Author: mightylark

” …Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together…”

In my last therapy session, I was assured that I just needed to focus on the next step rather than all of the steps. This advice always sounds so obvious. Did I put on pants? Did I go to work? It is so simple, but so necessary to vocalize. What do we do if we can’t vocalize? What if we’re all just stuck between stations?

But anyway, I didn’t jump on here to be a drag today. I’m listening to the Holdsteady and painting Chipper Jones. I’ve nearly finished one of the documents that I needed to work on for my divorce and I swept and mopped the majority of my apartment earlier today. Oh, and I even bought myself food and swam a mile today. Hurray for randomly gifted paid days off! I went to work, but apparently I wasn’t ever scheduled to begin with. And then, somewhere in the middle of writing all of this I felt overwhelmed with the urge to go to sleep and I took a little nap with the kitties as well. Overall, it has been a pretty good day.

I am very pleased with how this Chipper Jones is coming out. Here’s a little sneak peak for your peepers.

It felt fitting to begin with the bonsai tree which my friend Katie gifted me. I had proclaimed to myself that I would get a bonsai tree as a housewarming gift for myself once I was settled in this apartment by myself but I had not done so. So when I was in Rhode Island, my friend picked up this little friend for me. It’s perfect and I love it.

I have been thinking about freedom. When I speak with my therapist about freedom, he quotes Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” I think about this theory which was developed during Frankl’s time in a Nazi Prison Camp, Thich Naht Hahn’s philosophies developed during a genocide in Vietnam or even the power and soul of Black music from the Southern United States particularly in the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries.

The stimulus in all of these situations was at its most intense. As in one must give in to their situation and choose to live. It’s a serious Andy Dufresne mentality, no? “Get busy living or get busy dying.” 

The reason I’ve been thinking on freedom has less to do with suddenly feeling myself alone and more do with this feeling that it doesn’t matter so much that I am alone. My best friend lives by herself. She’s like the coolest and most self sufficient cat I think I’ve ever met. She just has my complete respect. She owns a little house with a big yard, is in graduate school and teaches full time. I spent a couple days with her this week and while I had already been valuing a sense of comfort in my own skin, I found myself longing for more time to myself.

Perhaps this is a phase in divorce. To be sure I’ve taken some interest in seeing who is out there. I’ve done my fair share of swiping right, but I’m not expecting much out of it and honestly my ideal would be to go have a nice dinner and some drinks and not worry about “it going anywhere.” The best part of hanging out with my friend this week, was the moment when I was painting in her yard, looking at birds and sitting quietly sipping on coffee with her five feet from me in her own chair doing her own thing. I’m finally reaching that sense of self comfort where I can just be around the people that I appreciate without having to uncomfortably filling the air with nonsense. Inevitably women that I end up dating have been subjected to this garbage and I would just like to offer a heartfelt apology to your ears. It’s nice to find myself settling into my skin.

But here I digress again.

I can’t get over the way that the lights in my apartment on Gilman Street attacked me in the early 2010s, the way that the dark seemed to creep in through the windows and strangle me. Loneliness was only drowned when my friends started pouring me five fingers worth glasses of Makers. I could never seem to quiet the tensions in my head. I don’t know if it is having kids or if it is a sense of heading in the right direction, but I do not feel this now. I do not feel alone most nights. I am depressed, but I don’t mind dwelling in it. I know that my reactions are due to depression and even that awareness seems to help ever so slightly. Or maybe the depression itself is its own collection of stimuli.

I’ve felt obsessed with Elliott Smith today and the strange thing is that I no longer must feel depressed to listen. I can certainly ‘feel’ some of his messages as I always have but I don’t feel controlled by that perspective right now. “Between the Bars” in particularly has been hitting me, both because of the high raw chorus, but because of the lyrics…”People you’ve been before, that you don’t want around anymore, they push and they shove and won’t bend to your will….” I am hearing this line with a hope that I’ve never felt before. I have definitely been a number of versions of myself that I no longer want to be around and that is completely okay.

But anyway, freedom… The space between stimulus and reaction. It’s like that sense of approaching a limit. I’m not sure that I am really getting that close to it, but at the same time I can legitimately feel the gap between impetus and response widening. The kids, the kids push those buttons more than anyone else can, and yet they are also the two people on the planet that I find that I love unconditionally. I’m not sure that I can hold off on reacting long enough with them though. I come up short with them even as they are the people that I WANT to come up short with the least. 

What’s one to do?

I have come to an impasse it seems. With only one class remaining to achieve my certification, one summer of hustling until I am on a more financially rewarding contract, and only two more months until the kids begin a regularly scheduled schooling, which, no doubt will improve their outlooks on life and general behavior, I find myself hitting a wall.

I’ve always felt a sort of void. Particularly, the void has been of a social nature. I’ve felt empty when talking with people, like I don’t have an opinion or like I have to shout to be heard and then I feel as though I am obnoxious and I grow embarrassed for having just shouted an opinion which may or may not have been relevant. I developed so much anxiety about interjecting that I think sometimes the conversation moves on before I speak and my comment is whisked aside.

Art was nearly always a way to express myself that helped me to avoid these social situations. Of course critiques on the other hand magnified this entire situation. People would tell me that I needed to guide the conversation, to get what I needed out of it, but my only real need was to survive and GET OUT of it. I’ve never enjoyed being under the microscope. It makes me wonder how on earth I’ve ended up teaching for a living. I suspect I do it for the vulnerable kids. They feel more like family than trying to live up to my father’s image ever did.

At any rate, I began with a ramble today, and I promise, this all has a point. After some thought I realize that seeking a girlfriend or a spouse was always an attempt to fill the void that I felt socially, but I feel more aware than ever now that no other person can fill that void. It was not created by the absence of a person, but by a perception of my own making. How could another individual change my perception. Certainly others can influence my perception, but I don’t believe for a second that they can change it. Changing me results in bitterness. I know this because two women have tried to change me. They’ve tried to make me a family man, to be aware of the beautiful moments around me, but I’ve always been resistant to their ideal of beauty.

I am much more comfortable with stillness, with the strange shapes the sun creates in the apartment in the mid-afternoon, or in the cool air from the window coming from overhead while the heat from the bath makes me sweat thereby chilling my whole body, or the sounds of those close to me snoring. I listened to a book once where the mother would walk around the house after everyone had fallen asleep and she would touch her hand to the person’s chest, feel their breath, and count them until she reached 7. This feels so compelling to me. I care for everyone in my house, but it is only when they are still that I feel comfortable being with them, living with them, occupying the same space. My attachment to cats seems more fitting than I might have before thought.

I strongly dislike people in my space, but I desperately want the right person in my space. I have no idea who that right person might be. I thought it was my girlfriend from my twenties for a while and then I thought that it might be my wife for a while, but neither really allowed me to be. And admittedly, that statement sounds like I am unwilling to compromise, but the truth is that I am more likely to bend over backwards to make someone else feel comfortable than I am to attempt to make myself feel comfortable.

My mother’s favorite line of scripture was from the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” I wonder if this is Earth in the grand sense or if I do not just inherit a six by four by nine foot plot of earth. I suspect the latter. But no matter what, it is Sunday afternoon and I feel lazy today. There is some guilt because I should be finishing my homework for the class I need to finish my certification, but I just returned from the garden, the children are occupied and I still feel so attached to the idea of Sunday being the day of rest.

 Today I was overcome with the desire to say something. Unfortunately, as is so often the case in my creative process, the desire to say something does not necessarily coincide with having anything to say. However, I woke from a nap wherein I was snuggled up with my seven year old who was watching Scooby Doo and I awoke with the desire to say something.

It has been an overwhelming year. Between the separation and now divorce proceedings that dominate my thoughts to the completion of a school year which left me with perhaps more questions than answers to a parental role which has felt, at times, more like a breathing heavy bag than a nurturing influence, the year has gotten the best of me.

Perhaps the strongest and most vital thing that I’ve learned is this acceptance that both my body and my brain are me. My body is not simply and propulsion device for the brain. I would never have thought of this on my own. It took a Sir Kenneth Robinson Ted Talk to really cement that thought for me. Bodies and brains are obviously linked. There is no separation. This is important since I am one who has, in the past, thought of my body as fat or slow, but not my brain. The idea that my body and brain are introduced at the same moment blows my mind.

But here I am digressing, thinking that I have something to say, when I still have nothing to say. I am surrounded by kids toys and food scraps. The kids are at my house every weekend. I struggle with a duality of parent vs human being with things to do. Again, like the body and mind, there is not separation and yet I find myself arguing over what it is to be a good parent or a good worker, but never considering that the two can co-exist. My ex always seemed so good at multitasking and I have always felt a bit wanting in this respect. But even now I am typing and a cat is taking comfort between my arms. I am providing shelter and calm while also exercising my brain and fingers in typing this message to no one in particular.

It was an odd start to the day. I had stayed up late last night making Austin, my son, a Darth Vader birthday cake. I call it a Darth Vader birthday cake, but really it looked a bit more like Lord Helmet, but then even that may have been a very optimistic moniker. I woke up this morning with a scratchy post nasal drip feeling, a gift from the film of pollen all over Southern Maine to me and others like me. My ex called at 7 to tell me that she was not on pace to be at my house to drop off the kids by 7, which seemed just fine to me as I was certain that she had originally said that she was dropping them off at 8. But I submitted to her demands and after making coffee was in the car and on the way to pick up the kids.

Yesterday was my son’s birthday. He was excited to see me this morning, both because he hadn’t in a while and also because he knew there were presents to be had at my house. My daughter was less excited. Actually, less excited may be the understatement of the year. She was distraught screaming on the sidewalk and for what reason I’m still not sure. But her mother had been up with her for 2 1/2 hours during the middle of the night and had no patience for it any more. I, apparently, shot her a death glare. I really do wish that my anxiety read as anxiety to others, especially the person that I had shared a bed with until so very recently. But that is another story for another day. It took perhaps 15 minutes of coaxing before Abilene was willing to get in her car seat. We may have woke the entire neighborhood. I’ve heard that it is desirable to be “woke,” so you’re welcome Walker Street, Portland.

Anyway, here I am, having rambled on for about twenty minutes and despite the fact that I wanted to write because I suspected that I had something to say, I still fear that I have said, as Vonnegut would say, “diddley.” If I could be as influential as Diddley instead of having said “diddley” that would be an achievement. Alas, I am not.

I suppose that all I really wished to communicate today is that I suddenly felt as though all aspects of the balance were me, rather than feeling irritated because parenting is something that “I’m forced to do, but is not me,” or that “I must go to work, but really I’m a painter,” or even “I have so much work to do and my kids are keeping me from it.” These dualities have been pervasive throughout my life. I think it may be a cause of living life comparing myself to others or to the image that people had built for me when I was young rather than doing things how I felt that they should be done. And still the balance feels impossible sometimes as I try to finish this paragraph with my daughter screaming at me that I need to be done. Sigh. Oh well. Time to go.