waking up, making coffee and settling in with a cup in one hand and a pen in the other, a notebook resting on my lap. More often than not, I fill two or three pages before I realize what I’ve done. I have filled more than 500 pages – front and back – with my scrawling handwriting. 

I am impatient, and yet the mountains I have moved the farthest are the ones that I pushed a little at a time. Although the ones ahead seem daunting, all I have to do is look behind me to see how far I’ve already come, one baby step at a time.

Love and baby step kisses

Morgan

Communication Gives Me Zits

Communication gives me zits.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I just pick at my face when I’m stressed out, and communicating in a mature way stresses me out, which makes me pick at my face, which makes it look like I have zits. It’s an evil, evil cycle.
Off and on, I have wondered what exactly made me different from other people, because I certainly have never felt as if I truly belonged. Over the years the things that made me self-consciously different have changed: I’m tall, I’m red-headed, I read too much, and at one point I wanted to teach cats to write with pens taped to their paws.
Today, I am probably most self-conscious about my total lack of ability when it comes to good, healthy communication.

Sometimes, it is incredibly obvious to me and others that I am failing at that whole “communication” thing: my face gets red and I mumble something incoherent, then back out of a room as fast as possible. This is usually what happens when I am put on the spot and I want to say no to whatever is being asked of me, but I can’t bring myself to do it. This is especially true when there are other people watching the scene.

Other times, I will think that I have communicated quite well, but it turns out I am less capable of using the English language than I thought, because whoever I said whatever I said it to acts as if I never said anything. This is very similar to the scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding when Toula’s mom asks her fiancé Ian if he’s hungry.

Mom: Would you like something to eat?
Ian: No thank you, I just ate.
Mom: Okay, I make you something.

My third communication predicament is definitely the one I am most guilty of. This is the case of the “You Should Know.” I realize it is incredibly ridiculous, but I suffer from a terrible disease where I am surprised – angry even – when someone doesn’t know something I haven’t told them. Basically, I am somehow thinking that I telepathically told someone something, (I can’t communicate out loud, but I am definitely good at communicating in my head; are my brain waves not loud enough to hear?) so I am surprised when they ask me to do something or assume something about me that is WAY off the mark of what my actual goals are, what I want out of life, or what I want for breakfast. I mean, I know what I want, shouldn’t they know what I want if they hang out with me, even on a semi-regular basis?
To escalate the problem of the “You Should Know,” I have to admit that even when confronted with a misconception about me, I rarely just out-and-out correct the person. Instead, I seethe and blame them for not knowing what I haven’t told them instead of spitting out two simple sentences to remedy the situation, something like, “No, you are wrong. I do not actually know all the words to Thriller.”

It’s amazing I have any friends at all.

Basically, I’m not sure I could communicate myself out of a paper bag. What makes this worse is that now I recognize these little “anti-communication strategies,” even as they’re happening, but I’m still not quite at a point where I can change them yet. It comes one small piece at a time. Right now the piece is “recognition;” I haven’t quite moved on to “corrective action.”

So bear with me, invisible audience. I’m working on it – communication, that is. I’d say that I’ll let you know how it goes, but who knows if I’ll be able to tell you?

Love and You Should Know Kisses,

Morgan