Some thoughts on a Saturday...

My friend Jenna posted this video today on a friend's wall

I have so many thoughts about this video.  So many.  And, as the good Humanities major that I am, I am sitting here writing all those thoughts down in a blog post.

First and foremost is just...dang.  It's straight up funny.  I mean, completely and unequivocally funny.  Go ahead and laugh and don't feel bad.

Next, this video brings back all my fascination with the human impulse to exhibitionism.  How many videos or pictures have you seen of someone doing something crazy simply for the sake of being seen?  So many I can't even begin to count.  What is it about human nature that so craves attention that it is willing to do bizarre things like dance around in front of people nearly naked to get it.  That almost diminishes it, though.  To say that some of these people are just seeking attention.  Sure, some truly are.  But others, like this gentleman here I think, or like Amanda Palmer in her street performing days, or like certainly many others...some of these people are seeking connection, or love, or truly just to make people happy.

I'm referring to just the beginning of her talk here, but please listen to all of it as it is wonderful

Or perhaps they simply want to express themselves and themselves is an exuberant, demonstrative person who simply cannot be contained in one single self but must bubble over in dance and song and action.  Whatever the reason, I am constantly fascinated by these impulses.  Trying to decipher those reasons, trying to understand why this expression, simply enjoying their moment...

Then I think about this specific man.  Regardless of his reason, he was brave enough to display his, shall we say "less than ideal", body quite fully.  In fact, it seems as though he makes rather a habit of doing so.  You could say that, for this specific gentleman, clearly it does not actually require courage to dance around in a speedo.  But I disagree.  Even if this man couldn't care less about parading his physique naked in public...that doesn't change the significance of the act.  It doesn't make him any less brave.  It remains inspiring to me.

This is where it comes back to me.  It's my blog so I'm allowed.  Anyway.  Remember how I've hinted a couple of times at a project I was thinking about for a while that didn't work out?  This project I was thinking about was to become a model for the art department for the drawing classes.  For those of you who don't know what that entails, it would boil down to me striking various poses in front of rooms full of strangers for a couple of hours at a time...wearing nothing but a bikini.  Anywhere but BYU it would be completely naked, but we gotta maintain our standards here at the Lord's university.  But the point is that I would be stripping myself down almost completely and exposing myself to people.  Nothing between them and all my imperfections, my fatness, my awkward shape and movement, and my blemishes.  I literally cannot think of any more socially terrifying activity.  It didn't happen in the end, not because I chickened out, but because I'm not taking enough credits this semester to qualify for a campus job.

I just have to remember that it's ok that I don't look like this.  This is
a profile picture for this model

I wasn't going to strip down just to satisfy my own exhibitionist impulses.  I don't really have many of those.  They got lost in some box with my mob mentality.  I thought it would be good for me.  I have a couple of friends who do this and they've told me a little about the experience.  The people drawing you are not evaluating your attractiveness or relative levels of physical fitness.  They're viewing you as an art.   They are de-personing you in the best possible way.  In the process of drawing your body simply becomes a thing, neither good nor bad, to be captured on paper.  And the end results can, and often are, beautiful.  Letting someone draw you and then looking at that drawing is a way for you to dissociate from your mental filter and see yourself through someone else's eyes.  Not to mention, you're standing there in front of them for several hours...I can think of no more effective means to metaphorically throw your body image and self-confidence into a lake and let it swim or drown.

Which leads to my last thought about that man.  Yes, we're getting back to the rotund dancing fellow in naught but a speedo.  Scroll back up and watch him again for a few minutes.  Look at how happy he is.  Feel the confidence that flows out of him.  You watch him for a while and suddenly....you forget that it's funny cause a fat guy is dancing naked.  Suddenly you're watching a happy, wonderful man be happy and wonderful.  His physicality is peripheral.  His enjoyment of the moment overwhelms our impulse to judge and in the end we love him, even think he's beautiful, because we see happiness and vitality rather than a contrived social construct of beauty or ugliness.  You don't care that he's "gross".  You don't care that he keeps missing the changes and doesn't know the moves.  How could you care?

This is the best lesson this video teaches me.  Simply be happy and be confident.  No one cares if you screw up while you're trying.  No one cares if you aren't perfect.  No one cares about any of those negative things. What they care about is that you're happy and you're sharing that happiness with everyone around you.  Because you are happy, they have become happy as well.  If you can give that to people then no matter what you look like you will be beautiful in their eyes.

So I shall endeavor to stop worrying and simply dance.

The distorting properties of the inner looking glass

Those of you who read my blog (all 3 of you) know I've sort of been on a little bit of a theme recently.  A self improvement theme.  If you missed them, here's the first and second post.  I'd like to continue on that theme today, but from a slightly different angle.  This post is about my mother.

I have been suffering recently from a lot of frustration with my mom.  It's not what you're thinking.  I'm not talking about your typical teen/young adult parental angst.  I haven't lived with my mom in years, I'm pretty much done with all that angst.  No, I'm talking about something else entirely.  My mom is brilliant, extremely gifted, and beautiful.  My frustration stems from her absolute inability to accept those facts.

Let's start with a description of my mom.  My mother is beautiful.  She has brown hair and brown eyes and a uniquely lovely face.  I have always felt like she looks like a real-life Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painting.  

something much like this painting by John Williams Watherhouse 

She has these beautiful delicate hands and long wrists that, odd as it may sound, have long been my great envy.  As for her abilities...

My mom was strong enough to separate from my dad when he abused their relationship.  She was strong enough to forgive him completely and take him back, and then to leave for good when he abused that relationship again (I respect her for every single one of those decisions).  My mom raised two very young children singlehandedly.  She worked incredibly hard at some very menial jobs at first and then essentially created the need for a completely new position at the local boys and girls club in New Mexico for herself.  She then packed us up and moved us up to Oregon ostensibly to help my great aunt who was, at that time, taking care of my great grandmother whilst also dealing with a newborn.  However a large part of her motivation was nothing but her faith in a prompting she received that she would meet her future husband in Oregon.  She did  meet the man she ended up marrying; she then committed to this man with significant and sometimes frightening baggage of his own.  She has remained committed to him for the last 18 years and poured herself into their relationship.  And in the last couple of years she took the entire weight of caring for her own mother throughout the progression of grandma's dementia with no help from any of her siblings.  

My mom is an excellent cook and baker.  She decided there was no reason to pay exorbitant prices for store-bought chocolates so she taught herself how to make her own hand-dipped gourmet chocolates.  Her children wanted absurd and impractical birthday cakes so she taught herself how to make them.  She created extravagant costumes and dress-up clothing for us purely through trial and error--she didn't have patterns or Pinterest to tell her how to make a crown or a scepter or an entire Native American costume complete with teepee.  She taught herself how to paint and draw and sing and play the guitar and piano.  She makes cards, and hand-made boxes, and face pins, and Ukranian easter eggs, and  so many more amazing things I can't even remember them all.  She writes songs and makes her own jewelry.  She has created a beautiful, calming space in our front and back yard.  She has recently started writing a story.

these are nothing compared to some of the ones my mom has made

I haven't even mentioned my mom's ability to empathize with people, her sincere concern for others, her commitment to her responsibilities, her ability to understand and help people, or her determination to put others before herself.  Truly, the list of my mom's achievements, abilities, and gifts is a long one.  

But do you know what she'd say if you asked her to list her own gifts?  She might say something about her proclivity for counselling (the vocation she's always dreamed of), but almost immediately she would start telling you about anything but her positive qualities.  She might tell you about her sister and how much greater Vicky is than her.  She might tell you about her husband or her kids.  Or she might start telling you about all her own failings and faults and flaws.  This is because she legitimately does not see all of those amazing things that I just told you about.

You might say my mother has anorexia of the mind.  Just like an anorexic girl looks in the mirror and sees an obese delusion rather than the slender (often even unhealthily so) reality, my mother looks at herself and rather than the capable, creative, beautiful reality she sees an ugly, incompetent, stupid, inadequate illusion.  

No matter how many times you tell the anorexic that she's crazy; she isn't fat; she has to eat something because she is quite literally wasting away...she will not listen.  She cannot.  She can see herself right there in the mirror and she can see how fat she is.  So it is with my mother.  No matter how many times I or my aunt Vicky, or everyone else in the world tells my mother that she is smart and talented and able; no matter how many times we tell her that she can do things; we tell her that she is hurting herself and those around her...she will not...she cannot believe us.  Can't she see for herself how untrue all of that is?  Can't she see how inadequate she is?  

I cannot remember a time when my mother was happy with herself--with her weight or her appearance.  And I have a remarkably good memory.  My entire life I've been listening to my mom say that she isn't smart enough for this or that; she's not skinny or young enough to wear that dress or those earrings; she's not talented enough to play that song.  She is never good enough.  Never.

It could be argued that what divides us from the "lesser" animals is self-awareness.  But, like so many things in this life, our great blessing and strength is also our great weakness.  There is no more vicious voice of criticism, judgement, and critique than the one inside your head.  Because you are aware of exactly how often you fall short of the mark.  Outsiders don't have the benefit of seeing our expectations, intentions, and goals alongside our actions like we do.  So they don't know just how often those actions are actually pathetic, half-assed failures.  At least, that is how it seems to us.  Because that mark you're falling short of?  It is self-imposed.  It is your mark, not the rest of the world's.

So when people tell my mom that she is wonderful she looks at her self and her life and her plans and she sees that they aren't what they're "supposed" to be so she says "it's all fine and good for them to say that...but they don't know what's really going on."  

How do I know this is what is going on inside her head?  Well, I suppose I don't for sure.  But I'm pretty confident.  Because she passed this right on to me.  

came from this guy's pretty awesome blog here

Kara came over last night to visit.  We had a really great talk, during one point of which she said to me "We've both turned out to be pretty great.  We're both confident, smart, capable women."  Do you want to know what my instant mental response was?  Something along the lines of "hell no I'm not confident!"  I am terrified all the time of every single thing!  I don't feel capable of dealing with things, I don't think I am particularly good at much.  I think I'm smart, but I'm constantly worried that I'm about to discover that that is not the case.  I assume people don't want me around or they don't like me.  I believe that the man I marry will have sacrificed being married to a woman he finds physically attractive to be married to one with "other qualities".  I am not exaggerating.  These are the constant refrains inside my head.  

Where did I start this?  I said I am frustrated with my mom.  

My mom has told me that she is convinced that her children hate her.  She thinks that my brother and I hate her.  Our mother.  And that is why I am frustrated with my mom.  Because her self-loathing and self-doubt are reaching crippling levels.  And there is nothing I can do to shatter that mental mirror that is showing her such a lie.  There is no way for me to communicate to her that that inner critic is lying.  That her children love her.  That she is brilliant.  That she is creative and capable.  All she can see and all she can hear are her own perceived inadequacies.  Every conversation, every interaction, is filtered through the distorting lens of her insecurities so that it inevitably comes out supporting her negative opinion of herself.

As I struggle through the process of conquering my own issues, dealing with my own self-doubt and self-loathing I keep looking at my mom's life and that is what keeps me motivated.  Even before I started this project I can see that I have been doing some of this.  I am trying desperately to not be my mother.  Not because I don't love her and not because I don't think that she is amazing...but because she does not believe she is.  And that is what I don't want to emulate.  

Yesterday I fell in love...

Yesterday morning I watched How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.  Incidentally one of the last tolerable Matthew McConaughey films ever made, unless you count Magic Mike, in which he simply plays himself.  In this movie you have savvy, cute, intelligent Andie Anderson (played by the queen of the decade Kate Hudson), a writer for the fastest growing women's magazine who wishes she could stop writing silly How To articles about getting skinny and avoiding tickets and could instead write something called "How to Bring Peace to Tajikistan".  Cause, you know, she's super smart!  And you have Ben Barry, an advertising agent trying to snatch a big diamonds account from two super slutty coworkers.  Andie tells her boss that her next article will be "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" where she'll start dating a guy and then drive him away using all the usual mistakes that most women make.  Ben makes a bet that he can make any woman fall in love with him in 10 days, and if he wins he'll get the big account.  The evil slutty coworkers pick Andie, who happens to be at the same "top watering hole for the young upwardly mobile", to be the lucky girl.  The rest of the movie is Andie bouncing between being her charming and delightful self and an insane, clingy, devil-spawn and Ben trying desperately to not shoot himself in the face as he tries to deal with her and also make her fall in love with him.  Hilarity ensues.

I still enjoy this movie on a very superficial level.  It's mildly funny to see all the things Andie does to drive Ben crazy.  But the entire time I am just thinking "this is absurd!  What is wrong with these people that they're actually doing this?  What is wrong with them???!!"  Why would you screw with someone like that?    And then why would you keep screwing with them when you started to actually like them as a person?  Not only that, but here are two young adults in very promising careers who have so few problems that the only way to create enough tension for a movie is to manufacture the world's stupidest work....assignments? bets? whatever... This is not my life.  I don't know whose life they're supposed to be portraying, but it is no one I know.  The whole thing left me with a distinct disgruntledness.  Who are the people that are supposed to identify with that movie?  This movie was made before my generation had quite grown up and faced reality.  It was made in a different time, in a different social atmosphere and it is no longer relevant to the world in which I live.

So I looked for something made very recently.  I wanted something contemporary and indie and real.  I found The Giant Mechanical Man.  I'd seen a trailer for it several months ago and remembered wanting to see it.  It stars Jenna Fischer (aka Pam from The Office) and Chris Messina (Danny from The Mindy Project or the husband in Julie and Julia) as two 20-30 somethings who are trying to figure their lives out.  Jenna plays Janice, who gets fired from her temp job, not for being unreliable, but simply for allowing her apathy for temp work to show.  Without a job she gets evicted and has to move in with her well-meaning but terribly insensitive sister who is constantly trying to "fix" her life for her.  To satisfy her sister, Janice takes a job selling concessions at the zoo (a job for which she is terribly overqualified, as the manager mentions when she hires her).  Tim is a street performer who dresses up as a giant mechanical man and wanders around the city.  He loves it, but when his girlfriend leaves him because she can't stand "the artist's struggle" any more, he decides he should try getting a "real" job, so he also gets a job at the zoo working sanitation.  The two quickly become friends.

I watched this movie first at work.  Then I came home and asked Matt if he would watch it with me.  I wanted to share it with someone.  He wrote his own review of the movie here, and I really like everything he said.  I sort of want to take up where he left off.  He talks about how this movie depicts real life in all of it's awkwardness.  People rarely talk to each other in perfectly turned phrases and bon mots.  They don't say the right thing.  Often a conversation is much more silence while two people try to think of something to say to the other that isn't completely stupid. This movie captures that in a really lovely way.  He also talks about how it is a movie about our generation and our problems.

This is what I wanted to talk about.  I have long been fascinated with the way movies reflect the cultural atmospheres in which they're made.  Where How to Lose a Guy reflected the optimism and the carefree feelings of pre-recession America, The Giant Mechanical Man reflects the bewilderment of my generation.  I don't have links to them right now, but I've read dozens of articles about my "lost" generation.  Articles about how people my age are waiting to get married, how we're losing the art of human interaction due to social media, how we aren't sure we are ready/able to be parents, and of course, how we are struggling to find something beyond "college work" that we could call a career.  We are supposed to be adults now, but we don't know how to do it and we're not sure we could even if we did know.  At one point Janice says "I feel like those people you were talking about, like I was just born into this life and I'm supposed to know what I'm doing.  Like I'm supposed to have it all figured out.  But I don't have it all figured out.  I just feel lost."  I feel like those words sum me up.  They sum up so many of my friends.  This movie is about feeling like everyone else somehow has it together, somehow has a plan, somehow knows the magical secret that you don't about how to be a successful human.  It's about wondering why you don't have that secret; what's wrong with you if you can't figure it out. But it is also about how to deal with that.

Tim invites Janice to go to a party with him.  It's a birthday party for some friend of his.  When it is time to blow out the candles on her cake, the friend stands up and gives a toast.  She thanks her friends and she thanks her man.  She says "It only takes just one person--just one person--to make you feel special, and valid, and like you belong in the world."  Later that night Tim is trying to explain to Janice why he likes her so much.  He tells her that she's real, and honest; he says "when I look at you...I can see you.  I can see you."

Yes, The Giant Mechanical Man is a love story.  But it's not a love story about two perky, adorable people saying perky, adorable things to each other and being oh so witty and oh so clever.  It's a love story for my time.  It's about two people who aren't sure what their life is supposed to be finding each other and telling each other that they understand.  Every time Tim and Janice talk Janice will try to explain her thoughts or her feelings to him.  She is not eloquent, she can't express herself clearly, but his response is always "I understand.  I get it."  She doesn't have to word it quite right because he's felt what she's trying to explain.  He knows it already.

There were so many other things that I loved about this movie.  I loved the colors.  I mean...I loved the colors.  They're rich and vivid and beautiful.  I think it is beautifully shot with some very interesting visuals.  I thought the music was fitting, it didn't feel overwhelming or blatantly manipulative.  So many things about this movie were perfect.  But the overwhelming feeling that is still lingering this morning--the thing that outshines all of the other wonderful aspects--was that this was a movie made for people like me.  It wasn't cloying or absurd or perky.  It was awkward in the realest sense.  It was sincere and unsure.  And it was honest.

Personal Progress...

I'm not gonna lie.  I kind of hated personal progress when I was a teenager.  It didn't seem important to me, the projects seemed like busy work, New Beginnings was an annoyance.  And yet, here I am at 26 struggling to take control of my life.....I'm trying to institute my own version of personal progress.  Howe humiliating.

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about a better way to motivate myself to improve the things that need improving.  I said at the time that it was likely to be the first in a series of, um, (for lack of a better/less cliche phrase) self-makeover posts.  At the time I was thinking my next post would be a continuation of the "I'm great right here, right now" theme.  However, the project I was thinking about at the time isn't happening just now (don't worry, I'll talk about it later).  Instead, I've been thinking today about the "where I want to be" side of things.

Last night I did 10 sit ups.  Just 10.  And then I stopped.  And I am not joking when I tell you that my abs didn't even wait till morning to let me know that they were not excited about that idea even a little bit.

this is how my guts felt.

I texted Kara after I finished: "I just did 10 sit ups and then stopped.  Clearly I am not good at exercise."  She texted back enthusiastically "that's excellent!"  Bless her heart.

But here's the thing.  Between none sit ups and 10 sit ups.......10 sit ups is excellent, if only because it isn't none.  Because even if I only did 10 yesterday, maybe today I'll do 15.  Or maybe I'll just do 11?  But the point is that I'm doing something, and if I start small, well then there's plenty of room for improvement.

the one place we all know will always have room for improvement
also, this is from xkcd.com, in case you live under a rock...

Part of the reason that I never work out is because I think about the prospect and I think about how much work it's going to be and it literally drains me of every ounce of....of anything!  Of desire and energy and good intentions.  (at this point I would like to post the clip of Jim Gaffigan talking about going to the gym, but alas it does not appear to exist on youtube.  so instead I'll tell you to go to netflix and watch both of his specials because they're ridiculously funny, and pay special attention to the part about the gym).  Anyway, I think this is because I assume that if I work out it is going to have to be super maximum hardcore and intense and I'll have to spend so much time on it and it will make me want to kill myself.  As I explained to Kara, the evening we spent making and gorging on poorly executed yet nonetheless delicious and fattening candy, I have never yet experienced the so-called "runner's high".  That is to say--I don't appear to have a body that releases endorphins when I work out.  I get exactly nothing from the experience except exhaustion and misery.  I'm not hyperbolizing for rhetorical effect.  I feel like shit after I exercise, and all I want to do is die.

ah grumpy cat...you never fail me

But I realized last night that when you're as out of shape as I am.....well, maybe starting with 10 sit ups is a perfectly good idea.  In my defense, I want you all to imagine not just that you're doing normal sit-ups, but that you're doing them with a 10 to 15 pound weight sitting on your chest.  Not to mention, you have the abdominal muscles of a 3 year old with stomach flu.  But the point is that I realized that...I could stop at 10.  It was something, but I didn't have to keep going till I hated life and wanted someone to punch me in the face to distract me from how much I hated it.  And more importantly, I stopped before I became overwhelmed at the impossibility of doing this insanity to myself more than one random night in my life.

And one last thing....even if I don't do 10 sit ups tonight, or 15, or 11, or whatever...I will do them tomorrow and that's ok.  Or if I do them tonight, but not tomorrow, that's ok too.  If you fail on any given day all it means is...well, nothing.  Tomorrow is, as Scarlet O'Hara says, another day upon which any previous days have no bearing.  I won't get overwhelmed and I won't get discouraged.  It's funny how cliches are cliche for a reason.

Sometimes a little self-love is not a bad thing...

One of the key aspects of Mormonism (and probably most other religions, but I don't have firsthand knowledge) is the idea of repetition.  That is--you can never hear those "plain and simple truths" too many times, you can never read the scriptures too often, you can never study the gospel so much that you no longer have anything to gain from it.  Endless relief society lessons on visiting teaching and motherhood aside, I have found this idea to be, more or less, true.  Not simply at church, either, but in many other facets of life.  In fact, there is one particular idea that comes to me, epiphany-like, every couple of years.  It's like seeing fireworks; even though you've seen them before and, really, one firework is pretty much exactly the same as the next firework, every time you see them again it's like the first time.  They're beautiful and thrilling and dazzling no matter how many times you see them.  That's like this idea of mine.  Every time it bursts inside my head it is illuminating and inspiring like the first time I ever thought of it.  Even though it's clichéd and recycled.  It is simply this:

The most effective changes in your life come from self-love, not self-hate.  

So many times I have taken stock of my life and and I have looked on the results with loathing.  I have been so disappointed in myself.  I've seen my failings and my faults and I have asked myself why I have not yet fixed them.  I can't understand it.  I know what is wrong, I know what needs to be done to fix it, and yet the problems remain.  How pathetic must I be that I can't just fix the damn things already?  Over and over again I come to the same conclusion:  I must not hate my problems--my sins--enough to excise them from my life.  I must secretly like all these faults.  I must not want it badly enough...

 I must not be unhappy enough.

That's consistently where my thoughts end up.  So many times.  So I just hate myself a little more.  And it's a beautiful system, really, because it's so self-sustaining.  Now, not only can I hate myself for my imperfections, but I can also hate myself for, apparently, deep down not hating them and for lacking the discipline to change all these things I hate, which means that I can hate myself for choosing to be miserable....you can see it just keeps going...

But amidst all that disappointment and dislike, do you know what doesn't happen?  Any of those changes I wanted way back in the beginning.  I get so distracted and weighed down with hating myself that either I don't have the time or attention for actually fixing the problems, or I simply give up and accept that it's not worth the effort for someone as pathetic as me (and even if it was, it wouldn't work anyway).  You can see the problem here, I think.

Do you know when I have had success changing myself and my life?  Clearly it is not when I am depressed and full of self-loathing.  The times when I have had the most success effecting the changes I want to see in my life are the times when I love myself, and am proud of myself, and tell myself that I'm doing ok.  

The way it works in my head is that the more I hate myself, the less I am worth the effort of trying to improve--why suffer through all the work I know it will take for something I actually dislike?  But the happier I am with the current me right here and right now, the greater the value in investing in this self.  If that makes sense...

Which finally leads us to the here and now.  I honestly have no idea why it is happening, but I find myself in a place where I am consciously trying to cultivate that positive attitude about myself .  Usually this sort of positivity requires the kick-start of an extended and extreme happiness.  But I can't really say I've been extremely happy all that much recently.  Regardless, I have started trying to invest in myself.  Those initially minute investments have been enough--not enough to inspire greater investment, but enough to remind me of that ever-recurring epiphany.  Enough to inspire me to start loving myself so that I will then want to continue investing even more in myself.  

There is a lot more I want to write on this theme.  There are some specific experiences and challenges that are looming on the horizon that I want to discuss.  But in the interest of length (this is already too long) and time (it's my bedtime now...) I shall leave those for another post.  This is enough to be going on with for the time being...

To my brilliant, beloved, and wonderful grandmother...

I went home for Christmas and was lucky enough to see my grandmother right before she drifted off into the sleep with which she will end her life.  I spoke to my mom this afternoon and she confirmed that grandma hasn't woken up and will likely die within days.  I can't begin to explain how I felt the first time I saw her there at Wildflower, the home we've had to put her in.  This is a woman who I have looked up to my entire life and she was diminished to a skeletal creature in a wheelchair.  I couldn't stop crying that first visit.  It got better the next day, and the next, but only because I was able to disassociate and disconnect.  The woman in that chair was not the grandmother in my memory.  They were two different people.  

But finding out that she is leaving for good, that the end is here (mercifully sooner than anyone expected) is not as easy as I thought it would be.  Certainly I am glad that she (and my mother, who has born the entire weight of her care as well as my grandfather's) will be spared the years of senility that her own mother suffered.  But that doesn't change the fact that my grandma is dying.  She's going to be gone forever.  And in the end I find that I'm just a little girl who misses her grama and doesn't want her to leave and can't understand that it's better this way.  

I wanted to write something here to commemorate her.  Something that would represent what she was in my life.  But I couldn't think of anything better than the final that I wrote for my English Literature class on my study abroad in 2007.  With some minor alterations and additions, here it is

            The assignment was to write an essay that related the class readings to the places they’d visited.  My fingers hovered above the keys expectantly—waiting for inspiration to strike.  All that struck was a hand on my bedroom door, giving me a distraction from my un-inspired thoughts.  The harder I tried to focus the more my mind wandered.  I asked myself how ideas might relate to places…

            I’d heard of memories being related to smells, and smells could be related to places.  For instance, I remember very distinctly the smell of my grandmother’s food-room back in New Mexico.  It was a cold smell and somehow pleasantly musty.  Like the smell of damp earth, even though the room was above ground.  Whenever I smell that smell I remember the room, cool and dark, even when the light was on.  It was one of my favorite places at my grandmother’s house, especially when it was my grandmother who took me there.  And because I loved my grandmother’s food room, I loved the food-room in my aunt’s house, and then finally the one in my mom’s new house. 

            The connection, then, was food-rooms to the idea of my grandmother, I supposed.  But really, that was not an example of an idea being connected with a place, except in barest technicality.  In actuality it was simply a fragment of my definition of my grandmother.  It was part of what made my grandmother in my mind.  She was many places and things and actions and ideas. 

I considered the idea of my grandmother and saw a kaleidoscope of things:  My grandmother teaching my addition; admonishing me to “burn the sums into my brain”.  My grandmother giving me raisins out of a Tupperware pitcher with a yellow lid as I sat on the wooden stool in the corner of the kitchen.  My grandmother bringing me a golf ball-sized blob of peanut butter cookie dough as I played in my uncle’s room on the green fuzzy carpet.  Then, more, after they all moved to Oregon.  I saw my grandmother’s small brown dish, or the blue plastic one, with two small scoops of Tin Roof Sundae ice cream in it and her sneakiest smile that told me this was a treat just for us.  I heard my grandmother teaching me and my brother one single phrase of Latin to say to the kids at school when they were mean.  There was my grandma sitting with my mother and uncle, singing “Dooley”.  Overarching them all were the bookshelves full of carefully organized and jealously guarded books.  Endless shelves hiding tempting treasures.  Sherlock Holmes and Freckles and Wind in the Willows.  That part of my grandmother that was a passionate love of books was also a part of me.

            I thought about these aspects of my grandmother.  I thought about the things that I refused to accept as part of her.  Those first years when the most articulate woman I knew started forgetting words; joking in the yellow light of our kitchen about the time when all it would take to entertain her would be the magnets on the fridge.  We’d cackled all the more at the looks of others who couldn't understand our morbid sense of humor, that it was better to laugh than cry.  Then the breathtakingly quick crescendo from a disoriented woman who wandered ceaselessly around her house and still harmonized at the family singalongs even if she couldn't remember the words…to a stranger huddled in a wheelchair in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar building, mumbling indistinctly from lips that were no longer quite under her control.    

None of these memories were places, though places were a part of the memories.  Yes, there were places in my mind, but to limit my grandmother to one place was like limiting the ocean to one grain of sand on one beach.  Would that be the same for anything? 

I remembered when we read “A Room of One’s Own” in class; how, before I even began to read, my mind resolved to like the story, based only on the fact that, long ago, my grandmother told me that someday I needed to read it.  Now I had read it, and liked it very much.  I thought it was brilliant, in fact.  But the only thing I could remember distinctly was that the book was everlastingly bound to my grandmother.  So, it seemed that a book could be connected to one single thing; perhaps if that single thing contained many things within it.  Perhaps it was only because it was my grandmother to which it was connected, and my grandmother contained all of me.

My mind floated back to the beginning.  There were my fingers, still expectant.  There was the screen, still blank.  Another hand was knocking at my door.  I smiled at the thought of my grandmother and began to type.

Sometimes you just need a little perspective...

Cliche as that is.

It's been another one of those days weeks months.  The ones where most nights the only way to stop your panic attack is to force yourself to fall asleep.  Where you have a constant headache because all your anxiety manifests itself in relentless tension in your shoulders and neck.

Where the careful balance of your life, perpetually held on the edge of the abyss, finally seems to be tipping past the event horizon of your control into full chaos.

When I first started dancing I remember a conversation I had with Chelsea.  I told her that sometimes when I'm dancing it's like my body gets over excited and rejects my supervision.  My spins start going crazy, my feet start flying all over the place, and I simply cannot keep my balance.  It's like I'm trying to go everywhere at once, and so, of course, I maladroitly go nowhere at all.  Chelsea advised me that the next time I noticed this happening I should stop dancing for just a moment and recenter myself.  Pull myself inward, either mentally or literally, and focus on my core.  Be still a moment.  Off the top of my head, I would be willing to claim that as the most helpful advice I ever received about dancing.  It certainly has stuck with me and proved its usefulness and truth repeatedly.

But tonight I realized that it is not just good dancing advice.

Today, even if just for this evening, I was able apply Chelsea's dancing advice to my life.  I was able to stop for a moment and recenter myself.  I was able to pull myself in and focus on my core.  I was able to be still.  It began with one of the most considerate and generous things anyone has ever done for me (the beauty of perspective is how something can be just a simple "nice thing" to one person, and yet mean the whole world to another).  I think one of the greatest things you can ever do for someone is find a way to make them feel sincerely and deeply cared about; that is what was done for me.  Then I came home, still thinking about this experience, hoping to have some time to myself to mull it over.  However, a friend needed to talk.  I am ashamed to admit that my first reaction was annoyance at the theft of my time.  But the annoyance faded as I listened to my friend tell me about some of the private trials she is struggling through.  We discussed the way people will sometimes, intentionally or otherwise, deny you the right to suffer--that is to say, they claim that your problems are not important enough to cause you real pain.  Certainly, I can look at my friend's life and be grateful that I did not have to live it.  And knowing that I would not trade my problems for hers helps me to feel better about mine.  But it doesn't mean that my problems are easy; it just means that they're mine.

So tonight I will go to bed centered.  The problems aren't gone and I'm still not sure that everything won't tip over the edge some time, but it won't be tonight.  I have pulled myself back into my core--I know that people care about me and I know that I am dealing with my own personal issues that fit me.  Tonight that seems to be significant.